Well we may just have to disagree. Even your definition requires that everyone be happy, and cooperating. I think that goes against your earlier contention that regardless of what people want, utopia has an objective definition.

It is what people want it to be, and people want different things.

It’s probably worth asking “what are the next steps for citizens of Portugal to stop the destruction of Palestine?”

Or Honduras or Australia or South Korea or Madagascar.

Because it’s now the same answer. You can do whatever you as a private citizen can do. Our friend’s dad travelled to Palestine and rode in on a boat loaded with construction supplies, sort of “throwing his body” in the path of the IDF to directly physically help Palestinians (he’s Jewish, btw).

Of course this was before this full scale war. I wouldn’t recommend this action now. Send money to aid groups. Whatever you could do from the suburbs of Cartegena, that’s what you can do as an American.

You can’t do anything about the policy from the top now. That’s a sealed envelope.

Haram!!

It’s so Papa John’s to support only one browser.

Sad saga, but here we are. I remember when Chrome was new and brought much needed speed and low resource usage to the browsing experience of the day. I even got email from a Chrome engineer once about a bug I mentioned in a forum, asking me for more information.

Google was already an ad company by then so anyone could have looked forward to this inevitability. Some did. Most of us did not.

Chrome has just always been there for some younger people but it will now live in my memory as a fully encapsulated end-to-end enshittification experience that I really should have always expected.

And just like it used to be with Internet Explorer, I am forced to use Chrome at work all day because thats the IT & security approved / enterprise-managed browser.

They are part of the problem, but not the answer. An answer would be how we can ensure that everyone supporting their enterprises shares in their wild wealth and success. There could be many answers to that. And Democrats need to pick one and drive it.

It should be said that Musk is manufacturing cars in the US, which is more than a lot of manufactured goods companies can say.

The Democrats’ plans for the working class are tweaks. A little tax credit here, a little minimum wage bump there.

But the working class in America have been experiencing long term systemic structural changes that permanently disadvantage them, globalization being one of them.

Between shipping manufacturing jobs elsewhere, and allowing in immigrants who do menial work, people at the low end of the economy are pretty pinched for work. People will say “Americans don’t want to pick fruit” and there’s some truth to that. But there definitely are Americans who want to mow lawns for a living and they’re constantly undercut on price by guys from Mexico who sleep 10 to a room so they can send a few dollars back to family in the old country. I love and admire those guys, don’t get me wrong, but there’s no question that people at the low end of the economy feel pinched from both ends, and one side of that pinch is the commodification of unskilled labor due in part to an unbounded supply of immigrants.

Trump voters see his policy on tariffs and they don’t think “hm economists say this could lead to a drop in GDP.” They see a structural policy shift aimed at bringing manufacturing back to the US. However ill-conceived it might be doesn’t matter. It’s big, it’s bold. It is a fundamental reordering. Economists flap their hands and Trump voters say “good - run scared, you Wall Street pimps.”

If I sound like I’m defending Trump voters, I’m not. But I absolutely believe that the Democrats have to offer more than tweaks and handouts to address the working class.

America spends huge amounts of money to project power abroad. We’re the richest nation by far. Why isn’t that benefitting the working class? These are real questions. Trump has all the wrong answers, but Democrats don’t have any answers. And frankly they are a bunch of moneyed elites, and I don’t throw that term around much. Look at the personal net worth and residential addresses of top Democrats and you’ll see rich people. They have a lot to lose in Bernie’s revolution and they don’t believe in it.

Sometimes being a single issue voter happens because people just care that much about that one issue. But there’s a natural tendency for anyone’s decision to come down to one thing. Complex issues are complex, most people don’t know what’s right. But then they do have ONE thing that they consider black-and-white, so that influences their choice. It gives them something they feel they can say to others “I just can’t bring myself to vote for someone who XYZ…”

Because let’s face it: no one wants to hear your entire list of political calculations. People’s choices are absolutely influenced by thoughts of how they’ll justify themselves to the people they know. And having one big pithy thing to say is more convenient than a subtle position based on a score of factors.

Humans are social, emotional, idiosyncratic shortcut machines, not logic engines.

Guy surrendering power says it’s gonna be okay.

Guy taking power says we’re coming for you motherfuckers.

Hm, who to believe?

Are the room and door arranged so that the washer is the first thing you come to when you walk in? I’d bet this is also a factor, in addition to the left-to-right thing.

It’s decided by builders, though, when they install the hookups and vent, so this question is really about what they are thinking, not any of us.

I don’t accept the argument that as long as 51% of people vote for something, it should be good to go. We have a constitution, you realize, and you need more than that to change it. Is the constitution suppressing democracy? You’re talking about a kindergartener’s view of “majority rule,” not American democracy. And thank goodness, because I heartily believe that 51% of people would vote for some ghoulish shit, like boiling immigrant children in oil. And there you’d be, shrugging and saying “ahem - 51%, people.”

Go off and think it through a little better. I’ll be here when you get back.

I actually feel a lot like I did in 2004. I felt sure that Bush’s lousy wars would be his undoing. Then people signed up for more of him and I realized “Oh, he isn’t the problem. It’s the electorate.”

You can say with hindsight that we shouldn’t be surprised, blah blah, but the truth is that a couple of days ago, most of us were saying “there’s no way people would actually RE elect this criminal, crazed, orange clown!”

And here we are. He could take a bullet tomorrow and we’d still share a country with all these deplorable people. Hilary took shit for using that word but she’s a smart lady and didn’t stutter.