WideningGyro

"What's the difference between the wealth being siphoned by national bourgeoisie cronies or foreign multinational cronies"

• In principle? Nothing. In reality? Massive difference in scale. It's very obvious from your dismissive tone that you don't actually understand the amounts in question. I'm not saying that other EU countries are free from corruption (legal and otherwise), but a massive amount of the money that would otherwise go to fund infrastructure, healthcare, etc. in Hungary were directly siphoned off. The prospect of that changing is going to benefit the Hungarian working class. I find it callous and a bit out of touch to tut-tut them for celebrating that fact.

"So, uh, they haven't really been that deeply compromised after all?"

• That's your words, not mine. We're talking about a country where supreme court justices have publicly apologized and grovelled before the president after fining his party a symbolic amount for breach of campaign laws. The same president who suspended term limits and ruled for 16 years. Who built a massive football stadium in his tiny home village. I hate my own EU country for a variety of reasons, but that shit simply couldn't currently happen here. The system, as flawed as it is, has brakes built into it that prevent this kind of open and massive embezzlement of public funds. It's fine if you don't think that matters, but it's unserious to act like it shouldn't matter to the average Hungarian.

You just know he is dying to wear an even more ridiculous and gold-encrusted hat

Yes, and various institutions are packed with Orbán men - a few years ago a supreme court justice (iirc) apologized to Orbán after slapping Fidesz with a symbolic fine for breaching election campaign rules, literally groveling in public. It's definitely possible that the new government is going to have it's hands tied behind its back. But I don't think it's a given that Orbán can maintain loyalty among his people once his hand is off the money spigot.

But yeah, I don't want to give the impression that I'm super optimistic about this. Magyar's positions on Israel and Russia are same and worse, respectively. But domestically, I think it would be out of touch to blame the Hungarian working class for celebrating that their public and EU funds might now find more productive use than solely lining the pockets of a handful of kleptocrats. Don't get me wrong - all liberal governments do this to some extent, but there are levels to this.

I'm not sure I get that position. It's a material fact that astounding amounts of wealth have been siphoned out of the Hungarian state and into the pockets of Orbán and a selection of his cronies. It's also a material fact that Hungary's democratic institutions (which, yeah, liberal democracy - were never great to begin with) have been systematically hollowed out to the point that it is a genuine shock for my friend that the supreme court (which has been packed with Orbán toadies) didn't overturn the election. I don't think it's exaggeration to believe that beginning to revert either of these facts will benefit the Hungarian working class - even if they are just reverting to what is essentially status quo in many European countries.

I'm not particularly optimistic about Magyar either. And I'm painfully aware that an incumbent has real little incentive to undo constitutional changes that benefit the incumbent. He also faces an uphill battle against hostile courts, media etc. and it's possible he'll have his hands tied. We'll see. I think Hungarians can have cautious optimism about having ended 16 years of high-handed kleptocracy, as a treat.

Take this with as many grains of salt you want, but I have a Hungarian friend who is at least sympathetic to communism, and while he would under no normal circumstances ever like someone a zionist neolib like Magyar, but even he is celebrating right now. It's not that Magyar is good, but rather that outsiders struggle to understand the depth of corruption and depravity that was the Orbán regime. Seeing someone systematically dismantle every institution in your country while powerless to stop it is pretty traumatic. And Magyar has even promised to set up a committee to prosecute corruption in the previous government, perhaps even Orbán himself (although like Trump, I'll believe it when I see it).

Anyway, I guess my point is that for Hungarians things did change, and you can't fault them for being optimistic right now. It remains to be seen if this is just going to be a Trump-Biden-Trump dynamic, or if the Magyar government can actually make meaningful changes to ensure this kind of takeover can't happen again (big if).

Agreed, it's not like the USSR was blindsided - they knew exactly what was coming.

Just want to point out that Abby participated in the "before talking about Gaza, it's super important to talk at length about the rise of antisemitic violence"-cliché in a (semi) recent video. I don't generally watch her content, so maybe it's an exception to otherwise good takes, but that one left a sour taste in my mouth.

Why are you here?

Seems bizarre to me that we're only at the "could cancel" stage. Isn't the tournament held in the US??

A final rest for a great soul

Absolutely. I'm actually hoping I can use this convo as a springboard to talking about materialism/idealism, I think if done more as a "this is why we often end up disagreeing" rather than "here's why your opinions are shit", it could be really productive (again, I have a lot of faith in this guy over most libs I know).

Not yet. He shared an opinion piece by a diaspora Iranian middle east expert he follows (and who he assured me is "on the left"), which I'm in the process of writing a response to. I should say that my friend is neither stupid nor a bad person. He is just in the liberal academic mind-prison, and I'm taking my time to talk to him about this because he has potential, and could definitely be radicalized.

The opinion piece kind of does the first two of your bullets. It is a sort of scolding of what he sees as "the left" having a superiority complex about our influence on Iran, that our intelligence agencies should have any power to dictate a vibrant and politically active country like Iran. He essentially just concludes that CIA/Mossad influence and western sanctions don't dictate what happens in Iran. And it is actually problematic to even suggest it, since that takes away the agency of Iranians. He hilariously tries to back this up by referring to 1953, saying that "Iranians were active participants" in the coup. As if that legitimized it, or was evidence of a mass movement for regime change. Absurd. Applying that logic to the bay of pigs shows how ridiculous it is. The author essentially want people to sort of "leave Iran to the Iranians" which in some ass-backwards way means not talking about western influence and meddling.

I'm in the process of writing all this to my friend, making sure to be very measured and careful. I want him to see how brainwormed this sort of western academic coverage really is, but without spooking him or making it too adversarial. The answers in this thread has been really helpful.