WAR! What is it good for?

You're reading waaay too much into that. Like I said, it's just a theory - one of many being pondered over as the centre-left tries to map a way back to the seats at the table. I only chanced upon it recently when reading up on the Court reforms and it intrigued me as one of the few I'd never heard before.

Absolutely didn't mean it to come across as victim blaming so please don't come away thinking that.

Saying that the Israeli left needs to up its game is hardly newsworthy. It's been ages since once proud parties like Labour or Meretz were politically relevant, and consensus on the ground is that has as much to do with poor leadership and internal bickering as it does anything else.

One thing is for sure, the Court wields far too much power and this needed to be addressed. Sadly, it is a right wing government addressing it and, equally sadly, with an absence of any real prospect of a centre-left govt coming to power any time soon (which is precisely why Netanyahu chose to act now), this is a very peculiar case of the right tools falling into the wrong hands.

 

First thing I thought reading what CK wrote, was it was the right wing causing problems, don't know if that helps, but that was my train of thought for someone who aint got a clue what's going on in Israel.

 

Fair enough mate, and btw I weren't questioning the rest above it. Good bit of insight and it seems some bit of redress against the power of SC is required.

But the whole of Israeli politics and its political systems seem fcked tbph. From the way PR works to the electoral system as a whole and the Knesset, and now the Supreme Court. It's a complete mess and isn't good for anyone except the extremists.

 

I just posted above at the same time. My feeling is the whole Israeli system is primed for anyone who is corrupt, or extreme, or on the fringe, to exploit it. The whole thing needs scrapping and reform.

 

btw I did read it CK as you went to the trouble, but I ain't reading no more

 

PR is a weird one as on paper it is miles more representative and democratic than systems like FPTP, under which millions of votes literally go down the toilet, but its strength is also its weakness: it does increase the chances of fringe parties gaining seats and wielding disproportionate power due to larger parties relying on them for a working coalition.

We saw a similar story here when 330 Tory seats were held to ransom by 8 DUP seats. And the Tories are bad enough without someone worse propping them up

 

Aye agree about PR and it should work but the way it's set up is wrong.

That has to be down to the electoral threshold. 3%. I appreciate it's gone up from 1% over the years but it's still way too low so any nutcase can hold influence over the ruling coalition's policies.

You said how fringe parties now wield total disproportionate influence on larger parties as majority kingmakers. And that in itself is preventing the major parties from providing the checks and balances of the knesset so that the SC wouldn't need to.

Add to that no government can last a full term bcos inevitably the fringe party usually pulls out at some point when they don't get their way.

My point being, the low threshold seems to be at the heart of a lot of the problems in Israeli politics? The situation could be vastly improved if they raised the threshold to something meaningful like 10%... or keep it at 3% and increase the seats to something like 200?

 

It's never a good idea to hike anything that much or that quickly. True across all areas, e.g. hiking interest rates from 3% to 10% overnight would ruin an economy. What we're living through is the opposite: inflation jumping a similar percentage in the space of half a year and millions of people are fecked as a result.

An increase to 10% is feasible but would need to be very gradual. Bear in mind the increase from 1.5% to the current 3.25% spans more than two decades, to put this into perspective. Hiking it overnight would plunge the country into more political chaos. Very few countries running PR have the line higher than 5% as far as I know.

Interestingly there is an argument out there (only a theory!) that lowering the threshold back to around 2.5% could actually be advantageous to the centre-left, for the simple reason that in politics once you're out the 'club' and lose public funding and media spotlight as a result, it is extremely difficult to fight your way back in and then grow from there.

So for example in the previous ge, both Meretz (far left Israeli) and Balad (left wing Palestinian) missed out on seats by a fraction of a percentage point. This handed Netanyahu a working majority.

So there is an argument that lowering it will open the door to give such parties one more fair shot at becoming mainstream again, but obviously you can't open that door selectively and there is always a risk in terms of who follows them through it.

In fact, quirk of history for you, but without the rise to 1.5% in 1992, having been 1% since 1951, too many seats would have been won by right wing parties, Rabin wouldn't have had a clear majority and Oslo wouldn't have happened. A totally different version of history flowed from that 0.5% increase.

 

What's the material the woman is carrying in this video?

First up the claims doing the rounds on twitter...



Second up, the original footage, which shows the same content, so we know it's not a fake edited video doing the rounds on twitter, although I suspect the twitter claims are...

https://news.sky.com/video/ukraine-war-what-do-we-know-about-the-latest-attack-on-odesa-12926106

 

Well, as someone who has seen the inside of a church, I would guess at some kind of wood or plaster, maybe gypsum alabaster, as those are usually what the interiors of churches are made from. I don't think they used concrete to build churches either, as building them is an act of faith and easy short-cuts like concrete kind of goes against that ethos.

 

So twitter chatting bolloxs as usual, which is what I suspected.

 

looks like film props to me

ever seen wag the dog

 

Nah, **** stone masons, bang it up with some fibreglass and concrete. Jobs a goodun

Asbestos is still mined in the motherland and would make fantastic insulation

 

Private jet has crashed north of Moscow, 10 dead, I'll give you one guess who was suspected to be on the list of passengers?

 

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Tim Burton?

 

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Visegrád 24

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BREAKING: Russia just shot down a private jet belonging to Prigozhin over the Tver region. Has Putin killed the leader of the Wagner Group?

 

OSINTdefender

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The Former-Leader of the Wagner PMC Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin is now Confirmed to have Died when his Embraer Legacy 600 Business Jet was Shot Down by what appears to have been Air Defense Batteries in the Tver Region of Western Russia.


6:07 PM · Aug 23, 2023
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Well, pushing someone out of a window was getting old. Just blow them to kingdom ****ing come