She’s also obviously trying to ride the fence here by not committing to trans rights. Fuck that.
Good to know laws are the immortal word of God, infallible and inherently correct. Not just something a few dipshits made in a room at some point. It’s not like slavery or anti-miscegenation used to be “the law” too
Also, everyone knows laws come to us fully formed, inscribed on stone tablets from the top of a mountain
Not to mention the laws that would make Kamala only 3/5ths of a person and unable to vote. But hey, follow the law
The way people talk about the 3/5s compromise is weird to me. Slaves were still considered property and fully not citizens, it was just how they were counted on the census for the purpose of the House of Representatives (i.e. how many representatives slave states should get). The logical answer, considering slaves had no right to vote, is that the census should not count them as citizens for the purpose of a slave state’s representative count, and it was slavers pushing for them to be counted as though they were full citizens in a political power grab that was the problem. It was the positive, rather than negative, side of 3/5, i.e. the present 3/5 and not the absent 2/5, that represented an injustice to slaves. The compromise never should have been made because, for this purpose, they never should have been counted as citizens at all until they were freed, and the compromise strictly gave power to the slavers.
Incidentally, assuming Kamala lived in a free state (which her home state of California was), it wouldn’t apply to her at all, she’d just be a normal citizen.
Oh look the dems have zero principles and are ditching one more group of people as though they are expendable.
: where did you get those laws?
: where did you get those laws!?
Among many good points that Adam Johnson makes, I appreciate his repeated reminders that politicians aren’t hapless captives of public opinion. They’re capable of steering public opinion and do so on the daily (see the characterization of Hamas as baby-beheading sadists, or college protestors as Sieg-Heiling antisemites) just rarely to the benefit of anything good.
In a rare dub Joe Biden went on TV and forced Obama into supporting gay marriage. And wouldn’t you know it, that worked out pretty well for them and the Democrats in the long run
speech to the first comintern
“Freedom of the press” is another of the principal slogans of “pure democracy”. And here, too, the workers know — and socialists everywhere have admitted it millions of times — that this freedom is a deception while the best printing presses and the biggest stocks of paper are appropriated by the capitalists and while capitalist rule over the press remains, a rule that is manifested throughout the world all the more strikingly, sharply, and cynically, the more democracy and the republican system are developed, as in America for example.
The first thing to do to win real equality and genuine democracy for the working people, for the workers and peasants, is to deprive capital of the possibility of hiring writers, buying up publishing houses, and hiring newspapers. And to do that the capitalists and exploiters have to be overthrown and their resistance suppressed.
The capitalists have always used the term ‘freedom’ to mean freedom for the rich to get richer and for the workers to starve to death.
In capitalist usage, freedom of the press means freedom of the rich to bribe the press, freedom to use their wealth to shape and fabricate so-called public opinion.
In this respect, too, the defenders of ‘pure democracy’ prove to be defenders of an utterly foul and venal system that gives the rich control over the mass media. They prove to be deceivers of the people who, with the aid of plausible, fine-sounding, but thoroughly false phrases, divert them from the concrete historical task of liberating the press from capitalist enslavement.
—Lenin, Congress of the First Comintern
