Why isn’t OPEC imposing sanctions on Israel, refusing to export oil to them, like the US did with Japan in 1941.

I think Piers Morgan is a self-aggrandizing, amoralist (slipping into unethical in a lot of his “journalism”) twat. But he’s also this. And your cynical view is the right answer and consistent with everything Piers Morgan has ever done. It’s all about the views, but this time it actually created something productive and worth watching and sharing.

Nah, man. If they cited all those things, or more importantly the complete stifling of Gazans’ ability to prosper or flourish today, that would be one thing. What did they cite instead? The desecration of the Al-Aqsa mosque. That is more important to them than the apartheid. Fuck Hamas. They’re accomplishing nothing more than the death of Palestinians and more suffering. And they just empowered the most right wing, unpopular government that Israel’s ever had, one that Israelis were divided against. Hamas and the Iranian regime need to be eradicated. They are hurting any chance at Palestinian freedom and equality and right to prosperity. And they’re just causing more and more every day normal Israeli/Jewish and Palestinian suffering. This Iranian regime supports the tyranny of the Syrian government over the Sunnis (and its use of chemical weapons against them), Russia’s terrorist attacks on civilians in Ukraine and the invasion of that country in general, the complete undermining of the Lebanese government by Hezbollah, and the complete overthrow of the Yemeni government by a similarly tyrannical group in Yemen. And it uses of rape and sexual violence and murder against men and women protesting the death of a woman caused by the morality police and the oppression of women by the regime.

I think the only way to accomplish either a true one state democratic nation that honors Israel-Palestine as the home of Judaism or a two state solution, is boycott and divestment (because there is no way to peacefully protest and engage in civil obedience to achieve freedom and equality (they murdered a journalist and nothing came of it) and there’s no way to win militarily). It worked with the apartheid government in South Africa, and hopefully it will work with Israel.

That’s what I’m saying. If we only have a majority that depends on Manchin and Sinema, how are we supposed to pass the public option? How do you get a majority without them?

And the reality is that passing the public option isn’t simple. Look at the institutional holders of three of the top insurance companies (United Health, Cigna, and Humana):

https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?symb=UNH&subView=institutional

https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?symb=CI&subView=institutional

https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?symb=HUM&subView=institutional

All those mutual funds hold a lot of people’s pensions/retirement. So if you pass medicare for all, what do you do with those investors. It’s not just rich fat cats, but also folks looking to retire.

I wish we’d have a real discussion beyond medicare is more comprehensive, cheaper (I don’t think a lot of people realize that you still owe 20% of part A bills and have to pay a premium every month for part B, and still have to deal with paying for drugs as part of Part D, and that medicare gap is only available through private companies (forget medicare advantage), and patient friendly. We have to figure out how to handle the consequences of essentially nationalizing an entire industry.

And it’s not just the insurance companies their investors that you have to battle here. You have to deal with big pharma who are doing everything possible to block medicare from using their market power to negotiate lower drug costs. And this whole private system leads to such ridiculous allocation of spending. You usually see big Pharma spending more money on SGA (https://www.fiercepharma.com/special-reports/top-10-pharma-drug-brand-ad-spenders-2022) than R&D. Yet they’ll argue that getting drugs through the three stages of clinical trials is really expensive and justifies the prices they place on these drugs.

Of course if you get rid of that inefficiency, it’s a whole bunch of advertisers and executives out of the job, and they ostensibly spend less money in the economy or find jobs in a different field. It’s all a giant, interconnected web, and we’re just trying to redistribute the composition of it.

I often point to the Kaiser Permanente poll on the popularity of Medicare for all. Sure people are for it. But then when you tell them that their private insurance would go away, favoribility drops to 30%. Can you imagine if you told them their pension funds or retirement is invested in health insurance companies or big pharma? See figure 9: https://www.kff.org/slideshow/public-opinion-on-single-payer-national-health-plans-and-expanding-access-to-medicare-coverage/

And I agree with you about feeling the coalition’s one sided. But I think Biden is trying with his executive and judicial appointments which only have to go through the Senate. And you really have to walk that fine line between negotiating a better deal/agenda reflective of your needs/wants and not being taken for granted (something the progressive caucus in the House did a terrible job at in negotiating with Manchin) and letting the right extreme coalition run everything. And one of the ways to do that is to run your candidate in the primary (we focus too much on the presidential, when we should be looking at more local representatives too), working for them or volunteering for them, and engage in dialogue that reaches their ears about your demands if they want you to be part of that coalition.

Yeah, but that Obama super majority in the Senate lasted one year and it was a different time, when Democratic voters and the Democratic party was less liberal than it is now. Hell, compare Biden in his 2008 presidential campaign to his 2020 one. And just look at how much filibuster rules have changed since then.

Anyways, my main point is that you have to remind Biden and Manchin that they need you and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in the coalition too and that they’re not going to get much done (like immigration reform) with the two “moderate” Republican senators left in the Senate (Collins and Murkowski).

And yeah, sure Biden and Pelosi and all of them (the Democratic Party apparatus) weighed against the progressive candidates in the primaries and still are. It’s your job to beat them and show that the bulk of our 50%+1 coalition is behind the progressive rather than the moderate. It means fundraising to fight the corporate donors and volunteering for these campaigns, going from door to door to get people to turn out and vote for the progressive candidate in the primary.

And the reality is that without Manchin, we’d have never gotten KBJ, judicial and executive appointments, the provisions in the infrastructure bill and the inflation reduction act. Did Manchin-Sinema fuck us? Yeah, they did. We could have prevented the rise in childhood poverty we’re seeing now if it weren’t for those two. People would be a lot more excited for Biden and the Democrats. But it’s our job to get a majority that doesn’t need those two or those of their ilk in the system we have (and yes, change the system along the way, so that we can have things like popular referendum, etc.).

It’s about getting 50%+1 in a democracy, right (or at least it should be)? So at some point the choices should come down to a binary to guarantee a 50%+1 outcome. However, the right candidate in a representative democracy and building of that 50%+1 should be done either with rank choiced voting or 2 round elections (either with a primary as we do it now or with multiple parties in the first round, that winnows everything down to 2 candidates). And an important role of the primaries is to get the resulting candidate to negotiate and build a coalition unifying the the 50%+1 coalition. So that deal that Biden and Sanders struck after Biden won the primary was huge. In the case of the left, the primary helps move the winning candidate left of where they might otherwise be. It’s why I was ecstatic to have Bernie run in 2016 and 2020 (It puled Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden to the left). And I think it’s bullshit that the Democratic party puts its thumb on the scale.

So if you have a left-right linear spectrum constituting 100% of the electorate, there are obviously different 50%+1 coalitions that can be made. Joe Manchin or Conor Lamb wants to be at the center of that 50%+1 coalition. Progressives obviously have an anathema to that and want that 50%+1 coalition to include everyone from the left end of the spectrum to the right of that up to 50%+1. Unfortunately, with institutions like the Senate and electoral college and whatnot, getting that 50%+1 coalition requires building it with Joe Manchin or Conor Lamb. Otherwise, there is no majority.

So while we fixate on Biden and whatnot, Biden and us need to focus on local elections, local referendums, and creating a Manchin-Sinema-Conor Lamb (or his equivalent) proof majority in the House and Senate. It’s obvious to me with several of Biden’s moves, he’s highly responsive to popular will and the votes available, regardless of what his own or his donors’ proclivities are. So if we want paid family leave and assistance with early child care and a pathway to medicare for all and expanded child tax credit, we need to be focused on winning all of these more local elections. Yes, having a popular candidate at the top of the ballot would help, but if you look at Biden’s polling, it’s the left end of the spectrum that’s keeping him from being closer to 50% popularity. Instead of getting angry that we didn’t get all this stuff when Manchin scuttled everything, we should be focused on building majorities that don’t need him.

If John Fetterman hadn’t had the stroke and the resulting depression, I’d be ecstatic about having him run for the presidency. Hopefully, he’ll recover by and be in good shape by 2028. We need a blue collar - union friendly presidential candidate to unify and build that 50%+1 coalition. I was hoping it was Sherrod Brown in Ohio in 2016 and 2020, but he voted against the Rail Worker strike and I think it’s taking its toll on his Senate election chances in Ohio.

And before people say that it didn’t need to be shut down, they ignore that the hospitals were overwhelmed and could have been even more overwhelmed if we didn’t have mask mandates and/or lock downs. People were being denied health care because the hospitals had no space.

The clip said that that this is the best economic intervention since the New Deal. I’d argue with the trillions we’ve spent, it’s probably greater. We prevented a Great economic collapse.

What? The New Deal was hardly successful at getting us out of the Depression? It took World War II. Most of FDR’s presidency was over the Great Depression (he didn’t cause it). That’s hardly a successful economy.

The best Economic years of America were Eisenhower-Kennedy-LBJ followed by 6 or so years of Clinton. We might be finally getting back to Clinton good, but we’ll see.

Ok, just saw the clip. The blurb is misquoting the guy. He’s saying Biden’s had the best economic intervention since the New Deal. I’d argue that Biden’s covid relief and infrastructure and climate bills are the best Economic intervention by the elected Federal government since WWII and better than the New Deal.

I wrote a reply to this when I should have been focused on real life deadlines, and Lemmy with its server issues lost it. : (

But I think your question gets at the heart of the question of how these platforms can be used to organize action. Will get back to you some time this week when things have calmed down.

I mean they already have one, Gecko. And since they also made Servo, they took a lot of the good parts and incorporated it into Gecko, which led to the speed up (they parallelized a lot of the processes and started using people’s GPUs more).

And they have made Mozilla VPN and had it integrate with this this multi-account container add-on (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/) that lets you sandbox your internet browsing (like you can set up a google account container, a Facebook/Instagram container, a banking/finance container). So those have been privacy pluses in the years since Baker canned the Rust and Servo teams, blaming Covid-19 all while giving herself a raise. And Firefox seems to be competitive with Chrome in terms of speed of web rendering and whatnot: https://www.androidauthority.com/firefox-vs-chrome-which-web-browser-reigns-supreme-3294340/

And there’s just some simple things in Firefox by default, like clicking on a simple button to disable most of the javascript that’s janking everything up on a website and making it simple and readable, that just make it so much better than Chrome.

Servo Folk. It’s one of the actions by Mitchell Baker that I disapproved of. Remember that the Rust programming language came out of Mozilla, right? It was being designed to create a fast and secure web engine by a related team. This Web Engine was of course Servo, written in Rust. Mozilla than took parts of their work and incorporated it into the Gecko web engine that runs Firefox, which was the Quantum Update. That’s where you saw the major speed up in Firefox to catch up to and beat Blink in many cases. Mitchell Baker a couple of years later made a move to lay off the Rust and Servo folk and spin out those projects so that they wouldn’t be Mozilla’s problem anymore, discontinuing their funding. She then proceeded to give herself a huge raise all while Mozilla’s market share had fallen to ~3%. It ticked me off needless to say.

Have you heard of Electron? It’s the use of Chromium’s Blink web engine to run web apps as individual programs. Applications like Signal, Ferdi, Atom text editor, VS Code (the most popular IDE for developers) all use electron. I asked myself for years why isn’t there a Gecko equivalent of Electron? The answer is that Gecko’s way too old and janky (cobbled together over decades since the Netscape Navigator days), making it too difficult to work with. But the Servo project, being a completely fresh web engine written in Rust, is looking to play that role as its immediate functional goal. It’s a smaller, more attainable goal before it becomes a full fledged web engine that competes with the likes of Gecko, Blink, and Webkit (Safari and also what Blink’s based off of) to run a full fledged browser. The Servo project was out in the wilderness for a while before coming back to life in 2023.

https://servo.org/

I want them to be a place where we can pull together like minded individuals of Lemmy and perhaps the Fediverse/ActivityPub together about a cause we care about and want to create a movement for. I figure c/movement will be were you can gather those folks c/organize is where you can have discussions and organize to take action. Perhaps there should be an associated matrix or discord channel for the second one.

I’d like both communities to be community owned and community-led. So on big decisions and deciding the guidelines, I’d like the community to call the shots while mods would do the heavy lifting of enforcing those guidelines and organizing things to where the community’s voice can be heard (so for example, after having a discussion about guidelines, consolidating all of that into some sort of vote if there needed to be one on finally voting in the new guidelines).

And the thing is we all have jobs, classes, family or something else entirely having claims to our attention and time, but we shouldn’t give up or give in. Let’s still figure out a way to persevere.

God damn it. *crumbles in embarrassment.

Sorry. I keep failing at tracking where each conversation’s happening. Here are the complaint websites

https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation (Lina Khan’s the most vigorous fighter I’ve seen on these grounds in my lifetime).

https://www.justice.gov/atr/citizen-complaint-center

https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/procedures/complaints_en

We’re having a discussion about it here: https://old.lemmy.world/post/2060683

Those complaint websites are tailored to the customers who suffer from the decline in competition. We are suffering from Google using its market position to kill our user experience and options. As I understand, it’s classic monopoly abuse.

In the 20th century, the US broke up the Hollywood model where companies owned both the studios and the theaters (how you have 20th century Fox (or just 20th century now) and Fox theaters). Google owning 75% online advertising and 75% of web browser share is a clear conflict of interest and you can see it from how they’re pushing things like Manifest V3 via their browser (especially when you consider how Chrome is the default browser on their phones), now that it’s the only browser that developers are increasingly starting to support.

If you follow that model, one thing that’s going to have to be done is to have Chrome/Chromium browser development be broken away from Google proper. Google can’t fund the developers any longer.

P.S. I thought I made my reply to your commment in another thread that I made instead of both yours and my comment being in this one. The post you were replying to inspired me to look up how to file an antitrust complaint with the US government.

Here’s what I was referring to:

https://lemmy.world/post/2060683

Look, if Lemmy, NPR, and PBS can happen, then it’s always possible to fork Firefox (or throw more weight behind the Servo folk who are moving towards developing the Rust web engine towards embedded applications to get it up to speed faster for general web browsing) if Mitchell Baker and search revenue approach to funding Firefox is getting in the way of having a fast, private, and secure browser for everybody.

But enough woah is me and our obstacles are overwhelming on here. In this case, if we do nothing, we get nothing. Especially if you’re right that the Mitchell Bakers of the world are not behind us. I know we at least have an ally in the EFF.

You wrote all this but you failed to mention that Google’s using it’s monopoly market position to force web “standards” unilaterally (without an independent/conglomerate web specification standards where Google is only one of many voices) that will disadvantage its competitors and force people to leave its competitors. The competitors need to sue.

It’s time for Firefox and others to sue Google for antitrust. When you’re using your monopoly to force web “standards” (instead of having an independent third party set standards) that cause developers to stop supporting your rival browser is clearly illegal monopoly actions.