Want to read something scary?

By
Want to read something scary?

Once in power, that supermajority allowed Trump to amend the constitution in 2019, reducing the number of seats in the Congress from 538 to 199, gerrymandering them brutally to shore up his party’s standing in future elections, barring gay marriage in perpetuity, and mandating that in election campaigns, state media would take precedence over independent sources. He also forced a wave of early retirements in the judiciary in order to pack the courts with loyalists.

That could very well be a paragraph from an article to be written in 2020, but it's not. Instead it's a section of an article written today about the demise of democracy in Hungary when a "I don't play by the rules outsider" with a penchant for ignoring established norms or the rule of law gets his way.

Real paragraph:

Once in power, that supermajority allowed Orbán to amend the constitution in 2011, reducing the number of seats in the parliament from 386 to 199, gerrymandering them brutally to shore up his party’s standing in future elections, barring gay marriage in perpetuity, and mandating that in election campaigns, state media would take precedence over independent sources. He also forced a wave of early retirements in the judiciary in order to pack the courts with loyalists.

Think of Hungary as a shadow of what's to come, much like we used Brexit to predict a #DonaldTrump win in 2016.

Luckily our Constitution is a little harder to modify.



http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/andrew-sullivan-a-democracy-disappears.html
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/andrew-sullivan-a-democracy-disappears.html

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

So, I asked Andrew Tamm, who filled my Stream with a hundred (sarcasm there) animated gifs and cat pictures to...

By
So, I asked Andrew Tamm, who filled my Stream with a hundred (sarcasm there) animated gifs and cat pictures to remove me from whatever Circle he has me in where he posts the animated gifs and cat pictures. It was either that or unfollow him and I didn't see any reason to unfollow him. Me asking https://plus.google.com/112885755521259735422/posts/78dwnvvgh4p <==edited to add the correct link Then he plusses me onto Public posts of animated cat gifs : https://plus.google.com/u/0/112885755521259735422/posts/EuuR1tnU3vJ https://plus.google.com/u/0/112885755521259735422/posts/8r6Grcm2Jpj https://plus.google.com/u/0/112885755521259735422/posts/74PgSu6iL2s Then one of his friends (or Circlers) starts plussing me into posts of animated cat gifs : https://plus.google.com/u/0/107120198886093172821/posts/gRW9JhWLs5T Don't get me wrong, I'm all about sarcasm and messing with people, but this seems sort of childish to me. Am I the only one who thinks so? So far I have only blocked
Read more

I'm shutting down Google+ for the night and quite possibly for the weekend.

By
I'm shutting down Google+ for the night and quite possibly for the weekend. Why? This stupid #gifwars thing people are so proud of. This Adam Black guy said he doesn't like gifs and now everyone is mass trolling him. Having been mass trolled like this I can relate to him easily enough. Have an opinion and the collective might of Google+'s lower class denizens jump on a bandwagon. I just saw a post where someone wanted to jump on board and had to get clarification she was tagging the proper Adam Black. She wasn't even connected to him ! Nor was she a part of the original discussion. She just wanted to follow the herd. When I called her out of it she claimed, "one gif doesn't make a troll." Perhaps not, but she's contributing to a larger troll effort. One straw doesn't break the camel's back, but thousands will. So, tonight, Google+ disgusts me. It probably will tomorrow as well. And possibly Sunday. I gave up Google+ for two months this spring
Read more