The few and far between folks reading this blog know that I grew up in a small peripheral (nowadays Western) country out in Eastern Europe, known to Western tourists as Romania1. Unfortunately, there's not much to say about it other than the fact that it's piss poor2 and that, in such being, it bears the perfect mark of a cautionary tale for the rest of the world.
So as I grew up in the 1990s, and especially towards the late part of that decade, when a certain light could be foreseen at the end of a fabled tunnel, I kept hearing the term "transition" in political contexts. Like all transitions, this was to be a transition from the old to the new, from retrograde communism to the more sophisticated and greatly evolved "democracy and market economy". Unfortunately, what this became to mean in practice was that unlike the old days, when there was this one dude who issued proverbial fucks in the ass to the common man, in the new ones the common man would get to choose between two or maybe three parties to provide the exact same type of consensual anal service. This transition, basically a transition from the first to the second echelon of the ex-communist party, lasted up until about the mid-2000s, when it transitioned into... well, another transition!
So as for some incomprehensible reason the West finally decided that Romania was to be part of the cool NATO/EU gang, the public discourse was that well boys, we've let you join our ranks, but you've yet to fully demonstrate that you've "integrated", and since your politicians are corrupt (not like ours) and your economy is underdeveloped (not like ours), now you have to transition... from a dirty Eastern European democracy to a fully-fledged Western one, just like the ones they have over in Paris, Berlin or London! the fact notwithstanding that by the mid-2010s it had become apparent3 that those democracies were entering into their full decadent phase.
Anyways, the mid-2010s are yesterday's news from a historical perspective, so it's quite hard for me to tell when exactly Romania became a "grown-up" democracy. It might have been 2017 when the good "civic army" was mobilized to protest Dragnea; it could have been 2020 during covid; or maybe the entire test of maturity was, as it often happens with such things, actually its demise. I don't know, and to be honest it doesn't make that much of a difference in my opinion. What's clear to me is that at some point during the last decade, Romanian democracy fully matured, and as a result... well, as a result, the transition transitioned into another transition, didn't it?
My own personal problem is that I can't really put a name on the exact end goal of this latest transition. Some locals call it an oligarchy, others a plutocracy -- I myself put it somewhere along the lines of a particular type of post-modern feudalism, but for now I lack the terms to describe it by way of analogy and in contrast to other similar phenomena in recent4 history.
So what do you folks think?
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Home, as they recount, to Romanian Robux, to superior burgers known as Mishi, and to lovely rural communities such as Buchdapesti, Clue Jay, Sucheesy, Brashovi or Mamma Mia. ↩
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Value, as understood in its naïve economic sense, is attributed based entirely on how much some particular object is wanted -- relative to its scarcity, but that's one level of nuance further than I'm willing to go in this humble blogpost.
In other words, say you want the latest and the greatest GPU. Then in that context that GPU is to be judged as valuable, especially with respect to other things that you more or less want; just like in some other context dollars are valuable, albeit much less valuable than they were a few decades ago; just like in some other context those bitcoins that (per that twat Taleb) are "worth zero" are actually worth way more than dollars are in the same context. Yes, value is also contextual.
So as contexts are broadened in scope, and you get, say, to the context of the affairs of the world at large, Romania is simply a poor country, somewhere at about the same level, with, say, Kenya; because nobody of importance cares about it, nor do they want to do anything with it, by virtue of nobody wanting to do anything with the people that inhabit that place. Despite the agitprop spread by the local self-haters, this wasn't always the case, but nowadays it certainly is, what with stupid Romanians' consistent wolf-crying coupled with contradictory superiority and inferiority complexes. So anyways, while I get no pleasure whatsoever in stating it -- it is the truth, what can I do. ↩
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One of the advantages of having a blog is that it makes it really cheap to remember things as they were then, even if through today's lens. The point being that you really can't blame Russia, covid or whatever other strawmen you've created for yourself for the situation that you've created for yourself. Say what you will, but I couldn't possibly believe that "150 dead in terror attacks" was an isolated incident -- it was quite the fucking omen of things to come, and that's the same point that I made then, even if I didn't state it explicitly. covid was just the consistent application of a marketing campaign. ↩
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I.e. last five centuries. Caragea's times seem to be the closest, to the point where I find it difficult to distinguish between those days' boyars and nowadays' Bolojans. But anyway, the phenomenon that I'm discussing is not local to Romanians, so I don't think that this example is so telling.
In any case: if you needed one more data point to refute Fukuyama's nonsense, here it is.
By the way, did you notice that history is myopic? As in, it's quite easy to make a story out of events that occurred three decades ago, but a hell of a backbreaking endeavour to put the last five years into a clear context. Were this flailing empire to still have any journalists, that would have been their job. ↩