A pitiless crackdown on on illegal immigration. A hardline approach to law and order. A purge of “gender ideology” and “wokeness” from the nation’s schools. Erosions of academic freedom, judicial independence and the free press. An alliance with Christian nationalism. An assault on democratic institutions.
The “electoral autocracy” that is Viktor Orbán’s Hungary has been long revered by Donald Trump and his “Make America Great Again” (Maga) movement. Now admiration is turning into emulation. In the early weeks of Trump’s second term as US president, analysts say, there are alarming signs that the Orbánisation of America has begun.
the guy is completely bypassing congress by abusing the executive order thing. it’s a constitutional crisis in my opinion
Democracy is inherently tied to progress.
For a more elaborate explanation, see below.
I am considering that progress on Earth is slowing down or halting long-term, and only continued progress could sustain Democracy.
Democracy is tied to progress because progress creates demand for workers, and as such gives them a say in the direction things go. Progress is what “free people can do” or sth. Without progress, there is neither a demand for workers or freedom, and both are at risk.
I saw what happened in hungary, warned you fuckers but nobody listened. “Umm, but the us has checks and balances” checks and balances are worth fuckall to fascists. Do you actually think hungary didnt have any mechanisms to prevent this? It did have them but they were worth as much as the us’s.
Besides, anyone paying attention has watched the checks and balances slowly collapsing over the last decade.
Hey democracy may be dying but at least Israel is still getting billions and billions of dollars.
You are using the wrong conjugation by using a present participle in that first verb.
The important thing is ‘are we still owning the libs’?
Democracy flatlined—time of death: circa 1980. Trump’s Orbán fanfic is bootleg authoritarianism, but both parties built the coffin. “Freedom” is just the brand name for auctioned infrastructure. Christian nationalism? A faith-based grift to sanctify oligarchic looting. Courts, media, schools—compliant subsidiaries, not casualties.
The rot isn’t new—it’s generational decay dressed as crisis. “Erosion” absolves the architects; we’ve been drowning in neoliberal rot since they sold labor to Wall Street. MAGA’s the stench, not the wound. Voting? A ritual to pacify the herd. The machine runs on apathy and cheap outrage. Wake up—you’re the product.
Oh it’s gone now. Republicans never really liked democracy in the first place, and Epstein’s bestie clearly stated that will never leave power. USA chose an authoritarian regime, they got it and you have to be pretty stupid to believe there will be another free election in the US before decades. The question now is, will there soon be a third world war with the US plays the role of fascist Germany, or will they have to struggle with a civil war before they can achieve their colonial ambitions. One way or another, millions will die in the coming years.
I’m sorry, but I chafe at the notion that America was a democracy within the recent past and has ceased to be particularly in the last month.
America was a weak democracy throughout its entire history; it has become weaker in the last generation, but still affords more democratic power – even under a fascist leader in the process of attempting to further dismantle it – than most citizens in the world enjoy today. A lot of people literally risk their lives for the political power that we often take for granted.
We should absolutely be disturbed and angry about the loss of civic power. We should also avoid defeatism or doomerism, as there is still a lot of room for this to get better or worse depending on what each of us do. And, we should absolutely reject any framing that suggests that the oligarchy we had last year and every year of our lifetimes before that was some sacred ideal.
America neither was a true democracy previously, nor has it ceased to be one at all. Ergo: democracy has not died.
Fair points.
But I still believe there was a tiny bit of democracy left, up to the last election, otherwise democrats would not have accepted a peaceful transition. As a Canadian, it make no doubts in my mind that US will try to annex us in the coming months or years. I will be fighting against it and I hope we can build a resistance we some of the US citizens.
I don’t mean to come at you in particular, but when I hear a phrase like “a tiny bit of democracy left”, I can’t help but think about the fact that there is so much unexercised democratic power available to citizens in the US, and the primary tool for disenfranchisement is just demoralizing and inactivating people.
Let’s just set aside all the people who just do not pay attention to politics and focus on folks in this thread. Within a thread of people who follow and react to international news, how many know who their county representative is? How many people vote in the primaries that determine who gets to run for their city council?
I’m not blaming anyone. It’s a ton of work. Until recently I didn’t know these things. But if we’re looking for a revival of democracy, we should all be working together to solidify power among the people who control our local cops and school boards and have authority over our state national guards and our state-level medical records, and regulate labor rights in our states and counties, and so on. This is really a key point at which we can either push fascism back to the fringes or let it actually end democracy.
Only in a real democracy could an idiot like trump become president the first time round. Even the russians were surprised, they never expected Hillary could lose. Now is the Democratic party a democracy? Eh, no, it’s a superdelegate oligarchy, with what happened to Bernie and got into this disastrous timeline.
Is Orban not, in turn, emulating putin? It’s dictators all the way down
Fascism goes all the way back down to Roman times. That’s where the word originates anyhow. " Modern" Fascism has a different outward symbolism, fashion style if you will, but the end game is always the same. Bad for normal people, good for elitist. And propaganda is always involved.
The land of the free is fast becoming a human rights wasteland. I’m still reeling from the sheer number of people who seemingly had no idea it was going to be exactly like this.
I’m really hoping this will be the wake up call America needed to get its shit together, because if they don’t, the oligarchs aren’t going to stop there. They’re coming for everything eventually.
Sorry to be a Debbie Downer but no fucking way it’s a wakeup call: the majority of Americans have no idea of the nauseating stuff that makes you feel like you’re having a stroke in the middle of the twilight zone. The level of curated 100% individualized echo chambers everyone around you is exposed to is massively underestimated. Everyone is in an algorithmiclly designed, perpetually-improving news and info echosystem basically designed to keep them engaged and hooked… They DONT SEE WHAT YOU SEE… How do you wake them up if you don’t share the same reality?
I thought January 6th could be a come to Jesus moment for us, but seeing how quickly people absolved Trump and the rest of the Republican enablers has made it clear we’re fucked, in my opinion. Shit, he pardoned people that assaulted cops. The law only applies for some. Fucking depressing.
Every American who wasn’t armed should have taken a clue on 01/06, or taken a class on WWII history.
Sick to fucking death of liberal pansies, “Guns bad!” Meanwhile, blacks, women and LGBT were, and still are, the leading gun purchasers. Suburban white boys: “But guns aren’t a solution! BAD!”
Well, it’s far too late for that rhetoric, we should have that convo in the 90s, too late kids. Get strapped or get on a fucking train.
“BUH BUH BUH they might shoot back and kill me!”
That was already in the cards you fucking pussies. I’ll choose to die with my boots on.
And we wonder why our Democratic politicians are milquetoast. Because Democrats voted for milquetoast and that’s what we got. Cowards. Suprised_pikachu.jpeg.
I’m more reeling from the sheer number of government employees who would just go along with such blatant attampt at fascism. I actually thought Americans had more guts than this.
I imagine a lot of them feel very threatened, for themselves and their families. There’s not a lot of evidence that if maga decided to just start locking up anyone who causes them inconvenience, there would be any authority coming to your aid. It’s survival at this point for them.
Hope world mods let me keep this post. It is imo worldnews at this point, unfortunately. We are literally non- stop being bombarded with his shit, every damn day on the other side of the Atlantic ( added: actually, the fallout is worldwide).
A 1940s US sabotage manual goes viral
Simple Sabotage Field Manual https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/26184/pg26184-images.html
I’m the same side of the Atlantic as you. Him doing this in the USA is one thing, it being so accepted is a totally different thing.
how it got to be (over the course of the last 50 years):
Jesus and John Wayne https://www.agathonlibrary.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/DuMez-Kristin-Kobes-Jesus_and_John_Wayne-oceanofpdf.pdf
it being so accepted is a totally different thing.
Only US citizens should change their President. I hope they succeed to stop his nonsensical violence and or Government.
Personally, I’m sure that I’m as much accepting of his policies as I am of Orban’s, i. e. not acceptable.
Only US citizens should change their President.
They did
The Heritage foundation has ties to Orbán.
“[a] formal agreement struck last year [2023] between a think tank funded by Orbán’s Fidesz Party, the Danube Institute, and The Heritage Foundation…”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/01/trump-orban-embrace-00176832
Of course they do. Thanks for the info.
Cool, I’ve always wanted the US to be just like fucking Hungary
The last line of the US national anthem has become the biggest joke now.
The land of the free and the home of the brave.
Neither of which America is at the moment.
Never has been.
To be fair, “Gender Ideology” is fucking craziness. Additionally, there has been this weird constantly pervasive push to just simply be anti-american, anti-colonial, anti-stability and anti-sanity.
We’re a colonial nation, and the constant push to tear that down has worn on for a very long time. I can see how these kinds of people have been created. I don’t agree with many of the things they do, but I am saying I understand how they managed to get that way.
Yeah well the US might have been founded as a colonial nation, but that doesn’t mean it has to stay that way forever.
Similar to how when there’s a new virus around, you might fall sick once or twice, but you’re expected to eventually recover and develop immunity to this particular virus. Similarly, the US immigrant population has literally overrun the country 300 years ago, but that does not mean that the mindset and the attitudes of that times are expected to stay around forever. Because honestly, they are a disease in many ways, if one considers many of the symptoms and side-effects.
So there’s this funny thing about colour. I’m not talking about race here. Actual colours. Wherein certain languages always seem to have the same colours when they only have a certain number of base words for colours. When the language has words for only two colours, these usually correspond to light and dark. Black and white.
I’m still not talking about race.
And when there’s three, the third is always red.
Then if there’s another it’s yellow or green.
Then if there’s five, they’re generally the other one from above and then blue.
Then you get an old and heavily moulded language like English with hundreds of colour names.
But there are languages which only discern only two colours.
Has the penny dropped yet?
Decrying gender ideology is like saying that there’s only light and dark. “What’s all this ‘red’ business? And don’t get me started on green.”
Now I’m certainly not going to tell people whose languages lack words for primary colours that they’re backward, because they have other ways of describing those things, or can learn names from other languages.
But if someone from one of those cultures was to insist that there’s only two and can’t accept that other languages break things up into separate categories, that’s denying a fact, and that’s a problem.
And if they get violent and start painting things black and white because “that’s all there is”, that’s an even bigger problem.
Do you understand yet?
“But black can’t change to white and white can’t change to black!!1!”
Not all things are the same colour all the way through. What’s on the outside is not necessarily representative of what’s going on on the inside. This here red apple, sorry, dark apple, is light on the inside.
And now it’s illegal to peel an apple.
This example is great, because it shows where there is sanity, and order. In each of your examples - things lined up naturally, without explanation across language, borders, sex, color, etc. Red, Green, etc all mapped perfectly across all of those instances, without people having to learn something new for each individual person. You say Blue = Azul, that’s a ruleset that spans the WHOLE language instantly. You learn it once, and you know it. Hell, you also just learned it in Portugese…
Gender identity is none of that. Every person with their own gender identity has their own special rules for their version of the subject. Each set of rules is unique to that individual, and they expect everyone around them to know those rules that are internal to them. (Primarily because Gender Identity circles are these huge echo-chambers which refuse to interact with anyone who doesn’t 200% agree with them) – Now imagine each and every person you met had a different word for Blue. Now imagine that you can’t keep all of that straight in your head and you just call the color “Blue” in your own tongue. And the person on the other side of the conversation gets IRRATIONALLY angry at you. THAT is Gender Identity.
That’s not going to fly. You don’t get to dictate the behaviors and actions of those around you. If someone meets you and they immediately need a 10 minute education on how they need to alter their OWN identity in order to keep you from flying off the handle, then you’re not sane.
If gender identity followed a set of rules (it doesn’t) then it would be much easier to grasp and understand for the world. But it’s not - it’s a mental illness. Or…maybe it looks like a mental illness because we don’t have the words to describe what people are trying to convey, but it has no similarities at all to the thing you describe.
Until the subject of Gender identities can unify into a simple to grasp thing that can have logic applied to it, people aren’t going to accept it.
I had a perfect conversation with a community of trans individuals about this. If a man has kids, and then considers himself a woman – what does he want to be called in relation to those kids? A father? A mother?
Turns out, nobody in the community could agree on what they wanted to be referred to in the past-tense. They all had their own unique flavor of what they would have preferred. So nobody, rational or otherwise, would ever be able to discern the proper way to approach the subject in the presence of theoretical individual. (It was a thought experiment that the community I was speaking with participated in thoughtfully and respectfully, and some people actually respected and attempted to understand the other side of things, which was incredibly refreshing. It hasn’t happened since - which is sad - but I quite enjoyed that community)
THAT’S the craziness. That’s the problem with Gender Identity. Unless it has an easily understood set of rules, people will not adopt it. We want to convey information, and move on. We don’t want to first learn how you would PREFER we convey the information - we need a set of rules that we can quickly and broadly apply, so that we aren’t throwing a wrench into the gears of our brains.
That goes doubly true with as many autistic and adhd people also cross over here. Especially for people with autism and other mental issues (myself included) - that juggling of special rules represents a real struggle.
Red, Green, etc all mapped perfectly across all of those instances
But it doesn’t map perfectly. That’s the point of the comment you replied to. In my native language, “blue” isn’t one word. If you say “blue” and I need to translate that, I need to ask whether you mean lighter or darker shade of blue, because those are straight up two different words. And it’s perfectly natural to me because I grew up speaking that language. But I also understand that not all languages have that distinction and sometimes it needs to be explicitly clarified.
and they expect everyone around them to know those rules that are internal to them
Yep. Fuck your pronouns. I’ll make a logical assumption, correct myself if asked to. Not going to fucking seek your preference. Fuck they.
huge echo-chambers which refuse to interact with anyone who doesn’t 200% agree with them
I’m ALREADY on your side! FFS give it a fucking rest already. There are plenty of others hurting without the constant wailing, “What about ME!”
the person on the other side of the conversation gets IRRATIONALLY angry at you
[removed by mod with zero explanation because fuck you]
I’m so done. These motherfuckers, arguing about bullshit when their very lives are on the line. STFU already. Been blocking all the non-stop trans posts and comms. It’s overwhelming.
tl;dr: I’m with you, but you aren’t with me. Fight among yourselves. I’ll help if I can.
I feel like that term is ambiguous.
Are you saying that gender ideology is crazy as in ‘It’s crazy that all these gender abolitionists are trying to force a complex ideology of new gender norms’ or that it’s crazy as in ‘it’s nuts that all these people think that any change in gender norms is part of a New World Order conspiracy to indoctrinate their kids and dissolve male authority in order to collapse civlization and turn everyone into livestock for the J*ws’ ?
It’s not clear where in that fog you’re pointing.
