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"Make Europe Great Again". Seriously, that is the new slogan for the Hungarian EU presidency.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/18/europe/hungary-make-europ...


Connotations aside, using a well worn slogan 8 years later is uninspired. This makes it very ironic.


> well worn slogan 8 years later is uninspired

Ironic considering that "Let's Make America Great Again" was Ronald Reagan's campaign slogan in 1980.


Bill Clinton too I believe.


And Hitler used it too.


> What's True

> A prominent theme during the Nazi Party's ascendancy was restoring Germany to its former greatness, and Adolf Hitler used the phrase "make Germany great again" upon occasion.

> What's False

> "Make Germany Great Again" was not a (campaign) slogan employed by Hitler, and Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler are far from the only politicians who promised to make their countries "great again."

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/make-germany-great-again/


Hitler wanted to make America Great Again?

He kinda succeeded…


Wasn't Thatcher the first?

And Make Britain Great Again is so much better than America/Europe/literally anything that doesn't have great in its name


It's true, as an acronym MBGA just slips off the tongue.


That’s a good thing. Expanded slogans have object-level meanings. Acronyms just stand as identity markers, and are much easier to dismiss.

It’s harder to argue against “Make America Great Again” or “Black Lives Matter”. Their object-level meanings are fairly anodyne and positive. It’s much easier to argue against “MAGA” or “BLM”, since the meaning is obscured by the acronym.

Political movements with nice slogans should avoid turning them into acronyms.


The rebuttal from The Beat flowed

    I see no joy
    I see only sorrow
    I see no chance of your bright new tomorrow

    So stand down Margaret
    Stand down please


It's fun to stay at the EEEEEM BE GEE AY, It's fun to stay at the EEEEM BE GEE AY...


It's even more ironic when Trump uses it. Like, weren't you supposed to do that 8 years ago? What happened? You didn't do it? Why should we think you'll do it this time?

I mean, I guess it's become like a brand name. But if you think about it for a minute, it's carrying a subtext that Trump failed last time.


It’s doublespeak. Orbán is not interested in making Europe or the EU any stronger, just in extracting as much as he can from it. He only cares about Hungary.

However, it is a signal (we cannot really talk of dog whistle here, it’s rather obvious) to other far-right parties with similar nationalist agenda that he’s on their side. So a better reading might be “make [individual countries in] Europe great again”.


He only cares about himself, not Hungary.


Money, power and football, in no particular order, to be precise


I don't think there's that much thought involved, they're just aping their Republican heroes.


[flagged]


> The EU is a behemoth that absolutely steamrolls smaller countries into submission

Yet curiously Hungary has been allowed to steep down into authoritarianism, and none of Orban's excesses like media or judicial overreaches have been been overiden through submission.


> That sounds fine for the people of Hungary whom he represents. What should he do, roll over and take it from Germany? The EU is a behemoth that absolutely steamrolls smaller countries into submission. But the squeaky wheel gets greased.

What a uneducated, populistic and stupid take. Just a litle basic statistics about net contributors vs net benificiaries: https://www.statista.com/chart/18794/net-contributors-to-eu-...

Gemany pays shitloads of money into the EU so that places like hungary can benefit. If they feel that's being "steamrolled" into accepting things like the contracts they fucking signed they can fuck back off into irrelevance. As a German tax payer i'd appreciate that very much.


Shhh.... keep cool.

As a German tax payer too, i appreciate very much that Orban does not roll over and take blackmailing* from Brussels regarding the migration crisis and what Hungary will allow regarding its remaining sovereignty.

* "Hungary has been ordered to pay a €200m (£169m) fine for its refusal to uphold the rights of asylum seekers"

Germany as well as other countries should be thankful that Hungary actually built border protections, something you will never see from established centrist parties and bureaucrats.

PS: Money, Power(, Football) - will always be of interest, be it for the Commies or the Righties. Corruption on both sides, it is just a human thing.


Yeah another uneducated take from a new account who'd thought. Hungary is paying thos fines because they currently, actively and willingly violate human right laws.[1] Not because they "build border protections". Even if you want a significantly more strict immigration and asylum law, human rights must be protected.

But that's always the trick of the fascists, First violate the rights of the undesired so you can get people used to it, then violate the rights of the rest.

[1]https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/06/13/ecj-fines-hung...


There is no violation of human rights mentioned on your linked page. Economically-motivated migration is not a human right.


> Even if you want a significantly more strict immigration and asylum law, human rights must be protected.

Says who? As a Hungarian I never voted for these “human rights” that allows third worlders to waltz through our borders and into our backyards.

If they don’t like being detained at the border they can pound sand and go back to where they came from. We never invited them and they went through several safe countries to get here.

I wonder how much migration would it take for the overwhelming majority to realize that these “ideals” are utterly ridiculous and go against the very idea of statehood. 10 million economic migrants? 50mil? maybe a hundred?


you shouldn't drink the coolaid this hard.


Orban never disappoints.


You're just trying to be contrarian for imaginary internet points. Satya is right about this one.


I'm not trying to be anything. He's demonstrably incorrect. It's just talking points, and I'm calling it out.

Microsoft has only ever forced standardization of aggressively mediocre software. In every case, be it OS, spreadsheets, or word processing, there has been a much better competitor who lost out due to market forces, not quality.


People also seem to forget spreadsheets as a concept pre-date computing.


To reduce the issue, "Let's burn books! It's ok because you can just buy them on the Apple Books Store for the iPad"


That would've be hilarious as parody of this commercial if the hydraulic press shot out flames too and burnt some books. Make that message even more ambiguous lol.


Burning books certainly doesn’t have the connotation it used to, given that the idea of a book is now mostly divorced from the physical implementation.

You could burn every physical copy of most recent books and no data would be lost; I assume most authors write with a word processor.


Given all the DRM and other shenanigans implemented on ebooks, I'm not sure that's true anymore.


Yeah, right, until they start rewriting classics, because they don’t fit in today's agenda.


If you need only LoRa connectivity, Mikrotik has options for that. Then you can hook up bog standard IP devices to those.


> As of June 2023 Starlink expenses for Ukraine are covered by the US Department of Defense through a contract with SpaceX.

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/pentagon-...


An Operation Mincemeat of our time.


You're allowed to admire the technical implementation while denouncing the business model at the same time.


Are we talking about Beeper Mini, or Apple?


Pretty much all Adtech comes to mind here.


This is IMO the exact spirit we should have


Is letting our hearts bleed for trillion dollar companies really the best way to spend our finite compassionate bandwidth?


Observing that a particular business model is very likely to fail because of the conflict with another business model that happens to have much more powerful backing requires no compassion spend.

But also, it seems to me that compassion is an involuntary reaction.


> also, it seems to me that compassion is an involuntary reaction.

Compassion is very much a quality that can be developed and nurtured.


I believe you're talking about capacity for compassion, and I'm speaking of the triggering of compassion.

I'd agree that both capacity and scope of triggers can be altered, but it seems to me that that's a process that takes some time and effort. Distinct from choosing in the moment "I am going to feel a certain way about this, right now".


The troll toll?

> Just putting the thought out there.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions


ratwiki is /literally/ a troll website. it has the same validity as encyclopedia dramatica.


I wonder who's the author, and if they did a Rodenberry on the theme (Rodenberry, in addition to everything else, was the author of lyrics for the Star Trek theme. Despite them never being used, he made a tidy sum in royalties.)


the star trek theme has lyrics? beyond the voiceover by the captain?


It was written with lyrics that were never used[0].

[0]https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/28895/star-trek-theme-so...


I remember that episode! https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2h8bx

I was listening to it on a bus and screaming inside because I had that mp3 sitting in my library, obtained years and years ago through questionable means, and had listened to it quite a lot.

Even Olson - So Much Better (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qTESaoSU_8), for the record.


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