They’re way proud of their Nobel winner, but he ain’t around. Wouldn‘t live in his home country if you paid him.

Pretty much no one’s around. No one under thirty. Shitty economy, and the joint’s run by a weirdo at once hyper-puritan and heavy into fuckywucky cuz the birth rate’s pathetic plus everyone’s leaving.

All very odd. Very malsain.

… is pleased to see that Jonathan Chait compares Trumpy America to Hungary throughout this essay.

[T]he parallels to Hungary are striking. Orbán’s economy has suffered a brain drain as the regime’s cronyism drives its great minds to work in freer societies. Trump’s policies have shown early signs of producing a similar outcome, as would-be international students must now consider whether pursuing an American degree is worth risking getting detained by ICE or having their visa revoked abruptly over minor legal infractions.

I’ve had exactly nothing good to say about Hungary on this blog, but that changes today.

Central European University, under relentless pressure by Hungary’s popular prime minister to get the hell out, is about to do so. It will probably move to Vienna. Lots of people are upset about it. Hungary’s only world-class university has been chased away by paranoid hyper-nationalist know-nothings.

UD proposes that this might be for the best. The ultimate provincial backwater and proud of it; known, if known at all, for its suicide rate, Hungary, like our own Mississippi, elects chauvinistic dolts and ejects the non-doltish. Mississippi and Hungary are hemorrhaging population, whereas Vienna – precisely the sort of place (despite its own rightish political leadership) to which intelligent Hungarians flee – is growing.

If it is the will of people that the places they call home dissolve into nothingnesses ruled by Ubus, if they want to be places outsiders visit to track the spread of wisteria over Faulkner’s manse, or get soused with the ghost of Gyula Krúdy in his favorite watering hole, eh. It’s their right; precisely because of their “shabby littleness,” these places threaten no one.

Hungarians are the west’s Sentinelese. Really best not to intervene. Sad but true.

And George Soros seems to think Hungary’s president will take that as an insult.

An investigating committee has cleared Hungary’s president of plagiarizing his 1992 doctoral thesis, despite the inclusion of many pages copied from other sources and a long list of errors.

A five-member committee at Budapest’s Semmelweis University says academics at the then-independent University of Physical Education should have noticed and called attention to similarities between large parts of Schmitt’s thesis analyzing the Olympic Games and works by other authors.

… why Hungary’s schools are failing, why its hospitals are crumbling, why it has become the poorest country in the European Union.  Victor Orban maintained a sophisticated propaganda apparatus to reframe what were ultimately not policy failures really at all but  the entirely predictable results of a system designed to enrich his cronies. There’s only so much propaganda can do when a citizen can’t get medical care in a hospital but knows their prime minister has exotic animals roaming a palatial country estate.”

Wowsa. An answer that really packs it in. Not many people can offer so much substance, detail, and argument in an elegant way.

David Pressman, ambassador to Hungary under Obama.

If, as predicted, he suffers a crushing defeat, what will happen to all the state funds dedicated to keeping Hungarian women pregnant 24/7?

Timothy Snyder, Marci Shore, and Jason Stanley are getting the hell out. Canada ho!

Like perifascist Hungary, we are beginning to experience a brain drain, mes petites.

Violate me in the violet time

In the vilest way that you know

Desecrate, savage me, utterly ravage me

On me no mercy bestow

Insisting that he was widely respected, Trump invoked the support of Viktor Orbán, the far-right prime minister of Hungary, who has dissented from Nato’s support for Ukraine in its war with Russia and shares much of the former president’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.

“Viktor Orbán is known for destroying Hungarian democracy using techniques Trump has tried to copy,” said David Driesen, a constitutional law professor at Syracuse University, who has written on the capture of democratic institutions by autocratic leaders. “It was surreal to hear Trump cite Orbán’s praise as validation of his own leadership.”

It’s The Audacity of Mope:

Lashing out against a world in which they are unhappy, [JD Vance, Patrick Deneen, and Adrian Vermeule] seek the sources of their discontent in an amorphous and carelessly defined liberalism.

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Hungary under raving illiberal V. Orban is really the only place acid haters of liberalism can thrive.

I mean, they can analyze the sources of their gnawing misery forever; but at some point, shouldn’t they stop whining and act? Shouldn’t they want to model for their children a happy parent, who lives in alignment with his deepest values?

If you had a choice between moping about in a free liberal democracy or frolicking in fascism, wouldn’t you frolic?

He has promoted Viktor Orban’s pro-natalist policies in Hungary, which offer paybacks to married couples that scale up along with the number of children…

Let’s stop beating around the vice-presidential bush: While Kamala Harris’s choice – probably Tim Walz – is a mild-mannered older person with two kids, Vance “The Lance” is a raging bull with three kids in quick succession and certainly more to come, if he takes seriously his pro-stiffy convictions.

Pragmatically, after all, the central pillar of anti-IVF natalism (no techno-cheating!) must be what Morrissey, winner of the 2015 Bad Sex in Fiction Award, dubs one’s “bulbous salutation.” Absent a willingness to scale up the “large pink prong,” as novelist/critic Edmund Wilson called his, there’s not going to be any other form of scaling up, Hungarian or what have you.

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A Trump/Vance pro-natalist presidency would perhaps feature graphic encouragement to men along these lines… So for instance take this Pyongyang poster:

Lose the Korean writing, and alter the exploding shaft to look more like a phallus, and imagine this image flashing at you day and night in the middle of Times Square. That sort of thing.

Hungary’s new National Core Curriculum

pointedly excludes the work of Imre Kertész, Hungary’s only Nobel Prize winner for literature, surrendering a national point of pride in order to erase the contributions of a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. And it adds to the core curriculum Ferenc Herczeg, a minor right-wing nationalist playwright who was celebrated and praised by Miklós Horthy, the World War II Hungarian leader who brought about an alliance between Hungary and Nazi Germany. Previous revisions of the core curriculum in prior Orbán administrations had already elevated similar minor writers into the pantheon on an obvious political basis, such as József Nyírő, a member of Parliament for the fascist Hungarian Arrow Cross Party, who harbored a passionate hatred of Jews. The new curriculum presents far-right Hungarian nationalist leaders of the past as heroes.

… going on in here!