Great job ignoring the healthy populational growth during socialism in Romania followed by demographic catastrophe since 1990.

You’re being dishonest by cherrypicking year 2000, the 1990s in Romania were horrifying due to the debt given by the IMF (western-aligned organization) in order to crush the welfare state in Romania and adopt austerity policy as I discussed. You cherrypicked the year 2000 because that’s more or less when the super high inflation of the 1990s started to balance, and you’re talking in Euros and not in the local currency because exchange rates were astonishingly low due to currency devaluation. Let’s see how well Romania fared in the 1990s during capitalism!

From 5% during communism to 250% during capitalism. This is EXACTLY what I mean by the European betrayal: Romanians were promised wealth comparable to western Europe, and instead were met with deindustrialization, destruction of welfare, horrifying levels of inflation, and sudden unimaginable unemployment after half a century without unemployment. It’s literally western-funded loans in the 1980s that started to crash the Romanian economy. You cherrypick two convenient dates, ignore the millions of lives lost and emigrated, and say “look, more Euro is better” ignoring that people literally have to flee the country due to the terrible economy.

If you also wanna discuss Spain that’s wonderful, I happen to be a Spaniard. I have seen nothing in my life but economic downturn, stagnation, reductions of real wages, and housing becoming increasingly unaffordable. Let’s go to the Spanish National Institute of Statistics to check the consumption per person:

So, the 20% poorest in Spain used to spend 4612€ per year in 2006. By 2023 it went up to 5443€… but inflation in this period was 38.7%, meaning that to maintain equal consumption capability they should be spending 6396€. Real expenditure, hence, has dropped by 15% for the poorest 20%.

Running the numbers for the following 20% poorest, who spent 7220€ in 2006, they should spend 10014€ to maintain consumer power, but it’s only risen to 9009€, so a 10% reduction in purchase power.

For the following 20%, meaning the 20% of people with the earnings closest to the mean (10% below and 10% above) it’s gone from 9551 to 12122, it should have gone to 13247€ per year, so an 8% reduction in purchase power for the average Spaniard over the past 20 years.

Now explain me how relevant your “average salary increases in Spain” are if the mean Spaniard has suffered not just stagnation. but a progressive worsening of purchase power. Tell me again how fucking wonderful this European model is.

Yeah but I’d shift the phrasing from “nobody wins from war” to “carpet bombing of civilians by an imperialist power is evil”

Romania and Bulgaria are rich? I’m Spanish, a country by no means rich, and we have tons of Romanian immigrants because the working conditions there are extremely hard, and they suffered similar issues:

This is especially true for Bulgaria, they lost like a freaking third of the population since 1990 (from 9mn to 6.4mn in 2024). By what metric are they rich? GDP per capita? How about access to housing, to healthcare, to quality education, the ability to stay in rural areas with non-decrepit infrastructure…

Regarding Poland, the country may be richer as a whole (again, using GDP per capita as metric), but are the people faring better? Look at the share of national income by the bottom 50% of the people:

Hey Cowbee, I’m back after deleting my account referencing your name lmao. I appreciate you bringing up your knowledge about the two counter-revolution events in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

Would you be interested in me doing a review of a book by Radoslav Selucký (economic advisor during the Czechoslovak counterrevolution attempt) called “El modelo Checoslovaco de Socialismo” (the Czechoslovak model of Socialism, printed in West Germany and later translated to Spanish and published in Fascist Spain)?

All good, buddy! Clarified who I meant :)

Someone: takes a selfie with their phone under low lighting conditions

You: "not a photo, it’s the output of an algorithm taking the luminosity from an array of light detectors, giving information of the colour and modifying it according to lighting conditions, and then using specific software to sharpen the original capture*

I meant Skiluros, not you, hence me referencing the $2800bn figure they made up

Nobody wins in war

The Vietnamese won, as a matter of fact, and liberated themselves from colonialism as a consequence

Huh? Where have I expressed support for Russian invasion of Ukraine? I’m simply correcting your made-up numbers. Anyone who corrects you is a Russian imperialist?

Also, why genocidal? Using that word lightly isn’t a good thing. It’s harmful to actual genocide victims like Gazans to call everything a genocide.

So, you CAN compare dollars. You can just delete or edit your previous comment to eliminate the misinformation of $2800bn because you applied inflation twice on the original figure by (for some reason instead of checking it up) assuming Greg hadn’t applied it

You can compare dollars in a nominal manner if you apply inflation indices, that’s what inflation is calculated for. Why did you literally make up the numbers by assuming that it wasn’t inflation-adjusted instead of saying “you can’t compare dollars”?

Edit: the commenter above (Skiluros) made up the $2.8tn figure by applying inflation to a commenter above saying that the USSR had received less money through lend-lease than Ukraine has since the invasion by Russia. This figure Is wrong because the original commenter was already discussing inflation-adjusted figures, and they refuse to correct the mistake.

According to Wikipedia’s article on lend-lease, the USSR got $11.3bn, which today would roughly be $250bn. It’s higher than what Greg said (which I assumed was taking inflation into account, hence me cheking), but still lower than what Ukraine has gotten (assuming the $300bn is correct, didn’t fact check that).

At what point have we betrayed Ukraine?

Literally since it is an independent country. Ukraine was, already well before 2022, the poorest country in Europe. The EU-exported model of neoliberalism, austerity and privatization led to catastrophic results for the Ukrainian economy, leading to drug abuse, crime, lack of healthcare, malnutrition, violence and unemployment, resulting in net population losses of above 10 million between 1991 and 2022, counting increased mortality, mass emigration and lack of births. Europe literally hollowed out Ukraine and made it desperately poor.

You mean to say western countries are betraying their ally?! No way!!! /s

Concern troll* about US imperialism while Trump is in office

I clearly won’t convince you and I don’t think you’ll convince me either, so let’s each guess based on their own ideas:

A) Trump destroys NATO through whatever form of invasion of Greenland

B) The US gains greater control over Greenland above what they have now (whatever form it may take) and EU keeps bootlicking the US

I’m betting on B), as a tankie. I wish it were A) because NATO is close as it gets to literally Satan, but I don’t believe the powers in the US are going to waste the EU influence in its most subservient moment in decades.

You are correct in that why would the US destroy NATO. The entire point is that the people in power in the US have decided that EU is now subservient enough to the US (and since the blowup of Nordstream 2 energetically dependent too) that they will simply do nothing when the US takes Greenland in whatever form that takes.

Greenland becomes strategically important when arctic ice melts and new shipping routes open between China and Europe, and the US plans to control this more directly than it does now.

Trump does not have the power to decide geopolitical policy of the US, if he went against US interests he would quickly be removed. This is not Trump’s personal designs (maybe the messaging is but not the core events), this is the US betraying yet again its allies as it has always done.