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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   960 thread views

Transnational Thursday for February 20, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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That's bullshit, Dean. You're always long-winded even when you have little to say. They would have taken east germany and showered it with money regardless of the the retirement benefits situation. East germany was full of pensioners anyway, so there was no relative gain to be had from the cheapness of the rest of the labor force. In your theory, east germany is both a cost and a profit, depending on what your theory needs it to be.

You weave these elaborate causal chains which bear no relation to reality. People never believe stuff, they 'have to' believe it, because random cause X is the true cause.

I disagree. They believed in neoliberalism, they believed in the productivity of syrian refugees, they believed that debt is a bad thing. Their opinions, like mine and yours and even the german people's, matter. When they're right, good things tend to happen, when they're wrong, the opposite.

Do not become antagonistic just because you feel like you're losing an argument.

Is someone reporting all your comments? Your mod notes always end up in my janitor duty.

There are a few people who do that when they're feeling petty, yes.

I am pleased to see you have abandoned the independent versus dependent event line of the argument, which was the only point of the definitional dispute you just replied to.

A definitional point, I will note, you are further validating with your emphasis on the 'they.' When there is a 'they' that can be meaningfully referred to as choosing multiple policies, those policy-events are not independent. The 'they' is the factor linking factor that makes the evaluation of islamic third-worlders’ productivity, the debt ceiling, and german unification a series of dependent rather than independent relationships.

Now, if you want to say the 'they' is a more spurious relationship a brain can come with... go ahead! But if the same group made policies, and those policies shape how the group makes other policies, those policies are in a dependent, not independent, relationship.

East germany was full of pensioners anyway, so there was no relative gain to be had from the cheapness of the rest of the labor force. In your theory, east germany is both a cost and a profit, depending on what your theory needs it to be.

And this would just be a dispute on the nature of the history and a misunderstanding of the premise. East Germany was not both a cost and a profit- East Germany was an immediate cost by almost any model, and a longer-term profit opportunity by a neo-liberal model.

The neo-liberal model arguably turned out correct, neo-liberal political influences gained significant power and influence, and their neo-liberal paradigm contributed to later policy decisions... decisions informed not only by dynamics of german reunification, but the historical paradigms (such as post-WW2 immigration policies) that helped drive the reunification neo-liberal models.

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