That’s why it’s called planned opposition. If you’re afraid of losing control to a genuine opposition movement, you set up a fake opposition movement that dramatically opposes you on a few big ticket items and generally agrees with you on the rest - or that dramatically opposes you on everything, but has no intention of keeping its promises.

Look, I’d like to be wrong. I hope I’m wrong. But I expect Magyar is going to make some dramatic economic moves that don’t actually change the economy, run some corruption show trials, crack down on political participation outside the two major parties, back down on his pro-EU stances, and quietly take his orders from Orban and Putin behind the scenes.

Private prisons in the US charge the government a fee per prisoner per day. The government pays it with tax money.

The US Constitution allows slavery as a punishment for crime. Private prisons can force prisoners to work in prison shops, or rent them out to businesses, and punish them if they refuse to work. The prisons pay the prisoners less than a dollar an hour and make enormous profits off their cheap labor.

Let me emphasize: this is slavery. This is actual literal slavery. The US government, and the private prisons it contracts with, collectively own almost two million imprisoned slaves, the majority of whom are Black. Slaves who refuse to work are punished with solitary confinement or loss of “privileges” like food, hygiene products, or communication with friends and family outside the prison. United States law and the United States Constitution allow it. And slavery is extraordinarily profitable for the slave owners.

Finally, private prisons are allowed to charge prisoners more or less whatever they want for things like phone calls and purchases from the prison commissaries. A prison can charge $5 for a 15 minute phone call or $10 for a bottle of shampoo. Since prisoners, again, earn less than $1 an hour, these ludicrous fees are generally extorted from the friends and family of prisoners, providing another revenue stream for the prison.

All this is so profitable that private prisons’ contracts with the US have minimum occupancy guarantees. The US government guarantees it will supply a certain number of prisoners to each private prison to guarantee its income. Somehow, despite crime rates falling consistently for decades, the US government never fails to make quota.

FYI, the private prison industry was one of Trump’s biggest donors, and their investment paid off massively - the industry is making billions from imprisoning and enslaving immigrants thanks to Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Oh fucking please. Fidesz got hammered by corruption scandals in 2024, Magyar dramatically breaks from the party over corruption, and somehow builds a massive nationwide coalition in a matter of months? The Hungarian opposition somehow abandons all its beliefs and rallies around a politician who holds all Orban’s political views?

The term for this is “planned opposition”.

Magyar isn’t Orban’s rival. He’s Orban’s chosen successor.

It’s easy to win an election if you own all the candidates.

And y’all fell for it.

I had a theory about multiple accounts being connected to the same person and how they’d use that to hide their insider trading, but I did some digging, and in this case the trader is a single anonymous account which has a pattern of making winning bets - 16 of them - based on things Trump does:

https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/309527584561937

https://x.com/Mrminick_/status/2041170962368844105

So, yeah, you could make money by following this account and doing what it does, presuming you knew it had insider information, and presuming it doesn’t shut down now that people know it has insider information. After all, you want people to bet against you, and nobody wants to bet against the person with insider info, right?

Also, here’s an article with examples of apparent insider trading on oil futures, and explaining some of the ways multiple accounts can be connected to the same (anonymous) people:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/insider-trading-claims-after-stock-and-oil-futures-surged-minutes-before-trump-s-iran-post

For one, some people don’t know it’s rigged, while others think they can guess how it’s rigged and profit off it. I saw it a lot when I followed cryptocurrency scams - thousands of people bought into obvious pump and dump schemes because they thought they could time the dump and cash out before it hit. And even during the old analog days, tens of thousands of people bought into obvious pyramid schemes because they thought they were early enough to make a profit before the scheme collapsed.

The old saying “you can’t cheat an honest man” has a lot of truth to it, and degenerate gamblers are gonna gamble degenerately.

And for the prediction markets and the insider trading, it’s because people can’t. The online stuff uses anonymous throwaway accounts, and the more traditional insider stock trading only gets noticed when (if) the insider publicly reports their stock trades months or years later.

If there’s one benefit to the rise of AI slop, it’ll be pushing people away from mass social media and back to IRL meetups where you can mostly guarantee you’re talking to a real person.

My bad, I misremembered the connections between the Trump crime family and the prediction markets.

https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/us-iran-war-prediction-markets-benefit-who-owns-donald-trump-jr-leading-prediction-firms-polymarket-kalshi-nyt-report-11772336769064.html

I’ll change my title 😆