SpringFish
22hr ago
Yeah, it sounds to me like the things some of my rural relatives say, that we should vote for politicians who have already been in power for years "because they've already stolen enough", while the new guys are not rich yet, so they will start stealing more. There is no such thing as having stolen enough and stopping. As the saying goes "the appetite comes with eating". In relationships, I just don't see any guy saying "I had a lot of awesome sex 5 years ago, therefore I don't desire it now".
SpringFish
1d ago
It's a big faux-pas to comment on women's tits in a mixed environment, creepy drunk uncle territory, it's like construction guys catcalling and whistling-territory. Eyes work because eyes are emotionally expressive, it's the window to the soul. You can similarly compliment her smile, but not her thick lush lips, unless you're already having sex or petting.
SpringFish
1d ago
men will praise other men for successfully bulking up at the gym
People praise each other for succeeding at hard stuff. Men also praise men for building a cool shed or doing cool skateboard tricks or whatever else.
women will praise men for having a "great personality,"
Among each other or to the man? Towards him, it's a signal he should keep up the way he is treating her, not to get too lazy comfortable, thinking that his physical appearance will carry him all the way.
women will praise other women for doing such a bang-up job with their make-up
It's effort and taste, again. Praise is feedback to keep up up the good work. Positive reinforcement. There's not much to reinforce about how good you are at being tall again today.
men will praise women for having big, natural tits
In their face? Not the best strategy unless you're already having sex. Or among the boys? Don't women also fawn about a guy in non-personality ways when among trusted female friends?
This is just politeness. It's rude to rub it in that you just have some fundamental flaws that cannot be improved. So people focus on the things you can change. Also praising makes sense in relation to stuff you did. You expended effort and achieved a positive result, that's laudable. You deserve no cookies for how your face looks or similar. "Anyone can achieve anything" is the western (or rather just American) myth. Nurture over nature, growth mindset etc. It sounds warm and cozy, a just world, up in the fluffy clouds. Talking about the dirty reality down here is just ugly and a vibe killer. Other cultures are much more matter-of-fact about these realities.
For sure. It takes a lot of effort to look effortless. But you should still look effortless.
But I'd also say that you can get results in a more natural and less strategic way as an ambitious, successful, decent looking man who moves in mixed gender circles, as long as your goal is just having a normal relationship with a normal woman, and not maximizing body count and seduction of party girl types. I know many couples where they more or less just formed in friend groups etc, hanging out, then stayed together. It takes some conscious effort to plan things out by the guy, but not necessarily this full analytical approach.
SpringFish
1d ago
"High-decoupler" is a term in rationalist circles and it means the person is able to talk about things in a neutral, abstract, emotionally distanced way, without taking it personally, and they can evaluate ideas and "what if" scenarios in a dispassionate way without working themselves up emotionally or taking offense at the assumptions behind the hypothetical, or taking it to mean that the person proposing the hypothetical is also fully believing in it.
Basically you decouple your abstract analysis of a topic from your emotional investment into it in your own life and your identity and self-image. It's more typical in somewhat autistic people, for whom implications and connotations are less obvious and they take things at face value and simply talk about the thing, without being aware of whether it's comfortable to others.
SpringFish
1d ago
Having to go meta and strategizing means that you are having trouble in the natural way. I think a similar reaction can be elicited among cool guys when the uncool guys are theorizing about how to make friends and how friendship is about transactionally giving each other access to social circles and a friend should be had to the extent of their usefulness and their network and social status, and you have to strategically choose and drop friends to gain social influence etc.
It all sounds like being manipulative and using people as instruments. As a man I would personally find it creepy if some guy is obsessed with books like "How to make friends and influence people" and I spot him trying the techniques recommended in there on me (e.g. ask for small trivial favors first, etc).
The default, high status, correct vibe is not looking for strategies and metagame analysis, but just doing the object level stuff of being entertaining, ambitious, skilled, talented, and being someone other people want to tag along with for their journey.
People are more fine with discussing similar things in more clearly transactional contexts, like job search and hiring, but even there it can be very emotionally loaded and telling someone that they are not good enough for a certain tier of job can be hurtful, and often people just want to commiserate and hear "you were too good for that job anyway".
Being open about these things requires a deeper level of connection. I wouldn't say it's impossible to talk about with women, I would assume they touch on these subjects with their best female friends.
SpringFish
2d ago
The issue is that in modern constitutions, you usually have some higher principles at the start that trump any lower one and any lower law has to be interpreted in the context of the principles laid out in the constitution. And the higher you go in these principles the more vague it gets. So from one point of view, this allows us to interpret the law correctly according to the intent expressed in the top rules. From the other point of view, appeals to those vague principles can allow one to derive anything and everything, and this makes a joke out of any lower level laws that a particular judge dislikes.
SpringFish
2d ago
I don't think it's a good example for what you want to argue. I scored 100%, and anyway, in real life we solve such issues by having legal vehicle categories, different categories need different licenses, can use or cannot use bike paths, some are allowed on highways, others aren't etc. And there are regulations about what the criteria are for a vehicle to be classified as a particular category. And those criteria depend on manufacturer data and tests and documentation. It's not as easy as one sentence, but that's fine, we are able to cope with it by writing detailed rules that mention engine volume, maximum speed, total weight, size, etc. And for each of those, yes it's fractal, you need to define how to measure the vehicle, with empty or full tank, with an average person sitting inside or not, for the width, do the side mirrors count or not, etc. But these questions don't mean you have to throw your hands in the air and give up. It means you just need to answer these questions as they come up and put them in the rules. It's doable and it's done.
There are much hairier areas of law though, like what exactly counts as slander, or fraud, or how you can determine intent, what kind of assault reaches what level, how do you determine if a certain bodily harm will heal in N days or N+1 days, when the category of severity would hinge on that, since healing isn't an instantaneous event. But in practice, we seem to be able to manage. Doctors and legal medical experts see many cases and develop an intuition for calling it one way or another.
SpringFish
4d ago
Higgsfield is making some series with Seedance 2.0 and Nano Banana:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=LQ-vSa9_H98 https://youtube.com/watch?v=digHr6k38x0
I just can't stand watching this genre (superhero action movie or whatever), more than 30 seconds at a time, but it looks fine on a technical level. It would be great to have something with a bit more interesting story.
SpringFish
4d ago
You may like Harry potter by balenciaga
I think AI acting is getting better and maybe more serious stories could also be told, see for example this proof of concept (the actual content of what she's yapping about is quite boring, but the facial expressions and voice tone are getting more and more realistic).
SpringFish
4d ago
Political as in commenting on concrete British political events, or more like political drama as a genre?
To maybe specify better what I would like to see is stuff in the ballpark of this, just with better ideas: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bYW_7rWjQMs Or a good thriller, or something psychological, or a good scifi that makes you think etc.
I guess a good start for people with fewer ideas would be to do film adaptations of interesting online short stories or highly upvoted nosleep stories, or even just regular short stories that appeared in print over the last 50 years or more.
AI videos. Have you seen any good short films that were made with the use of GenAI tools, in entirety or in large part? I don't mean oneshot from prompt to full movie, it can be any kind of multistep process where the creator may generate character sheet images with one model, then use a video model to make videos, and any other steps with AI models can be involved. I can only find a handful, and they aren't great. Though YouTube's search is notoriously broken anyway.
The ones I could find are very flat storywise and are more like a techdemo, packed with action movie shots. I'd be interested in a more story and character-driven one or just anything where the filmmaker wants to tell a story. Less "I wanted to geek out with AI tools so I have to come up with a story for this movie now", more "I wanted to make a movie and now AI makes it possible and simple to realize my vision".
It seems that the story, the content is the harder part. Which isn't surprising, since having access to pen and paper / printing press / rich word processor software didn't suddenly turn everyone into a book author either. The bottleneck is having something to say.
Or perhaps the human acting performance is just too subpar for creative people to accept it as of yet. I mean that the people / characters in a generated AI video often seem to express emotions in an uncanny way etc.
Or perhaps all creatives who would have story ideas and execution capability don't use it because A) they are strongly anti-AI of the bluesky sort, or B) they anyway have access to friends who can act for their short films and it's more fun to do it with other people for such non-nerd creative types. or perhaps C) the latest generation of AI tools need more time to penetrate the creative spaces because they are still mostly present in tech-geek spaces only, i.e. creative types don't yet know about how good the latest models are and have dismissed them months ago when they were worse. or maybe D) creatives have very low tolerance of deviating from their vision, and current models are too random and too hard to control for them to be a good vessel to carry their vision and ideas.
So the plan would be that single moms get much higher welfare than today. But for this to make a difference, this transfer would probably have to be very high, like the support obtainable from a high status "sugar daddy". There is just not enough productivity even in rich countries for this to be feasible. Not to mention that men won't really like seeing their taxes go to strangers' kids en masse as the norm, while they live and die alone without a family.
The retort could be that AI will turn everything on its head and all our current intuitions about the economy will become useless, as human labor ceases to have market value. Another problem, though, would be that women who don't want to raise children even with such extra welfare money would probably also not like this program. "Why do these other women get so much cash for having a hobby of raising kids? I also want that cash, we should all receive equal money." We've seen this in Hungary that many single women were quite angry at all the tax cuts for mothers and similar programs.
I'm also a bit skeptical whether there is a cohort of women who really "mother-material" and strongly want kids while not being "wife-material", ie women to whom single motherhood as a openly declared end goal from the get-go is attractive enough, and they want to live in co-housing presumably with other women like this.
Also, how would these women's romantic lives go? Some kind of sequential monogamy or promiscuity on a parallel track, fully decoupled from reproduction? Like a sequence of step-fathers to their child, and the father merely contributes attention and other non-material emotional things? (because the copious amounts of welfare already pay for a great life to mother and child?).
I find the article quite well written, and they have a poke at almost all quickly thought up counter-arguments and speculate about different alternatives and do discuss the likely downsides and upsides and how they would be received by different demographic groups.
My own prediction is that AI and robotics will reach sufficient levels in the next 10-20 years that automated elderly care will not be a catastrophic problem when the demographic imbalance really hits us (of too few young people and too many old who need care), and the rest will depend on whether and to what extent superintelligence works out. If things remain mostly "normal", I'd count on genetic and cultural evolution towards more pro-natality in values and temperaments simply through natural selection. If immigration from poor countries towards rich countries remains high, this kind of evolution would also strengthen the most conservative elements of these groups and that doesn't bode well for the whole liberal value system either. If things don't remain "normal", then I can't even speculate.
But this topic is still getting too little attention. And it's not one that you can just wish away, or reframe and "dissolve" or simply let fizzle out like some debate on some aspect of theology or something. The next generation will consist of the children of those who reproduce. People who don't reproduce will not have children in the next generation. It's obvious but it sometimes seems online as if the "debate" or the conflict was between groups who like chocolate vs vanilla ice cream, or one hobby or another, but there is a very strong asymmetry that if you chose one side you are eliminated from having a "representative" in the next round.
There's also the possibility that even without evolutionary selection effects, the tendency of young people to distrust what the older generations tell them may shift the value systems and cause a different attitude towards relationships and the other sex. This may not have any signs today but might become a thing when longer term consequences of the current generation of 20-40-somethings come to be realized and upcoming young generations (maybe those who are yet unborn) will be in opposition to those value systems.
SpringFish
12d ago
An interesting little moment in the marathon 7-hour 50-artist "System-Breaking Grand Concert" two days before the election was when the Jewish Hungarian reggae singer, vegan and pro-Palestine activist GRas called on the crowd to chant the Hungarian equivalent of "Free free Palestine" and then proceeded to diss "IsraHell" imperialism and capitalism. https://youtube.com/live/t6BEQJTqnXY?t=14593 Afterwards, the speaker / show host was quick to say that "we don't all agree in everything" and that this even is for one specific cause etc. All this good little attention afterwards, since the focus was stolen by a singer who flashed his dick and said he'd put his balls on the head of a minister, and everyone, including Orbán made references to that event.
SpringFish
12d ago
Suppose you take the latest and greatest LLM and use it to generate a huge corpus of text and use that text to train a new LLM. And then repeat the process a number of times. Intuitively, it seems unlikely that the result will be any better than what you started with. And apparently both experiments and mathematics indicates that what happens is "model collapse," i.e. with each iteration the new model performs worse. Because you always lose a little with each iteration. Assuming that's all true, it follows that LLMs must be missing some essential attribute possessed by human brains. Because we apparently picked ourselves up by our bootstraps and created from scratch all the text which is used to create LLMs.
Where did you hear that anyone is proposing to reach AGI via LLMs by training LLMs on their own generated output? That's clearly dumb and not what people propose. The model has to interact with something real, it has to "touch grass", for it to work. That's the external information. For example a coding LLM can get an informative learning signal by running its generated code through the compiler and running tests and seeing if the resulting program compiles, passes the tests, uses less RAM or is faster, etc. I'm not saying that leads to AGI, but there are clearly ways to obtain information from the outside world, and it's not just about sewing a pipe from the LLM's ass back into its mouth.
I'm more and more drifting to the view that this abstract principles-based reasoning in a vacuum, where you just assert rights and derive things from it and hold to it, is not where real impact lies. You need a social fabric that holds people together where the political differences are bridgeable and the other political parties are seen as legitimate alternatives. For example if one party says that income tax should be 5 percent higher and another disagrees, or one thinks that public healthcare is more efficient with larger regional hospitals, while another wants to prioritize good care being available closer to everyone's homes, etc. then there is no such danger. In other words, the Overton windows have to overlap enough.
Once you let society fracture so much that they see each other's political opinion as an existential threat to themselves, their identity, their deeply held cultural beliefs etc., the tool to reach for is not rules lawyering some better laws from first principles like free association or free speech, but to try to create social cohesion. Politics is downstream of culture, and culture comes from social interaction and exchange. If you have long-term relations to your co-citizens in ordinary contexts, and you depend on them for general life stuff, if you go to each other's weddings and help each other haul stuff or do some construction work or whatever, seeing each other in many different roles, that results in a convergence of understanding, and some degree of synchronization, and interest alignment.
Of course this is what's getting erased with the increasing individualism. There's nothing that ties you to your neighbors, so you're free floating and can take on any political views, without any connection to whatever other people believe. There's less pressure to compromise and more pressure to stand out by being the purest and most vocal, most righteous version of your chosen side and has very little cost associated with fully condemning the other side as pure evil.
Now, many would say that this kind of cohesion is not really possible and there are inherent conflicts of interest that will always remain. Some would point to class differences, others would point to ethnic ones. But if you identify such unbridgeable differences, the tools are also not really the abstract principles to solve this, but some kind of Bosnia-Herzegovina style regulated representation and explicit design around this social fact, because again, politics has to be designed around the social reality. There's certainly some "backflow" and the rules create incentives that have effects on social relations, but in the end the rules are more a codification and stabilization of what the real emotional connections are. It's like Conway’s Law, stating that "organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." The political rules of what's allowed, what's normal, what freedoms can be afforded, depend on the social (and interest) relation structures of the people themselves. High-trust cultures where most everyone believes in the same fundamental principles and are generally not at each other's throats can afford to allow unrestricted speech because most people anyway don't want to say things that would upset others too much. A society that's split in two tribes, which shout and plot about how to hurt the other tribe to the maximal degree, will find that they need to have some kind of constraints, but it's not very likely to solve the original problem.
Historically, such pent up tension was often released through war, like the Thirty Years War, after which people realized it's better to come to some kind of compromise, or one side is weakened so much that the tension is released that way. I'd hope that it's not a necessary stage to go through, though. Another thing may be the threat of an external enemy, or an external cause to unite around. I think the end-of-history types thought this could be these neutral inert things like space exploration, climate change and environmentalism, generic 90s elementary-school textbook obviously-good UN/UNESCO/UNICEF charities and human rights etc. But it seems that this is not really enough to form cohesion and are turned into wedge issues as well.
I think people are not inherently motivated enough to cooperate, only if circumstances force them, which is generally not pleasant. The village where everyone relies on everyone is not just sunshine and rainbows to live in. Because relying on others also carries dangers, and it limits your choices and there is constant judgment and gossip and observations, you have to care about your reputation, and the emergent judgments are not always fair.
SpringFish
18d ago
You can check my comment here: https://www.themotte.org/post/3671/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/430673?context=8#context
In 2022, the Russia-Ukraine war was very fresh, the invasion was barely more than a month old at the time of the election. The opposition candidate said a few stupid things in interviews about sending weapons and possibly Hungarian soldiers to Ukraine if NATO would decide so. Or that Ukraine is fighting our war too, and "blood is more important than oil" etc, which were blasted all around the pro-Fidesz media, there were huge billboards etc. saying that Fidesz will keep Hungary out of the war and will keep a strategic calm while the opposition would let Hungary slip into the war. It scared many people.
But even the baseline was different. In 2022, the opposition was a multi-party patchwork which included the despised previous Socialist PM who was in power before Orbán, and there were constant internal squabbles between the opposition parties, leading to an ineffective campaign.
I guess all those people handwringing about democratic backsliding were full of shit. Orban used to be popular, and now he's not. Simple as.
I don't think this is so black-and-white. Of course some ignorant people claimed that Orbán is like Erdogan or Lukashenka or Putin. He never was that sort of dictator with blood on his hands, people never fell out of windows of tall buildings, journalists were not imprisoned, there was no novichok, etc. The democratic backsliding is about making a joke out of institutions, placing puppets everywhere from his small inner circle including the constitutional court, the public prosecutor's office, the president of the republic, the national bank, etc, funneling about a quarter of all public contract money to his frontmen, making a joke out of the public state media (you cannot imagine it, it is parody-level extreme bias, something you couldn't imagine if your standard is the left-bias of western media), taking over a lot of private media, threatening to pass a law that would crush them under claims of being foreign agents, constantly keeping some state of emergency to make passing laws even easier, and ruling by decree, on a whim. First with the justification of the dangers of migration, then covid, then the Ukraine war, there was always some special emergency state for the legal system. They often passed totally unrelated laws and bypassed the need for public tenders and gave government contracts to their friends and themselves with the justification of the state of emergency. They constantly gerrymandered and originally tailored the electoral law to benefit them. They won a 2/3 constitutional parliamentary supermajority in 2014 with less than 45% of the votes because the voting system they designed benefited them. The system forced parties to join up, since one large party and many small ones simply results in this distorted outcome. But they made sure to give enough media space to small parties to avoid having any one of them grow too big. So in many of the elections a lot of energy was spent on the squabbles of the opposition parties and in what form they should run together, what to do with the party of former PM Gyurcsány who still had significant support, but not enough to win alone, but many voters outright rejected Gyurcsány, so it was a neither with, neither without situation.
Being a former Fidesz insider, Magyar could draw a line and he held to it throughout it all, that he will not collaborate with anyone from the former opposition parties. Every single person of their candidates is someone new, who was never an MP, and never held high political positions. Gyurcsány even resigned from chairing his party and it was taken over by his wife (whom he also divorced). The small parties also just withdrew from the election. But by then they were already led by unknown people and had very low support, each below the 5% threshold, because the 2022 parliamentary and 2024 European elections led to resignations of known figures in those opposition parties.
It's certainly a combination of incompetence (or deals with Fidesz) of the opposition parties, combined with good machinations by Orbán, tending to his little garden of opposition parties well. But he also centralized power in a way that can be labeled authoritarian and made a puppet show out of the institutional checks and balances. The country was basically ruled by Orbán's college dorm friends and his childhood friends.
There's definitely something to be said about the youth involvement in this election. In previous elections, young people were not very politically active and were apathetic. There were always some "activist" types who cared and who Deutsche Welle or Arte could make nice videos about, the slam poetry folks etc, but this time it really was something different. There was a bit of this already in 2022, but the story was much less clear and there was a lot of intra-opposition squabbling and the candidate was just not as talented.
It's also a generational effect. There are now many young voters whose only political memories are from Orbán's system. If, say, you first understand something about politics when you're 10, then everyone under 26 have no memory of anything else than Orbán being in power. And young people really resonated with the appearance of Magyar, it started with a YouTube interview on a channel watched by many young people, and they could follow the story right from the beginning, many "grew up" in a political sense with this story, it required little prior knowledge, and it started with a morally clear cut black and white story, the pardon scandal where Orbán's allies pardoned someone convicted for covering up child sexual abuse in a children's home. This led to a huge protest (independent of Péter Magyar) led by young social media influencers to stand up for children in children's homes overall. Many young people were reached by this campaign and Magyar could channel this moment and flurry around himself and formed a new movement. People were looking for someone to rally around and the 2022 defeat of the opposition had blown up the old opposition, so there was a vacuum. Then in the last summer, 2025, essentially all festivals and concerts were loud with chants of "Mocskos Fidesz!" (literally "dirty Fidesz", meaning something like "scumbag Fidesz" in emotional tone), which is really a new development. Young people used to say they want to get away from politics and propaganda during these festivals and they want to forget about it all for at least those times. This time, though, there was such strong consensus in the youth that there was basically no controversy in this.
As shown in this poll, which turned out to be remarkably accurate to the election results, young people in the 18-29 bracket support Tisza with 73% and Fidesz with 11%, and as you go higher with the age bracket, it gradually moves towards Fidesz majority with 28% Tisza and 48% Fidesz for 65+ (the gender gap that Fidesz is relatively stronger with women than with men is most likely due to men dying earlier, and there being more 65+ women than men). For educated people, it's 63% Tisza, 19% Fidesz. Also in Budapest it's 58% Tisza and 23% Fidesz. If you're an educated young person in Budapest, these all would stack up leading to minuscule support for Fidesz in that demographic you likely saw in Budapest.
There was also a massive concert last Friday, two days before the election, with 50 different musicians and bands performing one explicitly regime-critical song of theirs and it was headlined by one of the most popular singers Azahriah (years ago, even Orbán had a Tiktok video where he claimed he likes Azahriah in an attempt to be with the fellowkids). Azahriah is massive with young people, he filled the largest stadium of Hungary (Puskás Aréna, 67k seats) 3 times on 3 consequent days. On this even, the two hero whistleblowers (one a police captain who uncovered an intelligence plot against Tisza party and one a military captain who drew attention to Orbán's son's role in Hungary's mission to Chad and mismanagement in the military) made a surprise appearance on stage, and gave emotional speeches. I would also not underestimate these moments. Everything came together to "click" right for the election day. (There's also a genuine admiration worthy for a popstar towards Magyar from some young women and high school age girls, which would be worth its own exploration, regarding Tiktok and girls painting their nails with the Tisza logo or Magyar's face etc, though this is not really my space...)
Of course they will be disillusioned. I see it on Reddit that they are very enthusiastic right now, it's their first time seeing a non-Orbán in the role of Prime Minister(-elect), and project all their imagination and wishes for endless possibilities. It's really a honeymoon phase right now. Of course, people will have to learn, but this is how youth is. I had the same hope about Orbán back in 2010 when we finally sent Gyurcsány away and Orbán promised a break with all their corruption and campaigned with very similar sentiment as Magyar today. Including about the media, the "new aristocracy" sitting atop Hungarians, about dumb ads and propaganda etc. But I do think we just need this naive energy sometimes, we can't have everyone be cranky old buggers. Based on today's press conference I think Magyar will hold his position well, he's already proving less than fully eager to please whatever they ask for from Brussels. He was measured and didn't overpromise on Ukraine, LGBT or migration, regardless of what the reporters would have wanted to hear. He still wants the opt-out from the 90 billion credit for Ukraine, he still wants no migration pacts, and gave a balanced answer about LGBT rights, saying that everyone should be able to live as they want and love who they want as long as they don't break any laws.
They know the economy is important and do try things, Orban put price controls on plenty of different products and services
These are basically propaganda tools. He does this then put billboards everywhere, mandates signs in supermarkets, sends letters in the mail, mandates little orange highlighted boxes on utility bills about how the government saved you X HUF on this bill etc. This is a political product.
Their strategy for the economy is not very deep. Keeping the car assembly plants and now they had the big idea to go all in with the electric vehicle transition and brought Chinese battery factories in massive amounts to Hungary, but this gamble doesn't seem to play out. They brought BYD to Szeged, which does little more than launder tariffs, as they just do the last phase of assembly, but they can then claim EU origins and avoid some fees. There is no high-value contribution here. I'm not saying that it's easy, given the free movement within the EU, it's hard to retain the best experts, and the periphery is by default this kind of assembly place. But Hungary doesn't have great natural resources or oil, even the agriculture is not so competitive. Now, I'm not an economist, but it's clear that the trajectory has been disappointing compared to the regional performance of other Central European countries.
But also regarding social policies and culture war stuff, they have such a primitive and utterly incompetent "intellectual sphere" that you will simply not find thinking people who can go along with that. They try to top-down manufacture Youtube podcasts, some kind of Hungarian Joe Rogans, but their viewership is just tanking. They tried bringing in popular trash celebrities, like the primitive rapper Dopeman, to whose podcast Orbán went twice during the campaign, or the other criminal-looking rapper Jaber. Their Mathias Corvinus Collegium think-tank is just a bootlicking scaffold copy of American think tanks. There really is a dearth of thoughtful backing for any of Orbán's social policies. It's all about winning the moment and doing something for the polls, being able to put something on the billboards. But I even doubt that Orbán has any real principles at all. He turns like a sunflower to whichever direction he hopes to gain from.
What Hungary has is the age old népi-urbánus (national / urban) split, which is not very easy to explain. The modern Hungarian national consciousness arose around the reform period after 1825 and the revolution of 1848, and these are intertwined with French Revolutionary ideals, and the movement was anti-monarchic. Hungarian history was split in two by the Ottoman occupation. We are proud of the Hunyadis, King Mathias and the early Árpád dynasty, but that was already legend and myth by the 19th century when those things were revived into symbols especially in the 1896 celebrations of the 1000th anniversary of the original Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian basin. After the Ottoman occupation ended, the re-urbanization some of the Hungary had the peculiarity that the civic professional urban population was largely German-speaking, and in good part Jewish. There remained some Hungarian nobility too, and they also sponsored culture and development, e.g. the Széchenyis, but still there was a long-standing split in the more worldly cosmopolitan, westward looking side and the more traditional folk-oriented Hungarian-history-centered side. The publicist Róbert Puzsér dubbed this the Hunnia vs Pannonia split, referring to the Hun legendary origin of the Hungarian nation and an identity partially rooted in the East, vs the Roman province of Pannonia, symbolizing our integration in the Western Roman Empire, Western Christianity etc.
It's the same split that was presented in the István, a király (Stephen, the King) rock opera, where it's even symbolic that the author of the lyrics came from one side and the composer from the other. And it was an allegory based on the historical fight between Saint Stephen with his German allies (the Western cosmopolitan who takes on Western Christianity), vs Koppány, the representative of the pre-Christian pagan Hungarian tradition.
Orbán's family didn't really connect into any of these intellectual streams. But he was always, already from 1990, was looked down upon by the Budapest cultural elite who saw him as a loud villager nobody. So over time he stepped into the shoes of this "népi" identity, which would have originally been represented by the MDF and FKGP parties (and KDNP), whom he however chewed up and swallowed.
There is also a lot of inner pressure in Hungarian intellectuals/politicians/academics to be seen as modern enough, despite being on the periphery. Therefore they do like to ape whatever is fashionable in western academia. A perfect symbol of this for me was how Momentum MEPs Katalin Cseh and Anna Donáth glowed and sparkled in the eyes in the EU institutions, or when meeting Macron. What I'm seeing in contrast to this in Péter Magyar, is that he doesn't seem to be fazed by this as much. He doesn't seem to crave the bellyscratches by western cultural elites.
SpringFish
18d ago
Also Cseh (Czech) and Rácz (Serb) are quite common, and somewhat less common Orosz (Russian), Görög (Greek), Ruszin (Ruthenian).
Orbán defeated
As I wrote about it yesterday, Orbán's defeat was clear from the polls, but the scale of it wasn't so sure and it is massive. If you'd like some background on what the topics and issues of the campaign were (not the typical culture wars that many online threads try to shoehorn this into) check that post, but let's now look at the results and what could come.
It's a landslide with a bigger supermajority (around 138-140 seats of 199) than any of Orbán's victories in the last 16 years (the largest was 135 seats). The turnout was 80%, the largest of all free elections since 1990 by a good margin (Orbán's previous defeat in 2002 held the record with 73.5% turnout).
However, this was not only a defeat of Orbán but also of the old opposition. The Socialist party (the legal successor of the old communist state party from before 1990) and its spinoff previously headed by the former Socialist PM Gyurcsány (2004-2009) have been demolished too. The new parliament will be filled with many new faces, and most of them are young enough that they were not involved with or socialized under the pre-1990 system - which I see as a very positive development - and they were also not politicians of either the left or the right in more recent times.
This parliament will have three parties, the broad-tent center-right pro-EU Tisza (138-140 seats), Orbán's pro-Putin right-wing Fidesz (53-55), and the radical nationalist / antivax-right Mi Hazánk (6). The left-wing and progressive liberal parties did not run for the election and instead supported Tisza. This extra-parliamentary party landscape is quite small, but the liberal-progressive centrist Momentum stands out as one that may have a chance to return in a more proportional electoral system and had at least in the past passed the 5% threshold in an EU Parliament election. The green Dialogue for Hungary is only relevant as being the party of the liberal mayor of Budapest, but never had significant measurable support. Now I haven't mentioned the last party who contested yesterday's election: the formerly joke party Two-Tailed Dog Party received less than 1% of the vote and are on the way to irrelevance. It is therefore a moment where the whole political system is prime for refreshment.
Tisza is unlikely to remain as such a broadly popular party. Their main feature is and was in this election that they could form one unified block under a charismatic leader who could unite all opposing sentiment to Orbán's system, from various disparate directions, while not being tainted by the "old opposition". Previously the opposition block always had in its ranks the despised pre-2010 Socialists and their spinoff Democratic Coalition (DK), which simply could not gather the necessary amount of votes. Magyar managed to win by remaining a blank slate on which anyone can project their desires. He avoided divisive topics in the campaign. He promised to keep the southern border fence and not to accept a migration deal, but didn't talk much about the asylum system and immigration. He does not support a fast-tracking of Ukraine's EU membership, but he is against Putin and much less hostile to Ukraine than Orbán. Magyar did not take part in the Pride march last year, which was banned by Orbán and anyway turned out to become the largest participation ever in a Pride march. He supported it in generic terms, the liberty to love who you want etc., but didn't focus on these topics. Instead he toured the countryside in national costumes, always carrying the Hungarian flag, singing folk songs at rallies, visiting Hungarian communities in neighboring countries, wearing national symbols, referring to historical heroes, national poets etc. However, his party does contain more liberal people as well, and social issues will likely be led by Kriszta Bódis who wrote illustrated children's books about gay love and so on. As I said, it is a heterogeneous block.
The supermajority allows reshaping Hungary from the ground up. Magyar has already promised to create a new constitution, and in contrast to Orbán's single-party constitution, it shall be voted on by the people in a referendum. He already called for the resignation of president of the republic Tamás Sulyok, who is even less significant of a figure than would be implied by the symbolic nature of the presidency in Hungary - he is for all intents and purposes an Orbán puppet who signs all laws without question, just like the previous presidents have been in his system. Magyar promises to also join the European Public Prosecutor's Office, and review EU and state fund mismanagement and corruption, to investigate FM Szijjarto's Russian ties and to retrieve stolen wealth by Orbán's inner circle. Such promises we have already seen many times when governments were changed, and usually nothing came of it, there were background deals and the economic sector found new ways to get close to the new system. What may be different this time is that Magyar seems to have a real personal motivation to see the old regime prosecuted. And there is massive public expectation of this and failing to deliver could destabilize this patchwork coalition, as the main topics holding it together are being outraged by Orbán's corruption and the state of public services, and the state of the propaganda media. Improving the education system and hospitals and the punctuality of trains is a much slower and harder task especially when the economy is on a downturn. So he will need some symbolic wins.
Overall, what I see is that post-1990 Hungary had an era of somewhat naive attempt at copying western democracy, switching the governing side each 4 years, until around 2006-2010 which was the first big flip and disillusionment and phase change into the Orbán era, and now there is another big reordering and phase change. I believe Hungarians, mainly the intellectuals, have become much less naive than they were in the 90s. Orbán ditched many unwritten rules and will have a hard time to criticize anything Tisza may do, including using legal trickery to remove Orbán's puppets from high positions even if they were elected for 9 or 12 years (except the chairman of the national bank, whom he said he'd leave there not to scare the markets) and to starve off Orbán's economic empire. Anything Magyar may do, there will be plenty of examples to point to in Orbán's conduct, and backed by an even larger mandate with record turnout, it will be difficult to claim that all this is really done by Brussels and Zelensky. Of course Magyar will want to present himself as not simply copying Orbán's methods. One big promise is to introduce a two-term limit for prime ministers, which is unusual in parliamentary systems, but signals that he doesn't have ambitions for serving as long as Orbán.
SpringFish
18d ago
It's quite baffling, I've looked at some international coverage and what you're describing is happening on state media like ZDF, too. They have no neutrality it seems. Of course not as blatant and over the top as Hungarian public media has been, but one would expect a bit more neutrality than this messaging that Peter Magyar is not quite holding the obviously objectively correct opinions on all issues...
It depends on whether these beliefs are deeply internalized and impact real life behavior and decisions, or if they are vibes, aesthetics and slogans. It also matters how radical the woman is in the left ideology. If it's relatively moderate, echoing the mainstream schooling and institutional messaging, then it just signals being well-adjusted and agreeable. If they are mindkilled into talking about this all the time and are turning antinatalist because of the climate crisis and freaking out about the issue of the day all the time, then it's a pass. But most people live their lives modeled around what they see around them in real life. If they grew up in a stable family, have siblings who managed to form stable families and are going about life in a "normal" and "sane" way that is functional in the existing society (I do see that not everyone agrees on what that is, but you have to judge it from your own position), then it doesn't really matter if they are doing some signaling with these things that have been shown to them as being "the good causes" from kindergarten on, their whole lives.
In fact, I'd be more wary of an urban young woman who somehow decided to go "based". It may not be an issue but it seems they somehow couldn't fit in, either because they are very disagreeable and contrarian, or they had to rely on this strategy to stand out and attract men, which is also suspicious. It can all be clarified and may be fine, especially if they come from some conservative family or simply have this kind of social group somehow and it's not some kind of daily crusade, who knows.
My point is these declarations of party affiliations, slogans, logos, symbols are often superficial and compartmentalized. They are not much deeper than whether she likes Nike or Adidas shoes. What matters is how they behave on a daily basis, what they value and how they see the future, whose life advice they take seriously, what kind of life patterns are present in her closest friends and family, what's her personality like etc. But the deeply held beliefs and the life patterns they take seriously are super important. You have to agree on the actual ground level of how you live together, when and how you have kids, how you split the tasks, how important careers are, is moving every few years to climb the ladder worth it, versus staying put in one place and settling for long, etc.
If you're not aiming for a marriage and family yet, and plan to break up in a few years (or months) either way, then yes, you only need minimal compatibility in abstract beliefs, you just need attraction and a compatible schedule and activity level and agree you'll use contraception and abort if that fails. Well, okay that's a bit of agreement required right there...
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