When the USSR came to Hungary, they literally exhausted the syphilis medicine supply of the country for two years with the amount of rape, and the country has had collective PTSD from it for generations.

I’m sure others can bring up other countries, I’m more familiar and am more in touch with the culture of specifically Hungary. It is widely researched and not debated actually that it was so bad, suicides and misogyny spiked in the aftermath, as the people who couldn’t defend their loved ones from often repeated often gang rape either committed suicide, or just internalised that “rape is not so bad” to cope.

600 thousand people were also kidnapped (from a country of less than 10 million) and forced into labour camps for decades, with a third never coming home. This also specifically targeted the local German-Hungarian population (which had nothing to do with Germany, it was a diaspora dating back long into medieval times), so it can also qualify as genocide.

There were also examples of brutal torture, keeping people in cells small enough they couldn’t even sit down, and so on. Had nothing to do with communism, some of the direst things were actually done against communists who wanted to be free from Soviet occupation. It was pure Russian imperialism.

And truth be told, we got off easy compared to some other countries.

And finally, colonialism being “western” in an inherently racist way to view the world. East Asian empires also had colonies, so did most empires around the world.

In Hungarian, to pull a woman is in fact slang meaning to have sex with her.

Simple words are usually those that stayed with a language the longest.

Hungarian also has a very high percentage of loanwords, and a lot of those very old ancient non-compound non-calque non-loanwords are single syllable.

Like:

Horse = Ló
Road = Út
Bridge = Híd
Army = Had
Herd of horses = Mén

We took that into Hungarian

Fog = Tooth Kerék = Wheel Fogaskerék = Toothywheel = Cog

I mean in the current dictatorships, where it’s a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by Marxist terms, it is usually one dictator and the setup is fairly hierarchical.

Why is it called a dictatorship then?

without ever having colonies or engaging in imperialism

That’s only because the USSR lobbied hard in the UN so that colonialism is defined as having overseas colonies. The “near abroad” is/was a colonial empire.

The USSR was definitely imperialistic, see Hungary 1956, where it crushed a revolution which was not against communism, the revolutionaries were in fact communists, they just wanted to be free of Soviet occupation.

Not debating the accomplishments of the USSR though, it was definitely and improvement on the Russian Empire.

Well, in the USSR it was Ukrainians. Every authoritarian system find its outgroups.

Protestors stealing a tank and driving it out of a museum into the crowd (nobody got hurt) during the 2006 protests that were the foundation to the Orbán regime.

I got sucked into the two Pathfinder games they made, I want to wait out Rogue Trader’s last DLC before playing it

Or start stealing more expensive shit.

An open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and unguarded.

Read the whole comment, it’s sarcasm

Great for UTIs, or getting rid of them?

I mean I wouldn’t be surprised if I got an UTI after jamming up my peehole.

Yeah but they are taking your data from the laptop your mum bought yesterday and put all the family vacation pictures on. Mum didn’t know she had to kill off OneDrive or Microsoft will hoover up and monetise your memories.

Please don’t jam the jam in your ass

Not letting my guard down. If we go past April, it suddenly becomes possible that Hungary will also flip on the issue. We’re working on it. I want to be a citizen of the country that pioneered the recipe on how to destroy a Russophilic kleptocratic soft dictatorship instead of the country that pioneered said dictatorship.

People say that “they will push again and again” but that’s just how politics works. You have to go vote every time, in every election, get informed - reasonably, don’t turn yourself into a terminally online Twitter-zombie, read news outlets that do a big piece every week, not 24/7 reports on tweets - get active all the time, because this is your lives, your kids’ and parents’ and partners’ and friends’ lives that gets decided about. Political engagement turns your country into something like the Nordics, disengagement takes you to Russia, maybe even literally these days.

If I was a schoolteacher with high school kids, I’d make them go on the ECI website, and check out the petitions, read them, and sign what they agree with, and try to instill a habit of doing so every few months. I do this, and I signed petitions that sounded right to me and I could verify with minimal research that they were benevolent. It takes zero time, and lets you push a continent of societies towards a better future ever so slightly.

I was also spamming Hungarian MEPs for what good it did.

I feel like this and SKG were both nice “come together” activism moments for the EU nerd community. And while SKG was important as well, Chat Control was really an “end of democracy” moment and I love that we the people could shine the light on it so hard that it got abandoned until next time.

Or read Ed Zitron. What’s the youtube video? I’d like to check it out.

For research I assume.

I eat my pancakes without sugar, but with onions, cheese, sour cream, garlic and dill.

I also eat pasta with jam.

I once had a school lunch (public school cafeteria, everyone had the same) that consisted of apple soup, apple pasta and one fresh apple for dessert.

Fear me.