Nitpick: Milei was already president (ugh), Trump interfered in the midterm legislative elections.
I hoped that it would backfire, but no such luck.
Hungarian “gy” is a voiced stop consonant made by the upper surface of the tongue contacting the hard palate. Audio example at: Voiced palatal plosive - Wikipedia
Note: “[ɟ] is a less common sound worldwide than the voiced postalveolar affricate [d͡ʒ] because it is difficult to get the tongue to touch just the hard palate without also touching the back part of the alveolar ridge.”
I always thought it was something like mud-jar.
So in other words, it contains a sound that probably does not exist in English, so most of us can only approximate it.
It doesn’t exist in English, but it can be learned by anyone if they apply themself.
It would be pure speculation but what could be a realistic timeframe for Ukraine to now receive that EU support previously blocked by Orban?
There will be a huge amount of work to do to tackle corruption and restore some trust in government, so I don’t imagine Ukraine will be a top priority. But positioning Hungary ‘back in the EU tent’, so to speak, would presumably bring economic benefits.
Magyar is cleaning house. He reported that the Hungarian government under Orban was illegally funding CPAC, and that would stop now. CPAC was welcome to have a meeting in Budapest, but they would do it on their own dime.
Politico reports that CPAC denies ever taking Hungarian funds and claims that they obeyed the law:
CPAC spokespersons Roger Neal and Hannah Stone said in a statement that CPAC has never received funding from the Hungarian government. “Headquartered in the USA, CPAC started an international model 10 years ago that is effective and is fully compliant with all relevant laws. This movement is based on donations from a wide array of sources,” they said, adding that “any decisions on the use of government money in Hungary will have zero impact on our organization as it has never received any of these funds.”
My understanding from the little bit of coverage I saw was that the other parties basically say out the election in order to allow everyone to rally around one party.
I’ve also read that they basically decided to not engage with “culture war” stuff and focused primarily on pocketbook issues.
I’m happy with the results but I’m not sure how replicable that strategy would be in, say, a two party system with strong loyalty to the ruling party like the US. It feels a lot like what was tried before.
Yeah, pull the other one, it’s got bells on.
CPAC is such a bunch of turds.
Next meeting of the relevant EU Council on 21 April. Not sure if Magyar and his team are officially in post at that point
@BigT: The other plank is that they linked the economy to Orban’s corruption. I think that strategy would apply here. Paul Krugman:
Autocracy and corruption aren’t separate issues. In practice they inevitably go hand in hand. They’re a natural pairing, like crypto and crime, because authoritarian rule removes accountability and opens the door for Grand Theft Autocracy. There’s even solid statistical evidence:
What Hungary has shown the world is that autocratic corruption can be] a powerful mobilizing issue.
Cite:
On that graph, Hungary appear fair-to-middlin’ on both counts among all the nations of the world.
No country is rated as both highly democratic and corrupt"
Maybe not, but Brazil comes pretty close.
Yeah, I noticed the same thing. Still, an interesting graph.
There are a number of determinants of corruption. The graph shows the relationship with only one variable - extent of democracy. So yeah, it’s going to be a noisy though still statistically significant relationship.
This 2000 paper looks at some of the long run predictors of corruption. It uses a cross-country approach similar to the graph above.
Gazing at Table 2, the following factors are associated with lower corruption.
Being a former British colony
Percent Protestant in 1980
Being a higher income country
Uninterrupted democracy 1950-1995
The following factors are linked with higher corruption
Federal system. Huh.
Higher fuel, metal and mineral exports (mixed evidence)
Yes, somewhere along the line I’d acquired the notion that economies dependent on extraction were more likely to attract the corrupt.
They are by all appearances; part of what’s called the “resource curse”. It’s also connected with a tendency towards authoritarianism, itself correlated with corruption.
As for why? Most likely because a government that can sustain itself on extraction both provides an easy single target to siphon money from, and because it can just let the welfare of the populace rot without hurting itself much. An impoverished and unfree populace provides little benefit to the ruling class, but if they can build palaces with oil money (or whatever) then they have little reason to care.
Until it runs out.
Eh…? What’s your point?
I think part of the issue is that Orban ruled for 16 years straight. In the US Trump has only ruled for two separate 4 year terms. The longer one party is in office, the more the public want a change.
A democracy is only as good as its voters. And sadly in the US, a huge number of voters want to live in a white nationalist ethnostate dictatorship. I don’t know if anything can change that.
Thank you. Saved me trying to look it up.
And that is a difficult sound to vocalize.
Talks have started without waiting for Magyar to be officially in post: