Israeli election punditry
Well, it's not clear what it all means, or who's going to form a coalition with whom. Is Netanyahu right to say that it's a "victory of the right-wing bloc" or is Livni right that the winner was the party who got the most seats? I dunno. But I think we can see loud and clear from the results that the electorate of Israel has made one decision unambiguously. The Gil pensioners' party went from seven seats to zero. Israel has spoken, and the message is "fuck off, Grandad". I suspect that the problem was that there were never any moderate pensioners, prepared to condemn the excessive nagging and Werthers' Original consumption of the extremists. For the time being, though, pensionerism, however, has been confined to the dustbin of failed ideologies.
Update: corrected something that I thought was a synonym but isn't.
Not so fast, buster. It will raise again.
ReplyDeleteThey may be dead for now, but the young will take their place!
ReplyDeleteThere are some generational issues obviously, as the baby boomers retire and the WW2 generation die out, but it seemed like more trouble than it was worth to make a proper demographic model of Israel for that one joke.
ReplyDelete(and my serious point - there is one to most of them you know) is that this is a jab at the kind of pundit who always claims that he can read the national mood off such a crude indicator as the election results. If you read the papers, Avigdor Lieberman has gathered a lot of support from Likud, etc. But actually he picked up half the seats freed up by the Gil collapse.
ReplyDeleteclaims that he can read the national mood off such a crude indicator as the election results
ReplyDeleteHuh? In a multi-party parliamentary system, what would constitute a more precise indicator?
I very much enjoy your blog, thanks to the point from Brad DeLong.
ReplyDeleteCould you please ask for help with your feed however? Your posts have no titles when viewed by feed.
I would love to do something about this, but my Blogger template is so decrepit that any attempt to change it seems to cause untold strife. The titles are there - they're just in the first few words of the post. And truth be known, you're not missing much as the titles are almost invariably completely uninformative about the subject of the post.
ReplyDelete