Jon Stewart tells Bill O’Reilly July 19, 2024: “I am so fascinated by the patriotic fervor of of the Republican Party of the Republican conventions, the we the people of the Constitution, we are for freedom, we are for liberty: What is their acceptance of Victor Orban and Vladimir Putin? I don’t understand — you can say we stand for freedom, we stand for liberty, we stand for the Constitution and man, you know who’s doing it right? Putin and Orban… [Trump] has very clearly shown an affinity for the types of strong men and authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin like Victor Orban. Victor Orban was down at Mara Lago having a shrimp cocktail talking about here’s what you got to do with the Press.”
Christopher Caldwell wrote in 2019:
… sometime after Hungary joined the E.U. in 2004, this question of Europe’s borders had become complicated, legalistic, and obscured by what Orbán called “liberal babble.” Orbán now had to make a philosophical argument for why he should not be evicted from civilized company for carrying out what a decade before would have been considered the most basic part of his job. His Fidesz party had always belonged to the same political family that Merkel’s did—the hodgepodge of postwar conservative parties called “Christian Democracy.” Now, as Orbán spoke, it was clear the two were arguing from different centuries, opposite ideologies, and irreconcilable Europes.
“Hungary must protect its ethnic and cultural composition,” he said at Kötcse (which more or less rhymes with butcher). “I am convinced that Hungary has the right—and every nation has the right—to say that it does not want its country to change.” France and Britain had been perfectly within their prerogatives to admit millions of immigrants from the former Third World. Germany was entitled to welcome as many Turks as it liked. “I think they had a right to make this decision,” Orbán said. “We have a duty to look at where this has taken them.” He did not care to repeat the experiment.
…His dissent split Europeans into two clashing ideologies. With the approach in May 2019 of elections to the European Union parliament, the first since the migrant crisis, Europeans were being offered a stark choice between two irreconcilable societies: Orbán’s nationalism, which commands the assent of popular majorities, and Merkel’s human rights, a continuation of projects E.U. leaders had tried to carry out in the past quarter-century. One of these will be the Europe of tomorrow.
…At a January press conference, [Orban] interrupted a speechifying reporter by saying, “If I’ve counted correctly, that’s six questions,” then answered them in sequence with references to historical per capita income shifts, employment rates, demographic projections, and the like.
…Orbán believes that Western countries are in decline, and that they are in decline because of “liberalism,” which in his political vocabulary is a slur. He uses the word to describe the contemporary process of creating neutral social structures and a level playing field, usually in the name of rights.
This project of creating neutral institutions has two problems. First, it is destructive, because the bonds of affection out of which communities are built are—by definition—non-neutral. Second, it is a lie, because someone must administer this project, and administration, though advertised as neutral, rarely is. Some must administer over others.
Carried to its logical conclusion, liberalism will, in Orbán’s view, destroy Hungary. “It is not written in the great book of humanity that there must be Hungarians in the world,” he said in his State of the Nation address in February. “It is only written in our hearts—but the world cares nothing for that.” This sense that Hungary might be only one political miscalculation away from extinction is widely shared.
Victor Orban and Vladimir Putin want their countries to live. Nationalists find that easy to respect.
Why is Donald Trump so solicitous of Vladimir Putin and the leader in North Korea and so harsh with America’s allies?
Well, why do parents scream at their kids more than they scream at their enemies? Why does a bloke yell at his kid, who he loves more than anyone in the world, but then walking down the street, he’s polite to a thug with a gun? Because the thug with a gun is more likely to kill him than his kid.
Why does the woman with PMS make life for hell for everyone else in her home but when she goes to work, she’s nice to the people positioned to hurt or to help her? Self-interest.
Why do people kick a dog they love but scrape and bow to supervisors they loathe? Self-interest.
Sometimes you’re nice to people you hate. Sometimes you are nice to your enemies. Why? Self-interest.
People have varying likelihood and capability of hurting you severely. The wise man is careful with how he treats people who have a high likelihood and capability of hurting or helping him. How much you really like them doesn’t matter. How moral they are doesn’t matter either. Their particular hero system doesn’t matter either except to the extent it enable you to navigate around challenges.
Some people carry guns. Anyone who’s carrying a gun has the ability to end your life quickly and thus they should be treated with care, even if you hate them and everything they represent.
If someone has the capability and the likelihood of hurting you severely such as the leader of North Korea and the leader of Russia, it behooves you to treat them with great care. On the other hand, if you have an ally, and there is a low likelihood that they’ll try to hurt you severely, such as Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, then you can afford to yell at them to try to get a small advantage in a deal.
If someone cuts you off in traffic, and before you scream at them, you check them out and see that they are young black men, it is a bad idea to scream at them because young black men have astronomical rates of violent crime. On the other hand, if the offending driver is white, latino or asian in a business suit, you can probably scream at them without risking your life.
We don’t treat people according to their merits, we treat people according to their ability to hurt or to help us.
I don’t think the Republican party is in love with Vladimir Putin. Realists recognize it’s a bad idea to unnecessarily antagonize someone who has a high likelihood of hurting you and a high capability of hurting you severely. Russia has nuclear weapons.
Russia can cause America an unknown numbers of headaches whether it’s through hacking or stirring up the Balkans or the Middle East.
There are many reasons that the United States wants to have the best possible relations with Russia, and it really doesn’t matter how moral a country Russia is. It doesn’t matter how moral Vladimir Putin is.
As for Victor Orban, he’s the rare political leaders to have have successfully stood up in defense of his people. Apparently he’s reduced the influence of left-wing NGOs. That sounds good to me. I hope Trump taxes the endowments of NGOs and universities.
I hear JD Vance is an opportunist. I don’t see that as a particularly powerful put down. We should all be opportunistic. We should all take advantage of opportunities to further our own interests and to further our own side, our own family, our own in-group, our own hero system, our own religion. The one exception for when we should not be opportunistic is when we’re not really taking advantage of an opportunity, but instead we’re acting against our own best interests.
So let’s say you have the opportunity to sleep with your best friend’s spouse. I would suspect that 9 times out of 10, that’s not going to work out in your long-term best-interest. So what may be described as opportunistic sex is not opportunistic. It’s a disastrous choice. It’s the opposite of opportunistic. On the rare occasion, however, it might be a move that works out to your best advantage.
In May 1993, days after his 38th birthday, Seinfeld met 17-year-old Shoshanna Lonstein in Central Park. After a brief conversation, Lonstein gave Seinfeld her phone number. Lonstein was still a senior in high school and would turn 18 at the end of that month. Seinfeld and Lonstein dated for approximately four years, until 1997. She transferred from George Washington University to UCLA, in part to be with him, and cited constant press coverage and missing New York City as reasons for the relationship ending…
In August 1998, while at a Reebok Sports Club, Seinfeld met Jessica Sklar, a public relations executive for Tommy Hilfiger who had just returned from a three-week honeymoon in Italy with then-husband Eric Nederlander, a theatrical producer and scion of a theater-owning family. Unaware of Sklar’s marital status, Seinfeld invited her out. When Sklar eventually told Seinfeld about her relationship situation, she said, “I told him I didn’t think this was the right time for me to be involved with anybody.” Two months later, Sklar filed for divorce and continued dating Seinfeld. The pair married on December 25, 1999. Comedian George Wallace was the best man at the wedding. The Seinfelds have a daughter and two sons.
Jerry Seinfeld had an opportunistic love life. It seems to have worked out for him.
I have an addictive personality. Because so much of my life has been filled with self-loathing, I don’t want to do anything that reduces my self-respect and endangers my emotional sobriety.
If there a $5 bill on your desk, I’m not going to take it in a million years. On the other hand, if I’m often around your gorgeous 17-year old daughter in Los Angeles, and she’s constantly throwing herself at me, I would have to minimize my time alone with her or I’d break the law.
If I borrow a book from you, I will return it. If I borrow your property and damage it, I’ll disclose that to you and pay for the damage. On the other hand, around attractive women who dig me, I’m weak, even when I know that this is going to be bad for me.
I think we should take advantage of every opportunity except those that come at the price of your own self-respect and at the price of your own reputation with the people most important to you, such as your family. Some people are going to be around you for the next 50 years. Few opportunities are worth alienating them.
If you take advantage of your family and your closest friends, you’re going to lose them, and you’ll develop a bad reputation.
Let’s say you betray your in group. I’m thinking about those communist spies operating in United States and England. I don’t think it worked out well for them. If you are a Christian or a Jew, you’re going to have that identity for the rest of your life, and you don’t want to damage it.
If you get away with stealing millions of dollars, for most people, the loss of self-respect will exceed the value of that stolen money.
If you are a conservative such as JD Vance with typical right-wing instincts for authority, hierarchy, order, and the traditional way of doing things, you might well see Donald Trump in 2016 as a bad deal and by 2019 you might come around to seeing him as a great deal. If that’s opportunism, that’s great. Right-wing instincts can lead one to support a bewildering array of contradictory policies. In one context, you might support free trade, welfare cuts, financial deregulation and international alliances and then at a different time and place, you might support the opposite policies. They’re all coming from right-wing instincts. They just demonstrate themselves differently in different situations. It doesn’t make you unimpressive to loathe Donald Trump in 2015 and to love him in 2024.
Mentally healthy people with high regard for their well being make judicious choices. If you are as promiscuous as I was in my late 20s, are you hooking up with sane mature people? No, you’re banging people as damaged and immature as you are.
The worst part of having disabling addictions is that only equally messed up people will hang out with you.
The great thing about clarity and self-respect is that it is easy to say you were wrong, to course correct and to head off in a better direction. That seems to sum up JD Vance’s varying reactions to Trump.
If you have a white collar job and it requires you to violate your principles of despising chiropractic and free market principles, that’s not a big deal. You’re not creating the system. You are building the best life you can within that reality. You’d prefer to do work that doesn’t violate your principles, but you’ll do the best you can with your choices in a particular situation.
If you go on a honeymoon and come home and realize you don’t care for your new spouse, and you meet someone with whom you sense a deeper connection, you might find it is in your best interest to get a quick divorce and marry again.
Life that doesn’t adapt to new opportunities goes extinct.
There’s no true self. Who we are varies depends upon the situation. If you mix with a new crowd, you’ll become a new person and you might find yourself doing things that would never have previously felt right.
Because we’re in constantly different situations, we should conduct ourselves differently. We shouldn’t speak the way during sex as we do during prayer or during work or during the PTA meeting.
If you move from Los Angeles to rural Kentucky, you’re going to need to change some things to successfully adapt to your new environment. There may be all sorts of habits, practices, hobbies, that you take advantage of in rural Kentucky that would have been unfathomable to you living in Beverly Hills.
You’re going be a different person on different medication, in a different job, around a different crowd, in different clothes, in different states of health and wealth.
Whatever situation you’re in, however, you can always increase your mastery, your self-respect and your connections.
Opportunism is the practice of taking advantage of circumstances – with little regard for principles or with what the consequences are for others. Opportunist actions are expedient actions guided primarily by self-interested motives. The term can be applied to individual humans and living organisms, groups, organizations, styles, behaviors, and trends.
Opportunism or “opportunistic behaviour” is an important concept in such fields of study as biology, transaction cost economics, game theory, ethics, psychology, sociology and politics.
