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It's not true that it was never 12 countries.
On the contrary, while the flag existed before, it really became the EC flag in 1986 when the number of member countries was... 12.
It was adopted by the EEC in 1985 when there were 10 members.
In 1985 there might have been 10 members, but Spain and Portugal were already in talks for years and locked to be included (as was scheduled for the next year).
Indeed, they joined on 1st January 1986.
In 1985 the talks had ended and them joining was a done deal. This coincided with the adoption of the flag.
Yeah. And for many years from then onwards, E.U. was often referred to in local media as (translared to english) "The Europe of the twelve" -- until the much later expansion.
I remember this, too. That's what made me jump at the claim that there was never a time with 12 members!
In 1985 the admission of Spain and Portugal had been ratified and they formally joined on 1st January 1986.
The point is that the EC did have 12 members and that time coincided with the adoption of the 12-star flag.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/may/07/banksy-...
If you follow his chain all the way to end it's supposedly because there are 12 months in a year.
Actually there are 13.
Optimism!
https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/symbols/flag_en
The WikiPedia page [1] has much more information and probably a better answer.
Also a timeline with different flags through out the years [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Europe
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Europe#Timeline_of_Fla...
The reason is, apparently, nothing. There are some weird conspiracies that people take too far about this and that but nobody ever declared any reason for 12. It's like reading a high school literature interpretation of Moby Dick out there.
Sigh... I feel like I read an article about chemtrails. Author concluded it's a Eurocratic-Catholic-Coptic-Jewish-Canaanite-CroMagnon conspiracy. The dismissive or passive aggressive remarks he drops every 2 sentences don't do the article any favors either.
12 is a number that kept appearing throughout history, probably starting with the 12 months in a year we've had since the ancient Sumerian calendar and the wider adoption of the duodecimal system. It had meaning to the ancient Greeks, Hindus, Christians, Norsemen, Chinese, Muslims, Jews, etc.
It's fitting that the symbolism is still appealing in modern times, in addition to the EEC actually having 12 members when the flag was adopted.
I have no idea why he thinks that the 12 showed up because that is how many periods a woman has rather than how many full moons there are on average. Not that these are unconnected.
As https://qz.com/1706398/the-average-menstrual-cycle-is-not-28... points out, the average woman's menstrual cycle is 29.3 days. The length of a lunar cycle is 29.5 days.
That they are so close is unlikely to be coincidence. In fact a close-knit group of women in primitive conditions will synchronize their cycles to each other and then the group synchronizes to the Moon. An evolutionary explanation can be found in the fact that predators can smell the blood from menstruation. Therefore there is a real advantage to having women do this all together, when the moon's light makes defending them easier.
It would be more convenient still if women didn't menstruate. However periods seem to have evolved when primates lived in trees. There was no barrier to this since smell is less important for arboreal animals than ground dwelling ones. And once evolved, it is hard for it to unevolve.
A side note of evolutionary speculation. Our arboreal ancestry seems to have been when primates lost most of their sense of smell. However in temperate zones, smell is very important for finding food under snow. Is it a coincidence that there are only two species of primates that live in the temperate zone? (Japanese snow macaques are on an island with less competition, and homo sapiens is clearly a special case in a lot of ways.)
What kind of time-cube tier crap is this? It's hardly fit for hackernews, is it, this rant about weird flag conspiracies and Eurocrats and Cromaggnons...
Read more about its history, how it was adopted, unsuccessful proposals, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Europe
The clue is in the first sentence of the article:
"For my swan-song I’ll supply the faithful with a tall tale of the sort that induced Mark to invite me on to his blog. I’m sure he would have enjoyed the mixture of verifiable truths, multiple ironies, and fuel for nested conspiracy theories."
It's just a bit of fun.
This is honestly not clear enough. While the literal meaning of these sentences is perfectly clear, they are convoluted and sound exactly like the kind of nonsensical contradictory thing a conspiracy theorist would interject into his own rambling.
Sorry, you can’t have fun on HN.
The article is fractally bad, this shows up even in an insignificant detail. When the author inserted the Schiller quote into the article, he picked the wrong non-ASCII characters from a character map or something instead of simply copy-pasting from the linked Wikipedia article which is written correctly. Weird.
The article repeatedly talks about “Eurocrats”. This is a combat term used by Eurosceptics but certainly not a term anyone would use who wants to write a neutral article.
Whenever someone writes “Eurocrats” it’s a good idea to stop reading if you want unbiased information.
Their ultimate goal is to convert the world to dozenal.
From WP:
Against the blue sky of the Western world, the stars symbolise the peoples of Europe in a form of a circle, a sign of union. Their number is invariably twelve, the figure twelve being the symbol of perfection and entirety.
— Council of Europe. Paris, 7–9 December 1955.
"Pleasant to the Eye"
Probably much the same reason the US flag is red, white, blue rather than black, green, orange.
There is a lot of artistic expertise in flags, just as there is in company logos. What makes the Honda 'H' different from the Hyundai 'H'?