Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Joanne Orlando, Researcher, Digital Wellbeing, Western Sydney University

Walk into a shop, board a plane, log into your bank, or scroll through your social media feed, and chances are you might be asked to scan your face. Facial recognition and other kinds of face-based biometric technology are becoming an increasingly common form of identification.

The technology is promoted as quick, convenient and secure – but at the same time it has raised alarm over privacy violations. For instance, major retailers such as Kmart have been found to have broken the law by using the technology without customer consent.

So are we seeing a dangerous technological overreach or the future of security? And what does it mean for families, especially when even children are expected to prove their identity with nothing more than their face?

The two sides of facial recognition

Facial recognition tech is marketed as the height of seamless convenience.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the travel industry, where airlines such as Qantas tout facial recognition as the key to a smoother journey. Forget fumbling for passports and boarding passes – just scan your face and you’re away.

In contrast, when big retailers such as Kmart and Bunnings were found to be scanning customers’ faces without permission, regulators stepped in and the backlash was swift. Here, the same technology is not seen as a convenience but as a serious breach of trust.

Things get even murkier when it comes to children. Due to new government legislation, social media platforms may well introduce face-based age verification technology, framing it as a way to keep kids safe online.

At the same time, schools are trialling facial recognition for everything from classroom entry to paying in the cafeteria.

Yet concerns about data misuse remain. In one incident, Microsoft was accused of mishandling children’s biometric data.

For children, facial recognition is quietly becoming the default, despite very real risks.

A face is forever

Facial recognition technology works by mapping someone’s unique features and comparing them against a database of stored faces. Unlike passive CCTV cameras, it doesn’t just record, it actively identifies and categorises people.

This may feel similar to earlier identity technologies. Think of the check-in QR code systems that quickly sprung up at shops, cafes and airports during the COVID pandemic.

Facial recognition may be on a similar path of rapid adoption. However, there is a crucial difference: where a QR code can be removed or an account deleted, your face cannot.

Why these developments matter

Permanence is a big issue for facial recognition. Once your – or your child’s – facial scan is stored, it can stay in a database forever.

If the database is hacked, that identity is compromised. In a world where banks and tech platforms may increasingly rely on facial recognition for access, the stakes are very high.

What’s more, the technology is not foolproof. Mis-identifying people is a real problem.

Age-estimating systems are also often inaccurate. One 17-year-old might easily be classified as a child, while another passes as an adult. This may restrict their access to information or place them in the wrong digital space.

A lifetime of consequences

These risks aren’t just hypothetical. They already affect lives. Imagine being wrongly placed on a watchlist because of a facial recognition error, leading to delays and interrogations every time you travel.

Or consider how stolen facial data could be used for identity theft, with perpetrators gaining access to accounts and services.

In the future, your face could even influence insurance or loan approvals, with algorithms drawing conclusions about your health or reliability based on photo or video.

Facial recognition does have some clear benefits, such as helping law enforcement identify suspects quickly in crowded spaces and providing convenient access to secure areas.

But for children, the risks of misuse and error stretch across a lifetime.

So, good or bad?

As it stands, facial recognition would seem to carry more risks than rewards. In a world rife with scams and hacks, we can replace a stolen passport or drivers’ licence, but we can’t change our face.

The question we need to answer is where we draw the line between reckless implementation and mandatory use. Are we prepared to accept the consequences of the rapid adoption of this technology?

Security and convenience are important, but they are not the only values at stake. Until robust, enforceable rules around safety, privacy and fairness are firmly established, we should proceed with caution.

So next time you’re asked to scan your face, don’t just accept it blindly. Ask: why is this necessary? And do the benefits truly outweigh the risks – for me, and for everyone else involved?

Joanne Orlando receives funding from NSW Department of Education and previously from office of eSafety Commissioner.

– ref. How safe is your face? The pros and cons of having facial recognition everywhere – https://theconversation.com/how-safe-is-your-face-the-pros-and-cons-of-having-facial-recognition-everywhere-265753

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Ian Parmeter, Research Scholar, Middle East Studies, Australian National University

The 20-point plan announced by US President Donald Trump at a joint news conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu comes close to living up to Trump’s hype. It is a bold attempt to address all of the issues that need to be resolved if there is to be lasting peace in Gaza.

Could it work? Both sides are tired of the war. Throughout history, quite a number of wars have simply come to an end when both sides were too exhausted to continue. Two-thirds of Israelis want the war to end, and though polling of Palestinians is difficult, they clearly want the devastation and suffering in Gaza to stop, too.

So, this plan, despite its limitations, could come at the right time.

However, there are many outstanding questions about the feasibility of the plan and to what extent it is likely to be successful. Given the Middle East’s violent history, it’s impossible to be optimistic at this point.

Here are five main reasons for concern.

1. Trust is lacking

There’s zero trust between both sides right now. And several aspects of the plan are so vague, there is a big risk both sides could accuse the other of breaking their promises.

The last ceasefire between the two sides only lasted two months before Netanyahu backed out, blaming Hamas for not releasing more hostages before negotiations on the next phase could proceed.

2. The plan is asymmetrical

The deal favours Israel more than it does Hamas. Hamas is essentially being asked to give up all of the remaining Israeli hostages it holds and all of its weapons at the same time, rendering it entirely defenceless.

Hamas, with its lack of trust in Israel and Netanyahu, in particular, may fear the Israeli leader could use this as an opportunity to attack it again without worrying about harming the hostages.

Hamas was also not invited to negotiate the terms of the agreement. And it now faces an ultimatum: accept the terms or Israel will “finish the job”.

Given the asymmetry of the plan, Hamas may decide the risks of accepting it outweigh the potential benefits, despite its offer of amnesty for Hamas fighters who lay down their arms.

Israel is being asked to make some compromises in the plan. But how realistic are these?

For example, the deal envisions a future when the Palestinian Authority (PA) can “securely and effectively take back control of Gaza”. Netanyahu has previously said he would not accept this.

Likewise, it would also be very difficult for Netanyahu to accept “a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood”, as outlined in the plan. He has firmly rejected this in the past, most recently in his defiant address to the UN General Assembly last week.

3. Important details are lacking

The implementation strategy of the plan is extraordinarily vague. We know nothing at this stage about the “International Stabilisation Force” that would take the place of the Israeli military after it withdraws from Gaza.

Which countries would participate? It would obviously be a mission fraught with danger to the personnel involved. Netanyahu has previously mentioned an Arab force taking over in Gaza, but no Arab states have yet put their hands up for this.

There is also no timeframe in the plan for the Palestinian Authority reforms, nor any details on what these reforms would entail.

Presumably, there would need to be new elections to install a credible leader in place of current President Mahmoud Abbas. But how that would be done and whether the people of Gaza would be able to take part is still unknown.

In addition, the details of the civil authority that would oversee the reconstruction of Gaza are very unclear. All we know is that Trump would appoint himself chair of the “Board of Peace”, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair would also somehow be involved.

This board would need the absolute confidence of the Netanyahu government and Hamas to be effective. Trust is always in short supply in the Middle East.

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Read more:
The Palestinian Authority is facing a legitimacy crisis. Can it be reformed to govern a Palestinian state?

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4. No mention of the West Bank

The West Bank is clearly a flashpoint. There are disputes and clashes every day between the Israeli settlers and Palestinian residents, which are only likely to get worse.

Just last month, the Israeli government gave final approval to a controversial plan to build a new settlement that would effectively divide the West Bank in two, making a future, contiguous Palestinian state unviable.

The West Bank must be central to any overall settlement between Israel and Palestine.

5. Israel’s right-wing cabinet remains an obstacle

This could be the ultimate deal breaker: the hardline right-wing members of Netanyahu’s cabinet, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, have said they will not accept anything less than the complete destruction and elimination of Hamas.

And although Hamas would be disarmed and politically sidelined under this plan, its ideology would remain intact, as would a significant number of its fighters.

So, does it have a chance?

If Hamas accepts Trump’s plan, we could soon have the answers to several of these questions.

But it is going to require a great deal of work by the United States to maintain the pressure on Israel to stick to the deal. The chief Palestinian mediators, Qatar and Egypt, would also need to maintain pressure on Hamas so it doesn’t breach the conditions, as well.

Netanyahu is likely assuming there will be sufficient off-ramps for him to get out of the agreement if Hamas doesn’t live up to it. Netanyahu has already done this once when he backed out of the ceasefire in March and resumed Israel’s military operations.

In his forceful speech to a partially empty UN General Assembly hall last week, Netanyahu didn’t indicate he was thinking of walking away from any of the red lines he had previously set to end the war. In fact, he condemned the states recognising a Palestinian state and vowed, “Israel will not allow you to shove a terror state down our throats.”

Given this, Netanyahu would not have agreed to Trump’s plan at all if the US leader hadn’t put pressure on him. At the same time, Trump said at his news conference with Netanyahu that if Hamas fails to live up to the agreement or refuses to accept it, Israel would have his full backing to finish the job against Hamas.

This promise may be enough for Netanyahu to be able to persuade Smotrich and Ben-Gvir to support the plan – for now.

Ian Parmeter does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The 5 big problems with Trump’s Gaza peace plan – https://theconversation.com/the-5-big-problems-with-trumps-gaza-peace-plan-266355

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Maria Guagnin, Director, Ha’il Archaeology Identification Project, University of Sydney; Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology

About 12,000 years ago, high up on a cliff in the desert of northern Arabia, an artist – or perhaps artists – was hard at work.

Standing on a narrow ledge and with primitive tools, they engraved into the rock an image of a life-sized camel. This wasn’t the first artwork of its kind: in fact, there was already an entire row of fresh camel engravings on the 39-metre-high cliff face, below which a shallow lake sparkled in the sunshine.

Over thousands of years, these engravings weathered the elements. They gradually eroded until they were almost invisible and had been forgotten.

That is, until our international team discovered them and more than 170 others while on a field trip to the region, which sits near the southern edge of the Nefud Desert in Saudi Arabia, roughly two years ago.

As we explain in a new study, published today in Nature Communications, the engravings would have marked important desert water sources – and demonstrate the resilience and innovation of people who lived in such a harsh, arid environment.

Searching for clues

Our earlier research had shown that between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago Arabia was much wetter than it is today.

Grasslands had spread into areas that are now desert, and cattle herders used these pastures for their herds.

The rock art they left behind is well known from two UNESCO World Heritage sites.

We could see there was also older rock art at these UNESCO sites. It was much larger and more detailed, showing life-sized and naturalistic camels and wild donkeys. But it was not clear how old it was. So in May 2023 we set out to find more of this ancient rock art in the hope of finding clues about its age.

Life-sized engravings

In total, we identified more than 60 rock art panels containing 176 engravings in three previously unexplored areas – Jebel Arnaan, Jebel Mleiha and Jebel Misma. The engravings include 130 images of large, life-sized animals – camels, ibex, wild donkeys, gazelles and aurochs. Some are almost three metres long and more than two metres high.

We reached the first panel via a long off-road track which cut through a beautiful mountain landscape. A cool breeze made the heat of the emerging Saudi summer bearable.

The rock art panel showed two large camels, one on top of the other. The older camel looked as though it was in motion and about to stand up, the other like it was striding across the rock surface.

We were excited to find undisturbed archaeological layers directly beneath the engraved camels. In one sealed layer we even found an engraving tool that was once used to make rock art.

Luminescence dating – a dating method that measures when sediment was last exposed to sunlight – revealed the layer in which the tool was found is about 12,000 years old.

The same layer also contained artefacts that are typical for this time, including small arrowheads, stone beads and even a bead made from a seashell.

A far-reaching network

These artefacts tell us the people who made the rock art were part of a far-reaching network. They used the same stone tools and jewellery as communities in the Levant, 400 kilometres further north.

Significantly, our team also discovered the rock art was placed near ancient seasonal lakes.

At the end of the last ice age, during the Last Glacial Maximum, the climate was extremely dry.

These lakes, dated at roughly 15,000 years, are the first evidence of surface water returning to Arabia following the extremely arid period. And they move the timeline of the returning humid conditions back thousands of years, enlarging the opportunity window for humans to settle in these dry inland conditions.

Our results show 12,000 years ago, humans were able to use these seasonal lakes to survive in the desert. They marked these water sources, and the paths leading to them, with monumental rock art.

We don’t know why they did this. But even for us today, the camel is a striking symbol for survival in the desert.

Maria Guagnin received funding from a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (SRG2223231473) for fieldwork and research.

Ceri Shipton, Frans van Buchem, and Michael Petraglia do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. 12,000-year-old rock art marked ancient water sources in Arabia’s desert – https://theconversation.com/12-000-year-old-rock-art-marked-ancient-water-sources-in-arabias-desert-266144

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By T.J. Thomson, Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication & Digital Media, RMIT University

From the earliest year of school, children begin learning how to express ideas in different ways. Lines across a page, a wobbly letter, or a simple drawing form the foundation for how we share meaning beyond spoken language.

Over time, those first marks evolve into complex ideas. Children learn to combine words with visuals, express abstract concepts, and recognise how images, symbols and design carry meaning in different situations.

But generative artificial intelligence (AI), software that creates content based on user prompts, is reshaping these fundamental skills. AI is changing how people create, edit and present both text and images. In other words, it changes how we see – and how we decide what’s real.

Take photos, for example. They were once seen as a “mirror” of reality. Now, more people recognise their constructed nature.

Similarly, generative AI is disrupting long-held assumptions about the authenticity of images. These can appear photorealistic but can depict things or events that never existed.

Our latest research, published in the Journal of Visual Literacy, identifies key literacies at each stage of the AI image generation process, from selecting an AI image generator to creating and refining content.

As the way people make images changes, knowing how generative AI works will let you better understand and critically assess its outputs.

Textual and visual literacy

Literacy today extends beyond reading and writing. The Australian Curriculum defines literacy as the ability to “use language confidently for learning and communicating in and out of school”. The European Union broadens this to include navigating visual, audio and digital materials. These are essential skills not only in school, but for active citizenship.

These abilities span making meaning, communicating and creating through words, visuals and other forms. These abilities also require adapting expression to different audiences. You might text a friend informally but email a public official with more care, for example. Computers, too, demand different forms of literacy.

In the 1960s, users interacted with computers through written commands. By the 1970s, graphical elements like icons and menus emerged, making interaction more visual.

Generative AI is often a mix between these two approaches. Some technologies, like ChatGPT, rely on text prompts. Others, like Adobe’s Firefly, use both text commands and button controls.

Software often interprets or guesses user intent. This is especially true for minimalistic prompts, such as a single word or even an emoji. When these are used for prompts, the AI system often returns a stereotypical representation based on its training data or the way it’s been programmed.

Being more specific in your prompt helps to arrive at a result more aligned with what you envisioned. This highlights that we need “multimodal” literacies: knowledge and skills that cut across writing and visual modes.

What are some key literacies in AI generation?

One of the first generative AI literacies is knowing which system to use.

Some are free. Others are paid. Some might be free but built on unethical datasets. Some have been trained on particular datasets that make the outputs more representative or less risky from a copyright infringement perspective. Some support a wider range of inputs, including images, documents, spreadsheets and other files. Others might support text-only inputs.

After selecting an image generator, you need to be able to work with it productively.

If you’re trying to make a square image for an Instagram post, you’re in luck. This is because many AI systems produce images with a square orientation by default. But what if you need a horizontal or vertical image? You’ll have to ask for that or know how to modify that setting.

What if you want text included in your image? AI still struggles with rendering text, similarly to how early AI systems struggled with accurately representing human fingers and ears. In these cases, you might be better off adding text in a different software, such as Canva or Adobe InDesign.

Many AI systems also create images that lack specific cultural context. This lets them be easily used in wider contexts. Yet it might decrease the emotional appeal or engagement among audiences who perceive these images as inauthentic.

Working with AI is a moving target

Learning AI means keeping pace with constant change. New generative AI products appear regularly, while existing platforms rapidly evolve.

Earlier this year, OpenAI integrated image generation into ChatGPT and TikTok launched its AI Alive tool to animate photos. Meanwhile, Google’s Veo 3 made cinematic video with sound accessible to Canva users, and Midjourney introduced video outputs.

These examples show where things are headed. Users will be able to create and edit text, images, sound and video in one place rather than having to use separate tools for each.

Building multimodal literacies means developing the skills to adapt, evaluate and co-create as technology evolves.

If you want to start building those literacies now, begin with a few simple questions.

What do I want my audience to see or understand? Should I use AI for creating this content? What is the AI tool producing and how can I shape the outcome?

Approaching visual generative AI with curiosity, but also critical thinking is the first step toward having the skills to use these technologies intentionally and effectively. Doing so can help us tell visual stories that carry human rather than machine values.

T.J. Thomson receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is an affiliate with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making & Society.

Daniel Pfurtscheller previously received funding from the Tyrolean Science Fund and the Austrian Science Fund, for research unrelated to this article.

Katharina Christ works in a project funded by the Klaus Tschira Foundation. This research is unrelated to the content of this article.

Katharina Lobinger has previously received funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Federal Office of Communications in Switzerland.

Nataliia Laba has previously received Research Training Program funding from the Australian Government Department of Education.

– ref. We teach young people to write. In the age of AI, we must teach them how to see – https://theconversation.com/we-teach-young-people-to-write-in-the-age-of-ai-we-must-teach-them-how-to-see-259283

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Bruce Wolpe, Non-resident Senior Fellow, United States Study Centre, University of Sydney

It is downright eerie to read, right now, Kamala Harris’ memoir of her 2024 presidential campaign. These events feel so far away now, when we read them from within the frequent shocks of the Trump presidency, from troops on the streets of Washington to the indictment of former FBI director James Comey. But the chapter titles – beginning “July 21. 107 Days to the Election” – remind us the election was just last year.

“It says a lot about how traumatised we both were by what happened that night that Doug and I never discussed it with each other until I sat down to write this book,” Harris reflects about election night: her campaign at an end and Trump triumphant.

The book is not the whole story – not by a long shot. But her words about these events resonate with a ring of truth.

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Book review: 107 Days – Kamala Harris (Simon & Schuster)

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The first chapter, Sunday July 21, covers the day Joe Biden – who disintegrated before our eyes in his catastrophic debate with Trump – withdrew from the race, with no road to victory.

He did want to endorse Harris, but “not for a day, maybe two”. She told him that would be “ruinous”. She argued that she was not just “the candidate in the strongest position to win”, but “the only person” who would preserve Biden’s legacy. “At this point, anyone else was bound to throw him – and all the good he had achieved – under the bus.”

She draws on her call notes to supply the reactions of various senior Democrats to the news that day, from Bill Clinton (“Oh my god, I’m so relieved!”) to Gavin Newsom:

Hiking. Will call back. (He never did.)

Throughout, Harris is relentlessly sharp in recollecting the campaign – and very candid on all the principals, including the love of her husband, Doug Emhoff.

It takes courage to write about such an agonising, devastating defeat – after an historic, exhilarating campaign – so quickly and so personally. Memoirs are rarely written this quickly. (We are still waiting, five years later, for the second volume of Barack Obama’s memoirs.)

In writing this book, she got by with a little help from a “special friend”: Pulitzer prize winning Australian author Geraldine Brooks. Harris’ acknowledgements note her deep appreciation of working with Brooks, whose “ferocious and brilliant artistic insights were indispensable.”

The book fully reflects that. And who knows? Brooks one day might collaborate with Kamala on an inaugural address.

Candid, but loyal about Biden

Harris is candid about Biden’s decline, but still essentially loyal.

“On his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump at his best,” she writes. “There was a distinction between his ability to campaign and his ability to govern.”

Bob Woodward, the dean of presidential journalists, reached the same conclusion in his last book, War.

Harris writes:

of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out. I knew it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run. He would see it as naked ambition.

The choice, she says, should not “have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.”

In other words, this was a decision his family and associates did not want to make. But it was imperative the national interest be placed above Biden’s personal interest.

The Harris campaign kept the core of Team Biden. “I didn’t have time to build a new plane; I had to fly the aircraft available.”

One of Biden’s closest advisors, Mike Donilon (criticised in Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s recent Biden book, Original Sin) left Harris’ campaign two weeks in.

She describes him, during Biden’s 2024 campaign, filtering poll data and presenting “the numbers in soothing terms […] really there was nothing to see here”. At these briefings (which “made no sense to me”), she writes, “Doug had wanted to stop sitting next to me because he got tired of me kicking him under the table when I asked a question and got a nonanswer.”

Pete Buttigieg ‘too big of a risk’ as VP

Harris delivers the goods on her vice-presidential search. She admits Pete Buttigieg (a personal friend) was her first choice and the “ideal partner” – but the then transportation secretary, with his husband and children, was “too big of a risk” for “a Black woman married to a Jewish man”.

Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania, came across to her as wanting a co-presidency. “At one point, he mused that he would want to be in the room for every decision […] I had a nagging concern that he would be unable to settle for a role as number two.”

She viewed senator and retired astronaut Mark Kelly of Arizona very favourably, but was afraid the Trump attack machine would try to take him down on his (excellent) military service record – just like the Republicans did to John Kerry in 2004. The man who led that effort, Chris LaCivita, was now a top Trump campaign aide.

Could a captain, used to deference and respect, adapt to an opponent’s national campaign specifically designed to disrespect him, to cut a hero down to something small?

Of course, the military service slander she feared with Kelly was employed against her eventual choice. Minnesota governor Tim Walz, who served in the National Guard for 24 years, was accused by vice president JD Vance of “stolen valor” for his misstatement, while arguing for an assault weapons ban, that “these weapons of war that I carried in war” had no place on civilian streets, though he didn’t serve in combat.

Harris found the chemistry she wanted with the “genuinely self-deprecating” Walz: an all-American decent guy next door, with great values and common sense. “He had no fixed ideas about what the role of vice president would be, saying he would do whatever I found was most useful for him to do.”

She writes that her senior staff favoured Walz, “to a person”, as did her sister – while husband Doug Emhoff, interestingly, leaned towards Shapiro.

We will never know if Shapiro or Kelly would have carried their swing states, perhaps changing the outcome of the election.

‘Don’t ever let them make you cry’

Trump’s outrages on the campaign trail were rife. Harris takes us behind the scenes to reveal her reactions to key moments, like Trump’s infamous statement to the National Association with Black Journalists: “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black.” (Her mother is Indian; her father Jamaican.)

To campaign aide Brian Fallon, who wanted her to “punch back with a big speech about my racial identity”, she retorted:

Today he wants me to prove my race. What next? He’ll say I’m not a woman and I’ll need to show my vagina?

Harris takes us into her July 25 meeting with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu during her campaign. She also tells us she believes Israel was right to respond to “the atrocities of October 7”, but criticises the “ferocity” of Netanyahu’s response, including “the number of innocent Palestinian women and children killed and his failure to prioritize the lives of the hostages”. She was tough.

“I interrupted to reiterate the need for an immediate ceasefire and a day-after plan that gave Palestinians some kind of political horizon.” Netanyahu did not like what he was hearing – especially from her. “He wanted Trump in the seat opposite him. Not Joe. Not me.”

Harris does acknowledge Biden gaffes, like when he put on the MAGA hat of a Trump supporter he was joking with, who offered it to him. Her internal monologue went: “Don’t take it […] Don’t put it on.” Then: “He put it on.” That photo carried the caption, “Biden endorses Trump over Harris.” A bad day on a trail that had only 107 days.

When Harris talks about being a woman in politics, she sounds a lot like Julia Gillard.

“As any woman in a public-facing job knows, it takes us longer,” she writes about the two hours she needed to get ready on the campaign trail – make-up, hairstyling, “more complicated apparel choices”. Women are still judged on these seeming trivialities, she writes, over “the consequential matters we’re engaged in”.

She relates a conversation with German chancellor Angela Merkel. “They used to call me this – this ugly bird. And at first it hurt me deeply.” Angela leant towards Kamala. “Don’t ever let them make you cry.”

Harris never does.

‘I know Donald Trump’s type’

Harris’ speeches hit Trump where it hurts. As California’s attorney general, she told crowds:

I took on predators of all kinds […] Predators who abused women, who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own game. So hear me when I say […] I know Donald Trump’s type.

The crowds “exploded” at this line, she writes.

There are phrases in English that do a lot of work for you. “I know his type” is one of them. We’ve all said it about someone of low character whom we’ve personally known.

She had big rallies. And big money. She was fully competitive.

Harris told America what Day One of President Kamala Harris would look like. “When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list full of priorities on what I will get done for the American people.”

By contrast: “On day one, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list.” Does anyone following American politics today doubt that?

By her own account, the wisest advisor in her campaign was David Plouffe, who ran Barack Obama’s successful 2008 campaign. But like a Shakespearean ghost, Plouffe’s warnings haunt this play. He counselled her Trump was doing better than in 2016 and 2020, and the assassination attempt had pushed his turnout up 20%. “Whatever you think his turnout will be, add ten per cent.”

Her campaign strategists were not happy about Harris’ continued praise for Biden in her speeches, urging her to stop. Plouffe put it bluntly: “People hate Joe Biden.” Harris quotes those words twice.

Why does she believe she lost?

This is her verdict: “One hundred and seven days were not, in the end, long enough to accomplish the task of winning the presidency.”

Maybe.

Trump got three million more votes in 2024 than he did in 2020. Harris got six million fewer votes than she and Biden did in 2020.

All that Harris was proud of – the landmark legislation on infrastructure, health care and clean energy – would not deliver their full benefits before the election. In the run up to November, she writes, inflation and interest rates were high, and there was no immediate relief.

Harris wanted to talk directly to Trump supporters, but it never happened. She wrote:

I wished I could ask every one of them. What are you angry about? What about me makes you angry? Is it your health care, your grocery bills, a backbreaking job that doesn’t pay what you’re worth – and what can I do to help you?

She did not reach them.

She combated Trump’s strength on immigration and border issues, and the issue of Gen Z facing a future without good prospects. An anti-trans campaign ripped across the country: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” It was reported more than US$21 million was spent by Trump and Republicans on anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ television ads as of October 9 2024.

Harris peaked in mid-September. She never had a lead clear of the polls’ margin of error.

On election day, she believed she would win.

Bruce Wolpe donated to the Biden-Harris campaign. He has served on the staffs of the Democrats in Congress and former Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

– ref. Kamala Harris’ candid memoir reveals her ‘ideal’ vice president – and why she thinks she lost – https://theconversation.com/kamala-harris-candid-memoir-reveals-her-ideal-vice-president-and-why-she-thinks-she-lost-266047