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Rikard's avatar

Skeiv/skev: slanted; at an (the wrong) angle: "the wooden frame you made is 'skeiv', it won't do"; slang: slightly off in the head, mildly insane; off-kilter; not as it should be.

Used in a sentence:

"Obama var en skev president"/"Obama was a queer president"

As for the church... Swedish former state church loses between 30 000 - 50 000 members per year and have done so for two decades or so now. A development met with either a haughty "good riddance" or "who cares, we're tax-funded anyway and own billions upon billions in stocks, bonds and land - all donated to us by rubes on their death beds!".

Swedish Christians, the ones I meet at charity, quietly and uneasily despise the old state church for becoming what it is.

On the other hand, several hundreds of priests were trained in DDR in the 1970s, to go home to Sweden and join the clergy and subvert the church. Despite the DDR being long gone, they're continuing the plan on automatic.

If you want to read about the deep connections between Sweden and DDR, I recommend the only scientific study on the topic:

Birgitta Almgrens "Inte bara Stasi..."; She is the only researcher ever who has been given access to the archives of SÄPO covering this - all such material is still classified and she was only allowed access to it under guard, and had to - witnessed by officers of the security-police - burn all her notes and demolish the hard drive of her computer upon completion of her research. Further, the manuscript was vetted and edited by the security police, and by demand by the Socialist Democrat party of Sweden and in agreement with the state of Germany, Swedish researchers may not access any documents about Sweden, in the Stasi-archives.

The reason is well-known: the archives name names of politicians, clergy, and other high officials and business-men that were in so deep with the DDR and Stasi they might as well have been East Germans. m/s Estonia was f.e. often used to smuggle weapons and technology otherwise banned from sale to DDR, or to other banned nations using DDR as go-between. Small wonder the Socialist Democrat party of Sweden have blocked real investigations of the wreckage since the ship sank.

Ahem, sorry about ranting but it is highly possible that the Norwegian church has old ties to DDR too, was where I was aiming. Might be worth to ask around.

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Reader East of Albuquerque's avatar

It's a mystifying dynamic, but I recognize it. It says to me, crazy-arrogant and otherwise dangerously cluelessly projectin' peeps here, so keep your head down, out of range of tomatoes and other flying whatnots, and by the way Twitter assaults, and whilst mildly smiling and gently waving, back away slowly, slowly.... Once at the door, outsky.

So I'm a member of an association that I was rather fond of for some years. I couldn't make it to the annual conference last month, and now I get a followup mass-email from the president of said association about that conference. He was disappointed about the low turn out, but crowing about how inclusive and diverse & etc etc (nothing new there, he's woker than woke, like a good number of the members) and —this is what was new— how wonderful it was to start out the whole shebang with the land acknowledgement ceremony!

In case anyone in Europe was wondering, with the US wokies these days the land acknowledgement as a start-off for a meeting is a "must." The land acknowledgment ceremony, yes.... This involved acknowledging that the land the conference was taking place on had been stolen— yes, the president used the word "stolen"— by white European people from the (fill in the blank) people.

Now I actually know the history of that particular area, and going back a ways, well before European ships sailed anywhere near these shores, as the archeological record shows, it was hotly contested and rife with intertribal violence. But never mind all that.

What really is this "land acknowledgement" thing all about? Why, it is a performative masochistic ritual! We must acknowledge that we, who are so high-status, are very bad, we are in fact thieves, and that the fetishized other (presumably dark skinned and/or victim of fill-in-the-blank) is in need of our oh-so-lofty-and-knowing "special concern." But of course once we say these magic aren't-we-the bees-knees-of-pious words, eff 'em to oblivion & pass the coffee.

Performative masochism, not my thing. Well, membership in that association was nice while it lasted. The president's letter included a survey. I deleted it.

So that's how it falls apart. Now you might say, why so passive? Why not speak up and object? The answer for me is clear. I've been around for awhile. I know perfectly well what that president would do to any member who questioned, never mind actually objected, to such things as the land acknowledgement ceremony. He's got his allies on the board, that's how this happened. I wouldn't get far. It would get very ugly very fast, and mainly ugly for me.

I heed that old saying— "pick your battles." Like I already said, I'm not into masochism. If I had sure allies and a chance of changing things and, moreover, if I cared a whole lot, I'd object. But I don't.

Anyway, I'm sure the conference was a crashing bore of nonstop whinging about the Bad Orange Man. I don't have reason to expect it would be any different next year, either. I think I'm going to organize a pizza party in my house.

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