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Comment by aussieguy1234 | Hacker News Reader

This could be abused in any number of ways and would probably make people and their precious children less safe in the long run rather than more safe.

You can be sure Viktor Orban would use it to crack down on political opposition in Hungary, for example.

In the wrong hands, could be used to have these precious children or their parents killed or worse.

Authoritarian governments often do things, or threaten to do things, including sexual violence to children as a way to put pressure on and extract information from their parents. This type of surveillance tech would make it easier for them.

View on HN

There are people who believe that their job is more important than anything else and that they deserve to have the "sudo tools" so they can override any protection to catch the bad people and that they are respected mature people so it is OK to grant them with these privileges, they will be careful and won't abuse it.

Obviously that's bad idea and a bad practice as we know it from IT systems.

Maybe their intentions are good but even proposing something like that should be considered a ground for dismissal. EU, USA etc. are not startups, these are not newly forming countries that full stack politicians need the sharpest tools to make something great quickly. Those are established, sophisticated institutions that must move slowly and be risk averse and there's no space for sharp tools like these and the problems need to be solved through navigating the complex structure.

Maybe wouldn't be as fun as running Turkmenistan, maybe they will lag behind this emerging unicorn called China in some respect but that's how very large and complex structures have to operate. The new kids on the block will end up exactly the same if they are successful and mature beyond the hype.

> There are people who believe that their job is more important than anything else and that they deserve to have the "sudo tools"

I don't care in what they believe or how they explain they need in the total control over you. In fact, it's just a slavery, and I'm sure internally they know that and they like that. For some people it's the meaning of life to achieve that kind of power over other people. Unfortunately, a lot of such people achieve this goal nowadays.

You assume a lot of bad intent where there is (usualy) none. I worked with people related to cybercrime investigation a lot, and they are always driven by idea to help people. But when you see for a hundredth time that a struggling single mother loses her life savings because she fell victim to a phishing scam, you start being angry at the criminals. And when you invest months of your life to locate the perpetrator, and the investigation is thwarted by, let's say, encrypted chats, you start blaming the tools.

Now, I (obviously) don't agree with this, just trying to explain how something like chat control could be proposed in good faith by someone.

> a struggling single mother loses her life savings because she fell victim to a phishing scam

I thought the banking system was designed to reverse transactions (unlike cryptocurrencies). Why do you need finding the scammer for that?

Scammers don't keep their money in the account they used to scam people into wiring their money in. A common case is to use other people's accounts(sometimes stolen, sometimes rented) or purchase something like crypto, gold or anything else that is expensive and easy to move.

Often times the seller also doesn't know they are selling to a scammer, there's this technique where the scammers will give the account number of a seller to their victim, the victim will wire the money and the scammers at the same time will be pretending to be buyers and claim that they just wired the money and therefore the transaction is complete and they leave with the scammed money laundered in form of something valuable.

So, in short, scammers can launder money in minutes, but investigators need months to track them and reverse everything. Yet, I don't think ChatControl will solve anything.

I agree, it won't solve anything. Maybe in short term some idiots will get caught but the criminals will quickly learn their lesson and use other tools and avoid the surveilled ones.

Orban doesn’t need to crack down on political opposition he has a strong majority in his country.[1] I guess you have a wrong opinion about Hungary and Orban because the media doesn’t like him because he is a pain in the ass for many plans of the European Union and gets bad reporting.

Hungary has by the way not even 10 million residents.

1. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/hungarians-vote-orbans-...

Yeah, Putin also enjoys a really high approval rating.

Quite easy when you control the state media and suppress opposition... which is what the EU is trying to fine Hungary for doing, but Poland kept blocking it.

Source: https://europeanlawblog.eu/2024/07/01/evading-the-european-m...

FWIW the pervious Polish government modeled its state capture after Hungary quite openly. They quite miraculously lost the elections after a major mobilization (historic attendance of over 74%), and have now been stripped of funding due to illegally using state funds during their campaign in 2023. This was possible in Poland because, unlike Hungary, Poland still had free (non-state) mainstream media, and not for the lack of trying.

As far as I know Orban changed the electoral law, he uses the votes from Hungarians outside Hungary (weird to vote for shit that does not affect you), the people in cities are not voting for him so he gets the votes from uneducated people that do not know a foreign language and get indoctrinated by the Orban controlled media. He is also super corrupt and Putin fanboy so most online English support he gets are from Ruzzian trolls.

You can vote outside of any country pretty much if youre a citizen of that country. US included.

Many countries do put restrictions on this. Some examples:

Until literally this year, the UK removed the right to vote after 15 years of living abroad, and Canada even used to restrict that right to just 5 years.

Even now, civilian US citizens living abroad whose intent to return to live in the US is uncertain or who don't intend to return, and Canadian citizens living abroad regardless of intent to return, are only federally guaranteed a right to vote from their last in-country address in federal elections, but often can't vote in state, provincial territorial, or local elections. This is true even if they retain significant ties to the relevant state, province, territory, or locality, like having close family there (including kids too young to vote for whom they're a legal parent), owning property there, operating a business there, or being owed a pension controlled by the relevant level of government.

And the guarantee of a right to vote from abroad in US federal elections is purely statutory, not constitutional - not to mention it has a few gaps in it, like citizens who have never lived in the US and neither of whose parents last lived in a state that allows the right to vote from abroad to descend to the next generation based on last parental residence.

Et cetera.

Indeed the U.K. did not give the right to vote for U.K. citizens living in the EU when there was a vote about stripping their citizenship.

Yes they did. You could vote in the referendum from abroad (I did). There's no such thing as EU citizenship anyway, so nobodies citizenship changed as a result.

Of course there is

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_citizenship

Anyone living for more than 15 years was denied the right to vote but not denied the right to have their citizen forcibly removed against their will.

Well just go ahead and apply to Brussels to get your EU passport back then?

Obviously you can't, because there's no such thing as EU citizenship. It doesn't grant citizenship, and cannot because that would require it to be an independent nation recognized by other nations as such. There is only citizenship of member states. Playing with words doesn't make something real, it only confuses people.

You can state your “alternate facts” all you want while ignoring actual truth, doesn’t make you right.

You’re right indeed that there is a real legal concept in EU law called EU citizenship, which everyone with the nationality of an EU member state holds. The other commenter is wrong on that point.

But the other commenter is also right that there is not the kind of independently existent EU citizenship that would persist when one ceases to be a national of an EU member state - it gets lost in that case even if the reason for this change is not an individual loss of the member state’s nationality but because the member state withdrew from the EU. The ECJ definitively settled this last year. Nor are EU passports issued on the basis of EU citizenship, nor would EU citizens typically include “EU” as one of the answers if they are asked by a government to list all their citizenships or view themselves as dual citizens if their only national-level citizenship is from a single EU member state.

For several reasons like this, it’s not at all unreasonable for the other commenter not to view EU citizenship as a real citizenship of its own, despite the use of the term under EU law.

Personally, I view the term EU citizenship in part as a briefer shorthand for “national of an EU member state” - including in the definition whatever edge-case handling is appropriate for each country’s special-case territories, and therefore more precise in a predictable way. Beyond that, it’s just a symbolic reflection of the EU’s official aspirational policy goal of ever closer union.

Wikipedia always delivers, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-resident_citizen_voting

"As of 2020 a total of 141 countries grant expatriates the right to vote in elections in their countries of origin."

An interesting feature of people voting from abroad is that it is very easy to make it very easy or very hard for them to vote, and the choice between those two options tends to depend on how the current government thinks those people are likely to vote. So some countries allow expatriates to vote, but voters have to fill in a load of forms and then turn up with various document at the embassy at a particular time, while other countries proactively hunt down their expatriates and send them a form in the post with a prepaid envelope.

> he uses the votes from Hungarians outside Hungary

That is pretty standard for EU voting; as long as you are citizen, you can vote, usually by mail or by visiting your embassy.

Otherwise, I happen to agree with you -- why you should vote, if you don't feel the impact of your vote?

> the people in cities are not voting for him

That's the common occurrence, people in cities are easier to influence due to density; US also has the Rural-Urban divide.

> he gets the votes from uneducated people

Yes, this is what the (modern|progressive|educated|whatever) tell to themselves to fell on high horse in their bubble.

> Otherwise, I happen to agree with you -- why you should vote, if you don't feel the impact of your vote?

Very strange attitude. I voted while I was abroad for two decades, because my family and friends were still there, and I wanted the best from them.

Your family and friends know, what is best for them and can vote for themselves.

Meanwhile, you are abroad and do not have clear idea about the local situation; you are going to have one of game of telephone one (I know, I also lived abroad for a while). As a result, you might do more damage than helping.

> you are abroad and do not have clear idea about the local situation

You're walking a path you're almost guaranteed not properly equipped for. Probably nobody is but knowing not to charge ahead would already mean a lot.

If having a clear idea about the local situation is a prerequisite then what happens with locals exposed to misinformation? Do they lose the right to vote? Do you test people in advance to evaluate their level of understanding? If they vote for populist measures that are clearly unsustainable did they show a good understanding of the situation?

What happens if you're abroad but coming back in a year and are expected to live with a bad situation you could have helped avoid? Can you claim "sorry, I wasn't allowed to vote so the rules don't apply to me"? What about when you live abroad but (some of) the laws of your home country in which you're not allowed to vote still apply to you?

And more importantly, if you're living abroad and you can't vote in your home country because you're away but you can't vote in your country of residence because you're a foreigner, what happens to your right to vote? This right is given to citizens of a country just like many other rights, like the right to private ownership. If one can be taken away due to lack of proximity, can the other? Can that car or house that you haven't used in a year be taken away? What if you as a local didn't exercise your right to vote, should it be taken away because you don't need it?

> you might do more damage

You might too.

My initial comment was not clear, by I am referring of Hungarian citizens that are part of other countries like Romania, this people do not have relatives in Hungary, never lived there, will not move there.

Is it still a thing? AFAIK the neighbor countries protested against it as a passport of convenience. Some even made laws, that when you accept such a citizenship, you are going to lose your previous one. That curbed the enthusiasm for such citizenship rather significantly.

It is still a thing, Romania also does the same thing where we give citizenship to Romanians on territories we lost like R. Moldova so would be hypocritical for Romania to complain about Hungary, ,my personal opinion is that is not democratic if someone votes but they or their family are not affected by the vote. It would be like some jerk In UK gifts citizenship to people in ex colonies and then those people as gratitude wll vote for the jerk.

Slow down, you are taking it way to seriously, and skipped to another rail already.

Nobody ever even remotely suggested to go where you describe. That when you live abroad you are not familiar with local situation is a fact; you get to hear only partial, selected info. Maybe you should try it sometime. I did.

> What happens if you're abroad but coming back in a year and are expected to live with a bad situation you could have helped avoid? Can you claim "sorry, I wasn't allowed to vote so the rules don't apply to me"? What about when you live abroad but (some of) the laws of your home country in which you're not allowed to vote still apply to you?

Here, again on another track.

Nobody is ever going to figure out, when you live when you vote. The difference is showing up in the polling station inside the country or not. I.e. with not being able to vote via mail or embassy.

Again, in our country, we have several different elections (just like in other countries). But in some, you have to vote locally, in others, you can do via correspondence. So when all of them are local only, no harm done. If you can bring your ass to the polling station, that's enough. Nobody is taking your right to vote, it is on you to decide, whether it is worth to you to exercise your right, or not.

>Yes, this is what the (modern|progressive|educated|whatever) tell to themselves to fell on high horse in their bubble.

Right, the peasants with no education and only watching state TV are clearly the ones without a bias, their children that went to university, got a good job, know english are the one brainwashed by CIA/Israel and the evil LGBTQ. I read so many cases of educated Hungarians or Russians ashamed of the level of brainwashing of their parents.

Yes, because the friculins (as in free-cool-in) in their reddit bubbles are so much more clever.

Case in point; any discussion involving policits here, on hn. Politologs are face palming at the naivety, when they see an extract.

If you would know Romanian I would share with you links my parents share with me and have you defend that bullshit to prove that my parents are the correct ones when they fall for the online bullshit like medical stuff (or you will claim that this less educated people are wrong when they fall for medical bullshit but when is about election they are correct).

Latest link from my father was a clip from some TV channel where some pretend doctor was claiming something super vague that is scientifically incorrect, this time I ignored it since I was not in the mood to try to find evidence that the guy is not a real doctor, that the vague shit is bullshit and find scientific shit to clarify things, and all would need to be in Romanian so he can understand.

For this old generation if is on TV or internet and some scammer pretends is a doctor and uses a few medical words they will fall for it, is the same with politics especially blaiming bad stuff on various groups, that stuff works well on the internet.

Give me an example where your or a friend uneducated pessant parents were actually correct in this kind of topics then their educated children that know more languages and read more media.

Yeah I wish that within the EU we could just vote for the country we live in rather than the one we were born in. It would make so much more sense.

You can, in the communnal (local) elections.

For the parliamentary, it is here for a reason. To prevent voting touristic. The delay of several years -- you have to live several years in the other country -- serves exactly that.

But there is no delay, even if I've been in Spain for 10 years I still can't vote for the parliament there.

I know about the local ones but it's not that important IMO.

I could go to the trouble of obtaining Spanish citizenship after 10 years but it is incredibly difficult and long.

I understand the problem of touristic voting but then they should let me vote here after 3 years or so.

Right now I can only vote for the Dutch government which I have nothing to do with in my life (and which is an extreme-right regime since the last election anyway)

You are getting responses about expatriate voting. That's not what he did.

Before WWII, Hungary was much larger. After, a large portion was ceded to Romania. He used a sudden super-majority to grant those people the right to vote. Subsequently, his political party has even held political conferences in Romania.

Those Romanians are not Hungarian citizens. They mostly do not suffer the consequences Orban's policy decisions. Yet, they support him because he makes gestures to include them in the country of their cultural origin.

This is far different from allowing overseas voting. This would be like the UK allowing all Irish to vote in parliamentary elections.

Yes this is definitely what the parent comment was getting at, he gave voting rights to diaspora ethnic Hungarians: “Orban granted citizenship and the right to vote in Hungarian elections to more than a million Hungarians living in neighbouring countries. At the last election, 95% of those who voted backed Fidesz.”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/Viktor_Orban

Hungary lost vast swaths of territory after WW2. People who were Hungary citizens weren’t after the new borders were drawn.

I don’t see a big difference between that and Germany giving citizenship to all the people who were Germans prior to WW2, but weren’t after the war.

> Those Romanians are not Hungarian citizens.

Those “Romanians” are absolutely Hungarian citizens, as it is a precondition to voting in Hungarian elections.

- "votes from Hungarians outside Hungary (weird to vote for shit that does not affect you)"

I don't know if you're double-trolling or not, but it's pretty dehumanizing rhetoric to say people who've left their country for work or other reasons are not real citizens and presumptively have no stake in their own country's future.

(It's even stranger you apply this kind of–nativist?–language to a member state of the EU, where transnational ties are a founding ideal of that anti-nationalist union..)

I suggest you look at what has happened to journalists critical of him..

I'm not here to claim that Orban is anywhere near the level of a "real" dictator in terms of squashing dissent. But consider that one way Orban makes sure to maintain this - indeed significant - majority is to try to silence/discredit voices that go against his narrative. In fact, his party is spending millions of dollars in public funds to finance a continuous stream of propaganda on many channels. On top of this, there absolutely have been a few cases where more sinister tools like surveillance etc. were employed against independent news sources for example. Their newest invention "Szuverenitásvédelmi Hivatal" (= Sovereignty Protection Bureau, idk what the official English name is) is only the latest way to at least try to scare nonprofits/NGOs/news outlets that are in some way opposed to his goals.

I think the fascism you're looking for is in the UK and France this month.

I still can’t get over that the UK arrests people over social media posts. Is the US the only place on the planet that actually has free speech?

Depends on what you publish.... if you just yell about different random people, sure... if you post a video of war crimes, well.. that's a different story now.

We’re rapidly approaching that reality, yes.

Maybe Switzerland?

If people in Switzerland wanted that they could vote for it. But they actually prefer having limits on other peoples' speech more than they resent the limits on their own, so they don't.

The US does not have free speech. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/us/pro-palestinian-... I’m not suggesting the UK is better, btw, just rather that free speech already doesn’t exist anywhere. Some of these you can criticize because they aren’t public universities, and perhaps that’s fair, and the rest you can criticize because they weren’t arrested for protesting, but rather having “illegal encampments”, but a rose by any other name is still a rose.

Yeah, but are people getting arrested in America for social media posts?

Yes, and for saying broadly the same kind of things that got people arrested in the UK.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/federal-agents-mon...

The charges against Avery were suddenly dropped without explanation Wednesday.

That’s the difference from the UK.

The US enjoys free speech, but its not self enforcing.

free speech is often not something one “enjoys”. If you are at a funeral and have protesters burning pictures of your dead child then you aren’t “enjoying” that.

Howver the US does not have free speech. It has some speech which is not allowed by law, some which is allowed in theory but not in practice, and some which is allowed completely.

I think it’s important to not conflate trespassing with speech.

Those people have freedom of speech.

They don’t, however, have the right to occupy private property against the will of the owners.

> Is the US the only place on the planet that actually has free speech?

Yes, USA is indeed the only country on the planet with absolute free speech. Most residents of other places doesn't actually want what the USA has.

Is that actually true or what their governments tell them that they want?

That is actually true.

Free speech should not be an absolute. No freedom in a society is absolute. Living in a society is a huge compromise.

EDIT: I am not in favor of the Chat Control proposal by the way. It is poorly thought out and will only serve to harm innocent people. True criminals will use encryption and such anyway.

I don't want far-right neonazis freely inciting people to violence towards immigrants, no.

>Yes, USA is indeed the only country on the planet with absolute free speech. Most residents of other places doesn't actually want what the USA has.

The US does not have absolute free speech. Laws exist against slander, libel, perjury and making terroristic threats. The FDA regulates the speech of food producers and pharmaceutical companies. The FCC regulates speech on broadcast television and radio. It's a felony to lie to Congress. It's a felony to call for the assassination of the President.

Even speech in "public squares" is regulated by public nuisance and noise laws and curfews.

Yes, what's considered "hate speech" elsewhere is (mostly) legal in the US. But that doesn't make free speech in the US absolute, just more amenable to forms of racism and bigotry the rest of the world decided weren't worth defending after the consequences of World War 2.

Most residents of the USA want restrictions on free speech too. And they have it.

Most residents of other places doesn't actually want what the USA has.

How do you know this?

There's not a single place on earth that "has" free speech, it's all shades of gray.

The US government will have you jailed, tortured, or just ruin your life in other innovative ways if you dare expose their crimes, e.g. Snowden, Assange.

Well, sure - but generally speaking (for us normies writing random stuff on the internet) most of us are safe from that.

It’s the fine difference in shade of gray that makes all the difference though.

- "Is the US the only place on the planet that actually has free speech?"

I'm not aware of any other country with stronger protections, on the topic of the thing going on in the UK, of heated and violent rhetoric than the US has. US jurisprudence explicitly protects advocacy of violence and lawbreaking (up to the Brandenburg test is a very high bar), and I don't know if there's any other country with comparable protections.

(By which I specifically don't mean "has 'freedom of speech'" written on paper somewhere; nor "doesn't typically hassle people over tweets (but has legal options to do so should they choose)". I mean binding case law that weighs quasi-incitement to violence against the right to hyperbolic political rhetoric, and deliberately chooses the latter).

Ugh I guess it depends what you mean —

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-wh...

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/19/23923733/douglass-mackey...

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/06/politics/merchan-trump-gag-or...

There’s also a bunch of stuff that falls under free speech most people don’t realize (at least in the US): what you can or can refuse put in your body, what you can refuse to say, how you spend your money, what you can hear, where you can read/write/speak/listen, etc

All of which has been being curtailed substantially in many ways since the 80s in the United States.

People were arrested in America over the Capitol riots and messages online was used as part of the evidence.

What happened in the UK was exactly the same. We had violence and riots, millions of pounds of damages, innocent small business owners targeted because of their ethnicity. It was actually a much worse scale than the Capitol riots and thus people should absolutely be held accountable for their actions.

The US does not have freedom of speech (whatever that means), either on private platforms or at a government level.

It’s the only place that ever had it, if imperfectly. Everyone else pretends they have it, but it’s a joke. Everywhere else has these red lines they will simply pretend do not count as valid speech.

- In China you can say anything you want! (of course you can’t criticize Xi or though, that would be ridiculous)

- in the UK you can say anything you want! (of course you can’t say anything untoward about anyone, that would be ridiculous)

- in Denmark you can say anything you want! (of course you can’t say anything that would offend religious sensibilities — this is real by the way, Denmark has reinstated blasphemy laws as of 2023)

I've seen a few recent videos out of the UK that made my blood boil. Police visits to your home because of mean posts, and then off to jail in handcuffs. It's absolutely ridiculous.

Ridiculous hyperbole. Log off twitter.

perhaps you should strongly consider whether its you who are misinformed?

Those “mean posts” were people organising violent riots that cost the country millions and targeted small business owners just for being ethnic minorities.

People shouldn’t get a free pass on organising violence and riots just because they did it online.

Edit: I don’t normally comment on the peer moderation that happens on HN but wow there are a lot of people online today that believe free speech trumps all other laws.

Seems it’s ok to destroy people’s property just so long as you arrange to do it online. /s

Perhaps someone can explain why they think this way?

I'm a little hesitant to comment because I haven't been able to dig up the actual charges, but there is a history of people in the UK being charged and arrested for mean posts. A few storys jumped out at me, eg the Kelly case did seem at the time to be a betrayal of the liberal tradition assuming the BBCs reporting is accurate - realistically people should be able to gratuitously insult people who contributed of the largest imperial project in history as military officers. For all that it was in terrible taste.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-60930670

It’s hard to comment on that case without knowing what was Tweeted but on the surface of it, I do agree with you. However he wasn’t sent to jail and thus it wasn’t the incident the GP described.

What the GP was referring to was those jailed for inciting violence and hatred during the wave of riots the UK suffered last month.

Their actions were a lot worse and had real world, tangible, effects on people and their property. It wasn’t just them sharing a meme (which is the popular trope some on HN describe the event as).

It’s worth noting that people in America get arrested for similar actions. In another comment I drew parallels to the Capitol riots.

The crux of the reason people get put in jail “for posting mean things” is because they’ve broken other, much worse laws in the process.

> What the GP was referring to was those jailed for inciting violence and hatred during the wave of riots the UK suffered last month.

My friend, I didn't refer to that at all, there's no need to lie. You were referring to those cases, not me.

Then perhaps you can share what other recent cases there have been of people jailed for posting stuff online.

And please don’t call me a liar. You said it was recent, and they were jailed. I don’t know of anything else besides the incidents I’ve covered. Worst case is I’m misinformed. And if that’s the case then I’m sorry. But I assure you that I’m not a liar.

UK law is far stricter than you might suppose.

https://fee.org/articles/uk-man-arrested-for-malicious-commu...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-for-offensive-...

Oh I’m well aware of how strict the uk is. However none of those articles you shared are about people getting jail time (most of those cases were likely dropped in fact) and they certainly weren’t recent.

I’m not making generalisations here. The OP made a very specific statement about people being jailed recently for posting online and I’m saying they’ve completely missed the truth behind those actual arrests.

Just as all the subsequent posts yourself and others have made are glossing over the very specific claims the OP made.

I’m not going to argue that I think the UK gets things right with its approach to online content. But the OPs specific claim of people being arrested is missing the bigger story about why they got arrested. And that’s what I’m specifically calling FUD on — not the UKs wider policy. The uk is a shit show for a great many reasons (as a UK citizen I’m not blind to this at all). But that doesn’t mean we should exaggerate the truth for the sake of gaining a little extra karma on HN.

The simple fact is the reason for the recent arrests and jail time is for similar reasons people have been arrested and jailed for online content in the US (yes, it’s happened there too). This isn’t a problem with free speech, it’s actual criminals causing actual physical damage and thus who have broken other laws besides just communicating about it online. Hence my comparison to the Capitol riots.

If you're trying to be precise about specific meaning, you probably should also be specific about only using the word jailed. You use "arrested" a few times there, and people do seem to be being arrested for mean tweets.

Well you said I said something I didn't, I don't have to call it a lie, I can call it Fernando, but you still did it.

>I'm not here to claim that Orban is anywhere near the level of a "real" dictator in terms of squashing dissent.

It is preposterous to concede this. Orban has destroyed the independence of media and weaponized it to support his party and spread disinformation against his opponents. He's also weaponized the tools of the state to harass the family members of his political opponents with frivolous lawsuits and exhausting legal battles.

so you are saying he is a standard politician, trying to discredit his opponents?

Btw after Hungary got the Presidency of the Council of the European Union[1] in July Orban made a trip to Ukraine[2] which was fine for the media until he went directly afterwards to Russia and then to China[3] which the media didn’t took very well. To finish off his trip he went to the USA to meet and endorse Trump.[4] The media wasn’t really happy with that either.

But overall he is one of the only European leaders which speaks with all relevant parties and tries to stop the conflict in Ukraine.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_the_Council_of... 2. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/02/world/europe/orban-hungar... 3. https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/07/08/hungarian-prim... 4. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/viktor-trump-mar-a-lago-visit-n...

> tries to stop the conflict in Ukraine

Afaik only cares about cheap gas, the rest is irrelevant.

If that's what hungarians want, cheap gas, he's working for hungarians, he's their president, i don't know what's wrong with that.

I mean.. ask an average american, cut support for ukraine and in turn get cheaper gas.. what would a Billy or Bobby in texas say?

Exactly, we need more talking and less moralizing and “preconditions” for talking.

* Not an endorsement of this particular politician

But overall he is one of the only European leaders which speaks with all relevant parties and tries to stop the conflict in Ukraine.

They may not be making visits to Moscow to kiss Putin's hand, like Orban did. But the governments of all the major European countries are continually in contact with the relevant parties, and they all want to "stop the conflict in Ukraine". It's just a question of under which terms.

I think one real good test of a democracy is to plot a line with years and above the name of the person ruling the country.

In the US you will see at least every 8 years a different name on top of the line.

I think a good democratic system will not have a new leader every year but maybe every 4-8 years.

Anything below won’t be stable enough for mid/long term policy changes. Anything above will be good for the leader and her entourage but most probably not for the entire country and its democracy.

True. If only these elected leaders wouldn’t be controlled by institutions and individuals who (1) are handlers to the elected leaders and (2) are not even elected in the first place.

In the US, who currently has the power over your country? Is it your Biden (where is he?), your Harris? It someone else, maybe unelected?

>Is it your Biden (where is he?)

He's currently at Rehoboth Beach in Delaware and he will be campaigning in Pittsburgh on Monday.

https://rollcall.com/factbase/biden/topic/calendar/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/30/us/politics/harris-biden-...

At the beach again! What a great life as a president! I’m sure he gets to solve many of the US problems thinking carefully at the beach…

That's a cheap shot that's not even related to your own point from one comment ago.

Not related? Surely I’m still commenting on my parent’s post:

> I think a good democratic system will not have a new leader every year but maybe every 4-8 years.

I’m saying that this democracy is an illusion as long as you have puppet masters controlling these “democratically elected” puppets like Biden.

And to your point, increasingly long tenures are increasingly suggestive of a breakdown in democratic norms.

It's a good test of one aspect of a democracy, but a democracy is more than just its leader. A strongly independent judiciary is also a crucial element for a fair and free democracy. In my view the US fails in this regard. Its supreme court is effectively made up of politicians; judges with party affiliation who are appointed for life for partisan reasons. Its rulings frequently end up being split down party lines when such a thing is statistically improbable in a system where decisions should be based strictly on interpretation and application of the written words of the law.

Yes of course, it tests only one aspect of a democracy.

So 8 years is fine but 10 isn’t?

Policy dictated by a single elected leader is better than policy set by a group of elected people?

Just because your cultural and educational background has told you that the relatively new US model of democracy is better than that of other countries doesn’t make it so.

This is all stuff you came up with. Not me.

> Hungary has by the way not even 10 million residents.

What relevance does the size of Hungary's population have to this conversation?

Just a typical trick that liars use to distract from the main topic.

>gets bad reporting

He "gets bad reporting" because he has destroyed democracy in Hungary. Including but not limited to packing the courts, erasing the independence of media, and extreme redistricting that turned pluralities or slim majorities at the polls into super majorities in Parliament.

Recharacterizing that nightmare as if it is just 'reporting' helpfully introduces a layer of abstraction that implies there's nothing in his actions to condemn.

> Orban doesn’t need to crack down on political opposition he has a strong majority in his country.[1]

Erdogan had the majority of votes go his way in the last election. Also Putin. :)

Of course gerrymandering is an age old tactic:

> First, the party rewrote the entire Hungarian constitution in secret. Parliament passed the new constitution after only nine days of debate. Changes included a restructuring of Hungarian elections, such that more than half of parliamentary representatives would be chosen through single-member, American-style districts (the remainder are determined by a national proportional-vote share). In drawing the new districts, Fidesz abused a rule that allowed the government to vary them in size from roughly 60,000 to 90,000 people.

> The new map packed opposition voters into a handful of larger districts, diluting their votes, while pro-Fidesz voters were distributed among smaller districts. This gerrymandered system would allow Fidesz to fall short of a popular-vote majority but still win a two-thirds majority in Parliament—something that happened not once but twice, in 2014 and 2018.

> A blizzard of other electoral changes accompanied the redistricting. Each was incremental, and potentially even defensible in isolation. But in combination, the laws erected extraordinary barriers that would keep opposition parties from winning elections. For example, the old system had allowed for a runoff in any district where the victorious candidate got less than 50 percent of the vote. The new system abolished the runoff, allowing a party to win a district with a mere plurality. At the same time, Fidesz created a rule that required national parties to compete in at least 27 single-member districts—even as the party passed laws that made it trickier for small parties to unite on a joint list. The result was that the various opposition parties were basically forced to split the anti-Fidesz vote in many districts, allowing Orbán’s candidates to win with relatively small pluralities.

* https://archive.ph/6DiTT / https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/07/wh...

The trick in 'modern' authoritarian systems is (often) to not bother going after your opposition, but mostly trying to stay in power (see above) and helping your friends:

> The railway and stadium have been pilloried by the prime minister’s critics as vanity projects. But they have something else in common. Both were built, in part, by Felcsut’s mayor, and a childhood friend of Mr Orban, Lorinc Meszaros. Until a few years ago, Mr Meszaros was a gas fitter. Thanks to winning state contracts, he jumped to number five in this year’s list of the wealthiest Hungarians compiled by website Napi.hu. In a year, his fortune soared from Ft23bn (€73m) to Ft120bn.

* https://archive.ph/v8f6R / https://www.ft.com/content/ecf6fb4e-d900-11e7-a039-c64b1c09b...

> I guess you have a wrong opinion about Hungary and Orban because the media doesn’t like him because he is a pain in the ass for many plans of the European Union and gets bad reporting.

The Cato Institute called out Hungary in their most recent Human Freedom Report:

> Since 2007, the high point in human freedom, a minority of jurisdictions have increased their level of freedom, but many of them, such as Myanmar, began from a very low base, and many others experienced only minor improvements. The vast majority of jurisdictions saw declines. Among the countries and territories that deteriorated the most are Nicaragua, Syria, Hong Kong, Egypt, Turkey, and Hungary (see Table 3).

* https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2023-12/human-free...

* https://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index/2023

> in the wrong hands

are there any right hands?

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