@mrsbeanbag I don't think that's true, but their certainly exists a lot of pressure on members to buy from the alliance.
Both Sweden and Israel, with others, made the call that an independent defence required an domestic arms industry, that is not without reason.
"Companies wishing to be considered as NATO HQ suppliers must be established in NATO member countries."
But maybe "NATO HQ suppliers" is a more specific thing than i thought.
@mrsbeanbag NATO HQ is an office building in Belgium, technically the people that works their. This is going to be true anyway, it would be a long way to ship office supplies from outside the alliance.
@mrsbeanbag I may have described NATO HQ as an office building in Belgium, but after recent expansion it's the third largest office building in the world. After the Octogon, where the Egyptian dod is housed, and the Pentagon where the us dod is taking up space.
@ekg i just looked it up and i now consider it a crime nobody calls it The Big Zipper
@mrsbeanbag I want to point out that NATO have expanded faster then the newly dubbed The Big Zipper, forcing newer members, including Sweden, to send their delegation to nearby buildings instead. Housing military command is a true challenge, requiring some of the most impressive infrastructure we humans build.
@ekg new theory about the purpose of the Tower of Babel just dropped
@ekg God destroys the military headquarters of a vast totalitarian empire. the tabloid press: "God hates it when everyone speaks the same language"
@mrsbeanbag I like the description of the Bible as an tabloid, I think that is an fair assessment of the amount of trust to place in its words.
@ekg some of the source material for the Pentateuch certainly (although it doesn't exactly make out the Tower of Babel to have been good, as vague as it is about the reason for its destruction). the prophets are like when an opinion columnist writes a book. Ecclesiastes is like when your English assignment is rewrite the Epic of Gilgamesh from a different point of view. lamentations are goth poetry. psalms are folk music. the song of songs is basically porn.
@mrsbeanbag I imagine it doesn't help most English speaker accept The King James version uncritically. In Sweden the most recent translation is from this millennium, not that I know if that helps. I have actually never read the Bible, not in hole at least. My most recent experience is YouTube Atheist reading select passages with their unique interpretation, if you remember thats era of YouTube you know what I mean.
@ekg i would be wary of anyone calling themselves "Youtube Atheist" tbh, that in itself is a doctrinal bias right off the bat. not sure how prevalent King James Only is but the NIV is certainly popular among the trendy evangelical youth you get at universities. and i really hate that one even more than the KJV.
oh also the Book of Judges serves largely the same function as cowboy films
@mrsbeanbag the Atheist community on YouTube is thankfully dead now, but it was an misinformation engine. I spent way to much time consuming that uncritically.
What is NIV referring to, might be worth reading about.
@ekg New International Version. it's disturbingly simple-minded in its approach. a good test is to ask one of these people what Leviathan is, and if they say it's a crocodile you sound the QI Klaxon.
@mrsbeanbag after skimming the Wikipedia page, I am shocked shocked I tell you that a morden English language bible isn't based on king James, I guess I still belive some of the misinformation taught by the YouTube Atheists.
@mrsbeanbag I want to point out that I grew up in Sweden, in a less then religious family. What I remember from church was that we are all crated in the image of God, so be careful you never know who really is God. And that everyone have their own relationship with God, and being encourage to develop that relationship on my own terms.
@ekg that sounds like quite a liberal Christianity. Judaism has a similar thing going on actually. except it's anyone you meet might actually be the prophet Elijah. same idea though i guess
@mrsbeanbag well technically they said Jesus. And yes incredibly liberal, they are even removing Christian symbols to be more inclusive.
@ekg sounds like Unitarians, i used to go there for a few years
@mrsbeanbag church of Sweden, if you are interested in looking them up on your own. It's neo-Catholic, and arguably satanic, at least if you as The Watch Tower Society.
@ekg lol, the Watch Tower Society think a lot of things are satanic.
@mrsbeanbag if remember correctly. The Watch Tower Society got banned in Sweden, because they encourage their members to take their kids out of the public school system, leading them to ask the church of Sweden for support. The church of Sweden answered them in an open letter telling them not only did they support public education, they established the public school system in Sweden.
@ekg as much as i don't generally support banning religions (and JWs are historically persecuted, and currently banned in China and Russia) they really are quite unhinged sometimes
@mrsbeanbag technically speaking the Jehovas Witness aren't banned, and they do have an qusai independent organisation in Sweden. But yes the Swedish state is incredibly aggressive when it comes to baning organisation that carries a perceived threat to children. To the point that Sweden for a long time refused to sign the UN charter on the rights of the child, arguing it limited its ability to protect children from their parents.
@ekg that's strange.
@mrsbeanbag one of the rights listed is the childs right to access the parents religion and culture, also the right for the child to know their parents and ancestors. This somehow got interpreted in Stockholm as taking away the states abilities to protect children from abuse, thankfully they have reconsidered that interpretation.
@mrsbeanbag Sweden also had a strange interpretation of the rights of indigenous people, and therefore fought to not have the sami recognition as such. The Swedish states treatment of the sami would be shocking, unless it was for every other western government treatment of their's indigenous people. Compared to other countries Swedens treatment of the sami is nothing but exemplary.
@ekg i dunno i have a friend who is a Sami and she has some things to say.
i'm not actually sure who would count as our indigenous people? highland Scots and the Welsh i guess.
@mrsbeanbag gaelic, it's completely assimilated.
I called Swedens treatment exemplary because I am not awere of any genocide committed against the sami in Sweden, except the northern crusade, I will ofcourse retract that statement if I am made awere of such a genocide committed by an entity that can plausible be connected to the Swedish state.
@ekg what do you mean assimilated? Welsh is now an official language. everything in Wales has to be bilingual. there are still people there who speak it as their native language (mostly in rural communities). Scottish Gaelic isn't quite there yet but they are pushing for it.
I am more then happy to admit if I made a mistake, but I was under the clear impression that the Celtic language, on Great Britain, was pretty much dead from common use, before the revival efforts started.
@ekg it was close to dead in Scotland i think, but not entirely, although Scotland has even another language, being Scots, which is another Germanic language that diverged from English in like the 12th century or so. and then there's Doric.
Welsh never fully went away, although modern Welsh has a lot of relatively new words i believe.
afaik the only language ever to be brought back completely from the grave is Hebrew. and it's not really the same language anymore.
Yeah, that sounds familiar know that you say it.
Latin, and Hebrew is both really weird situations. Latin is apparently used as faux lingua franca, when English is inappropriate.
@ekg Latin was the international language of academia and scholarship well into the modern era, and never stopped being taught, at least in certain circles. i never heard of anyone actually speaking it but it's quite well known at least. Hebrew was kept as a sacred language by the Jewish community, but nobody really spoke it daily. but what they speak in Israel now is a Slavic language with Hebrew words. and then there's Yiddish. which is kinda like the Jewish version of Scots.
@mrsbeanbag their exist a small community of revivalists that want to promote it as an alternative to English, they have their success every once in awhile.
My understanding is that they approaching numbers equivalent to Esperanto, or at least that is their main point of compression.
@ekg lol, Esperanto. the Betamax of Lingua Francas
@ekg *Linguas Franca(?)
@mrsbeanbag I don't think so. But I am speaking Swedish with English words, so what do I know.
@ekg am a big fan of conlangs actually. i like it when they invent an entire language just for a science fiction show, and the actors all have to learn how to pronounce it properly.
@mrsbeanbag the Babel fish solution of everyone magically speaking English isn't quiet as satisfying. Inventing a whole language is quiet an effort though.
@ekg i don't know if you watched The Expanse. but the Beltalang in that is very compelling. there is a dictionary for it online. the linguist they got in does a ton of work on films and so on.
@ekg lol and we circle back to Stargate. where they go to distant planets that haven't had contact with Earth populations for thousands of years and everyone speaks perfect American English, and not a "universal translator" in sight.
most of these fictional languages aren't really whole languages. i mean you couldn't have much of a conversation in them. they have a basic grammar and maybe a hundred largely domain-specific words. but i like to hear it. it shows they care.