A mugger stabs your friend and runs off. They are bleeding out. You do nothing. That’s what he’s saying. The fact is Biden did nothing to prevent this. Including not locking the fucker up. Not stacking the Supreme Court after the Ginsberg shitshow.
There are a lot of people that do not know what to do.
There are also wounds that you can't really do anything about without hospital. (internal bleeding?!)
The funny thing is, as analogies go, here the friend tells you to bugger off because of israel and tells the mugger to come back and help him... mugger stabs him some more
It's called the ratchet effect [1]. In our modern political paradigm, conservatives torch the economy, introduce heinous policies and give massive tax breaks to the wealthy until their popularity drops enough that Democrats get voted in and... do nothing. This has several names such as "controlled opposition" and the "mirage of dissent" [2].
As an example, take the current Iran war. There's very little opposition in establishment politics to the actual war. What you get instead are process objections, such as the president not consulting Congress. Objecting to the process is a way of appearing to be in opposition without being in opposition.
This was ultimately why Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election. "Trump bad" isn't a platform that people get excited for. People are asking "what are you going to do about it?" and her answer was... nothing. It was the culmination of years of what's been called "lesser evil voting" or "harm reduction voting". Democrats have adopted a platform of just not being quite as bad as the Republicans, probably because they have the exact same donors. And millions of voters stayed home in 2024 rather than vote for the status quo.
So back to the JCPOA, Biden should've done something but did nothing. Because he likes what Trump did. He agrees with it. And so do most Democrats. That's the point.
Other than Dems having a super majority for a few weeks with Obama, when was the last time they were “voted in” at a national level?
Biden did a pretty good job cleaning up after Trump. Was he perfect? Not even close. But Dem primary voters had the option of more progressive candidates and instead they circled around Biden. Did donors try and engineer a Biden win? Sure. Were voters obligated to go along with their scheme? Also no.
The blame for our situations rests squarely on the shoulders of the American people, who have been living so insulated from the consequences of their votes that they entertained a guy like Trump, twice.
First the super majority isn't a constitutional or even legislative barrier. It's simply a Senate rule. Rules for the Senate are established at the start of every Congress. There's no reason why the Senate couldn't simply eliminate the rule.
Republicans like the filibuster because they can force through most of what they want under reconciliation, which only requires a simply majority, and they can block Democrats with a minority. Democrats like the filibuster because it gives them an excuse to do nothing. Because a lot of what Democrats want to do isn't filibuster-proof.
Also, the filibuster once meant that you had to stand up and hold the floor to block a vote. Now we have a silent hold since the 1970s. If you for some reason believe in needing 60 votes to end debate, why not at least adopt the earlier interpretation that requires someone to stand at a podium? Because Democrats don't want to do anything. That's why.
Biden had four terrible decisions in his presidency:
1. Appointing Merrick Garland as AG. He's another establishment Democrat that didn't want to do anything, really, particularly not prosecute the insurrection that took place. He was embarrassed into doing so by the January 6 Committee. He basically lost 2 years of potentially prosecuting the administration;
2. His Israel policy, particularly the bear hug strategy and especially not ending the genocide;
3. Not raking MBS over the coals for not ending the Trump 2020 OPEC deal, wich exacerbated the inflation price shock; and
4. Running for re-election.
It's worth adding that the only reason Biden was the candidate was because the DNC was scared Bernie Sanders would be the candidate so they fixed the race in South Carolina thanks to Jim Clyburn in particular. Everyone dropped out of the primary and got rewarded with Cabinet posts, etc (eg Pete Buttigief as DoT Secretary). Except one. Elizabeth Warren stayed in to split Bernie's vote.
As for blaming the voters, I 100% disagree. The party leadership has repeatedly engineered situations to give the voters terrible choices and rely on lesser evil voting. After the 2017 election, the DNC got sued and argued in court that they had no obligation to stay neutral. That was a political promise not a binding promise. Basically, they argued that they were free to overrule the will of primary voters with superdelegates and manipualting of funds by then DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who when exposed and was forced out, just went and joined the Hilary campaign.
Voters stayed home in the millions in 2024 (vs 2020) because they were given no choice. They're not responsible for that. The candidate is. And if you end up being angry about Kamala losing, blame her for having a terrible platform, not the voters who decided a slightly better candidate was the only available choice.
The filibuster is the only thing protecting us right now from the worst of the laws Trump is pushing. Yeah I know it’s not “real” but lots of things about our govt aren’t “real” as Trump has demonstrated. I thought Presidents didn’t have power of the purse but look at USAID or many other gutted regulatory depts.
Anyway we will have to agree to disagree. IMO almost everything you’ve said is true but still doesn’t absolve the voters who haven’t been voting in a vacuum starting in 2016.
Not helped by both parties uniting wherever necessary to freeze out outsiders (socialists, libertarians, or even liberal reformists). Anything to preserve the status quo.
Any time someone actually proposes effective reforms, they get frozen out. The status quo is all about symbolic action and posturing. This often gets framed as a “culture war” issue but for some reason the party old guard always ends up on the side opposing change, no matter who it is.
You could argue that the “Abundance” Democrats fall into this group, as they have been mostly sidelined. Al Franken and Howard Dean come to mind as well. Dean’s exit was particularly painful as his (somewhat obvious) 50 state strategy succeeded in 2007 and 2013, and resulted in a party that was more flexible and responsive to material regional concerns. As an independent voter, this was a huge improvement over any party organization before or since.
I think it depends on how you characterize “reformist”. I’m almost certainly being too loose with this term. I mean people who actually push hard for substantial reform, including deep technical reforms, not the common colloquial meaning of incremental, superficial reform from groups like the New Democrat Coalition. Frankly I probably should have used a different word, as I think my usage here is atypical.
What I mean is the somewhat awkward “non-mainstream liberals who advocate for substantial policy changes.” Maybe I should just say progressives? But the people I’m thinking of don’t quite fit in with most of the progressives, even if they do sometimes align with them. We don’t have Lib Dems like the UK does, but that would probably be the segment I’m talking about if we had that here.
It wasn't economically feasible, the owners wanted out, no buyers stepped up.
Numbers wise it was ~ 1.6 million tonne per annum in a global market that demands ~ 20 million tonne per annum, as a smaller producer in Tasmania with other factors dragging down it wasn't competitive with South Africa, Gabon, and Ghana.
I can reel off a list of plants being torn down for scrap also.
The question is, does that actually mean there is no way to get a smelter up and running in the event of a critical need within a useful timeframe.
Bear in mind, right now today, Australia has multiple shuttered lithium production sites that went up in anticipation of a much greater battery demand than actually occurred, and have since been shuttered. In a similar manner the same is true for other mineral supply chains.
The link to mining.com was a nod to the historic ebb and flow of Australian exploration / production and the kinds of things that get hashed out at the Diggers and Dealers mining forums.
In terms of "critical resources" - we have them in the ground, and we have a lot of smelting technology that we can draw on / repurpose.
What Australia does lack, for now, is next level up processing - eg: hard rock lithium spodumene concentrate processing, currently outsourced to China and Malaysia, only recently barely begun here.
I guess that's the question - how fast can you build required plants during war time?
How do you get the very bespoke equipment from overseas if supply chains are being attacked?
Where do you get the designers and operational staff, bearing in mind the industry might have been closed for a while and all prior talent has retired or died?
What's the risk of above vs the government subsidising a plant to keep it operational and known good state?
For manganese ore concentration and binding with carbon?? Ball mills, acid washing, screening, anodes, et al. are 'bespoke' now?
Look, there are big speciality bits which you can order in from overseas, fabricate locally, or retrieve from "stashed one over there" yards.
When existing processing plants are "scrapped" that usually means that beams, catwalks, and all manner of things are crushed and melted down - but it also means that motors, crucibles, linings, etc. are sold on (usually within Australia), or stored and eventually refurbished and sold or reused.
So really its all conjecture unless an actual project plan is written up with supply chain sources, and the plan is kept up to date with inventory of items scrapped vs placed in storage and capacity from current importers & manufacturers.
One thing that I, personally, am not overly concerned about would be a long lasting critical shortage of ferromanganese production ability in Australia.
If the demand / desire is there then we have the resources and in-country skills to step up and make it happen.
We are, as a country, aiming too low on what we can do with mineral resources and charging other countries / non-Australian companies far too little for the privilege of extracting our "wealth" / assets and flogging them on overseas.
Unfortunately too many Australians are swayed by scare campaigns and vote against their own interest.
The mining super profits tax, franking credits, and similar failed reforms benefited only the top 1% of 1% of Australians, yet people voted against them.
Hopefully the recent negative gearing and trust changes stick.
I've held this stance on agile for a long time - it coincided with mainstream adoption of ssds, windows with memory protection and google search - all of which sped delivery despite agile, not because of agile.
Most were enjoying not having to stop whatever they were doing at whatever time a show was broadcast to watch it live on air - time shifting recorded TV was a game changer.
Does that matter that much in practice? I bet lots of costumers are okay with software that crashes 10x as much if it costs 10x less. There already is a ton of shitty software that still sells.
Not everything is a simple ctrl-z, and the blame lays squarely on who implemented it.
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