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Dictator Book Club: Orban

• dane-pgp 5y ago
  > There was a rule that the Hungarian constitution could not be amended by less than a four-fifths majority. Unfortunately, that rule itself could be amended by a two-thirds majority. Orban used his two-thirds majority to trash the rule, then amend the constitution with whatever he wanted. I wonder what was going through the heads of the people who wrote the four-fifths rule. The article points out at the end that psychopaths see opportunities which people with moral consciences disregard, but I would hope that the principle of "think like an attacker" is well enough understood in domains outside of computing now. Unfortunately it seems that governments with enough power to implement the necessary protections are more likely to use that power to instead entrench their own advantage; and countries where a cross-party consensus could be achieved to secure things, are less likely to encounter the problems that the protections are designed to defend against, so there is less motivation for them to invest political effort into it.
• TheMonarchist 5y ago
  Why would Hungarians succumb to a totalitarian system that benefits a small minority (as it is painted in the article) so soon after the yoke of Russia broke? There was an uprising against even it in the fifties and Hungary was the first prison state to breach its own walls. Why are they so submissive now?