Charlie Stross20h ago

Holy shit.

Hungary’s New Leader Reveals Viktor Orbán Was Paying CPAC

Magyar noted that his government will be investigating Orbán’s expenditures, and will no longer finance CPAC or other right-wing institutions abroad.

https://newrepublic.com/post/209035/hungary-prime-minister-victor-orban-paying-cpac

Hungary’s New Leader Reveals Viktor Orbán Was Paying CPAC

Péter Magyar called the payments a “crime” and said his government would stop the funds.

The New Republic
Show threadmilitant_dilettante7h ago
@cstross a person, whose Telegram channel I'm reading since 2022, has this take: every known (far-)right politician contemporary to us is a scam, a fraud, a con artist, a grifter, and a thief. This heuristic more or less holds, with almost no exceptions.
Show threadCharlie Stross7h ago
@militant_dilettante I suspect there used to be some who weren't, who genuinely thought they were doing the right thing for their nation … and they got shoved out of the way or trampled by the mob. And then there's Liz Truss, who *believes* every scam, fraud, and grift they feed her and earnestly regurgitates them without understanding what it's really about (she's the comic relief on the lecture circuit).
Show threadMarcus Marcius Marcellus5h ago
@cstross @militant_dilettante When AfD was formed, it was not a nazi party. Its founders were ordoliberal* economists whose idea was to withdraw Germany from the eurozone to alleviate the Greek debt crisis. (As a € state, Greece could no longer kill debt by devaluing the drachma. AfD figured German withdrawal would effectively devalue the euro.)
1/n
Show threadMarcus Marcius Marcellus

@cstross @militant_dilettante These were pretty right-wing guys, but more from the business than from the blood & soil faction. They weren't nazis, and they were true believers.

They were all (including the founder) purged in about 10 seconds by the nazis and expelled from the party. One of the leaders of the (now) homophobic, economic-populist, xenophobic AfD is a lesbian ex-investment banker who lives in Switzerland with her Sri Lankan partner.
2/n

10:41amWeb
Show threadMarcus Marcius Marcellus5h ago
@cstross @militant_dilettante * Ordoliberals are not like liberals in the UK sense, let alone the American. They are spiritual heirs to the British ministers who refused to stop food exports from Ireland during the Famine because that would have violated the sacred laws of The Market.
3/3
Show threadmilitant_dilettante4h ago
@marcas @cstross Thank you, that was informative and interesting.
"Ordoliberals" sounds peculiar and funny in my language, because of all this staff that happened between the thing that later became my country, and the Golden Horde, the Ulus of Jochi, which in my language is pronounced as "orda".