Some people will be miserable no matter who is running
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2024
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She's a woman, and she's black, of course there will be opposition.
It'll be interesting to see what minor controversy from her past that voters glom onto and equivocate with Trump's blatant assault on democracy.
She argued in court in favor of California's death penalty, and she threatened to jail parents of truant kids while she was the DA in San Francisco. It's more complicated than those sound bites--like, it was her job to argue the state's position--but you'll get the sound bite opposition.
I don't like Harris since I support 2A rights in addition to things like LGBTQ+ rights, and right to choose, but I like her odds of winning more than I liked Biden's.
Truancy courts are not controversial. Literally holding a parent criminally liable for not sending their child to school. Maybe there’d be less Lord of the Flies gangs of tweenage criminals in every major city if truancy was better enforced.
Throwing people in prison does not benefit the children of those people.
And truancy courts don't typically target far right homeschooler quiverfull families. They're aimed squarely at Two Income Trap working families and poor single parents, already under the gun thanks to poor bussing policies, no statutory time off from work, and abysmal access to health care.
Truancy laws are a tool of the School-To-Prison Pipeline. They substitute a criminal mandate for accessible education.
More daycare, free school breakfast/dinner programs, public after school activities, and less child homelessness would go much farther towards reducing delinquent kids than arresting their parents.
...Because they don't have to. The homeschoolers are home schooling (or, at least claiming to do so), whereas truant kids aren't being educated at all. If the parents that were going to truancy courts were home schooling kids, they could just say that and be done with it. (I'm no fan of home schooling; I think that it's almost always a disservice to the kids. But it's still a legal right.)
IIRC, Harris had other programs that she was using/working with to reduce truancy rates, and courts were the last-ditch effort for parents that refused to even show up for anything else. If I recall correctly--and please, fact check me here--no parents received any jail time for truancy while she was a DA. It was used as a tool to get parents to take truancy seriously.
And yes, I agree that school lunches, etc. would all help, But there's only so many tools that a district attorney has to use. The DA can't mandate a tax to cover daycare or after school activities; that's the job of the city council or state legislature.
Right. Which is to say they pretend to teach and we pretend to believe them.
But these homeschool kids come out with all the same problems as their school skipping counterparts. They're misinformed, anti-social, and often xenophobic. They have trouble holding down jobs outside of a family business or parent's career. They're prone to crime and drug abuse. They don't do well in higher education. But they're spared the indignity of seeing their parents dragged into prison or being sent their themselves, so they've got that going for them at least.
Maybe the DA shouldn't be the one charged with fixing the problem.
I was homeschooled from kindergarten through highschool. While I don't dispute much of what you said here (I was mis- and under- informed, I was anti-social, and I was xenophobic), I think the situation is more nuanced than you make it out to be.
First, I don't think it's the role of the school to make sure that students are not xenophobic or anti-social.
Second, it took me one remedial class in college (trigonometry) to get caught up.
By the time I reached the university level, I was extremely good at learning things on my own, and the raw information was available online. The ability to learn on my own without anyone holding my hand has proven to be very useful, and it's a skill that is lacking in a lot of public school graduates.
It is the duty of school officials to maintain civility among the students. When districts aren't already segregated by state leadership, that means cultivating a certain degree of egalitarianism and inter-racial tolerance among the student body. Similarly, teachers and admins have a duty to discourage bullying and guaranteeing students an opportunity to participate in school life without fear. That gives students the freedom to interact without fear.
To a student at the high school baseline. Not a student who has been taking AP classes since junior year. This isn't just a question of meeting the minimum standard. High Schools - particularly well-funded and expertly administered schools - offer a wealth of college-level class opportunities at the high school level. And holding kids back from these schools means denying them access to a wealth of professional education and advanced tools.
Yes, it was cool to grow up in the early '00s and have a relatively reliable and robust online free-at-point-of-access reference library. Its a shame we're dissolving these resources and gatekeeping them behind paywalls, as well fill up the basic search tools with bullshit and FUD.
Yes. But that's the way the system works. We've decided, as a society, that parents have the right to manage their child's education, as long as they at least claim to be educating them. Parents of truant children aren't making that claim at all. They're more than welcome to do that, if that's what they want, but they're usually not interested in attempting home schooling either.
And yes, I agree that home schooling is, in almost all cases, a problem. I know some parents choose it because the schools refuse to follow IEPs for children with documented disabilities, and they simply don't have the resources to sue the schools to force compliance. But that's not most families that home school.
The DA is charged with fixing only one part of the problem, rather than the entire problem. In an ideal world, all of the systems would be working together perfectly, but since we have some people that are determined to break the system, and since they keep throwing sabots in the machinery, that's not happening.
They shouldn't be. But I recall the way that they were framed at the time made them sound really bad. When you looked into it, and realized that no one had even gotten past the threatened with arrest part, it started to make a lot more sense.
Yeah just like that.
As if they were less hateful towards the white old man...
This was something I struggled with during the early years of the Obama presidency. At least initially, while the avenues of attack that right wing demagogues deployed against him were unique in their racist overtones, the volume and intensity wasn't all that much different from what was directed against Clinton or Gore.
Then, as the years went on, they went progressively more insane and vitriolic. It turns out, I think, that it's a lot easier to get a casual racist on your side if you can use the upending of the racial status quo to activate them.
I'm undecided on that because that increasing racism by Republicans towards Obama coincided with the period when both Democracts and Republicans moved more and more of their political propaganda into the domain of Identitarian Wars: whilst before there was still a lot of talk about Economics, later the loud shouting was all about people's race, country of birth, religion, gender and sexual orientation.
It's unclear if the increase of the racism from the Republicans towards Obama was directly due to Obama's being a black POTUS or if it was a reflection of a wider trend: it's just as logical an explanation that with the 2008 Crash and both parties being unified in shoving money to Financial Institutions and saving large Asset Owners at a significant cost (i.e. Austerity) for the rest of Society, they had to switch their discourse from Economics (were their actions in the post-2008 Crash had made painfully clear there was no significant difference between both) and into the Moral space, which from the side of the Republicans means amongst other things turning up the racist speech, with Obama being the most visible minority-member recipient of it.
There's a double standard for Democrats, even if you're an old white man. There's also a double standard for women. And there's a double standard for minorities. And it's not just Republicans who hold them but voters all around. Harris is about to be on the receiving end of all of it.
She could have dodged all this criticism by running as a Republican (and then getting ignored by all the old white guys at the RNC).
This idea that any criticism of her is invalid and just misogyny/racism is bullshit. She is a very flawed candidate, ESPECIALLY for people of color.
Why especially for people of color?
Her activity as a prosecutor. A particular standout for me was prosecuting lower income parents of color for school absenteeism. While I firmly believe children should be educated, I don't think throwing overworked low income parents in jail is going to help keep those children in school, well supervised, and ultimately safe.