In the old days, protesters used to physically go and picket in front of company offices. These days, protesters leave one-star reviews. I wonder which is more effective.
And actually there will be a protest in front of the office of the Public Transport Authority tomorrow. But I think in this case, the online petitioning worked pretty well.
I thought that Hungary has a democratically elected government. Did I miss something?
The very definition of election means aristocracy. To have a democracy it requires sortition instead.
Much of it focuses on the treatment of refugees, but you'll also find information about the suppression of free speech and the like. A "democratically elected government" in a country where the opposition is suppressed is not that democratically elected after all.
<tinfoil>Financier and philanthropist George Soros of the Open Society Foundation announced in 2010 his intention to grant US $100 million to HRW over a period of ten years to help it expand its efforts internationally.</tinfoil>
Ah, I see. Presumably he also finances...
Freedom House: https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2015/hungary
The International Press Institute: https://ipi.media/civil-defamation-and-media-freedom-in-hung...
The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/09/opinion/hungarys-crackdow...
The US government: https://hu.usembassy.gov/hungary-media-freedom-press-stateme...
The LA Times: http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-hungary-media-free...
Hitler was democratically elected as well, that is not sufficient to label his regime as democracy.
No he wasn't, it is not that simple. His party at that time had no majority despite being the largest one. He got appointed chancellor not by democratic vote but by backroom negotiations - mostly because he was expected to be easy to control.
From this state he went for the dictatorship but again not by democratic election but rather by scaring the other parties into voting him the Enabling Act in 1933 after the supposedly communist-inspired Reichstag Fire.
But if you don't like that, here's a short excerpt from Wikipedia: "No consensus exists on how to define democracy, but legal equality, political freedom and rule of law have been identified as important characteristics."[1]
We don't have any of these. Or, to put it in an easier to digest way: all of these have been regularly (and increasingly) violated by the govt.
As probably a fellow Hungarian who likes (is emotionally attached to) this government, I understand you are OK with it, but it doesn't make the current system any more democratic. Fun fact: the Kadar system called itself democratic too. But it's judged from the outside, for obvious reasons.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy#Characteristics
At some point we need to understand the novlang used here, by squatting the word democracy to label the political system based on elections, people in power manage to prevent to emergence of an actual democracy.
Please stop misusing this word so we have a better chance of actually having a democracy somwhere at some point in the future.
There may be better ways of doing things but it doesn't make democracies not democracies.
From a technical perspective, this is clearly untrue.
It's impossible if you take “every issue” literally, as you are multiplying the number of pdecisions that must be made by each participant per unit of time so much that the time to consider them is non-existent.
It's less impossible if you reduce it to the kind of decisions typically made by a legislature, which mainly just sets rules for executive and judicial officials to apply in deciding more specific issues.
But even then it's of dubious practicality; obviously not every citizen can have a full-time legislative staff, and most of other things besides legislation to devote their time to.
Please stop promoting democracy as the be-all end-all of systems for organizing human society. As the old saw goes "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner. Liberty is a well armed sheep contesting the outcome".
Also there seems to be some irl protesting going on as well, at least in this case.
When the story made it to Slashdot's front page, it had ~46k 1-start reviews and a few hundred ratings in the 2-5 stars range.
Methinks whoever is in charge of company reviews at BKK is despairing right now. Unless they somehow convince FB to drop the recent cohort of 1-star ratings (which will almost certainly yield a Streisand effect) and keep a low profile for a very long time before allowing star ratings again, there's simply no way the BKK will rescue the rating.
It's unfortunate for the BKK and its staff. The quality of their service and vehicles is good overall and the staff is friendly. It's admittedly not 5-star grade, but it's certainly not 1-star material either. Yet this sequence of event might haunt them for years.