QotD: how is Israel like North Korea

Comment of the Day, Gaza, Israel Apartheid state, Israel/Palestine
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From Jamie:

Is it extreme to raise parallels between Israel and North Korea? I don’t think so. Both countries are highly militarized and intensely nationalistic, quite a lot of the time to the point of messianism . Both regard themselves as lights unto the nations, as the saying goes. Neither consider themselves bound by treaty arrangements, and are indeed generally suspicious of them. Both believe themselves to be under existential threat and neither acknowledges that their own behaviour may have anything to do with whatever hostility they face. Both pursue a strategy of active deterrence, based on a philosophy of applying disproportionate force. Both countries enjoy active, committed support from within a diaspora population. Both have nuclear weapons and neither subscribe to the anti-proliferation regime. Both economies depend heavily on arms sales abroad. While both countries consider themselves to be friendless, and use this perception to mobilise support among their respective populations, each enjoys close relations with a major sponsor.

QotD: conservatism in bus form – the new fake Routemaster

Boris Blunders, Poverty, Tories
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Alex on Boris Johnson’s new buses:

In conclusion, this is modern conservatism, implemented in hardware, with your taxes. The obsession with PR, spin, and guff in general? Check. The heel-grinding contempt for the poor? Check. The pride in technical and scientific ignorance? Doublecheck. The low, ugly, spiteful obsession with getting one over on political enemies? (It’s of a piece with behaviour like this.) Check.

Read the whole post, it’s the best you’ll read today. The whole sordid anti-bendy buses jihad Boris and his cronies went for means that nobody in the UK can ever make fun of the American rightwing for being incredulous cretins ever again. It’s as daft and vicious an episode as everything they came up with.

Bastards

Gaza, Israel/Palestine
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This attack found place in international waters, against an unarmed humanitarian mission to feed the people Israel wanted to put on a diet. As per usual, supposed concerns for Israeli security are meant to trump anything else and also as per usual the victims are accussed of having forced the poor, heavily armed Israeli special forces to kill them, as they may have had slingshots and marbles. This will of course turn out to be nonsense, as it always does when the IDF complains about the supposed crimes of its victims. The real motivation is much simpler: to show Gaza and the world that Israel and Israel alone will decide whether or not the people of Gaza will recieve any help. It also shows how little Israel cares about public opinion and that it won’t be moved by it. A very dangerous game to play, as Israel leaves itself very little room for anything other than increasingly brutal oppression.

Efficiency savings always mean making political choices

Life under Capitalism, Tories, UK politics
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Chris Dillion argues that it’s impossible to just “cut waste” from goverment spending:

The idea that waste can be identified well by a top boss is deeply dubious. It ignores two central facts of economics: the importance of limited knowledge and of incentives. The true knowledge of where waste lies is fragmentary and dispersed across millions of public sector workers. A Chancellor cannot aggregate this knowledge. Nor can he rely upon civil service managers to do so; these do not have incentives to cut their own departments or jobs. The upshot is that, as I’ve said, top-down management is a terrible way to cut waste.

Therefore the idea that it was ever possible for the new ConDem government to immediately identify and target six billion pounds worth of unnecessary spendings without making political judgments was always absurd, yet treated seriously both in Westminister and the Westminister orientated media. As Dillon shows, the first announced cuts are nothing but political — and there’s nothing wrong with that. Obviously, you can disagree with the choices made, but that you can’t cut spending without making these choices should not be controversial.

But absurd or not, it remains easier to sell cuts as efficiency savings — who could object to that — than as explicit political choices. That’s something the Tories (and everybody else) learned from the far more ideological battles of the eighties.