Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• Netanyahu’s Likely Departure Is Not Easing the Fears of Palestinians - Attacks by settlers in the West Bank have been on the rise for years—and a new Israeli government is no guarantee of change. - link

• Is There Any Time Left for Maya Wiley? - The former City Hall lawyer, who has received the endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, considers herself the last progressive standing in New York’s mayoral race. - link

• The Importance of Teaching Dred Scott - By limiting discussion of the infamous Supreme Court decision, law-school professors risk minimizing the role of racism in American history. - link

• The Defeat of Benjamin Netanyahu - Israel’s longest-serving Prime Minister has dragged the country ever rightward, abandoning the peace process and imperilling its very democracy. - link

• The Big Stakes and Deep Weirdness of the Last Days of New York City’s Mayoral Race - The future of the country’s largest city is on the line. This week, campaign reporting focussed on a candidate’s refrigerator. - link

From Vox

• One Good Thing: A very funny show about girlboss feminism and workplaces full of petty men -

  

  AppleTV+’s Mythic Quest is one of TV’s sneakiest comedies, funny and tragic all at once.

  Poppy Li is one of my favorite characters in all of television.

  Poppy, as played by Charlotte Nicdao, is one of the main characters of Mythic Quest, an AppleTV+ comedy set at a video game studio. The studio produces the massively multiplayer online role-playing game of the show’s title, and when the show begins, it is about to release a major expansion for the game named Raven’s Banquet. (In fact, season one is properly called Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet.) Much of that first season centers on the conflict between creative director Ian Grimm (Rob McElhenney), from whose brain Mythic Quest first sprung, and lead engineer Poppy, who has to make all of Ian’s dreams a reality.

  (I just want to note here that Ian’s name is pronounced like the word “ion,” which is a perfect joke about his pretension and self-regard that slowly reveals itself to have more layers as the show goes on. That slow unfolding is kind of Mythic Quest’s whole deal.)

  It would be so easy for Mythic Quest to make Poppy an underdog hero the audience can root for. She is perpetually overworked and underpraised, and as the series gets underway, she simply wants to program a shovel into the game so players can use it to dig stuff. Ian insists she make the shovel into a weapon, because if it’s only a shovel, the players will use it to dig dicks, plus it will be more exciting if players can use it to wail on people. Ian is right on both counts: They do dig dicks, and the shovel is way more satisfying as an implement of blunt force trauma.

  Mythic Quest plays on everything you know about dramatic storytelling to make you think from that very first episode that it is a story about Ian slowly realizing Poppy’s genius and the two of them learning to trust and support each other. And the series sort of is that. But it’s never just that, especially when it comes to Poppy.

  Nicdao plays Poppy like she’s a dandelion fighting against her very self to let all her seeds blow away. She maybe should let go of some stuff, but she takes on more and more until it’s too much. She is constantly grabbing hold of new tasks and challenges while also trying to keep an eye on the old ones, and she sometimes seems like the only person working on the game of Mythic Quest who is capable of actually doing her job. There’s a just-subtle-enough throughline about how Poppy would earn more recognition for her achievements if she were a man, and how being a woman who works in video games means always working harder and harder and harder to remain only one step behind male colleagues who aren’t as talented.

  Yet Poppy is so much more than a commentary on being a woman in a male-dominated field. She’s also a fairly savage satire of girlboss feminism and its propensity to turn the people who practice it into narcissists who only look out for themselves. The easiest way to make Poppy crumple and do what you want is to call her a genius, so intent is she on getting people to understand how great she is. Poppy is so constantly focused on catching up to Ian that she doesn’t see all of the people she’s stepping on along the way.

  In Mythic Quest’s season two premiere, for instance, she corrals two of the handful of other women on staff for a little gossip and girl talk, then threatens to fire them if they spill her secrets. The show plays the scene for laughs, to be sure, but it’s always aware of the razor-thin line it walks between making Poppy too much of a rah-rah underdog and too much of a boss from hell. She’s complicated and self-obsessed and very funny, and it’s telling just how aggressively the series pivoted to be about the unlikely creative rivalry/partnership between Poppy and Ian. It was already trending in that direction in season one; in season two, Poppy and Ian’s friction is the very core of the show.

  Mythic Quest is a bit of an oddball show because, for most of its episodes, it’s a very funny workplace comedy with a killer ensemble cast and a surprising amount of heart. (If you watch it, you will not be surprised when I tell you that co-creator Megan Ganz cut her teeth on Community.) But then, every so often, the series will abruptly become one of TV’s most moving dramas about the impossibility of creating art that can match up to the vision in one’s own head, because of market forces, personal failings, or both. The episodes that confront this impossibility largely stand outside of Mythic Quest’s narrative, commenting on it only obliquely. But they always tie into the show’s thematic core.

  These more dramatic episodes often become Mythic Quest’s most hyped element — the season two standalone, for instance, garnered probably the most media coverage the series has received in its second season. But that level of attention has also somewhat distorted the view of what Mythic Quest even is, which is a workplace comedy about navigating a world in which small and petty men call most of the shots. Ian is probably the genius his marketing materials make him out to be — he did create a pretty great video game — but he’s also just exhausting to work with. Many comedies would soften him, the better to make him slightly more cuddly. With only 20 episodes so far, Mythic Quest has humanized Ian without losing how annoying he is. That’s an impressive feat.

  I have barely touched on the other elements that make Mythic Quest great, like Danny Pudi’s against-type work as a conniving asshole or the show’s frequently inventive visuals. (I will never get tired of little doors popping open in a giant mural of the video game’s characters — it stands multiple stories tall and serves as the flashy focal point of the office — to reveal one employee yelling down to another on the main floor to fetch them something.) Hell, the show has one of TV’s best romantic relationships between two women, and its rotating cast of recurring players is almost as good as its main ensemble.

  Mostly, though, Mythic Quest struck me, again and again throughout its first two seasons, as a show about how difficult it is to make anything good, especially when ego stands in the way. But if you want to best someone with an inflated ego, often the only way to do so is to puff up your own ego until it’s larger, and then where does that leave you? Poppy’s on her way there, and I have no idea where she might end up.

  Mythic Quest releases new season two episodes every Friday through June 25 on AppleTV+. The first season and most of the second are streaming already.

  For more recommendations from the world of culture, check out the One Good Thing archives.

• The DOJ has a plan to protect voting rights. It might not be enough. -

  

  Merrick Garland’s speech is a cry for congressional action.

  As Republican-controlled state legislatures around the country clamp down on the right to vote, the Biden Justice Department is preparing to push back — but its efforts, hampered by stalled federal voting rights legislation, may only be able to achieve so much.

  In a speech on Friday, Attorney General Merrick Garland laid out the DOJ plan to protect voting rights and announced that the department’s Civil Rights Division would begin staffing up to aid enforcement efforts.

  According to Garland, the voting section of the Civil Rights Division will double its staff of lawyers “within the next thirty days,” and the DOJ will renew its efforts to use existing laws, such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the National Voter Registration Act, and the Help America Vote Act, to “ensure that we protect every qualified American seeking to participate in our democracy.”

  “There are many things that are open to debate in America,” Garland said Friday. “But the right of all eligible citizens to vote is not one of them. The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, the right from which all other rights ultimately flow.”

  Attorney General Merrick Garland: “There are many things that are open to debate in America. But the right of all eligible citizens to vote is not one of them. The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, the right from which all other rights ultimately flow.” pic.twitter.com/CweEfo3bVX

  — CBS News (@CBSNews) June 11, 2021

To protect that right, though, the department has its work cut out for it: already this year, at least 14 states, including swing states like Arizona, Florida, and Georgia, have imposed new voting restrictions, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks voting rights issues.

And last weekend, Texas Democrats narrowly (and possibly only temporarily) blocked an additional measure in the Lone Star State, which would have slashed early voting hours and limited mail-in voting in the state, among other changes, by walking out of the Texas Capitol to deny the state House a necessary quorum.

Garland said Friday that those new laws would be examined as part of the DOJ’s voting rights push, as would state-level election “audits” like the one currently underway in Arizona.

Additionally, the DOJ will take steps to address election disinformation, according to Garland, and it will publish new guidance on early voting, mail-in voting, and the upcoming redistricting process.

“Where we see violations, we will not hesitate to act,” Garland said.

The DOJ doesn’t have as many tools to protect voting rights as it used to

Despite laying out a major effort to combat voter suppression and protect voting rights, however, Garland was also forthright on Friday about the DOJ’s limitations in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down a key portion of the Voting Rights Act.

According to the Court’s ruling in Shelby, the preclearance formula used in the act — which defined which states and localities were subject to preclearance, or approval by the federal DOJ before changing their voting laws — was out-of-date and unconstitutional.

The result, as Jenée Desmond-Harris explained for Vox in 2016, is that “until Congress passes legislation with a new formula for preclearance under Section 4 — which doesn’t look likely to happen anytime soon — jurisdictions that were covered by the previous formula are free to make election changes without any need to get approval from the federal government.”

Prior to Shelby, nine states — Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia — were governed by the federal preclearance requirement, as were some areas in California, Florida, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, and South Dakota.

The pre-Shelby coverage formula that imposed preclearance requirements on those states mandated that any state or “political subdivision” within a state that both “maintained a ‘test or device’ restricting the opportunity to register and vote,” and had less than 50 percent of its voting-age population either registered to vote or voting in the 1964 presidential election would be subject to federal preclearance.

However, while the formula was updated over the years — for example, the iteration struck down by the Supreme Court relied on voter turnout and voter registration levels from 1972 instead — the Court ruled that:

[A] statute’s “current burdens” must be justified by “current needs,” and any “disparate geographic coverage” must be “sufficiently related to the problem that it targets.” The coverage formula met that test in 1965, but no longer does so. Coverage today is based on decades-old data and eradicated practices. The formula captures States by reference to literacy tests and low voter registration and turnout in the 1960s and early 1970s. … In 1965, the States could be divided into two groups: those with a recent history of voting tests and low voter registration and turnout, and those without those characteristics. Congress based its coverage formula on that distinction. Today the Nation is no longer divided along those lines, yet the Voting Rights Act continues to treat it as if it were.

But approximately eight years after the Supreme Court’s decision, Congress still hasn’t provided a new formula for preclearance, and doesn’t look likely to do so anytime soon, since a renewal of the Voting Rights Act would require 60 votes in the Senate under current rules and, despite little Republican support for such a bill, Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema continue to take a hard line against abolishing the filibuster.

What did happen in the interim, however, was a slew of new voting restrictions in states previously subject to preclearance — restrictions that may not have become law, were preclearance still in place. As P.R. Lockhart reported for Vox in 2019:

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, a policy and research group that monitors new voting restrictions, there have been hundreds of “harsh measures making it harder to vote” introduced in state legislatures since 2010. Many of these were introduced after the 2013 Shelby ruling, and, as a federal commission noted last year, have been seen both in states previously subjected to preclearance and states that were not.

These restrictions have taken many forms, including strict photo ID requirements, limitations on who can provide assistance at polling places, the curbing of early voting days, and the closing of hundreds of polling places across the US. Other measures, like the purging of voters from state voter rolls and drawing election districts in a way that curbs the power of voters of color, have affected how much power communities of color hold in elections.

Similar measures have continued to pile up since then, particularly in the wake of former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election defeat and the widespread GOP adoption of baseless “election fraud” rhetoric. As Garland pointed out on Friday, that’s at least partially because of Shelby, which put an end to preclearance absent further congressional action.

“Although we will not wait for that legislation to act, we must be clear-eyed,” Garland said Friday. “The Shelby County decision eliminated critical tools for protecting voting rights. And, as the President has said, we need Congress to pass S.1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would provide the department with the tools it needs.”

The GOP doesn’t just want to make it harder to vote — they want to make it easier to overturn elections if they lose

Though the harm done by Shelby and the effective end of preclearance isn’t new, Garland’s speech Friday highlights why things are looking increasingly grim for voting rights in the US, despite the prospect of more DOJ enforcement of federal voting protections.

Specifically, as Vox’s Ian Millhiser explained earlier this month, the current GOP offensive against voting rights, animated by the Big Lie that has increasingly become an article of faith for the Republican Party, is all the more worrying because it is being advanced on multiple fronts, some far harder to overcome than others.

In addition to direct efforts to make it harder to vote — early voting restrictions, voter ID laws, and the like, none of which are new to the GOP — multiple Republican-controlled state legislatures have advanced efforts that could make it easier for the GOP to overturn elections on the basis of made-up claims of voter fraud.

According to Millhiser,

Not every provision of the latest round of voter suppression bills can be overcome either by vigilant voters or by smart campaigns.

Georgia’s new law, for example, permits state-level Republican officials to take over local election boards in Democratic strongholds such as Atlanta. That matters because these local boards can potentially close polling places, disqualify voters, or even refuse to certify an election result. Voters who do everything right might nonetheless have their ballots disqualified.

What’s more, Georgia isn’t alone in attempting to shift power over elections to Republicans. In Arizona, Republican state legislators are pushing a measure to strip Democratic secretary of state Katie Hobbs of her power to defend election lawsuits.

The measure, which was advanced through committee late last month, would instead transfer that power to a Republican — and as the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake points out, appears specifically designed to target Hobbs and would expire when her term does.

That particular proposal hasn’t passed yet, and it’s unclear if it will — but Arizona Republicans, who are currently overseeing an “audit” of the the 2020 election results in Maricopa County, have been at the forefront of the GOP war against small-d democracy with measures like the one targeting Hobbs.

As political scientist David Faris explained to Vox’s Sean Illing in May, the new GOP strategy hinges on finding “a way to overturn an election with the veneer of legality” — and Faris says 2020 was only a “test run.”

“You have to give Trump and Republicans some kind of dark credit for figuring out that this is really conceivable,” Faris told Vox. “I think they now know that, even though it would cause a court battle and possibly a civil war, that if they can’t win by suppressing the vote and the election is close enough, they can do this if they control enough state legislatures and the Congress.”

“Sleepwalking toward democratic collapse”

As Garland said in his speech Friday, however, there are bills that could potentially stem the tide of GOP-led voter suppression and election subversion measures. Specifically, two Democratic proposals — the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act — would both make strides toward resurrecting and expanding federal voting rights protections.

The first of the pair, the For the People Act, would represent a sea change in federal voting protections if passed.

According to Vox’s Andrew Prokop, the bill “would require automatic voter registration, same-day registration, and at least two weeks of early voting” in all federal elections, and it would “restore voting rights to all felons who have completed their terms of incarceration, allow registered voters lacking IDs to submit a sworn written statement instead, and attempt to limit voter roll purges,” among a slew of other changes.

It would also establish nonpartisan redistricting commissions to end partisan gerrymandering, create new anti-corruption measures, and quite a bit more.

However, it’s likely dead in the water after Manchin came out against it in an op-ed last week, even setting aside the fact that it lacks Republican support and thus couldn’t clear the 60-vote threshold imposed by the filibuster (which, again, Manchin does support).

That leaves the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would give the DOJ back what Garland called its “most effective tool to protect voting rights over the past half-century” — preclearance.

According to New York magazine’s Ed Kilgore, Manchin has even proposed a version of the bill that would go farther than the formula struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013 and expand preclearance to all 50 states, though it wouldn’t impact voting laws like the one already on the books in Georgia.

Still, a renewal of the Voting Rights Act, like the For the People Act, would be subject to the filibuster, which doesn’t put it in much better shape as far as prospects in the Senate go. Since Manchin is on the record as supporting it, and it has at least one Republican backer in Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, it’s a slightly cheerier picture — but if Manchin and Sinema don’t budge on the filibuster, and they don’t seem inclined to so far, it won’t matter.

As a result, even as the DOJ prepares to step up its voting protection efforts, it’s somewhat unclear what comes next in the struggle over voting rights. As Washington Post columnist and former FiveThirtyEight elections reporter Perry Bacon Jr. wrote last month, “America is still headed in a terrible direction — and at a much faster pace than I expected when Biden took over.”

“Moderate Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans either don’t appreciate the direness of the situation or don’t care,” Bacon argues. “I hope I am overly alarmed about all of this. But I don’t think I am. Perhaps democracy dies faster in darkness. But it could also die slowly in the light, as all of us watched but didn’t do enough to save it.”

• The fall of “King Bibi” -

  

  How Netanyahu’s ouster could change Israel.

  Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, having held the job continuously since 2009. Now, finally, the reign of “King Bibi” — a moniker earned by his lengthy stay in office and authoritarian inclinations — has come to an end.

  On Sunday, Netanyahu’s opponents in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, voted to replace him with a “change” coalition: a group of diverse parties from across the Israeli political spectrum united only by their interest in pushing Netanyahu out. The new prime minister is Naftali Bennett, from the far-right Yamina party — though Yair Lapid, from the centrist Yesh Atid party, will have a veto over his decisions.

  Netanyahu’s downfall is, more than anything else, the result of his own hubris.

  Over the past 12 years, Netanyahu has dominated Israeli politics. He’s not only successfully implemented a series of right-wing policies, such as entrenching Israel’s presence in the West Bank, but also consolidated a dangerous amount of power in his own hands. He is currently on trial for corruption charges stemming from, among other things, his attempt to buy off media outlets.

  Israeli politics has divided into pro- and anti-Bibi camps; the split is so narrow that Israel has been forced to hold four elections in two years, with none delivering a decisive verdict.

  It’s this paralysis, and the looming threat of Netanyahu’s anti-democratic behavior, that brought parties from across the political spectrum together to finally get beyond him.

  Bennett will serve as prime minister first, for two years, with Lapid taking over from him after that. It’s a power split that partly reflects the internal divisions inside the coalition, which depends on votes from eight different parties on the right, center, and left. One of the eight is Ra’am, an Islamist party and the first Arab party ever to join an Israeli governing coalition.

  Ronen Zvulun/AFP/Getty Images

  Calling this arrangement unstable is an understatement. The members of this coalition agree on almost nothing and thus will be unable to make major policy changes on most issues without collapsing. This is especially true in the conflict with the Palestinians, where the divides among the coalition parties are arguably most severe. A major event, like another flare-up in Hamas rocket fire, could bring them to each others’ throats — forcing yet another round of elections.

  But the fact that this new government exists at all speaks to the desire among many Israelis to move on from the Netanyahu era — a desire that led to a seismic change to Israeli politics.

  “Simply replacing Netanyahu is a huge deal,” said Michael Koplow, the policy director at the US-based Israel Policy Forum think tank. “And including an Arab party in a government is a huge deal, even if the coalition falls apart after six months.”

  How Netanyahu fell

  For 10 years, from 2009 to 2019, Netanyahu rode the long-running rightward drift of the Israeli electorate to victory — defeating his opponents on the center and left through a mix of deft political strategy and demagoguery. But things started to fall apart after Israel’s election in April 2019, when the current political crisis began.

  In that vote, Netanyahu’s Likud and allied right-wing parties won a majority of seats in the Knesset, seemingly setting them up for another extension of his historic premiership. But one party, the secular nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu, refused to join the government — citing a disagreement over special exemptions for mandatory military service given to ultra-Orthodox Jews.

  The inability of Netanyahu or his opponents to form a government then led to another election in September of that year, which was supposed to resolve the deadlock. By then, Israeli politics had come to revolve around one big thing: Netanyahu himself and his alleged abuse of power while in office.

  Bibi had served as prime minister once before, from 1996 to 1999. His defeat convinced him that he needed to make Israeli society more pliant to him personally — specifically, by bending the press to his will: “I need my own media,” as he put it at the time.

  After his return to the top job, he seems to have tried to turn this proposal into action, allegedly attempting to trade political and regulatory favors for favorable coverage in two other outlets, the leading daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth (Latest News) and the popular online portal Walla! News. He seems to have succeeded with Walla, allegedly reaching a secret deal to approve a merger that its parent company wanted in exchange for slanting the news in his direction.

  The head of government attempting to suborn the independent media by handing out favors is not only undemocratic, but also quite possibly illegal. Israel’s attorney general, the conservative Avichai Mandelblit, announced in February 2019 that he would seek to indict the prime minister on a series of corruption and bribery-related charges — including ones that carried up to 10 years of jail time.

  By the time of the second election in September 2019, Netanyahu’s maneuvering to avoid prosecution had become increasingly dangerous to Israeli democracy. His allies in the Likud party had already proposed a law that would grant Netanyahu immunity from prosecution while in office, allowing him to get away with what looks like an assault on democratic institutions.

  The September election was inconclusive: Netanyahu did not have enough support to hold office, but the opposition was too internally divided to form any kind of government. A third election, held in March 2020, had similar results. The outcome was a temporary unity government, designed primarily to respond to the coronavirus outbreak while sidelining the issue of Bibi’s prosecution.

  Netanyahu blew up this fragile agreement in December, gambling that a fourth election would get him enough votes to form a more stable right-wing government. But he failed: That election, held in March, yielded the current Knesset.

  Amir Levy/Getty Images

  This time around, Netanyahu’s opponents decided enough was enough: Two years of chaos and elections needed to come to an end.

  Lapid, whose Yesh Atid party won the most votes of any in the anti-Netanyahu camp, made a series of agreements with parties across the political spectrum to form the new coalition. This included not only Netanyahu’s longstanding opponents on the left and center, but also right-wing leaders who had previously been either ministers in Netanyahu’s cabinet or members of his own party.

  The thing bringing these factions together is their shared belief that the chaos of the last two years must end. The only way to do that, they reasoned, is to take Netanyahu out of the top job.

  “Netanyahu will not be able to get a majority [in a fifth election] and then we will go to a sixth election,” Bennett, the leader of Yamina, said during coalition discussions. “The country can’t continue like that.”

  And now, as a result, Netanyahu has lost the top job — and will be forced to deal with his currently ongoing criminal trial without the power of the premiership.

  What will the “change coalition” actually change?

  Now, Bennett will serve as prime minister — a job he’ll keep for two years while Lapid serves as foreign minister. After two years, they will rotate, with Lapid taking the top position and Bennett in the cabinet. During the whole period, both of them will have veto power over policy — so even while Bennett is nominally Lapid’s boss, the latter will be able to block the former’s moves at will.

  This complex power-sharing agreement is necessary to address the disagreements between these two men in particular and the coalition parties in general. In most of the key policy areas facing Israel, this government will be unable to agree on significant changes.

  Take what’s arguably the country’s most important issue: the conflict with the Palestinians. On this, Bennett and Lapid have divergent views. Bennett supports annexing much of the West Bank and opposes the creation of a Palestinian state, while Lapid supports a two-state solution negotiated with the Palestinian leadership. The broader coalition is similarly divided, containing both hawkish factions like Yisrael Beiteinu and dovish ones like Meretz.

  Any major actions on the Palestinians, in either an aggressive or conciliatory direction, would divide the change coalition bitterly. The most likely result is that, as long as this government is in power, the conflict will basically remain stuck in its abysmal status quo.

  “If [the coalition] stays together, then it will necessarily mean inertia on the issues that affect Palestinians,” says Khaled Elgindy, director of the program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli affairs at the Middle East Institute. “Occupation, settlements, evictions, demolitions, [and the] Gaza blockade continue as they are.”

  This is the case on a series of key issues that divide the Israeli left and right, like whether Israel’s courts have gone too far in protecting individual rights. Such controversial topics will, in general, remain untouched by the change coalition — tinkered with at the edges, perhaps, but unaffected in any large way.

  “The limits on any contentious action are real. In some ways their mandate will be to just govern,” says Natan Sachs, director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

  Ronen Zvulun/AFP/Getty Images

  Nonetheless, there are some exceptions to this rule — areas where the new government could actually make a difference.

  First, there’s the area that prompted Yisrael Beiteinu to break with Netanyahu all the way back in April 2019: the relationship between synagogue and state.

  In the past, Israel’s ultra-Orthodox parties have been willing to throw their lot in with governments on both the left and the right so long as the government preserves their privileged status in Israeli law. But in the current standoff, the ultra-Orthodox parties chose to back Netanyahu — and now, as a result, are locked out of power. The right-wing parties in the current coalition are, by the standards of the Israeli right, relatively secular.

  Judy Maltz, a reporter at the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, suggests there are still constraints in this area: Both Yamina and Ra’am, the Islamist party, will block some moves toward a more secular society. But at the same time, there are some areas — including reductions in special funding for the ultra-Orthodox, support for public transit on Shabbat, and non-Orthodox prayer at the Western Wall — where policy change is possible.

  Second, there might also be some ability to improve the status of Palestinian citizens of Israel (also known as Arab Israelis). The very fact that one of this group’s leaders is in government for the first time — sharing power with right-wing politicians with a history of anti-Arab agitation — is a testament to the rising influence and growing legitimacy that Arab Israelis have in the Jewish-dominated political mainstream.

  To keep Ra’am happy, the new coalition will need to provide concrete accomplishments that its members can show to its long-marginalized constituents. The party’s leader, Mansour Abbas, has already demanded more funding for infrastructure in Arab communities and an end to building codes that disadvantage Arabs — but there’s much more the coalition could do.

  One of the top issues for Arab Israelis is a surge in Arab organized crime that has led to a murder epidemic; in 2019, 71 percent of Israeli murder victims were Arab, despite Palestinian citizens making up only 21 percent of the Israeli population. The Netanyahu government failed to adequately address this problem with police resources; perhaps, the new one will.

  Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the change in government opens up prospects for political change.

  For 20 years, the political right has dominated Israeli politics. Right-wing dominance empowered Netanyahu to both deepen the occupation of the West Bank and assault democracy inside Israel’s borders — two trends that are closely related.

  Dethroning Netanyahu won’t put a stop to the occupation, nor will it entirely stop Israel’s slide away from democracy. But by ending Netanyahu’s chokehold on Israeli politics, it will create the possibilities for a move beyond the political status quo. Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli political strategist and fellow at the Century Foundation, puts the point well in a piece for the Guardian:

  Part of Netanyahu’s staying power has been the snowball effect of consolidating power. Voters cannot imagine anyone else governing, hence the oft-heard refrain “There’s no one else but him”. A new government would demonstrate that there is. If the rotation for prime minister goes as planned, from Bennett to Lapid, citizens will see that there are even two someone elses. That’s healthy for democracy.

  Of course, it’s also possible that things go the other way. Once Netanyahu is out of the picture, perhaps even in jail, his Likud party will be free to join with the right-wing members of the coalition and the religious parties in a far-right coalition.

  But that’s the nature of change: It’s unpredictable. Whether it ends up being for better or for worse in the long run is hard to say, but what’s clear is that some kind of change is finally coming to Israeli politics.

  “I’m not optimistic about Israel, ever,” says Hadas Aron, a professor at New York University who studies Israeli politics. “But I do think it’s not meaningless that someone else will be in government, that something else could at least have the potential to rise.”

From The Hindu: Sports

• Southampton curator aims for ‘pace, bounce and carry’ in WTC final pitch - Both the teams have high-quality pace bowlers and Simon Lee wants them to be in the game at all times

• Chess fundraiser | Nikhil Kamath admits using computer in his win against Viswanathan Anand - Controversy erupts after Anand’s chess games with celebrities

• Want to pay tribute to COVID-19 warriors by winning medal in Tokyo: Manpreet - India have won eight Olympic gold medals in the past but their last top finish came way back in 1980 Moscow Games.

• Portugal: Dalot in for COVID-positive Cancelo - Portugal defender Joao Cancelo (in pic) has been ruled out of Euro 2020 after testing positive for COVID-19 and will be replaced by Diogo Dalot ahead

• Castagne out of Euros with double fracture - Belgium coach Roberto Martinez has said that wing back Timothy Castagne (right, in pic) will miss the rest of the European Championship after sustaini

From The Hindu: National News

• Bengal eases COVID-19 restrictions; offices allowed to function with 25% workforce - Restaurants and bars will be allowed to open from noon to 8 p.m. with 50% of the seating capacity, says Chief Secretary H.K. Dwivedi

• Congress leaders hit out at PM Modi’s address to G-7 - Govt must practise what it preaches to world: Chidambaram

• After Mumbai, Hyderabad sees petrol touch ₹100/litre after price hike - The hike — 24th in six weeks — pushed fuel prices across the country to new historic highs.

• Former Punjab CM Parkash Singh Badal not to appear before SIT on June 16, says his party - The SIT had summoned the 93-year-old Akali leader, asking him to appear before it with “relevant records” at a resthouse in Mohali.

• Some people don’t leave opportunity to defame Ram Janmabhoomi: Uttar Pradesh Deputy CM Dinesh Sharma - He said that when all the obstructions for the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya were cleared, the Opposition started a nonsensical hue and cry.

From BBC: Europe

• Nato summit: Nato must face up to China’s rise, alliance chief says - The alliance is expected to brand China a security risk at US President Joe Biden’s first summit.

• What Putin really wants from Biden - The Geneva summit on 16 June between the Russian and US presidents will not be a friendly encounter.

• Covid: Lockdown easing in England to be delayed by four weeks - Most current Covid rules will remain for four more weeks after 21 June, government sources say.

• Swiss voters reject key climate change measures - In a shock result, voters narrowly reject a tax on flights and a fuel levy among other policies.

• Madrid protests: Thousands rally against Catalan pardons - Right-wing Spanish parties say plans to pardon separatist leaders are a threat to national unity.

From Ars Technica

• The Ars Technica Father’s Day 2021 gift guide - We give a few gifting prompts for the guy who won’t say what he actually wants. - link

• 16 games to keep an eye on from Sunday’s E3 2021 trailer showcases - From shooters to puzzles to mail delivery sims, these concepts stood out from the crowd. - link

• Raiders of the Lost Ark turns 40, and it’s still an unqualified masterpiece - Paramount released 4K Blu-Ray collection of first 4 films to mark the occasion. - link

• Every trailer and announcement from Microsoft and Bethesda’s E3 showcase - Halo! Forza! Psychonauts! Age of Empires! And dozens of other games, too! - link

• Ticket for space flight with Jeff Bezos is auctioned for $28 million - Unnamed passenger will pay more than $9 million per minute of zero gravity. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• I saw a crying kid and asked him where his parents were. -

  And that’s how I lost my job at the orphanage.

  submitted by /u/SleazySerpent1469
  [link] [comments]

• Husband and wife are in a bar when the wife sees her ex boyfriend -

  She says to her husband, ‘see that drunk, I turned down his proposal 10 years ago. Husband looks at his wife, looks at the guy and sighs, ‘that explains why he is still celebrating’

  submitted by /u/dr1ll37
  [link] [comments]

• My grandfathers favorite joke: what’s the difference between a drug dealer and a hooker? -

  The drug dealer can’t wash the crack and resell it

  submitted by /u/ertdgaf
  [link] [comments]

• “Doctor, doctor, I’m so worried,” said the anxious man. -

  “Both my wife and I have black hair, but our son’s just been born with red hair. Do you think something funny has been going on?”

  “Not necessarily,” replied the doctor. “How many times do you have sex?”

  “About 5 times a year.”

  “Well, there’s your answer then, you’re just a little rusty.”

  submitted by /u/purple-circle
  [link] [comments]

• How do you think the unthinkable? -

  With an ithberg

  submitted by /u/Popular-Salamander-6
  [link] [comments]