In a move that experts say could significantly hurt Israel’s military readiness, pilots and other personnel issued a warning after Benjamin Netanyahu pressed ahead with a plan to limit judicial power.
More than a thousand pilots and other personnel in the Israeli Air Force reserve said on Friday that they would stop reporting for duty if the government pushes through a contentious plan next week to reduce judicial power without broader consensus.
In a joint letter released Friday, 1,142 Air Force reservists — including 235 fighter pilots, 98 transport plane pilots, 89 helicopter pilots and 173 drone operators — said they would not serve if the government proceeded with its plan to reduce the ways in which the Supreme Court can overrule the government.
I enjoyed your rambling actually! Lots of good points there.
My own two pence is something that Yanis Varoufakis once said in an interview: leftists don’t win elections. This has always stayed with me because he is largely correct. The only times you had proper, true left socialist governments elected was immediately after WW2 (Attlee, Hatoyama), or during the great depression (FDR, and some extent Truman). The moment there is any prosperity of any kind, the world tilts back into greed and individualism. Only during times of existential threat does the ego of the average voter subsume enough to adopt a meaningful, collectivist attitude of actually cooperating and working together for the betterment of all. And yet, some of the most championed constructs of the 20th century came out of those leftist governments, such as social security in the US and the NHS in the UK.
But it’s just so weird to me that when times are anything but awful (literally mass starvation) everyone only focuses on themselves and their own enrichment, which is why outside of a global depression or world war, most voters elect from centre to the right, but rarely left. Even in China today, they’re hardly Bernie Sanders leftists anymore, much closer Andrew Carnegie style laizzez faire capitalists now.
I think the reason for this is because humans are fundamentally shitty creatures, right down to their chimpanzee DNA. We’re just not designed to work for a collective good and share resources equitably. And, because chimpanzee society is also based around a 1% top dog who controls 90% of the resources, so too do humans always build stratified societies where all power and wealth is held by some elite 1%. From Mesopotamia, to ancient Egypt, to Rome, to the middle ages, to today, it is always that there is some rich elite that own everything, and struggling peons who hate one another and are always looking for an excuse to fight someone and go to war.
Hence, I don’t think it’s necessarily about lack of education or propaganda or indoctrination. I think it’s more to do with biology and DNA itself. As a species, we’re sadly fucked, and setup to fail. And it will always be fascism, racism, and oligarchy which wins out, because that is who we are at an existential core.