Skip to main content

Kamala Harris

Inside the life and career of Kamala Harris, Biden's VP pick ...


Well, I was right last week when I said that it wasn't going to be Bass! Victory lap taken.

Allow me a moment of reflection on former Vice-President Biden's choice of Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate.

Actually, I don't have a lot to say on this, except that what the Orange Dynast has been saying about it strikes me as unusually odd, even for him.

It seems that President Trump and his acolytes have heard that Harris has a "tough cop" reputation, developed because her upward path through Californian politics was a path through various prosecutorial offices. So there are people to her left (for lack of a better concise term), who are unhappy with Biden's choice. They are for the most part containing their unhappiness, because they have their eyes on the November prize. But they are unhappy.

At any rate, Trump's circle is at least vaguely aware of this, and they are trying to benefit from it. In 2016 they did benefit by the unhappiness of Sanders' supporters about Clinton's nomination, and they want some similar vig now. Unfortunately, they also have the idea in their heads that the riots that broke out after the murder of George Floyd were the work of anarchistic chaos-loving scary freaks, and that they can win by tying Biden to said anarchistic chaos-loving scary freaks (ACLSFs).

This has led to some striking incoherence. Either Harris is Inspector Javert, eagerly hunting down and over-charging miscreants, or she is ACLSF, precisely the sort of person Javert thought he was hunting for the good of the crown and social order. It seems laughably incoherent to try to paint her as both, though they are working at it. Heck, they're throwing in some birtherism too.

The next few weeks are gonna be tedious times.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti
7 comments
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers
Post a Comment
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak
13 comments
Read more