www.talkcyprus.org

[cypezokyli]

i guess you all heard the story.
the president of hungary, was recorded saying that he was lying about the progress of the economy , and people went crazy.

among other things he said:

Quote:
If I am honest with you, I can say that we are full of doubts. That torment and anguish are behind the self-assurance. I can tell you exactly that all that we are doing will not be perfect...

We did what we could in the past month. We did whatever was possible to do in secret in the preceding months, making sure that papers on what we were preparing for would not surface in the last weeks of the election campaign.

We kept the secret, while we knew and you did too, that if the election victory comes, we will have to seriously settle down to work and that we have never had such a problem.

SCREWING UP

Since last summer we have been preserving our political unity and, behind it, our professional political unity as never before in recent years...

There is not much choice. There is not, because we have screwed up. Not a little but a lot. No country in Europe has screwed up as much as we have. It can be explained. We have obviously lied throughout the past 18 to 24 months. It was perfectly clear that what we were saying was not true.

We are beyond the country's possibilities to such an extent that we could not conceive earlier that a joint government of the Socialists and the liberals would ever do. And in the meantime we did not actually do anything for four years. Nothing.

You cannot mention any significant government measures that we can be proud of, apart from the fact that in the end we managed to get governance out of the shit. Nothing. If we have to give an account to the country of what we have done in four years, what are we going to say?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5359546.stm

and the results :
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/5358690.stm

this brought up some questions concerning the infamous "political culture".

do the riots show a highly politified country , or a bunch of inmature mob ?

i am wondering sometimes what is the best way to react when the president is recorded to have been lying. i wonder if people should keep demonstrating or give it up alltogether.

from the one side :
the "orange revolution" in ukraine (apparently supported or even financed from the west) , brought nothing more than its own downfall two years later. the mob, just demonstrated for some time, only to choose someone as bad as the one before.

from the other :
bush and blair (and others around the world) , obviously lied about very serious things, and the majority of people seem to prefer sitting in their chairs - indifferent. even if they make a demonstration it wont last more than a day.

i dont know what to say to those hungarians.
go on demonstrating.... perhaps the only thing you can save is not your economy, but your pride... or go home, all this demonstrating will bring you nothing

[thebrix]

cypezokyli wrote:
i dont know what to say to those hungarians.
go on demonstrating.... perhaps the only thing you can save is not your economy, but your pride... or go home, all this demonstrating will bring you nothing

Something that worries me about demonstrations is that they are always painted as more important than they are.

For example, 1.5-2 million people demonstrated in this country against the second invasion of Iraq ... to absolutely zero effect. And, a couple of years later, after the "lies" and "illegal* war" had supposedly been exposed, the government in power won a third term of office, albeit with a reduced majority. (Most interestingly, I was working in Bracknell at the time - not an area sympathetic to the Labour Party - and the taxi drivers there almost unanimously said that the government was doing a "good job". War was not mentioned, not once!)

* I dislike this sophistry which is almost obligatory in several newspapers; it has never been declared illegal by a court, and there has been a curious lack of attempts to prove it illegal.

[Alexios]

If we reacted the same way every time one of our Politicians lied to the people, we would be on a riot 365 days a year....i wish we did some times, but i guess after 46 years of lying one gets used to it....

[brother]

Alexios wrote: If we reacted the same way every time one of our Politicians lied to the people, we would be on a riot 365 days a year....i wish we did some times, but i guess after 46 years of lying one gets used to it....

One should never have to get used to that. :shock: