Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

...the power monopoly of the communist party was ensured with a ban on the operation of any other party - and that's all that is required to establish a one party state. Once complete the struggle for power happens within the party rather than within the state.

This is the first cowboy book I've read.

Writes like Hemingway, though not as well. Painfully slow start until Jimmy Blevins came along. He's gone now.

Writes like Hemingway, though not as well. Painfully slow start until Jimmy Blevins came along. He's gone now.

By providing state news free of charge the Government has undermined, practically liquidated the market for independent news providers, ...

Mainly it's the nation that forms that emotional community, whose interests the mafia states pleads when it loots properties of the greatest posdible variety.

"Not even the support of the Fidesz membership, the party, or sympathy with Fidesz means any protection if the interests of the higher regions of the political family require the plunder of a company." - is this true?

In the mafia state the musclemen collecting the cash are replaced by the repurposed parliament, tax authorities and prosecutor's office.

Yet the new circle of proprietors do not become true businessmen, because...they are only extractors of tributes.

Though there were no inherent, moral constraints to the hunger for power and wealth even then, institutional ones prevailed. - overstated, but important.

In contrast in eastern Europe, whole social groups have been stripped of their wealth on a number of occasions over the past century...

While it's ideology proclaims a labor-based society, in fact the revenues of the mafia state are based on the protection money it squeezes out of others.

[The solar panel tax] shows the geopolitical interests of Russia dangerously intertwined with the private interests of the Hungarian political family.

In fact Tesco ensures the export of approximately 65 billion forints of Hungarian foodstuffs through its non-Hungarian retail chain.

Fidesz...promised to decrease the 52 forms of tax then applicable by one third, yet they have actually increased their number to 73 by July 2014.

"...the poor boy of the Hungarian fairy tales...his task was not burdened by all sorts of scruples about the rule of law, regulations on conflicts of interests and what not" - can't work out if this is insightful or just insulting.

Private-public leads to private-private, and soon you have the Circle running most or even all government services, with incredible private sector efficiency and insatiable appetite.

If public opinion pursues the offender more vociferously, or the case meets with an exceptionally serious international response, it may come to the sacrifice of one responsible. Yet those individuals can still be assured of one thing: the political family will always be there for them.

"A position, claimed heretofore by merit, became a job delivered- and taken away at the drop of a hat - by political favour' - what are the long term effects on this on the quality of work performed, c.f. construction contracts.

Total control covered the whole of society. In contrast, the post-communist mafia state only concentrates on the nodes of decision making, and trade transaction...

"By now there is more to lose" - Only among those who already have, and it is unlikely they came by what they have without 'patronage' in the first place.

"..it is not willing to support the artist ... inappropriate to its public taste from political funds" - this Is not a criticism, but evidence of the breakdown the gentleman's agreement between the parties.

...neither democracies nor dictatorships necessitate the institution of stooges...

The distribution of the lower and lower administrative positions as political rewards practically demolished the Max Weberian ethos of party-neutral public administration before it had even taken root.

"...imagining the way the president, no matter the situation, has to find a medium between raw emotion, and quiet dignity, practiced composure." - Mae obviously doesn't anticipate Trump.

Had she really thought of all that herself? - Socrates would say so.

You don"t own the news, even if it happens to you. You don't own history. It's part of the collective record now.

Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication. - Only a bad workman blames his tools?

"...he was stuck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near-infinity of private sorrows..." - Against Stalin?

Turning points are the inventions of story-tellers and dramatists, a necessary mechanism when a life is reduced to, traduced by, a plot, when a morality must be distilled from a sequence of actions, when an audience must be sent home with something unforgettable to mark a character's growth.