Yesterday I watched a few news broadcasts from the 80s and a science centered show from 1964 reporting on the space race and general scientific progress.
The 1964 popular science report was really funny to watch, especially the parts about space travel, where they speculated that travelling to the moon is quite the possibility within the decade, and by the end of the century there would be permanent moon bases and expeditions to Mars and Venus.
Also talking about the possibility of building a tunnel between England and France.
Strangely enough, it reported on western science too, not just on what the eastern block did. (Though they made sure that Soviet achievements are mentioned too.)
The news reports felt strange. They were often explicitly political, but for some reason it wasn't as political as a modern news segment.
It reported on events that wouldn't make it into the news today, like a new ambassador being appointed to the country.
It's political news, but also kind of apolitical in a sense, at least for me. Makes me feel nice to know we have relations with that country too.
And also because the country ran on a command economy they could accurately report on the price of toilet paper and tissues, both locally produced and Chinese imports.
One of my father's business partners stopped by today. He's an interesting man. Rarely comes buy, lives abroad. Whenever he comes along and we meet we talk a lot. Apparently I'm a "man of grand intellectual stature" according to him. He was very eager to ask me about China, especially its political developments, both past and future.
Whenever China's policies and politics comes up, I feel like a used car salesman. The only difference is that I have a conscience, so I feel bad after putting across a deal. To the leftists, I sell it as the next evolution of Marxism, a true new paradigm, to the rightists as quasi-national socialism that's about to break neoliberal history forever.
Does this make me evil, dishonest, stupid, or all of them at once? Probably the latter. I'm an evil turncoat fool for peddling political illusions I myself am not even sure are actually correct or have any relation with reality.
Exams start next week. It's making me feel incredibly stressed, but mainly the Chinese language exam. I want to get an A.
Really, it feels like I've been thinking way too much about China. I kinda want to rest a bit after the exams and maybe decrease the share of the word "China" and derivative in my thinking to below 10%.
>>54754Depends, really. Most people in the party are just old pensioners and former party members who were actually enthusiastic about marxism-leninism, the USSR and feel like the country was thrown off a righteous path it was trekking along on with other nations in a bond of brotherhood.
They use the party to get a sense of community I guess.
The party paper called "The Liberty" is very dry, mainly written by the chairman himself, usually dealing with foreign policy and relations (since he worked at the foreign ministry before '89). The tone is anti-nato, pro-Russia and China.
Most of the content the party produces is the weekly ~10 minute interview with him, the 3-4 line communiqués and demands they publish on their websites.
They promise free everything, from tuition to medicine while also quadrupling the minimum wage, leaving NATO and renationalising every industry and guaranteeing employment.
Personally, I doubt they'd have enough cadres to run the country if elected. (But otherwise I don't think they're evil people or have bad intentions. They just do it because they have nothing better to do.)(Maybe I'm just going crazy and that's why I don't consider them lunatics.)
Besides them, a lot of people both in government, but mainly the opposition have the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party in their political pedigree or heritage. Of course most became little more than simple liberals over the years, enthusiastically privatising whatever they can get their dirty hands on.
Now these people actually feel entitled to govern. They think they ought to run the country, even if they got voted out of office, and it's incredibly irritating because this mentality makes it impossible to have a normal coalition government or inter-party cooperation.
The political situation is so bad that if Orbán said in an interview that "I don't like being run over by a bus" the majority of the opposition would jump under a bus just to prove it's not so bad. (This of course was true the other way around too when Orbán's party was the opposition.)
Everything is done out of spite instead of genuine concern for the welfare of the nation.
Basically the only political objective of the opposition becomes change for the sake of change.