ParaBrutus
ParaBrutus t1_jb2d0jd wrote
Reply to comment by Areljak in Dozens of Israeli reserve pilots ditch drill to protest judicial overhaul by Dirty_Quesadilla
The entire US military is voluntary—that doesn’t give them the right to decide what drills they want to attend. They may have volunteered to be reservists but they are still required to follow orders while in the reserves. Maybe because they are pilots/officers they can voluntarily resign from the reserves.
ParaBrutus t1_jb26s9v wrote
Reply to comment by YUKL27 in Dozens of Israeli reserve pilots ditch drill to protest judicial overhaul by Dirty_Quesadilla
This seems like a relatively fair description: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/03/01/israel-judicial-reforms-protests-against-netanyahu-risks-to-economy.html
The biggest items are allowing the Knesset to override supreme court rulings with a bare majority (61/120 votes) and removing the ability of Israel’s Supreme Court to review the “reasonableness” of laws and regulations.
ParaBrutus t1_jb26aed wrote
Reply to comment by Areljak in Dozens of Israeli reserve pilots ditch drill to protest judicial overhaul by Dirty_Quesadilla
They just had an election in November. It’s a slippery slope whenever the military refuses to follow orders from democratically elected leaders, particularly when they are protesting judicial reforms which are arguably legal but that they don’t like. It’s one thing for soldiers to refuse unlawful orders and another for them to refuse to follow orders, in general, because they don’t like the policies of their civilian leaders, in general. These are not 18-yo conscripts, they are pilots with a lot of training and responsibility.
ParaBrutus t1_jb25o4q wrote
Reply to comment by Ligma_Bowels in Dozens of Israeli reserve pilots ditch drill to protest judicial overhaul by Dirty_Quesadilla
While Netanyahu is certainly unpopular on Reddit, he just won election in Israel three months ago and these judicial reforms were not a surprise. The military defections/protests are more a symptom of extreme partisan animosity in Israel than a failure of democracy.
Frankly, the reforms Netanyahu is advocating for are pro-majoritarian by allowing the Knesset to override Israel’s supreme court’s rulings by simple majority vote. What benefits Netanyahu now could just as easily be used by more liberal governments to undo these laws with a simple majority after future elections. The ability of legislatures to override court rulings in Europe is the norm and is relatively uncontroversial—the British high court cannot override parliament, and the French code is the supreme law of the land—the courts merely enforce the code as it is written by the legislature.
What Netanyahu is advocating for is not so different from liberal democrats in the US advocating for congress to pack SCOTUS with a simple majority vote—the reason democrats don’t like the current SCOTUS is because its constitutional rulings cannot easily be “overruled” by congress without amending the constitution itself, but the composition of the court can be controlled with simple majority votes for new appointees.
ParaBrutus t1_jb1nykh wrote
Reply to comment by dzastrus in Genevieve Lhermitte: Belgian mother who killed her five children euthanised by Quirkie
Meh I wouldn’t put too much stock in an evolutionary impulse to kill our children with compassion. A lot of species kill and eat their young during food scarcity because the parents have a better chance of procreating in the future than the offspring, and sometimes animals will kill offspring so the mother has capacity to find a new mate and bear its offspring instead. There are a bunch of reasons why primates kill offspring but none of them are altruistic from the offspring’s perspective: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide_in_primates
I do think people find these particular child murders fascinating because women are generally much less violent than men. When men kill their children it’s just assumed it’s for revenge or some other selfish motive, whereas when women do it society likes to speculate that they are also victims in some sense.
ParaBrutus t1_jb6apeg wrote
Reply to comment by EagleRise in Dozens of Israeli reserve pilots ditch drill to protest judicial overhaul by Dirty_Quesadilla
To be fair, the legislature can override the Supreme Court in every parliamentary system; if there’s no constitution preserving power for the Supreme Court (like in the US) then legislatures can always restrict the courts’ powers. For example, nothing is stopping Britain’s parliament from dissolving their supreme court, and unlike Israel the British high court has no power to overrule parliamentary legislation for any reason.
What makes the US system unique is that it is uniquely counter-majoritarian. The constitution giving SCOTUS its status as a co-equal branch of government cannot be amended unless 2/3 of congress (or 2/3s of states) propose an amendment, and then 3/4ths of all 50 state legislatures ratify it. That means theoretically 90% of the population could support abolishing or reforming the Supreme Court and if even just 13 of the smallest-population states oppose ratification then nothing happens.