Last weekend, CPAC, the annual conference for conservative thought leaders and Republicans, was held in Hungary of all places. This week, Hungary's fascist dictator declared a state of emergency essentially assuming complete control of the country. We are in a global struggle of fascism vs. democracy and the American Republican Party is on the side of global fascism.
Right winger, Viktor Orban, was elected Prime Minister of Hungary in 2010. Now in Hungary the government, or private sector allies of the government, control the media. They did this via government advertising dollars and selective anti-trust rulings. The "threat" constantly pumped out by the government controlled media are the Islamic hordes migrating from the middle east as well as a steady diet of anti-semitism. Orban is building a fence around Hungary and has sent a bill to Brussels to pay for it (sound familiar?). The opposition population is gerrymandered into irrelevance and Orban's wealthy allies (made the more wealthy by ties to government) prop up phony opposition parties to split the anti-Orban vote. Civil servants, including election officials, were fired and replaced by Orban.
After hosting CPAC last weekend, this week Orban has used emergency powers (the threat of Russia's war in Ukraine) to assume full control of Hungary. A right wing fascist dictatorship. On day two of CPAC a speaker called Jews "stinking excrement". Tucker Carlson, Mark Meadows, and Donald Trump spoke at this convention. Here is what Trump said about Orban:
Quote:
"He's a great leader, a great gentleman, and he just had a very big election result. I was very honored to have endorsed him. A little unusual endorsement. Usually, I'm looking at the 50 states but here we went a little bit astrayand I did that only because he really is a good man and he has done a fantastic job for his country."
Interesting that none of the Trump supporters or even the "democrats are just as bad" crowd care to have any say about this obvious shift towards fascism from the Republican Party that we are seeing in broad daylight.
Interesting that none of the Trump supporters or even the "democrats are just as bad" crowd care to have any say about this obvious shift towards fascism from the Republican Party that we are seeing in broad daylight.
They are waiting for the talking points from the mother ship (faux news)!
It's disgusting but Orban is building the model for what the Republican party wants in America. It's unbelievable to me that the anti-semitism is out in the open at CPAC but I guess that's better than ((( ))) and other attempts to obfuscate what we all know is happening.
Meanwhile, "moderation in all things" conservatives are furrowing their brows at a few powerless extremist progressives and will continue to support the Republican party by default.
Interesting that none of the Trump supporters or even the "democrats are just as bad" crowd care to have any say about this obvious shift towards fascism from the Republican Party that we are seeing in broad daylight.
Absurd. You have no evidence to support your claims of fascism even after 4 years worth of data. What is actually alarming is two things, one is Biden's government which you never talk about and the other is this group of elites gathered in Davos, Switzerland talking about ways to make life better for you.
The difference between a right wing conspiracy and the truth is about 20 months.
Last weekend, CPAC, the annual conference for conservative thought leaders and Republicans, was held in Hungary of all places. This week, Hungary's fascist dictator...
Orban is not a "dictator", and is not fascist, he is a populist. He is arguably the most popular and legitimate leader in all of Europe, with some of the highest approval rates, and was recently elected for the 4th consecutive term with a parliament supermajority in a landslide, 20 points ahead of his neoliberal opponent, who is against minimum wage and for very low tax rates on multinational corporations. Orban is to the left of his main opponent on economic issues, and to the right on social issues.
2022 Hungaian elections results
In a recent referendum, 95% of Hungarians recently rejected the LGBT agenda, answering "no" to the following questions:
Quote:
Do you support holding information events on sexual orientation to minors, in public education institutions without parental consent?
Do you support the promotion of gender-reassignment treatments to minors?
Do you support the unrestricted exposure of minors to sexually explicit media content, that may influence their development?
Do you support showing minors media content on gender changing procedures?
Hungary is a more socially conservative society, as is the case today in much of eastern Europe. I think the only liberal country in EE is Czechia, which is also the westernmost geographically. Prague is the European capital of the porn industry.
Part of the reason why Hungary (and neighbors like Poland) are more socially conservative societies today is that they had been exposed to forced "sexual liberation" and other cultural marxist precepts over 100 years ago under the Bella Kun communist dictatorship, which was the first regime to impose sexualization of children, part of the cultural marxist political package pioneered by bolshevik intellectuals like Georg Lukacs, who served as Deputy Commissar for Culture in the provisional Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919.
Eastern/central European intellectuals like Lukacs or Herbert Marcuse are some of the most influential philosophers in the West today. A good part of the cultural gap between the West and Eastern Europe that we find today is the fact that EE has had a tremendous degree of exposure to cultural marxism, which was imposed on them many decades before that philosophy became dominant in the West, after a long march through the institutions which started out in earnest in the 1960s.
"Central European conservatism after the fall of communism," wrote Gergely Szilvay recently, "has been and still is today anti-communist and patriotic, focusing on national traditions and Christianity. It stands for national independence. For us, freedom means national freedom."
Polling data from throughout the region supports that thesis. When it comes to open borders, same-sex marriage, and legal abortion, a vast "values gap" exists between East-Central Europeans and their western neighbors. Most take the conservative position on these issues.
To me, this suggests that wokeness is a luxury item: it flourishes in places like America that have not seen the ravages of totalitarian suffering. Cultures like ours, which have more recent experience with utopianism and its attendant disasters, cannot afford to indulge in arcane fantasies and identitarian ritual.
Over the last few months, I have informally surveyed dozens of university and graduate students, mostly here in Budapest. To a person, no one understands the logic, let alone the appeal, of the woke movement in America and Great Britain.
Poignantly, one student asked: "Why do so many Americans seem to hate their country? We love America. America has always been our example of freedom."
A political science student I talked to at a regional campus said, "Even if wokeness made sense to uswhich it doesn't Hungarians do not have the luxury of being woke. If we stop working together to make Hungary better, we will cease to exist. The Eurocrats will see to that."
A Hungarian graduate student who now works in Brussels told me, "People I meet here misunderstand why Hungarian identity and sovereignty are so important to us. They also don't understand how important the family was during the Communist years."
Recently, an undergraduate student in social science who closely follows American news and social media confessed that he worries America will destroy itself, because "partisan politics is one thing. We have that here too. But an all-out civil war is something different."
Quelle surprise that in Cal88's mixed media cherry-picked defense of Orban he forgot to mention that Orban is a virulent racist/xenophobe.
Surely Cal88, international student of history would be aware of this:
A member of Viktor Orban's inner circle has resigned after the #Hungarian prime minister spoke out against becoming a "mixed race". "I don't know how you didn't notice that the speech you delivered is a purely Nazi diatribe worthy of Joseph Goebbels." https://t.co/gQ0Pgfah3B
Every time Cal88 amplifies Putin's propaganda about nazis in Ukraine (while ignoring the larger number of nazis in Russia's military), remember that Cal88 unequivocally supports Orban.
Next, we can talk about the LGBT referendum. I hadn't heard about it, so I looked it up. Quelle surprise again - Cal88 completely misrepresented what happened.
First - the referendum failed. Cal88 doesn't want you to know this because it doesn't suit his cherry picking agenda.
Second - the questions aren't reflective of the "LGBT agenda" whatever Cal88 thinks that is. The questions were chosen to smear LGBT people by positing strawman positions. If you read the questions that is quite obvious. There is no LGBT agenda promoting unrestricted exposure of minors to sexually explicit content.
Quelle surprise that in Cal88's mixed media cherry-picked defense of Orban he forgot to mention that Orban is a virulent racist/xenophobe.
Surely Cal88, international student of history would be aware of this:
A member of Viktor Orban's inner circle has resigned after the #Hungarian prime minister spoke out against becoming a "mixed race". "I don't know how you didn't notice that the speech you delivered is a purely Nazi diatribe worthy of Joseph Goebbels." https://t.co/gQ0Pgfah3B
Every time Cal88 amplifies Putin's propaganda about nazis in Ukraine (while ignoring the larger number of nazis in Russia's military), remember that Cal88 unequivocally supports Orban.
Next, we can talk about the LGBT referendum. I hadn't heard about it, so I looked it up. Quelle surprise again - Cal88 completely misrepresented what happened.
First - the referendum failed. Cal88 doesn't want you to know this because it doesn't suit his cherry picking agenda.
Second - the questions aren't reflective of the "LGBT agenda" whatever Cal88 thinks that is. The questions were chosen to smear LGBT people by positing strawman positions. If you read the questions that is quite obvious. There is no LGBT agenda promoting unrestricted exposure of minors to sexually explicit content.
The relevant point here is that the Hungarian people support Orban, massively so, more so than what you or I think of Orban. Perhaps you believe we should invade Hungary, and regime-change them to set them straight (no pun intended)?
Most countries in the world are also against mass immigration that would radically change their national character. Not just Hungary, Poland, and nearly every other eastern European country, but nearly every country in the old world, across Asia, Africa, and even in Latin America. The United States, Canada are exceptions to the rule.
In Japan, you have third and fourth-generation Korean immigrants who aren't even given Japanese citizenship. The same is true in many west African countries.
You can't view the rest of the world through the lens of postmodern western liberalism, that is a recipe for disaster in the form of rampant interventionism and potentially, world wars.
The relevant point is that you are an untrustworthy narrator. You constantly cherry-pick, dissemble or lie. You did all three in your defense of Orban.
No one should trust your posts because they are about as reliable as the fake magazine covers you enjoy.
The relevant point is that you are an untrustworthy narrator. You constantly cherry-pick, dissemble or lie. You did all three in your defense of Orban.
No one should trust your posts because they are about as reliable as the fake magazine covers you enjoy.
Right, because posting elections results of Hungary is "cherry-picking", because the fact that the guy got elected and reelected by landslides for literally decades, is an irrelevant cherry-picking lie when it comes to evaluating whether he is a "dictator".
You coud have chosen to discuss the topics of Hungarian 20th century socio-cultural history and its repercussions on modern Hungary in a reasonable and informative matter as I have done above, presenting your arguments from your political perspective, or angrily flip the whole table with a quick and empty smear. Unfortunately with you it is usually the latter...
The relevant point is that you are an untrustworthy narrator. You constantly cherry-pick, dissemble or lie. You did all three in your defense of Orban.
No one should trust your posts because they are about as reliable as the fake magazine covers you enjoy.
Right, because posting elections results of Hungary is "cherry-picking", because the fact that the guy got elected and reelected by landslides for literally decades, is an irrelevant cherry-picking lie when it comes to evaluating whether he is a "dictator".
You coud have chosen to discuss the topics of Hungarian 20th century socio-cultural history and its repercussions on modern Hungary in a reasonable and informative matter as I have done above, presenting your arguments from your political perspective, or angrily flip the whole table with a quick and empty smear. Unfortunately with you it is usually the latter...
You lied about the referendum. Why do you have to lie so much to promote your anti-democracy agenda?
I understand you don't like when I point out your frequent lies but I won't apologize.
You lied about the referendum. Why do you have to lie so much to promote your anti-democracy agenda?
I understand you don't like when I point out your frequent lies but I won't apologize.
Who is lying here, I've posted links to the official english wiki referendum results. It turns out "only" 2/3 of Hungarians were opposed due to the vote spoilage campaign, a fact that wasn't clear from a cursory read of the wiki page, but it's also a fact that doesn't change my basic premise of Hungarians being largely opposed to the LGBT school program, which they've rejected by a margin of 2 to 1.
I also went through the trouble of citing the exact text of that referendum, so readers are free to judge whether these questions are discriminatory in nature or not.
Your modus operandi is to pick a small detail that is completely irrelevant to the big picture, and to use this piece of sophistry to smear your interlocutor and reject his/her/xir whole argument on that basis. That is exactly what you did in the climate change argument where I've presented several dozen media sources in support of my argument of 1970s scientific and media consensus on global cooling, and you've flipped the table and went ad hominem because one magazine cover out of 20+ pieces I've presented turned out to be a meme and not a real vintage Time magazine cover.
You lied about the referendum. Why do you have to lie so much to promote your anti-democracy agenda?
I understand you don't like when I point out your frequent lies but I won't apologize.
Who is lying here, I've posted links to the official english wiki referendum results. It turns out "only" 2/3 of Hungarians were opposed due to the vote spoilage campaign, a fact that wasn't clear from a cursory read of the wiki page, but it's also a fact that doesn't change my basic premise of Hungarians being largely opposed to the LGBT school program, which they've rejected by a margin of 2 to 1.
I also went through the trouble of citing the exact text of that referendum, so readers are free to judge whether these questions are discriminatory in nature or not.
Your modus operandi is to pick a small detail that is completely irrelevant to the big picture, and to use this piece of sophistry to smear your interlocutor and reject his/her/xir whole argument on that basis. That is exactly what you did in the climate change argument where I've presented several dozen media sources in support of my argument of 1970s scientific and media consensus on global cooling, and you've flipped the table and went ad hominem because one magazine cover out of 20+ pieces I've presented turned out to be a meme and not a real vintage Time magazine cover.
It's pretty clear who is being disingenuous here.
You lied about the failed referendum to support your narrative and now you are dissembling.
The referendum was an attempt by Orban to negatively stereotype LGBT just like regressive conservatives do in the US and you fell for it. Don't be so gullible.
We should have an anti libertarian referendum to ask people if they think intel's should be allowed to marry 1p year olds. Would you fall for that?