And now it is the summer of our COVID/white supremacy/Trumpian/climate catastrophe discontent. I think July 2020's month of tweets is significantly shorter than usual, maybe because I've had a couple other Twitter-based posts this month or... maybe it's complete exhaustion from the fire hose of putrid sludge that passes for news these days.
First, there's the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and the related economic crisis, including the criminal mismanagement of Mafia Mulligan, his administration, and some (not all!) other Republicans around the country:
I don't know who needs to hear this but:
Landlord can't pay mortgage on second property — lose their investment, which they made knowing risks. *Still have a place to live.*
Renter can't pay rent — *becomes homeless during a pandemic.*
THESE ARE NOT THE SAME PROBLEM.
Hilary Agro
A 1% drop in GDP is a recession. We called a 6.5% drop in GDP "The Great Recession". In 1929, we called a 15% drop in GDP "The Great Depression". What the fuck do we call a 33% drop in GDP?
Richard Lionheart @LionheartNYC
U.S. COVID death count has surpassed 150,000. *Whew* Good thing we didn't elect the woman who "overprepared" for the Presidential debate.
Carolyn Porter
y'all realize that 30 million people getting evicted in one month is going to result in utter chaos, right?
@comradesergio
I have a feeling some of [the assumption that public transit would spread COVID-19] was due to people's perception of poor people, and public services often used by poor people, as being inherently contaminated and contagious
Michelle Allison @fatnutritionist
Imagine that the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, the Orlando nightclub shooting, the Virginia Tech shooting, and Sandy Hook had all happened on the same day, in the same state. That's how many Texans died from COVID yesterday.
Angus Johnston @studentactivism
Please stay 432 picas apart. #GraphicDesign
Carolyn Porter
This is going to sound like an exaggeration but it is literally true that instead of funding testing and food and rent and schools and preventing layoffs and evictions republicans proposed a full write-off for the three martini lunch and more money for the F-35.
Brian Schatz
If your governor won’t take action until there’s a refrigerated truck outside the county hospital, you can do better.
Andy Slavitt
Over a 1,000 people died of Covid-19 in America today. You know how many people were murdered? Statistically...45. And yet Donald Trump is going to send 75,000 federal goons to keep the streets “safe.” He doesn’t care if you die as long as you’re terrified when you’re alive.
Jeffrey Lieber
It costs an estimated $790 to fully dress a police officer in riot gear. It costs an estimated $11 to dress a medical worker in PPE. Which one of these groups do you think is running low on equipment across the nation?
Ben Jealous
Dear media: Since Trump won't bring doctors to his daily Covid briefings, help America out by NOT sending your White House correspondent BUT instead send your medical experts to ask Trump questions. Your Drs can then challenge Trump's lies and misinfo LIVE on TV.
@DeanObeidallah
"each individual is free to do what they want as long as they don't hurt others" is an impractical philosophy during a pandemic because few people are able to responsibly manage the risk of hurting others thru COVID transmission. crazy that event organizers don't understand this.
@bcrypt
The NYC Subway alone is carrying more people than all of the nation’s airlines. Guess who got their bailout first tho.
Shabazz Stuart
Just astonishing. If you remove New York State from the equation, here's our progress with this epidemic since March 5th. Congrats, everyone:
Josh Marshall [dated July 16]
This is who the States will be sending Covid data to instead of CDC? “Caputo moved to Russia in 1994, after the fall of the Soviet Union, and was an adviser to Boris Yeltsin. He worked for Gazprom Media in 2000 where he worked on improving the image of Vladimir Putin in the U.S.”
Sorry Charlie @smacktuna
Not too much to say that the entire weight of the federal government
is now harnessed to hiding information about the pandemic and
force-marching the economy and schools into a dead cat bounce to salvage
President Trump's reelection prospects. That's really it.
Josh Marshall
I’ve been wearing an underwire bra since I was twelve you can wear a mask
Jennifer McAuliffe @JenniferJokes
right now in congress they're having spirited debates about what is the exact amount of money that will keep people the appropriate amount of poor while not rioting
@jackallisonLOL
I mean, who should you trust in the middle of a pandemic? A medical expert with more than 50 years of experience and no political motive, or a reality show host who can’t pronounce Namibia and who wants to date his own daughter? It’s a tough choice.
@ida_skibenes
At this moment a U.S. passport grants you access to only 24 countries.
Joshua Potash
It's become very clear at this point, that there are entire categories of businesses that are basically screwed for an indefinite period of time: nightclubs, music venues, theaters or any kind come to mind. There's gotta be a specific rescue package for them or they're gone.
Chris Hayes
Not everything that is collapsing needs to be saved.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin
The messaging has left me confused. We’re told not to visit family, but we can patronize restaurants? We’re told we need to wear masks, but bars were opened — how do you drink a beer with a mask on? The only consistent message we’ve heard is this: any rise in cases is our fault.
Nithya Raman
hard not to think about how Trump was acquitted of impeachment charges just a month before all of this started. it was as if the universe was explicitly giving us a chance to get this guy out of here before it was too late.
@jbouie
I am now hearing the term "mask bully" to describe those who call out non-mask wearers. Mask-wearing protects others from you. People who don't care about infecting others feel aggreived by those who point out their self-centeredness. What a self-centered way to think
Joseph N. Cohen
NOTE TO PARENTS: Donald Trump and Mike Pence did nothing to protect your children from being killed at school by gunfire, so do you really think they are going to do anything to protect your child from being killed at school by a virus?
Mrs. Betty Bowers
My calculations found that banks made around $17 billion in profits off of the PPP. Total federal spending on homelessness in the 2020 budget is $2.8 billion.
Amanda Fischer
probably won't ever stop thinking about the sentence "White House officials hope Americans will grow numb to the escalating death toll"
kathbarbadoro
Re: planning for school/college this fall, but it applies to so much else: “Plans right now are just to manage our anxiety.” –Tressie McMillan Cottom
@pattho
A flag is a symbol. A mask is a protective garment. Not the other way around.
Hari Kondabolu
“So far, Congress has allotted $3.5 billion for child-care help during the pandemic. That’s less than the emergency aid for Delta Air Lines.”
amy walter
As I've already written about in a couple of
other posts this month, there were a lot of tweets about "cancel culture," a new moral panic similar to the one about "political correctness" (which I also have no patience for, as regular readers may remember). Here are a few stray tweets that didn't get caught in the earlier posts:
In most cases what people call “self censorship” is actually just being polite. Maybe not saying that racist or sexist thing that popped into your head. Listening hard to others and thinking about the impact of your words. It’s a good idea. We live in a society.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish
“Cancel culture” is the new “virtue signalling” in that the instant someone says it you can stop listening to them
Sam Adams
Funny that universities were at their freest according to the dude when they were largely segregated and women and faculty of color were closed out. Fascinating. Telling.
Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders
Also please note that white people being publicly racist is "free speech" but Black people saying "Hey, that's racist" is "cancel culture"
Melissa Hillman @bittergertrude
The "free speech" letter is just respectability politics from the usual suspects. Your speech will always, always be tone-policed as yelling fire in a theater.
McKinnon Literary
Black women are fired for wearing their hair natural, fired when they speak out about workplace discrimination and harassment, and fired when they demand equal pay. It's rich to see people writing op-eds and letters in national papers about how cancel culture has come for them.
African American Policy Forum
If you are concerned with how "cancel culture" is creating unjust outcomes in the workplace, wait until you hear about racism and sexism
Judd Legum
jk rowling: i demand free speech
others: okay, you're transphobic
jk rowling: not THAT free speech
Chuck Tingle
“Leading intellectuals” is code for people who can’t handle criticism of their worst ideas.
Hemant Mehta
Of course, there were tweets about the 2020 presidential election, "voter fraud," and real voter suppression:
Fun Constitutional fact: if the Electoral College doesn’t name a new President by January 20th following the designated election year, the Speaker of the House becomes President until one is elected. Sure, let’s delay!
Ryan of Minneapolis
Bill Barr testified under oath that there is NO evidence to suggest we are at risk of voter fraud by using mail in ballots. But on that topic...Press Sec Kayleigh McEnany:
- Voted by mail in Florida elections.
- While living in Washington DC.
- Using a NJ drivers license.
@DotDotDot_John
the funniest thing about all of this is there was no considered thinking behind the electoral college. it was basically chosen at random by a bunch of exhausted delegates who just want to go home at the end of a long summer.
@jbouie
Trump is not going to accept losing the election. It's bad but not relevant. We need the Republican party and the military to accept him losing the election. That's still up in the air.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish
The Constitution makes Congress the primary judge and guarantor of presidential elections — not any officials who take orders from the Oval Office. It’s a muscle Congress has never had to flex and imo leadership needs to prepare to use it (and not surrender it to the courts again).
@nycsouthpaw
It just feels like our political system sees even epochal catastrophes as existing to make elections interesting, rather than elections existing to help resolve the catastrophes. There’s a toxic solipsism in that inversion, and in the disinterest in finding the best solutions
Will Stancil
“I was going to vote for Joe Biden, but then I realized he’s not for the Confederate flag” is a demographic that the president seems really convinced is real and in urgent need of political attention
Benjy Sarlin
Trump message, distilled: “Vote for me, or your whiteness will be erased. Your whiteness will be cancelled. Vote your whiteness.” Let’s just be clear what his entire campaign message is over the next four months. It’s this. Nothing else.
Jon Reinish
There were also tweets about Republicans and their complicity in all this generally:
It has become increasingly clear, at least to me, that the majority of Republicans in Congress and in the White House are an existential threat to this Republic.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
As empires collapse they devolve into hysterical paranoia, venomous factionalism, and become hotbeds for fascistic, authoritarian cults of power. Histories of collapse are riddled with bizarre and disturbing insanities.
Jared Yates Sexton
Call me crazy but my idea of making America great always involved fewer swastikas.
The Volatile Mermaid @OhNoSheTwitnt
In 2018, the GOP was routed in suburban communities from coast to coast. Many 2020 polls show Trump facing unprecedented deficits for a Republican with white college+ voters. How many of them look at this picture and say: yes, where I belong is in the same political coalition as that woman?
Ronald Brownstein
Democrats: government can help people with this problem
Republicans: keep government out
Compromise: create a government program that works terribly so everyone hates it
Todd Berman @theartdontstop
I’m so, so, angry at white America. And even that anger is not really productive. Instead, let’s care for each other. We are the South Africa we told ourselves we were better than.
Adam Miller
When Trump and the GOP say they love “America” they mean they love “white rule.”
Tea Pain
I spent 12 years in Congress. It’s not divided because people don’t know how to play nice. It’s divided because some think the rich don’t have enough money and everyone else has too much. Candidates who claim that they’re going to walk in and “mediate” are naive or dishonest.
Keith Ellison
You know how your parents used to call every console a "Nintendo"? That's how conservatives use the word "socialist" to describe everything to the left of hunting the homeless for sport.
Voodoo Pork
Stop saying both sides gerrymander! A new study finds a 9.1% point increase in the GOP House seat share following Republicans control over redistricting in last 20 years. It's 0% when Dems control. This has netted the GOP 27 House seats.
Marc E. Elias
I guess there had to be a few about Mafia Mulligan himself and all he has wrought in general:
“Economically, Trump’s America is Soviet. Politically and socially, it resembles Nazi Germany. And culturally, it’s Taliban-esque, aggressively retrograde. That’s a lot of ruin for one country, which is why it’s so hard to put into words.“
Red heart @umairh
I’ve been thinking today about the media outlets that decided in the wake of trump's election that they missed the story. They were right, but the story they missed is the enduring power of racism and misogyny, rather than Trump as the new voice of white poor people.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish
We have two systems of justice in America: one where Trump helps Roger Stone avoid prison time, and another where a Black 15 year old girl is incarcerated during a pandemic for not doing her homework.
Kamala Harris
The White House orchestrating a hit job on one of the country’s most respected public health officials in the middle of a pandemic isn’t just dangerous and repugnant - it’s one of the politically stupider moves they’ve made in a long time. I’ve seen multiple focus groups now where swing voters will specifically mention Trump’s tendency to put his own ego over the advice of public health experts as a reason they’re not voting for him this time.
Jon Favreau
Had I not seen it with mine own eyes...
Benjamin Dreyer
We couldn’t fathom that George W. Bush read to children for an extra seven minutes on 9/11 and now the president literally doesn’t know how to read, his only dealings with children are putting them in cages, and he is responsible for a 9/11’s worth of deaths every four days.
Gabe Delahaye
Read this again: "the President naively elevated Russia -- a second-rate totalitarian state with less than 4% of the world's GDP -- and its authoritarian leader almost to parity with the United States." The harm that has been done is incalculable
Shooters Grill
And who could miss the intentional clusterfuck in Portland and related topics:
In the years after 9/11, Homeland Security has ballooned into the third largest agency in the U.S. government, employing 240,000 people, including more than 60,000 law enforcement agents — nearly half the total number of federal law enforcement agents.
The Intercept
the word “anarchist” was deliberately semantically pushed to mean “bomb-thrower” because like five dudes died in anarchist bombings around the year 1900, meanwhile liberals and conservatives have bombed millions of people but it’s okay because they signed the proper forms
Bruno Dias
To state the obvious: solving and reducing crime requires the trust of policed communities. Armed military forces occupying a city, by definition, can't and won't get that. So it's not about "crime." It's about suppressing political dissent and stoking violence. Duh.
David Roberts
Who could have predicted that an agency called Homeland Security would be authoritarian?
Jeet Heer
These idiots went from, “wearing a mask is tyranny,” to “the government can snatch people off the street in unmarked vans,” in two fucking weeks.
Mikel Jollett
"good trouble" is powerful as a shorthand for the idea that disrupting the rules in pursuit of the greater good is honorable and righteous. the danger is when people use it to demonize the "wrong kind" of protest (protest that makes them uncomfortable, missing the entire point).
wikipedia brown @eveewing
The federal government won't demand people wear a small mask to end an epidemic but it will come to your town with millions of dollars of tactical gear and throw someone in a van because someone else wrote "ACAB" on a wall
Lydia Kiesling
Notice again how the establishment is quick to label universal healthcare as a dangerous socialist concept but when unidentified federal forces are snatching folks off the street in unmarked cars, they still can’t bring themselves to call it fascism.
Bree Newsome Bass
Early in the month, it was July 4, our ironic holiday:
The story of America is that rich white men said everyone is created equal and spent the next 250 years being surprised that people took them seriously.
Shaenon K. Garrity
“Freedom isn’t Free.” This is a sticker on a veteran’s car. Freedom should be free.
Judith Browne Dianis
As general rule, white people don’t have the moral authority to tell other racial groups who they should admire. In other news, Thomas Jefferson was 46 years old and Sally Hemings 15 when he made her his lifelong sex slave. #HappyFourthOfJuly #FvckTheFourth:
ChuckModi
I prefer the holiday where ghosts and princesses shake you down for
candy to the one where the neighbors shoot noise and smoke at your
house.
CoopEats
Patriotism is demanding that your country live up to the ideals and principles it claims to hold so dear. Patriotism is fighting until the land of the free is truly a land where everyone is free. Remember the past. Celebrate the future.
Aisha Tyler
Folks are REALLY invested in the idea that u can fight for justice without upsetting anyone and it just doesn’t work that way at all.
@Kaimandante
Then, there was my usual list of topics, starting with racism, white supremacy, and police brutality:
the funniest thing about “DC and Puerto Rican statehood are dangerous power grabs” is that the people making the argument concede from the start there’s no chance Republicans could make ground in either place, but never bother asking why.
@jbouie
If we don’t require social scientists to be fluent in the history and theories of racial oppression, they end up saying stupid mess that furthers racial oppression. Yes. This is probably subtweeting who you’re thinking. Because...all of them.
Phillip Atiba Goff
History lesson. American suburbs were engineered in the mid-20th century by law and financial policy to be a place for white Americans to do two things:
1) Own homes —> build wealth —> build faith in American capitalism
2) Live far from Black, Chinese, Japanese, Jewish people
@anniefryman
I, for one, did not realize how much 2020 was going to reveal who’s a racist. Maybe we should get cards printed or something.
Adam Miller
I swear, any journalist who refers to Trump's "suburban dream life" tweet as "racially charged" or "racially tinged" or "playing on racial anxieties" instead of just plain old "racist" should be launched into the sun
Parker Molloy
Social change happens at the speed of white.
Hari Kondabolu
You ever notice how mafia activity is romanticized but gang activity isn't?
J.Muhammad
Every single day, at his day job, at his side job, and his off hours, Derek Chauvin worked to plunder wealth from Minneapolis. He made Minneapolis poorer with every low-level arrest on a record, every dollar of salary spent in Washington County, every tax he cheated.
Alex Schieferdecker
Honestly, cops are lucky we’re only demanding defunding future payments and not demanding a refund of the money they’ve stolen from us for decades of justice they’ve failed to provide.
Andrew Ti
Basically half of all white folks.
This is where we are.
After all that we’ve been through.
Whiteness over democracy.
Whiteness over safety.
Whiteness over justice.
That is what these numbers mean.
49%. smh
Ava DuVernay
I wish white reporters would stop asking if Trump or anyone else ever used the n word. The word is vile, but it’s not the depth of racism. Black people never had a march to protest someone using the n word; we’ve marched vs denying voting rights, police violence, and segregation...
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II
So Ghislaine Maxwell who is charged with sex-trafficking minors - ignores police when they knocked on her door then goes to another room “quickly shutting the door” was arrested without incident. But Breonna Taylor sleeping in her bed was shot 8 times and killed?
Ayman Mohyeldin
a lot of dystopian movie plots are just what would happen if white people were suddenly oppressed the way everyone else is
Becca O'Neal
There really should be a whole bunch of different Native and Black and Brown people on different [television] networks (all of them) to break down and interpret what’s going on in the world. Honestly, at this point white people as navigators is obsolete — y’all really don’t know what’s going on.
@BigIndianGyasi
When a white person tells a racist joke is isn't just "offensive." It is a violent act of claiming their space for white supremacy.
Nathan Irons Roberts
So frustrated by cis het affluent white men who cannot fathom that we, most fundamentally, are the problem.
Adam Miller
The first American police department to be founded as a police department and not a slave patrol was in the 1830's - so from the 1600's to the 1830's, every police department was linked to slave patrols...That history is ingrained in every police department.
Transformative Justice Coalition
Who would've guessed? Shopping malls happened because racism. Also? Our rabid consumption is killing us. 40% of all US GHG emissions are tied to the production of goods. We will confront our racism, climate, poverty, & consumerism at once, or we fail to solve any of it.
julie kearns @juliejunket
Can you believe that cops are resigning all over America because they’re being told not to choke, beat or kill black people anymore?
@Numbers28
What is it with white people who never served [in the military] talking about their Dad or whoever being a reason not to kneel, instead of listening to Black & Brown vets who are at a higher risk of police brutality?
Mikki Kendall @Karnythia
The society is organized around marginalizing people based on how Black they look, while everyone devotes endless energy to pretending that it’s somehow more complex than that. I’m so over it. That’s why I don’t want to hear none of y’all’s Black on Black crime narratives anymore. Folks have GOT to find a way to divorce themselves from these racist ideas of the menacing Negro who must be constantly policed and controlled in a way the white and wealthy NEVER are (even when they’re committing rampant crime like child sex trafficking). Y’all are killing us.
Bree Newsome Bass
ive said it before but it cannot be understated that elon musk is the beneficiary to wealth made from apartheid
@posadist_trapgd
If we are committed to dismantling white supremacy, we are required to interrogate American homeownership, which is one of these most widespread monuments to it.
@taraghuveer
Every time the media is like, “No but this guy is the *smart* bigot” it always turns out that the guy is not actually smart, just white and wearing a tie.
@LuxAlptraum
Sexism, misogyny, and toxic masculinity:
great news! I started removing "just"s and "i think"s and extra exclamation points to my work communications and started receiving complaints that I'm coming off as "attacking and aggressive"!
@juliajulesjuju
the right wing was like "fuckin feminazis" for 30 years and now all of a sudden they're like "you can't just call people Nazis for disagreeing with you
@Chinchillazllla
going to start saying "male journalist" and "male comedian" and "male engineer" so people start to hear how fucking stupid it sounds
ellory smith
Use caution when describing barriers.
Being Black is not a barrier for me.
White supremacy is the barrier.
Being female is not a barrier for me.
Patriarchy is the barrier.
Name the systems of power.
These are the barriers.
DrawntoIntellect
How many guys would die rather than see their big trucks, guns taken away? Why? Not because they're practical. Because the threat of violence gives them power over other people. And they are bullies. Also why no one wants to challenge them.
Angie Schmitt
I resent the fact that the security of my civil rights hinges on an elderly woman's ability to repeatedly defeat cancer
@telushk
Something I think about a lot: A lot of people have said that Hillary Clinton would have done a better job if she'd been more relaxed and shown her "real" self. At the same time, a lot of people say that Kamala Harris laughs too much. Women in politics so often just cannot win.
Mangy Jay
I'm watching the Flintstones and Wilma's maiden name is canonically Pebble!? this makes it so deep that she named her daughter Pebbles like it's a desperate act of reclamation in the face of patriarchy
Saladin Ahmed
The thing that’s the big tell for me that libertarianism is mostly
just white male identity politics is the way they can’t seem to get very
upset about government forced births.
Angie Schmitt
So, now that employers control birth control coverage for their female and male employees (and families), does that mean they need to include a warning of sorts in their job postings? Kind of like EOE, except this one will be MRBTYB (My religious beliefs trump your body)
Mary Morse Marti
never ever forget that salman rushdie told padma lakshmi she was a “bad investment” as a wife because she has endometriosis
Caroline Reilly
The climate crisis and renewable energy:
Wow. Actual accountability. Irish supreme court tells govt it has to come up with a better climate plan
Bill McKibben
The next generation will tear down the statues of climate criminals.
Alex Steffen
A quarter of Bangladesh is now underwater. The average American produces 33x more carbon emissions than the average Bangladeshi. Climate justice demands we act now
Bill McKibben
As climate breakdown begins to drive human displacement, we must affirm that every person should have the right to access safe and habitable parts of the planet. Defending this principle will be a defining struggle of the 21st century.
Jason Hickel
Okay, it's time to lay down some "net zero by 2050" questions.
1: That's a nice 2050 target. What's your plan for 2025?
2: What are your 2-year or 5 year budgets?
3: What happens if you miss those targets? (Nothing? I thought so)
4: What do you mean by "net"? Explain yourself
Ketan Joshi
It should not be "normal" to burn fossil fuels and destroy the life-supporting capacity of our planet. But everything in our society supports this behavior. Finance, politics, advertising, travel, food, car infrastructure, the way we think... everything.
Peter Kalmus
That the excess emissions of a few rich nations will devastate the lives of billions of people in poorer nations, who have contributed nothing to climate breakdown, is a crime against humanity and we should call it that.
Jason Hickel
And lest you feign surprise, the oil industry has funded violent/fascist militias in *every single oil producing country on earth.* This is *how oil works.* This is *what you pay for with your car.* Don't tell me you didn't fucking know.
@mateosfo
The republican response to COVID is a preview of what their response to climate change will look like in future years as climate change becomes a more pressing issue.
-deny
-obfuscate
-blame "others"
-take the opportunity to loot while claiming to help
-wait for us to just die
@futurebird
Eventually, and probably sooner rather than later, climate change will make Covid look like a brief summer thunderstorm.
Chris Hayes
BREAKING - Court orders Dakota Access Pipeline to shut down #NoDAPL #GoodNews #StopLine3
Melissa R Partin
If mankind is going to survive the next century, we have to fundamentally reshape our society. History tells us that doesn't happen without direct action and mass mobilization. Indigenous communities are the ones doing that. The best chance for survival is following their lead. #NoDAPL
Rebecca Nagle
In case you’ve lost count THREE pipelines have come to a halt this week...
Keystone XL
Atlantic Coast
Dakota Access
At the center of all three campaigns was Indigenous resistance.
Rebecca Nagle
That everyone is not utterly obsessed with climate change, which is bringing about the end of the 10,000 year stable period that gave rise to human civilization, shocks me every day.
Eric Holthaus
Did you know that over 90% of climate scientists think global warming will be so severe by 2038 or so that we'll hit temperatures shown to be hot enough to wreck the basic crops humanity relies upon for decent survival, or do you get your information from ad-dependent newspapers?
Ben See @ClimateBen
"If geoengineering research is going to happen at all, it should be rigorous, transparent, and not proprietary. It may indeed be a very bad idea. But it will certainly be a bad idea if the equivalent of, say, a Mark Zuckerberg gets control of it."
Alex Steffen
Right now the dominant plan in economics is to double the size of the global economy in the next 20 years. Take all the extraction, production and consumption we're doing right now and double it by the 2040s, on a planet that's already buckling. That's what 3% growth entails.
Jason Hickel
Livable cities and sustainable transportation:
Still think drivers pay their way & people on bikes are “getting a free ride?” If commuters had to pay for their impact on society, drivers would pay 87 cents/km. People on bikes would GET 25 cents/km. Commuting by bike saves society money.
Brent Toderian
One of these vehicles doesn’t belong on city streets….
Shabazz Stuart
I'm getting real sick and tired of people calling bus and bike lanes "gentrification" when in reality they just wanna park and go 50 mph without giving up a lane to public transit and non-polluters.
@IDoTheThinking
The Republican relief bill gives almost $7.5 billion to air travel, but $0 to transit, walking and biking, which millions of Americans rely on to reach essential jobs and services.
Streetsblog USA
Why are we bailing out the kind of high-polluting transportation infrastructure rich people use for leisure (airlines) while letting the kind of sustainable infrastructure poorer people use for necessities (transit) go bust? 12 percent of Americans account for two thirds of air travel. More than half of Americans don't fly in a typical year. Congresspeople fly a lot but almost never ride the bus.
Angie Schmitt
“If a city had increased its road capacity by 10% between 1980-1990, then driving in that city went up by 10%. If the amount of roads in the same city then went up by 11% between 1990-2000, the total number of miles driven also went up by 11%.” Via Wired
Brent Toderian
Departments of Transportation keep trying to solve the problem of how to accommodate more cars, which is futile, economically disastrous, and also the wrong problem. The problem to solve is how to reduce the number of Vehicle Miles Traveled. They need to stop equating moving cars with moving people.
Heidi Perov
Crosswalks as art! So much of our city is an unpainted canvas for
public art & beauty. It doesn’t take much — usually just for City
Hall to stay out of the way. Hamilton Canada is helping it happen:
Brent Toderian
LGTBQ people often migrate to bigger cities for relative safety, and a many of us love good urban infrastructure. I personally love good transit systems because to me it is a symbol of a safer city/region to be in, one with functioning government that prioritizes people.
@pyry
I love that on buses, little kids have agency, that they can pull the stop cable and the bus stops. I love that they're not physically restrained and strapped down. I love that they're part of our community and we're part of theirs, and all of us are better for being together. We've ceded so much of our public space to cars (including by ruining adjacent spaces with air/noise pollution) that buses are one of the few remaining community gathering spaces where everyone who's anyone might show up and sit, keep to themselves, or chat with a stranger.
@happifydesign
reminder that we have all the bus and bike infrastructure we need, it's just covered in cars
@mikevnooj
Do people realize two years' worth of the money we spend on pavement for cars in California is just about enough to build shelter for all 150,000 homeless Californians? Yes, it is a tradeoff. Money spent on car culture exacerbates homelessness and the housing crisis.
@mateosfo
100:1 — My estimate of the ratio of time spent worrying about not having enough parking to actual neighborhood disruptions caused by insufficient parking. And about the neighborhood disruptions caused by having too much parking, we hear far too little.
Jason Segedy
The reason we don't have (enough) bike lanes is not that they are too expensive, it is that they are too cheap. So no one from construction advocates for them ...
David M. Levinson @trnsprtst
According to FBI 2019 analysis, 6 police officers in the entire country were murdered while conducting a traffic stop. 36 police officers were killed in traffic accidents. The most prominent danger in traffic enforcement, like all things in the U.S., is getting killed by a car.
@IDoTheThinking
8 years ago, a prominent mayor of a major city (who is still mayor today) insisted to me that in 10 years we would all be riding in driverless/automated vehicles. I said we wouldn’t be close to that in 10 years, & if we were, it wouldn’t be a good thing for cities. 2 years left.
Brent Toderian
When cars are going too fast: raise the speed limit to the speed of the 15% most reckless! When bikes are going too fast:
Sean Hayford Oleary
If you want to funnel private vehicles at higher volumes and speeds down our highest density residential/community corridors and bus routes, you might be very confused about how things like racial/economic equity and transportation efficiency and community and planets work.
@happifydesign
There is not enough “carbon budget” left in the developed world to switch to EVs at scale.
The Leys Eco-Schools
But nobody bikes when it rains!
Or snows
Or is hot
Or cold
Or cloudy
Or Mondays
Face with rolling eyes
No, that’s wrong. Nobody really bikes when it’s unsafe, and inconvenient. So let’s build bike infrastructure taken from car space to tilt the scales in favor of sustainable transportation.
Lou Miranda
only when they’re gone does one truly realize the extent of cars’ terrible dominance:
Oliver Roeder
It never occurred to me that dead end streets (cul de sacs, as we like to say in the suburbs) are essentially private streets. Anyone *can* use them, but who would, other than the owners (and visitors, garbage haulers and snowplows)?
Lou Miranda
House flips in LA are a purer example of gentrification/displacement than new buildings that represent net new housing units. In a lot of cases people are just mad about “change” and just want a virtuous reason to oppose it; they don’t really care much about displacement.
Jason Damas @labelscar
This is Princeton and this is what every city should be doing:
Florian Ederer
Education:
So puzzled that schools can't regulate if students wear a mask but
are happy to cut Native students' braids, expel Native students without
cause, and punish Native students for speaking their languages.
Alec Calac
There is one banner that the far left and far right seem to consistently unite under: Forcing kids to learn things they don’t want to learn is good for them and prepares them for life.
Philip Mott
The students who will lose out the most in online learning are those living in poverty, but teachers also shouldn't be forced to risk their lives going back into school buildings. What a terrible situation. It didn't have to be this way. Never forget it didn't have to be this way
@ClintSmithIII
As the K-12 school year bears down, seemingly impossible, it’s notable how quickly everyone has essentially admitted that the hundred-year history of compulsory school in America was mostly a subsidized childcare effort meant to drive business, employment, consumption, debt, &c.
Ian Bogost
Betsy DeVos is the most baroque combination of ignorance, incompetence, and monied arrogance to be found anywhere.
Charles P. Pierce
Income/wealth inequality, wage theft, and a better way to organize the economy:
Since 1980, 28% of new income from global GDP growth has gone to the richest 1%. In other words, nearly a third of all the labour we’ve rendered, all the resources we’ve extracted, and all the CO2 we’ve emitted over the past half century has been done to make rich people richer.
Jason Hickel
funny how everything is a “handout” besides generational wealth
@titianosaurus
I love a graph that’s dropping a hint
@Raddishh
If we're serious about addressing racial inequality, rather than arguing about how to fix the "meritocracy," how about not redistributing so much income to the top, so it doesn't matter so much who is on top and who isn't.
Dean Baker
Capitalists are for "science" when it makes them money and against science when it costs them money.
Professor Fleming @alwaystheself
They make markets of everything. Even relief and disaster assistance. And it is an absolutely unethical and ineffectual approach to human suffering.
Imani Perry
America is amazing because the people who make $600,000 a year think that the people who make $15,000 a year are greedy for wanting to make $30,000 a year lmao
@JoeyxRoss
Whither (wither?) the USA? Is it any surprise that a society that (over several decades) affirmed private wealth over any attention to the general public good is now disintegrating through the crisis of Covid-19?
Langdon Winner
Why is it easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism?
@richmerino
"If Amazon’s 840,000 employees owned the same proportion of their employer’s stock as Sears workers did in the 1950s — a quarter of the company — each would now own shares worth an average of about $386,904." —Robert Reich
Alec MacGillis
Imagine believing that what's actually wrong in the world is the people with the least power in the world.
Benjamin Dixon
I think one of the major lines of division in political thought is between those who recognize capitalism to be a system of organized theft held in place through racist state violence and those who believe it’s a philosophy of free will and economic opportunity.
Bree Newsome Bass
It is irrational to expect that an economic system that is predicated on externalizing the costs of ecological destruction will somehow automatically stop driving ecological destruction.
Jason Hickel
A succinct argument for the estate tax:
Kriston Capps
And finally, the best of the rest:
Something to consider for the next Democractic president: raid the Defense budget for whatever you need and ask for forgiveness rather than permission.
Chris Hayes
Noah couldn't stop laughing when I told him that my beard just grows out of my face.
@mikesonn
In-person conferences are fun and enriching, but what's happening right now is that knowledge is being shared more quickly, more democratically, and with less ecological impact than before — and that is absolutely worth embracing.
Jason Hickel
If the federal government were to hire every unemployed American and pay them a living wage of, say, $58,000 a year, it would cost roughly $1.1 trillion annually
Bloomberg Opinion
Ida B. Wells was born July 16, 1862 in Mississippi
Haymarket Books
Housing is no longer shelter but a class of investment asset.
Richard Florida
The population of Wyoming is 578,759
The population of Puerto Rico is 3,194,000
You could make PR into 5 states with none of them being the smallest state in the union.
@TommSciortino
If I could actually cancel one thing it would be the idea that we ought to have calm, dispassionate discussions of demonstrably cruel ideas.
Maggie Koerth
Just not in that order:
Cory Doctorow
“Intersectionality is a theory of oppression not a statement of identity, and you have to teach it that way....It’s about vulnerabilities and oppressions; it’s not about how many identities you can embody.” Dr. Loretta Ross #MsTeachWGSS
Amy Scott
The government cannot be trusted with the power to kill our fellow citizens. The death penalty is a failed public policy rife with racism, abuse, and errors. Abolish this immoral practice now.
Sister Helen Prejean
Parents who hit their children lack empathy and self awareness and are walking around with a dead child inside themselves. If they could truthfully recover their own childhood memories and repressed feelings then they would never repeat this behavior with their own children.
Stacey Patton
Europeans' out of offices are like "I will not be working until 18 September. All emails will be automatically deleted."
Americans: "I am in the hospital. Email responses may be delayed by up to 30 mins. Sorry for the inconvenience! If urgent, please reach me in the ER at..."
Leanna Orr
I think on some level many people know punishment doesn’t do all the stuff they claim is does but it’s often easier to pretend it’s about deterrence and what not rather than saying you want blood.
David Kaib
shoutout to whoever in trivia didn't know richard i's nickname and called him dickie onestick, that's his new name and i'm never calling him anything else
trees @tornadosw
it's easy to think of Ayn Rand as a terrible person with an evil philosophy, but if you've ever read her books you'd know she was also a terrible writer.
@disco_socialist
Movies are escapist I suppose but getting a pile of books at a used bookstore while imagining a world in which you actually read them is a true escapism.
Chris Steller
Reading about the history of the early 1970s and there’s a strange dynamic where lawmakers talk about a problem and then Congress passes legislation to fix it.
@yayitsrob
I remember someone arguing brutal Russian prisons were a "deterrent"
so I googled the murder rate for Russia vs. Finland and yikes. Narrator
voice: prison cruelty doesn't deter crime:
@The_Albatross
A lot of people seem to think we should have a museum filled with nothing but statues of assholes.
@pattho
rules of US government: anything that helps anyone live in any way is too expensive
anything that kills people is necessary and cannot be overfunded
this hideous mindset is def embedded in both parties btw
Talia Lavin @chick_in_kiev
What ends up happening, with statues and memorials and paintings and even curricula in public schools, is that complex, faulty people are turned into religious idols. That's the crux. American history has been made into a religious myth all of its own where we worship men.
Jared Yates Sexton
Just call them the Washington Racists. It has the same number of syllables, starts with the same letter, and is an accurate portrayal of their values as an organization. #NotYourMascot
Joseph M. Pierce
You may not recognise it at first glance, but this is London, and
it's the earliest photograph ever taken of the city. Camera M. de Ste
Croix in 1839.
@V_and_A
When the world seems to be falling apart, it's easy to feel a loss of control. The best cure for helplessness is helpfulness. You might try generosity day. Set aside an hour a week for people you can help and problems you can solve. Small wins restore efficacy.
Adam Grant
