Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen it wasn't just myself I despised but my family, my friends, and their culture..."
- happens earlier in Hungary, later in the UK. A function of the school system?

I was, as I had begun to discover even then, the sort who could wear the same clothes and eat the same things and go for a hundred years without getting bored so long as I could entertain wild dreams in the privacy of my imagination.

I never saw the rich of Istanbul as beneficiaries of their own ingenuity but as people who long ago had seized some opportunity to bribe someone in the state bureaucracy and then struck it rich.

I came to understand that the place they called school had no part in answering life's most profound questions; rather, its main function was to prepare us for 'real life' in all its political brutality.

There are practically no cases of desertion (of Fidesz MPs supporting legislation).

But since the software [that handles EU tenders] formed the property of a private company - this is hardly an improvement on nationalisation.

But in 2006 the governing socialists ended the [secret] services practice of reporting both ways.

- Both Kövér and Áder give the slip to the Counter Terrorism Centre

...and the normative status of equality before the law is undermined by laws arbitrarily tailored to individuals and businesses...

It is the institution of the stooge, among others that separates the classical mafia and, by the same token, the mafia state from those systems where the nature of power and its legitimation coincide.

...in the begining of 2015 ...state resources...were to be concentrated on a state media that had been converted to become the mouthpiece of the ruling party. - this only makes sense, if the ruling party expects to rule indefinitely.

[Simicska's network, which had permeated almost every field of the state apparatus,] curtailed the prime minister's freedom of choice far more than Brussels or the multinationals.

The threshold constraining the use of violence in the case of EU member Hungary is higher than in Russia, which is not a member, and even in Russia it is higher than in the case of post-communist mafia state in Central Asia. - this is something that predates EU membership.

In the post-communist mafia state however it becomes an obvious fact that the boss is the one who can outlaw his rival by means of the legislature, the tax authorities, the prosecutor's office or the police.

...the outstanding socialist minister of industry... - he doesn't name his colleagues names.

...it is no longer the economic players approach the political sphere with their claims, but it is the political regime that milks the economic actors as well as the taxpayers..

...the mafia state also sets out to end partisan, anarchic corruption...

However, no historical example can be found of an instance where state property is transformed en-masse into private property... - privatisation in the UK?

...in the east and central European states the western institutional system was more-or-less established. - I doubt this

the post-communist mafia state uses ideology with value-free pragmatism. - this suggests that the problems with Hungarian politics are pragmatic not ideological.

Those enlarging the European Union believed that the countries were motivated not only by the desire to belong to a community of consumers, with it's restrictions on entry, but also that of belonging to a voluntarily assumed community of values. - That was naive

These are nothing like the remains of great empires to be seen in western cities, preserved like museums of history and proudly displayed. The people of Istanbul simply carry on with their lives amid the ruins - is this not what happened to Rome?

Melling's is an insider's eye. But because the Istanbullus of his time did not know how to paint themselves or their city - in deed, had no interest in doing so - the techniques he brought with him still give these candid paintings a foreign air. - I could find a drawing either.

For in this instance it is not partial economic interests that capture the state, but a political venture that captures the economy through gaining monopoly of power - accept international businesses operating in Hungary, there was a long struggle over this in the first Orbán government

prior to the 2010 election...all [Fidesz] parliamentary candidates had to make [a trip] to Orbán's country estate for a face to face hearing and to place an oath of loyalty.

The responsibility of the constitutional judges is therefore beyond question...in the erosion of the liberal laws of the republic.

The removal of the state secretaries of public administration...in 2006 - why then the Socialists were re-elected.

The reforms that would have made a rise in the standard of living possible- as well as growth sustainable- would have shifted precisely these strata into discomfort. - the impossibility of a socialist led program of privatisation. Hungarian equivalent of Basildon man?