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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9190 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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I meant the Baltics but am extremely dumb and mistyped.

As for the Balkans…

  1. Since Yugoslavia was not in the USSR or Warsaw Pact and probably had at least half the population of the communist Balkans, I didn’t include it.

  2. There was a huge series of nationalist wars that delayed economic recovery by a decade, destroyed much infrastructure and dislocated a lot of people, all of which is bad for business.

That isn’t an inherent issue with shock therapy or capitalism. What happened in the Balkans was the final outcome of the Ottoman Collapse, which led to the first Balkan wars in the 1910s and which was frozen in stasis by the grand events of the 20th century until the collapse of communism caused them to resume in the 1990s.

It's not like the situation in the Baltics was that much better though. If we correct for the negative effects of the Yugoslavian war, that is.

Even if GDP was the same in the countries listed, the gini coefficient was wildly off. You can check how poor a country is by how many mail order brides it generates if the women there are hot.

In East Berlin pretty young women were known to throw themselves at any travelling West German or Western foreign men at hotel bars, just to have a small hope of escape. There was no mail order bride industry behind the Iron Curtain because gaining an exit visa to a Western country was close to impossible unless you were very well connected and therefore doing well under the system (and therefore had less of an incentive to leave).

There was huge mail order bride industry in the Eastern Bloc after 1990. And huge porn for whatever is worth. With going rates of 100$ for a shoot if you believe producers. And sex tourism too. If normalized in the last years, so I guess we actually caught up to the west.

Sure, but it’s not a good point of comparison because the reason that behavior was less common under communism wasn’t because it was wealthier or more developed but because people were banned from leaving (or coming to do business, except in very limited cases), it wasn’t some inherent achievement of socialist prosperity.

In East Berlin pretty young women were known to throw themselves at any travelling West German or Western foreign men at hotel bars, just to have a small hope of escape.

This was exactly the same in Hungary as well.

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