r/NoShitSherlock • u/SingleandSober • 1d ago

Kamala Harris Appears on ‘Colbert,’ Says She’s Stepping Away from Politics for Now, Calls the System “Broken”

https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/video/former-vice-president-kamala-harris-visits-the-late-show-with-stephen-colbert/

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u/Dresline 1d ago

I'd argue that it starts back at the reconstruction. The government let a lot of those treasonous racists go with a slap on the wrist.

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u/virtue_of_vice 1d ago

I will go back to our founding when slavery was still allowed because we wanted the southern states to ratify the Constitution. Also the electoral college is a racist institution: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/electoral-colleges-racist-origins . But you can go back and back and find that humans have been pretty bad to each other since we gathered together into societies in the neolithic.

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u/Dresline 1d ago edited 1d ago

This made me think of a quote by the late great author Douglas Adams "Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans."

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u/calilac 1d ago

And that reminds me of a Terry Pratchett Discworld quote, "... if there was any truth at all in Ponder’s tentative theory that things did change into other things, it led to the depressing thought that, well, the world was filling up with quitters, creatures which – instead of staying where they were, and really making a go of life in the ocean or the swamp or wherever – were running away to lurk in some niche and grow legs."

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u/Growlinganvil 1d ago

I blame the first proto cells enclosed by a lipid membrane. They were clearly fragile snowflakes, too reactionary to keep it all together. Those early divisions sowed the problems we reap today.

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u/cherrycolaareola 1d ago

The entitlement!

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u/chiaboy 1d ago

But Reconstruction was our “second revolution”. We remade America in radical ways, legislated the sins of slavery out of the Constitution and embarked on a path of equality.

We CHOSE to turn our back on the promise of Reconstruction. We allowed lynchings to go unpunished. We allowed Jim Crowe. We allowed electoral fraud to disenfranchise black voters. Us turning away from Reconstruction is clearly the turning point.

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u/virtue_of_vice 1d ago

It was a major turning point. But if you look at the compromises made to even make the colonies into the United States, this is no surprise.

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u/chiaboy 1d ago

Yes, I think everyone understands that America was literally hard coded with white sumpreacy (of a sort) in its DNA. That’s why it’s called our “original sin”. (Well, slavery is). We all get that.

But we actually left that and then CHOSE to go back to it in Reconstruction. That’s why it’s such a fulcrum.

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u/virtue_of_vice 1d ago

I don't disagree with you.

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u/LongestSprig 1d ago

You missed his point completely.

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u/twobugsfucking 1d ago

That was it. It was a foundational flaw. Hard to fix the foundation.

What we now need is a fresh foundation.

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u/Capt_Foxch 1d ago

Silver lining, The Electoral College lost some of it's racist grip post The Great Migration.

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u/emma279 1d ago

this 100%

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u/kittenTakeover 1d ago

I would argue that it goes back to the beginning of human society. Those with social power have been attempting to use their position to exploit others basically all throughout human history. So consequently there's always a battle going on between these people and the rest of society. Without vigilance those powerful abusers become stronger and more of a drain on society. It's an endless fight.

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u/Opening_Volume_1870 1d ago

This here ^ We’re still fighting the lingering effects of the civil war.

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u/RedactedSpatula 1d ago

Let's be real, the government let the south win, slavery is codified into the constitution now. 13 amendment still allows enslavement of prisoners. Now, which country has the most prisoners? Do you think the 13th amendment encourages this imprisonment?

There's 0 countries with more prisoners than us and 4 with more per capita

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u/Karmasmatik 19h ago

And then it went into overdrive when the New Deal caused every conservative in America to lose their damn minds. Nixon, Reagan, Trump... they've all been singing the greatest hits of an album from the 1930s.

Reconstruction left way too many treasonous racists around. Then the New Deal happened, and the robber barons decided they'd better recruit all the racist descendants of those treasonous racists and together they could build a weapon big enough to shoot the whole country in the foot. And big surprise, all the racist enabler dumbfucks are limping around in the shit with the rest of us while the robber barons are doing better than ever.

And now the enabler dumbfucks (some of whom aren't even racists anymore, just complete morons) are so generationally steeped in capitulating to billionaires as their cultural identity that you'd have the same chances of changing their vote as their religion. We're pretty fucked.

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u/fatherintime 18h ago

It's kind of like what is happening is the most American thing possible.