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> "Personal liberties" Over the past few weeks, it's felt like this term has become a euphemism for "ban or severely curtail moderation (and the associated lia

> "Personal liberties" Over the past few weeks, it's felt like this term has become a euphemism for "ban or severely curtail moderation (and the associated liability implications)". It's tough as someone who is a strong proponent for strong civil liberties seeing their philosophy's verbiage being co-opted as such (but the former PM/PMM in me respects game) > At the end of the day I expect the quality of discourse to dip: being afraid of contradictory opinions is the first step in intellectual decline. In Turkiye, Hungary, a lot of Latin America (notably Mexico, Brazil), Russia in the early 2010s, CEE EU member states (Yes Czechs and Poles, continue to be high and mighty on HN and Reddit until Babis and PiS win again the next couple months thanks to your parents in Brno or Wroclaw), Israel, South Korea, and India, this meant the rise of independent blogs and media - sort of like what Substack is trying but failing to do. Plenty of senior journalists who felt over-muzzled would split off and form their own independent blog companies and those increasingly supplemented legacy press orgs amongst leadership, because even an illiberal democracy, you need some unbiased info. Of course, unlike the US, plenty of journalists in those countries have bar licenses and know how to parry judicial overreach. It also meant the opposition had balls and wasn't afraid to lie if needed as well. Politics is a brawl, not a Socratic session in a Gov94 Seminar, but these are also countries where junior party members from opposing parties beating each up with fists or a tire iron is a rite of passage.

rurp 2y ago
Is Substack really failing? I don't have any particular insight into the business as a whole but I do see quite a few prominent political writers on there who seem happy with their traffic and reach.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  As a business they are doing decent (kick myself for not participating in one of their earlier rounds, and potentially turbocharging my career). But from the standpoint of an independent news organization, they suck. If you as an independent commentator are tied to a centralized platform, you are a feature to be sold, and will be muzzled or deprecated if needed.
  - coldtea 2y ago
    >But from the standpoint of an independent news organization, they suck. Well, they're not an independent news organization. It was supposed to be a newsletter service, whatever the pivots. But in any case, even if they don't have the "news", the breadth and quality of commentary there, one never sees in establisment media. And the option to cut down the shit is trivially easy: just read your subscribed newsletters (in your inbox preferably) and skip any other feed Substack has.
    - rurp 2y ago
      Yeah as a reader and occasional commenter I find Substack to be a great source for interesting and informative writing on a number of topics. I spend a decent chunk of my internet reading time on there and hope the platform thrives.
  - baud147258 2y ago
    > If you as an independent commentator are tied to a centralized platform, you are a feature to be sold, and will be muzzled or deprecated if needed. Wasn't one selling point of Substack that you could easily leave with your subscribers, so substack writers aren't really for sale and can't be muzzled/deprecated? Or did it change since Substack was launed? Also are you thinking about specific writer(s)/events when you wrote 'muzzled or deprecated if needed.'?
    - rurp 2y ago
      That's still the case. I've seen a few newsletters I follow move off the platform, one of them just a couple weeks ago. I don't like to see them go though because I think Substack is great overall, much better than competing services.
      - leereeves 2y ago
        When a newsletter moves off Substack, can they take their incoming links and SEO mojo with them? If so, how does that work?
- conradev 2y ago
  The Free Press is one of the biggest publications on Substack and they're a small news organization with ~25 people. It seems like Substack is doing well.
  - rurp 2y ago
    Sure it's not hosting full news rooms, but the big names on there who have gone independent seem to have a pretty sizable audience relative to their size.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  They're enshittifying like medium did before them.
  - lukas099 2y ago
    How so?
specialist 2y ago
> ...a euphemism for "ban or severely curtail moderation (and the associated liability implications)". Yup. Just more doublespeak. Remember "free enterprise"? Sounds awesome right? Yes, please, gimme some more of that freedom. Imagine my surprise apon learning the "free enterprise" advocates actually meant freedom from consequences.
- baranul 2y ago
  It's amazing how increasingly Orwellian things are becoming under our ever more powerful dictatorial and oligarchical benefactors. Always bringing smiles to the faces of the most willing believers. The power to impose this new wonderland, is almost within reach. Where before it failed, greater are the possibilities for it to succeed this time around. Nothing to worry about, freedom is for those who deserve it.
fallingknife 2y ago
What liability implications are there? With section 230 there really isn't any. And even without that it's basically impossible to libel a public figure so I doubt there would be much change in terms of politics.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  > What liability implications are there EU [0], not US. There's a reason JD Vance was harping about "free speech" and "personal freedom" during MSC. Hot take, but if we as Ds sacrifice Bruxelles to bring back Obama era tech donors who are overly impacted by the Digital Services Act, I'm fine with it. [0] - https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-services-act_en https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
  - Karrot_Kream 2y ago
    Hot for HN maybe but not that hot in general. But we all know Dems have a lot of voters who demand ideological purity who will make a huge show of anger if they do something like this. The Dems have a cranky, fractious base and this contributed to their loss IMO.
    - watwut 2y ago
      Your party can't handle no dissent. Not internally and really go to emotional temperature tamptrum if the see outsiders.
    - dkarl 2y ago
      We've forgotten what politics is. We think it's just about being right and having our rightness rewarded and memorialized by history. Less than 40% of the adult population has a college degree. Less than 45% of voters have college degrees. Yet we took for granted the ascendence of ideas that few non-college-educated voters have been able to digest and see the evidence for. That it happened at all is pretty amazing, yet our only response has been to whine and moan that it hasn't happened faster or more completely. We could see that a lot of people weren't really getting it, and as long as we thought they were a minority, our response was who cares, they're losing. If they aren't educating themselves and keeping up to date, they're simply bad people and if they're confused and angry, fuck 'em, they deserve it. It is not necessarily wrong as a moral stance, but it's not a strategy for succeeding in a democracy where those people can tip the balance of an election. As we felt more and more entitled to our triumph and got more and more angry and whiny about the bad people holding us back, surprise surprise, those people decided we weren't the best party to represent them anymore. If there's any lesson we should take from this, it's that if we hold people in contempt, we can't count on their votes. There's nothing coherent behind the shift to Trump except mutual contempt. I hope we are getting to a point where we can talk about our own political failings without reflexively changing the subject to the voters' moral failings. Also, we should consider that when our definition of a good person includes the rapid assimilation of new information and ideas, the ability to be a good person is not evenly distributed. We're only a tiny way towards building a world where that ideal isn't elitist and exclusionary. A lot of people were not raised with that definition of moral goodness. Acting in good faith, they did not equip themselves with the necessary skills, because they thought they could be good people without them. What we're demanding from them now is that they either exercise intellectual skills and habits they don't have, or they speak and believe in obedience to those of us who have them. I don't see a good way around it, but we shouldn't be surprised if they're unhappy about it.
EasyMark 2y ago
- personal liberties this is fine if he really means it. This is the most important thing we get from the Constitution recognizing our rights as humans. It remains to be seen if it's really just to copy what what Musk is doing at X which is amplifying far right posts along with enragement (engagement) posts, and he deamplifie everything else. - free markets this is worrisome. it sounds to me like they want free markets for billionaires and their arm twisting of the current Congress and Trump, and -NOT- actually giving lower and middle class an equal chance in "free markets", because it can't be free if corps are allowed to run hog wild over rights, monopolies, and colluding between each other to dominate markets.
hackyhacky 2y ago
>> "Personal liberties" > Over the past few weeks, it's felt like this term has become a euphemism for "ban or severely curtail moderation (and the associated liability implications)". "Personal liberty" is a euphemism for discrimination against "out groups," based on their ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, or political orientation. The Masterpiece Cake Shop debacle[0] was framed on the right as an issue of religious liberty. "Free markets," the other "pillar" in the Bezos letter, is obviously a euphemism for opposing government regulation or oversight. In this case, I imagine it means in particular opposition to labor unions. [0] https://fedsoc.org/case/masterpiece-cakeshop https://fedsoc.org/case/masterpiece-cakeshop
- antonchekhov 2y ago
  It's very much like an echo of the old Wall Street Journal Opinion motto "Free Men and Free Markets".
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  Yeah, I mean is he in favor of breakups of monopolies, in particular his (former kinda) company? That's what free markets need to function.....
- coldtea 2y ago
  Considering that the cake shop won their case, but still got attacked and dragged in the mud for their rights, not the best argument. The solution was trivially easy: go to another cake shop that doesn't not have such an objection, but that wouldn't be heroic enough.
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
    The fact that it won is only stronger condemnation of the state of things.
  - hackyhacky 2y ago
    I'm not here to argue about the correctness or value of the cake case. I'm just using the case as an example of rhetoric, specifically the rhetoric of "personal liberty" to mean "freedom to discriminate." The cake case became a wedge issue, but we're already seeing similar rhetoric used to dismantle the separation of church and state and enshrine government-sanctioned oppression of protected classes. That is: "if the cake shop doesn't have to serve gay people, then why should my (publicly-funded) school?" [0] [0] https://www.aceprensa.com/english/united-states-approves-first-publicly-funded-catholic-school/ https://www.aceprensa.com/english/united-states-approves-fir...
selimthegrim 2y ago
Didn’t the left’s lies in Hungary pave the way for Orbán’s ascent?
- alephnerd 2y ago
  I get where you're coming from, because Hungary was a Communist state until 1989, but ex-MKP (Hungarian Communist Party) cadre joined Fidesz as well as MSZP. Like any other non-Western European and North American country, politics in the CEE is very much about those networks and connections you cultivated - not really ideological - and almost everyone mid-high level in Hungarian politics today started their careers in the 1990s. Politics in much of the CEE amongst that generation appears much more mercenary than ideological. Anecdotally, I've heard the biggest reason my Hungarian coworkers parents voted for Fidesz was largely because of the cash benefits they would provide before elections - same as Bolsa Familia in Brazil, TOKİ in Turkiye, and Freebies in India (all illiberal democracies have a similar form of patronage politics, this is a very incomplete list)
  - selimthegrim 2y ago
    I meant Gyurcsány and the tapes.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - pestaa 2y ago
      The tapes didn't contain lies, but the harsh truth. Gyurcsány addressed the lack of performance of his government. The public didn't want to hear that and gave supermajority to Orbán for the next decade and a half.
petre 2y ago
Dunno about the parents in Brno or Wroclaw. I read an article on DW with age metrics of the recent election. Guess what demographic voted the for AfD and Die Linke? < 45. Unfortunately this is the new opposition, nazis and commies. https://www.dw.com/en/german-election-results-and-voter-demographics-explained-in-charts/a-71724186 https://www.dw.com/en/german-election-results-and-voter-demo...
- maeil 2y ago
  Huh? The graph in your link shows that AfD is indeed most popular among the parents of the average Reddit user - HN skews slightly older, but still. Scoring highest among 35-44, and in general pretty similar, showing a pretty normal distribution with the mean at ~40yo. You're definitely right about Die Linke's demographics though.
- sterlind 2y ago
  I'm heartened to learn about Die Linke, thank you. I was afraid AfD's only real opposition was an anemic coalition of centrist political parties. Youth are rejecting the status quo, they're done with neoliberalism, for better or worse. Radical ideas are in. If the only radical ideas are on the Right, well - we know how well that worked out for Weimar Germany (or the USSR under Brezhnev.) Democrats have had since 2016 to learn that lesson, and I fear they still won't in 2028. I'm not a Commie, but if the choice is between Nazis and Commies, I'll sing the Internationale. (Yes, I know that Die Linke aren't literally Communist, and I know AfD aren't literally Nazis, but Die Linke descended from the legal successor of a Marxist-Leninist party, as AfD descended from the legal successor of a neo-Nazi party, so I think my analogy holds.)
  - nozzlegear 2y ago
    I'm a firm believer in the horseshoe theory, so I'm really not interested in a radical left or a radical right. Give me more Bidens, Harrises, Clintons and Obamas. I'll vote for them every time. > Democrats have had since 2016 to learn that lesson Biden won in 2020 pretty resoundingly, so the lesson they learned from 2016 was enough to win decisively in 2020. Parties don't stay in power indefinitely, conditions change and incumbents all across the world — not just the US — lost in 2024.
t0bia_s 2y ago
Opposition in Czech will win because current government fail almost in everything. SPOLU declared themselves as middle right coalition, but implement left politics, ie increasing taxes about 20% for freelancers in last year, keeping almost one od highest inflation in EU, funding useless projects... No wonder that about 75% Czechs are dissatisfied with current PM Fiala. https://cvvm.soc.cas.cz/en/press-releases/political/politicians-political-institutions/5826-evaluation-of-petr-fialas-cabinet-april-may-2024 https://cvvm.soc.cas.cz/en/press-releases/political/politici... Opposition is even worse. They do what public surveys and Babis (the leading oligarch here) tells them to do. I expect lowest voter turnout because quite a lot people don't see any point in voting. Which is ok for me. We need rethinking about current approach of giving our responsibility to unknown electorate.
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  Well, our economy is stagnating, and the PM is an academic who looks detached from the real world. There are also obvious struggles within Brussels whether the unrealistic eco-plans are going to be at least watered down or no, and the EC is still trying to push them through as much as possible. In that environment, a "media-talented" oppositional politician who professes mild Euroskepticism is going to have an easy time winning.
  - t0bia_s 2y ago
    That is a least bothering aspects of opposition to me. Whats frustrate me is how people still believe in politics even though nothing much really change. Debt, taxes and inflation driven by greedy politicans will increase, uneconomical spending and socialism dependence on state rising. Most wouldn't get any penny without fundings from our taxes. Or mortgage. We have ridiculous amount of state employees (highest police members per citizen), heavy bureaucracy, 50 thousand new regulations every year. It's not sustainable both for economy and sake of mind.
    - rightbyte 2y ago
      > Whats frustrate me is how people still believe in politics even though nothing much really change. ... greedy politicians ... Join a local party and observe how the discussion is not really centred around screwing their voters over, hopefully. My take was about as yours before I tried to do something and realized how hard it is.

rurp 2y ago

Is Substack really failing? I don't have any particular insight into the business as a whole but I do see quite a few prominent political writers on there who seem happy with their traffic and reach.

alephnerd 2y ago
As a business they are doing decent (kick myself for not participating in one of their earlier rounds, and potentially turbocharging my career). But from the standpoint of an independent news organization, they suck. If you as an independent commentator are tied to a centralized platform, you are a feature to be sold, and will be muzzled or deprecated if needed.
- coldtea 2y ago
  >But from the standpoint of an independent news organization, they suck. Well, they're not an independent news organization. It was supposed to be a newsletter service, whatever the pivots. But in any case, even if they don't have the "news", the breadth and quality of commentary there, one never sees in establisment media. And the option to cut down the shit is trivially easy: just read your subscribed newsletters (in your inbox preferably) and skip any other feed Substack has.
  - rurp 2y ago
    Yeah as a reader and occasional commenter I find Substack to be a great source for interesting and informative writing on a number of topics. I spend a decent chunk of my internet reading time on there and hope the platform thrives.
- baud147258 2y ago
  > If you as an independent commentator are tied to a centralized platform, you are a feature to be sold, and will be muzzled or deprecated if needed. Wasn't one selling point of Substack that you could easily leave with your subscribers, so substack writers aren't really for sale and can't be muzzled/deprecated? Or did it change since Substack was launed? Also are you thinking about specific writer(s)/events when you wrote 'muzzled or deprecated if needed.'?
  - rurp 2y ago
    That's still the case. I've seen a few newsletters I follow move off the platform, one of them just a couple weeks ago. I don't like to see them go though because I think Substack is great overall, much better than competing services.
    - leereeves 2y ago
      When a newsletter moves off Substack, can they take their incoming links and SEO mojo with them? If so, how does that work?
conradev 2y ago
The Free Press is one of the biggest publications on Substack and they're a small news organization with ~25 people. It seems like Substack is doing well.
- rurp 2y ago
  Sure it's not hosting full news rooms, but the big names on there who have gone independent seem to have a pretty sizable audience relative to their size.
wkat4242 2y ago
They're enshittifying like medium did before them.
- lukas099 2y ago
  How so?

specialist 2y ago

> ...a euphemism for "ban or severely curtail moderation (and the associated liability implications)". Yup. Just more doublespeak. Remember "free enterprise"? Sounds awesome right? Yes, please, gimme some more of that freedom. Imagine my surprise apon learning the "free enterprise" advocates actually meant freedom from consequences.

baranul 2y ago
It's amazing how increasingly Orwellian things are becoming under our ever more powerful dictatorial and oligarchical benefactors. Always bringing smiles to the faces of the most willing believers. The power to impose this new wonderland, is almost within reach. Where before it failed, greater are the possibilities for it to succeed this time around. Nothing to worry about, freedom is for those who deserve it.

fallingknife 2y ago

What liability implications are there? With section 230 there really isn't any. And even without that it's basically impossible to libel a public figure so I doubt there would be much change in terms of politics.

alephnerd 2y ago
> What liability implications are there EU [0], not US. There's a reason JD Vance was harping about "free speech" and "personal freedom" during MSC. Hot take, but if we as Ds sacrifice Bruxelles to bring back Obama era tech donors who are overly impacted by the Digital Services Act, I'm fine with it. [0] - https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-services-act_en https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
- Karrot_Kream 2y ago
  Hot for HN maybe but not that hot in general. But we all know Dems have a lot of voters who demand ideological purity who will make a huge show of anger if they do something like this. The Dems have a cranky, fractious base and this contributed to their loss IMO.
  - watwut 2y ago
    Your party can't handle no dissent. Not internally and really go to emotional temperature tamptrum if the see outsiders.
  - dkarl 2y ago
    We've forgotten what politics is. We think it's just about being right and having our rightness rewarded and memorialized by history. Less than 40% of the adult population has a college degree. Less than 45% of voters have college degrees. Yet we took for granted the ascendence of ideas that few non-college-educated voters have been able to digest and see the evidence for. That it happened at all is pretty amazing, yet our only response has been to whine and moan that it hasn't happened faster or more completely. We could see that a lot of people weren't really getting it, and as long as we thought they were a minority, our response was who cares, they're losing. If they aren't educating themselves and keeping up to date, they're simply bad people and if they're confused and angry, fuck 'em, they deserve it. It is not necessarily wrong as a moral stance, but it's not a strategy for succeeding in a democracy where those people can tip the balance of an election. As we felt more and more entitled to our triumph and got more and more angry and whiny about the bad people holding us back, surprise surprise, those people decided we weren't the best party to represent them anymore. If there's any lesson we should take from this, it's that if we hold people in contempt, we can't count on their votes. There's nothing coherent behind the shift to Trump except mutual contempt. I hope we are getting to a point where we can talk about our own political failings without reflexively changing the subject to the voters' moral failings. Also, we should consider that when our definition of a good person includes the rapid assimilation of new information and ideas, the ability to be a good person is not evenly distributed. We're only a tiny way towards building a world where that ideal isn't elitist and exclusionary. A lot of people were not raised with that definition of moral goodness. Acting in good faith, they did not equip themselves with the necessary skills, because they thought they could be good people without them. What we're demanding from them now is that they either exercise intellectual skills and habits they don't have, or they speak and believe in obedience to those of us who have them. I don't see a good way around it, but we shouldn't be surprised if they're unhappy about it.

EasyMark 2y ago

- personal liberties this is fine if he really means it. This is the most important thing we get from the Constitution recognizing our rights as humans. It remains to be seen if it's really just to copy what what Musk is doing at X which is amplifying far right posts along with enragement (engagement) posts, and he deamplifie everything else. - free markets this is worrisome. it sounds to me like they want free markets for billionaires and their arm twisting of the current Congress and Trump, and -NOT- actually giving lower and middle class an equal chance in "free markets", because it can't be free if corps are allowed to run hog wild over rights, monopolies, and colluding between each other to dominate markets.

hackyhacky 2y ago

>> "Personal liberties" > Over the past few weeks, it's felt like this term has become a euphemism for "ban or severely curtail moderation (and the associated liability implications)". "Personal liberty" is a euphemism for discrimination against "out groups," based on their ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, or political orientation. The Masterpiece Cake Shop debacle[0] was framed on the right as an issue of religious liberty. "Free markets," the other "pillar" in the Bezos letter, is obviously a euphemism for opposing government regulation or oversight. In this case, I imagine it means in particular opposition to labor unions. [0] https://fedsoc.org/case/masterpiece-cakeshop https://fedsoc.org/case/masterpiece-cakeshop

antonchekhov 2y ago
It's very much like an echo of the old Wall Street Journal Opinion motto "Free Men and Free Markets".
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
Yeah, I mean is he in favor of breakups of monopolies, in particular his (former kinda) company? That's what free markets need to function.....
coldtea 2y ago
Considering that the cake shop won their case, but still got attacked and dragged in the mud for their rights, not the best argument. The solution was trivially easy: go to another cake shop that doesn't not have such an objection, but that wouldn't be heroic enough.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
  The fact that it won is only stronger condemnation of the state of things.
- hackyhacky 2y ago
  I'm not here to argue about the correctness or value of the cake case. I'm just using the case as an example of rhetoric, specifically the rhetoric of "personal liberty" to mean "freedom to discriminate." The cake case became a wedge issue, but we're already seeing similar rhetoric used to dismantle the separation of church and state and enshrine government-sanctioned oppression of protected classes. That is: "if the cake shop doesn't have to serve gay people, then why should my (publicly-funded) school?" [0] [0] https://www.aceprensa.com/english/united-states-approves-first-publicly-funded-catholic-school/ https://www.aceprensa.com/english/united-states-approves-fir...

selimthegrim 2y ago

Didn’t the left’s lies in Hungary pave the way for Orbán’s ascent?

alephnerd 2y ago
I get where you're coming from, because Hungary was a Communist state until 1989, but ex-MKP (Hungarian Communist Party) cadre joined Fidesz as well as MSZP. Like any other non-Western European and North American country, politics in the CEE is very much about those networks and connections you cultivated - not really ideological - and almost everyone mid-high level in Hungarian politics today started their careers in the 1990s. Politics in much of the CEE amongst that generation appears much more mercenary than ideological. Anecdotally, I've heard the biggest reason my Hungarian coworkers parents voted for Fidesz was largely because of the cash benefits they would provide before elections - same as Bolsa Familia in Brazil, TOKİ in Turkiye, and Freebies in India (all illiberal democracies have a similar form of patronage politics, this is a very incomplete list)
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  I meant Gyurcsány and the tapes.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - pestaa 2y ago
    The tapes didn't contain lies, but the harsh truth. Gyurcsány addressed the lack of performance of his government. The public didn't want to hear that and gave supermajority to Orbán for the next decade and a half.

petre 2y ago

Dunno about the parents in Brno or Wroclaw. I read an article on DW with age metrics of the recent election. Guess what demographic voted the for AfD and Die Linke? < 45. Unfortunately this is the new opposition, nazis and commies. https://www.dw.com/en/german-election-results-and-voter-demographics-explained-in-charts/a-71724186 https://www.dw.com/en/german-election-results-and-voter-demo...

maeil 2y ago
Huh? The graph in your link shows that AfD is indeed most popular among the parents of the average Reddit user - HN skews slightly older, but still. Scoring highest among 35-44, and in general pretty similar, showing a pretty normal distribution with the mean at ~40yo. You're definitely right about Die Linke's demographics though.
sterlind 2y ago
I'm heartened to learn about Die Linke, thank you. I was afraid AfD's only real opposition was an anemic coalition of centrist political parties. Youth are rejecting the status quo, they're done with neoliberalism, for better or worse. Radical ideas are in. If the only radical ideas are on the Right, well - we know how well that worked out for Weimar Germany (or the USSR under Brezhnev.) Democrats have had since 2016 to learn that lesson, and I fear they still won't in 2028. I'm not a Commie, but if the choice is between Nazis and Commies, I'll sing the Internationale. (Yes, I know that Die Linke aren't literally Communist, and I know AfD aren't literally Nazis, but Die Linke descended from the legal successor of a Marxist-Leninist party, as AfD descended from the legal successor of a neo-Nazi party, so I think my analogy holds.)
- nozzlegear 2y ago
  I'm a firm believer in the horseshoe theory, so I'm really not interested in a radical left or a radical right. Give me more Bidens, Harrises, Clintons and Obamas. I'll vote for them every time. > Democrats have had since 2016 to learn that lesson Biden won in 2020 pretty resoundingly, so the lesson they learned from 2016 was enough to win decisively in 2020. Parties don't stay in power indefinitely, conditions change and incumbents all across the world — not just the US — lost in 2024.

t0bia_s 2y ago

Opposition in Czech will win because current government fail almost in everything. SPOLU declared themselves as middle right coalition, but implement left politics, ie increasing taxes about 20% for freelancers in last year, keeping almost one od highest inflation in EU, funding useless projects... No wonder that about 75% Czechs are dissatisfied with current PM Fiala. https://cvvm.soc.cas.cz/en/press-releases/political/politicians-political-institutions/5826-evaluation-of-petr-fialas-cabinet-april-may-2024 https://cvvm.soc.cas.cz/en/press-releases/political/politici... Opposition is even worse. They do what public surveys and Babis (the leading oligarch here) tells them to do. I expect lowest voter turnout because quite a lot people don't see any point in voting. Which is ok for me. We need rethinking about current approach of giving our responsibility to unknown electorate.

inglor_cz 2y ago
Well, our economy is stagnating, and the PM is an academic who looks detached from the real world. There are also obvious struggles within Brussels whether the unrealistic eco-plans are going to be at least watered down or no, and the EC is still trying to push them through as much as possible. In that environment, a "media-talented" oppositional politician who professes mild Euroskepticism is going to have an easy time winning.
- t0bia_s 2y ago
  That is a least bothering aspects of opposition to me. Whats frustrate me is how people still believe in politics even though nothing much really change. Debt, taxes and inflation driven by greedy politicans will increase, uneconomical spending and socialism dependence on state rising. Most wouldn't get any penny without fundings from our taxes. Or mortgage. We have ridiculous amount of state employees (highest police members per citizen), heavy bureaucracy, 50 thousand new regulations every year. It's not sustainable both for economy and sake of mind.
  - rightbyte 2y ago
    > Whats frustrate me is how people still believe in politics even though nothing much really change. ... greedy politicians ... Join a local party and observe how the discussion is not really centred around screwing their voters over, hopefully. My take was about as yours before I tried to do something and realized how hard it is.