First point is definetly a problem in other western democracies. In Sweden there is the “loyalty obligation”, which states that you have to – according to one of the centrist unions here – “put the interest of the company above your own”. It is a strong intrusion in your freedom of speech.
“Unionen”. I think they focus a lot on like engineers and bosses, and other upper middle class jobs.
I don’t think the union is really to blame there, “loyalty obligation”, lojalitetsplikt, is afaik a set of laws that really does what Unionen says about it. It’s not the union implementing it.
To be frank, I think its quite a refreshingly honest phrasing they are using. A more company-friendly way would be like “we all like to be teamplayers, and that is what the loyalty obligation is all about”, or something like that. Now it sounds like “you are the guy on the track in the trolly problem meme, get fucked”, and to some degree, fair play to you.
From what I could read during my morning fugue state, it seems to me that they’re warning you that the contract you signed when getting hired does not allow you to be disloyal to the company as long as you’re working for it. I could not find anything about it being an actual law, though I’ve been wrong before so it wouldn’t surprise me if I missed something.
Sweden is a western democracy?
Sounds like that Swedish centrist union should pound sand
That is absolutely not how the term Western works in a geopolitical context. Alaska almost borders Russia, so by your definition the US isn’t a Western country.
Everything in Europe west of the old Iron Curtain has been considered “The West”, the Nordic countries are absolutely among them. There have been close ties to the US and UK since WW2, Norway’s old prime minister is currently the NATO general secretary.
Maybe an interesting cultural curiosity, maybe not, but Riot Games had the same misconception as you and made an “EU Nordic and East” server for Scandinavians and Russians to play League of Legends together. The game got huge here, but almost all Scandinavians rejected the EUNE server and chose the “EU West” server instead. Nobody wanted to play with the Russians, including me.
This attitude extends beyond just this one game, but it’s a prime example. Western Europe is a largely English-speaking region, it’s why and how we can relate. Russians usually don’t, with some exceptions. Either you communicate in Russian or you don’t really communicate at all. We generally don’t talk with Russians and don’t relate to them.
Politically, in simple terms, we Northern Europeans often tend to want to pull the rest of the west farther left, but the border to Russia is a hard barrier we don’t want to cross, not for any period of their political history do we want to emulate them. They are bad. They’ve been bad for a very long time. I don’t know what’s wrong with them, but they’ve been thoroughly fucked up for way too long. Maybe the Ukrainians can give a better analysis of the Russian psyche and culture that causes all this shit, when they get done with the current torrent of it.
