I.
You can tell a person’s character by how they treat vulnerable people.
Throughout history there have always been victim populations. People who are targetted for abuse specifically because they are vulnerable and unpopular. A small subpopulation that doesn’t have the ability to defend itself, that is denigrated by the rest of society as unclean or immoral, and that anyone can throw a punch against to make themselves more popular without any fear of retaliation or consequence.
In a noble society, such a group would be protected. In most societies their plight is ignored. In some of the worst societies, what few protections such groups may have had are systematically stripped away to make them more and more vulnerable.
There are people who say “If I was a 1930s German I would have stood up against the Nazis” or “If I was an early American I would have stood up against slavery,” not realizing that the problem isn’t standing up for a group of noble innocents, it’s associating yourself with a group of hated criminals in front of all of your peers and coworkers.
In 2018 Kamala Harris had an opportunity to gain public favor. To do this, she would have to target a group of people already hated by much of America. A group of people who already don’t have any protection of the law in their workplace. A group made up predominantly of women, minorities, and the poor. She would have to make their already precarious lives more dangerous, taking away some of the few tools they have to defend themselves, and turn the police even further against them. And if that wasn’t enough, Harris would be doing this by furthering the slander that this group is mostly child rapists.
She did this knowingly. Many advocacy organizations contacted her to plead on behalf of the hated group, as most of them can’t do so themselves. People I know in my personal life did some of this work, as they were Harris’s constituents at the time. But Kamala Harris saw the popularity to be gained by attacking this group, and judged that to be more important than standing up for a vulnerable, hated subpopulation in her state.
On March 21, 2018, Kamala Harris voted for H.R. 1865, known as Fosta/Sesta, to advance the persecution of sex workers, and to advance her own career at the cost of their misery and their lives.
II.
It sickens me that the two realistic options on the presidential ticket this year have an opportunistic abuser of the vulnerable on one side, and a wanna-be tyrant with contempt for democracy on the other. It makes me want to burn down the entire system. It makes me want to vote for someone who would do his darndest to destroy these corrupt institutions rather than bothering to actually lead the nation or act as an administrator.
This leads me to realize that’s exactly what Trump is. Trump is the brick thrown by the rioter. He is the molotov cocktail of the enraged, the wrench slipped into the works. In 2016, a vote for Trump was specifically a vote to destroy the system. He is the riot vote. The “a city/country on fire and in ruins is better than this” vote. We’ve had four years of a country on fire. It’s bad. I can’t believe these are my options.
But notice that Kamala Harris’s opportunistic abuse of the weak is what launches this brick-throwing. Kamala Harris is the reason Trump was elected in 2016. Too many people would rather see the system burn than see opportunistic evil like her’s take power.
III
Why yes, the funny part IS that a large part of the reason she got Biden’s VP nod was because there have been many violent riots recently, and people are afraid and want a cop to stop the violence. The cycle continues.
2 Responses to “Kamala Harris is a coward who attacks the vulnerable for popularity”
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https://scheerpost.com/2020/08/10/chris-hedges-americas-death-march/
I keep repeating this, the problem is the winner-takes-it-all-system. Besides the other problem that John Oliver in his show highlited in the episodes about that topic.
So long as both parties don’t have to worry about a third party they can be as bad as they want. It’s a bit like a perverted version of the prisoners dilemma where cooperating means presenting the worst possible candidate and defecting means using a not-so-bad candidate. They can get away with whatever bad candidate they want if both cooperate and it kinda looks like that’s what happens.
I admit that I was originally in favor of Trump winning the election, mostly for the reasons you described, that I hoped he would bring down the system. Also I’m not so sure wether we wouldn’t think “Maybe Trump would have been the better option” now if Clinton had won 2016. Coronavirus would have happened in nearly the same way (it’s not that much up to the president to prevent infections, it’s the population that has to do that and a large part doesn’t seem to care, at least that’s how I perceive it from my perspective in europe). I think the protests and clashes with the police would probably also have happened in a similar way. In both cases it might not have been as bad, but let’s say it would only have been 75% as bad, we wouldn’t have thought that it could have been worse, would we?
What you need is a system where a vote for a third (or fourth or fifth) party candidate isn’t “lost” because they didn’t get the most votes in a state. Screw states and districts in federal elections. For each 1% a party gets they get one seat in the senate, no matter how spread out those votes are.
Or something like that. The point is, people should view other parties than the two big parties as options and get that view confirmed after an election (like “these 3 people are in the senate now because I voted for them” instead of “ugh, I thought Clinton would win my district but now Trump won it really close.. if only I and some others hadn’t voted green”).
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel for it, there’s plenty of different systems out there, pick the features your like and combine them. :-D
The problem is that the change won’t come from the top because both leading parties would sabotage themselves (if their goal is to have power and not to make the situation better) by implementing such a system.