Curious About Budapest?

Hell yeah! I live here and I haven't a clue what the fuck is going on. No TV, a 70-hour workweek, and being at the beck-and-call of two diaper-filling machines means that I don't get out much. Or get much news. If I don't see it on my run to buy groceries and more diapers to be filled, chances are it will fall outside the scope of my attention.

But no longer! Now there is an almost daily English-language blog/news/website thingie called pestiside that I can turn to for all the Hungarian news I can stomach. Sure, after reading a bit you might get the feeling that the guy behind this thing has a shrine to Ayn Rand in his reading room, but that's a damned sight better than the four dead hookers buried in Budapest Sun editor Robin Marshall's backyard. No, no, I kid. His yard couldn't possibly fit more than two.

Anyways, pestiside is a fun read for anyone who can't read Hungarian sources, or who, like myself, just couldn't be arsed. The site is cynical enough to poke fun at thugs and politicians on all sides, and if it weren't for the fact that they actually had a sense of humour about all things magyar, I'd swear that it was a bunch of Hungarians putting it together.

Hurray I voted! (so fucking what)

There was a referendum here in Hungary yesterday - a two parter. One question was regarding the privatisation of Hungary's hospitals, and the other was about whether we wanted to grant citizenship rights automatically to Hungarians living outside Hungary's borders. Now, leaving aside the question of which side I personally supported, (suffice it to say that if you think that trying to redraw the map to reflect some pre-trianon fantasyland isn't going to piss your neighbours off you're a fucking moron, and if you think that the private sector gives a flaming rat's ass whether you live or die in their hospitals then you're an even bigger fucking moron), let's just take a quick peek at what stance the political parties took.

The NATO-embracing, foreign investment fellating, proud "coalition of the willing" member (falling right between the military might of the Honduras and Iceland in the big alphabetical list, in case you're curious) governing party that, in a fit of irony, Hungarians have named the "Socialist" party is all for privatising the hospitals and keeping the borders and citizenship rules as is, thank you very much.

The clinically insane, increasingly extreme right wing opposition party "FIDESZ" wants the hospitals to stay public and wants to open the borders to ethnic Hungarians living abroad.

Let me get this straight. The Socialists want to dump public health care and the right wing bozos want to open our borders up. Don't tell me Hungarians don't have a sense of humour.

Anyways, the upshot of it all is that, as with most things political and Hungarian, the whole thing is irrelevant. A waste of time. Null and void. The small-minded knuckle-draggers in FIDESZ couldn't get the minimum number of idiots off their asses to vote, so even though both their initiatives won (public hospitals and Nationalism ahoy!), the overall turnout was so poor that it was declared invalid. And though I'm sad to see the, *ahem*, Socialists see this as a mandate to go on ahead and sell my local hospital to Pfizer, (after all, who better to treat me cost-effectively and know exactly what brand to prescribe for whatever might ail me), I am heartened to see the FIDESZ bozos get some much-deserved egg on their faces. Fear not though. I'm sure they'll find some way to blame the Jews.