Twitter in the Final Month of a Hell of a Year

December brought even more tweets about how Black Lives Matter (including the fight between NYPD's union and Mayor DeBlasio and the derailing "All Lives Matter" movement), plus the CIA torture report.

On Black Lives Matter and related topics:

Racism doesn't usually look like someone shouting slurs. It looks like people eagerly looking for a reason why a black kid deserved to die.
By Lou Schumaker

There's a word for armed forces demanding that an elected leader be removed from office. And it's not 'democracy.'


By David Harris-Gershon

Complete list of groups who stage protests at funerals: Westboro Baptist Church - New York Police Department.
By Matt Binder

Protestors told for the past week to take a hiatus to allow for healing. NYPD stages a protest at the funeral. Incredible.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates

We've outfitted police with military weaponry and now they're refusing to answer to civilian leadership. That seems crazy dangerous.
By Simon Royalty

Maybe the NYPD can use their new-found love of back-turning the next time they see a black man walking down the street doing nothing wrong.
By Joseph Flynn

Remember, what de Blasio did to "disrespect the police" was reveal he gave his black son "the talk" about being careful around cops.
By Jamelle Bouie

via @daveweigel: I'm a little weirded out by the people saying DeBlasio should resign because cops are angry. That's... how coups work.
By Logan Smith

Families of Las Vegas cops killed by Tea Party supporters must feel terrible with wall-to-wall coverage of NYPD funerals, nothing for them.
By Dave Johnson

NYPD Should Vote Out DeBlasio & Get a Republican Mayor Who Will Gladly Cut Police Salaries & Pensions for Wall Street. Go For It!
By The New Deal

As NYPD officers turn their backs on De Blasio, they turn away from democracy and toward immunity for racist, broken-windows violence.
By David Harris-Gershon

If one crazed murderer can delegitimize a non-violent protest movement, several crazed & unpunished murderer cops delegitimize the system.
By Saul Williams

I'm shocked at how "controversial" the protests are. We are literally just saying that police are killing unarmed black people and shouldn't.
By DeRay Mckesson

White people when black man is killed: "But he had a gun!" When white man kills people: "If only the victims had had guns!"
By Jess

If Eric Garner and other black men only died because they resisted arrest, then how come no suspects have ever been killed on the TV show "COPS"?
By Hari Kondabolu

The world already values cops' lives. Hashtag unneeded. But we *do* still need to remind people that #BlackLivesMatter. Hashtag needed.
By Rebecca Eisenberg

Interesting role reversal: for months officers say, Don't condemn us for acts of few "bad apples." Now they link the protests to a lone attacker.
By Wesley Lowery

The argument is that criticizing cops is to endanger them; there's nothing more dangerous than putting people with guns beyond reach of criticism.
By Sam Adams

People are rightly upset at the NYPD murder--now imagine how you'd feel if this happened to a cop every 28 hours*.
By Smooth Kobra

A person who murders a woman in the afternoon then kills two cops does not remotely represent what has been a nonviolent movement in NYC.
By Howard Bryant

White people are NEVER asked to apologize for white men who kill cops. Black Lives Matter protesters shouldn't have to apologize now, either.
By Terrell J. Starr

It's possible to both be appalled by senseless executions of cops, and angry at unjustified killings by cops. This isn't hard to understand.
By radleybalko

White men smugly mocking murders of innocent Black people: your "I Can Breathe" shirts should say "I have a sociopathic lack of empathy."
By Jennifer L. Pozner

Man, cops really hate being treated like criminals because of the actions of a few bad cops. Weird.
By Ijeoma Oluo

Interesting that Ferguson protesters in their 20s/30s are called "youth" while Michael Brown, who was actually a youth, is portrayed as menacing adult.
By Sarah Kendzior

Today showed me that some people like "young people leading" as long as it mimics patterns from the past. That's not support. #Ferguson
By DeRay Mckesson

We have to get over this idea that being peaceful means we can't be angry. You don't have to tear things up to be mad.
By Atom Ant

Cute: NYPD union responds to the Daily News report on 179 [NYC citizens] killed by cops in 15 years by noting 80 cops were killed in that span. All but 10 of the cops were 9/11-related.
By Oren Yaniv

Kris Straub nails the problem with #AllLivesMatter in a simple three-panel comic from his Patreon feed:


By Tim Marsh

Let's make a deal: Peaceful protest in exchange for NON-DEADLY police enforcement? Seems those in charge should LEAD BY EXAMPLE.
By Paul Thomas

“Why do we diminish it by suggesting that it was an act against just one group?” asked a leading Canadian journalist about a massacre of women [in Montreal]. That was 1989 and nothing about that narrative has changed. Pay attention to that. She claims that calling killings of women killings of women “diminishes” them. This is the logic of #AllLivesMatter.
By Erin Kissane

There were also a lot of tweets about the torture report:

The 5 stages of torture apologists:


By almightygod

hey a bunch of people were shackled + anally raped in your name IT'S OVER LET'S MOVE ON. a corporation's computers were hacked THIS MEANS WAR
By Saladin Ahmed

Just like 70% of Americans once though Saddam was behind 9/11, now 56% think torture worked. This is a massive indictment of the US media.
By Dan Froomkin

Funny how Jesus somehow became a wealthy white suburbanite who hates the poor and loves war & torture.
By David Roberts

Everything is torture except for torture.
By Jonathan Glick

It's a wonder that more kids don't dress as Dick Cheney at Halloween.
By Robert O. Simonson

Shooting a 12-year-old. Shoving a man in a box and pouring insects in. These things are never okay. Why are we treating them like debates?
By Saladin Ahmed

If you are making an amoral "results" argument for safety, you can basically do anything--including torture and kill.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates

The only accurate intelligence that torture provided us, was that torture doesn't work.
By jamiekilstein

Some people think the 9/11 attacks were only morally wrong because they happened to the United States.
By nothingsmonstered

Al Qaeda "an evil we couldn't fathom." Incredible. In a country built on theft, blood and slavery.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ouch, Steve Sack. Funny, but ouch!


By Todd Stone

Brennan says the CIA had to work hard to get intelligence after 9/11. Which is why they got people with no interrogation experience to do it.
By AdamSerwer

Slavery: Enhanced Labor Techniques.
By Carvell Wallace

Torture is wrong! (Except for when I torture people for all eternity if they don't believe in me.)
By almightygod

One would have to be a moron not to see that Hollywood's long barrage of monstrous Muslims provides rationalization for killing real people.
By Saladin Ahmed

If the moral calculation is simply, "Did the ends justify the means?" it's hard to see why we even bother with laws in the first place.
By Christopher Hayes

"They" don't hate us for our freedoms! They hate us because we elect scumbags that institute torture programs & don't care.
By Mary

"Does torture work?" as a question needs to be put in the bin with "Is slavery commercially feasible?" & "Can genocide help overpopulation?"
By Hend

I want an America I can believe in. Where sadistic torturers, the mass thieves of Wall Street, and sociopathic murdering cops go to jail.
By Xeni Jardin

Sometimes I wish the news cycle would stop so we could focus for a few days on the fact that the US was torturing people.
By Bill McKibben

Cheney & ISIS:


By Tilo Jung

A global cult of tough-guy bullshit. This is the male culture that extends from jihadi wannabe to frothing gamer to killer cop to torturer.
By Saladin Ahmed

A rule of thumb: If a future report on what you're doing would spur international protests & endanger American lives, don't do it.
By Julian Sanchez

In just the last few months, the US Right has gone from defending xenophobia to defending racism to defending torture. What’s next?
By David Roberts

"They were planning an attack!" is the "He had a gun!" of national security.
By Saladin Ahmed

Even if you "debate" the efficacy of torture and decide it's bad, you're a bad person. It's not up for debate, if you believe in human rights
By Zaid Jilani

Torture, racism, climate change — life must be nice when you can just deny the existence of anything that troubles you.
By David Roberts

Coincidentally, the only information interrogators got from waterboarding prisoners was "I can't breathe."
By Frank Conniff

From there on, it's the usual round-up of topics that yank my chain and funny things that keep me going, despite it all.

The real "women in tech" issue: women are less likely to put up with sophomoric behavior and cartoonish incompetence.
By Buzz Andersen

Get those kids to stop running around laughing, pretending and imagining. They need to sit so I can teach my lesson on How to Play.
By Sisyphys38

Rich people love to "solve" education, but they never seem to tackle economic inequality.
By LoremIpsum

If your business is going to fold unless real wages of your employees decline each year, you have to wonder whether your doing it right.
By Matt Bruenig

With the information age the world looks uglier, dirtier, more corrupt, scheming, mostly because the malicious was hidden from us before.
By Nassim N. Taleb

I appreciate it when people suggest things to rid the body of "toxins" because it's an easy way to find out that they're idiots.
By Ken Jennings

With publicly funded clinical drug trials all drugs could sell for $5 per prescription, way too simple for DC wonks.
By Dean Baker

When adding density to the city, it's not the *people* that most object to - it's adding more cars:


By jennifer keesmaat

We need to do three major things to our institutions. We need to democratize them. We need to restructure them. And we need to humanize them.
By Nikhil Goyal

The Mall of America has long had huge public subsidies, which is why it shouldn't be allowed to opt out of "public space" discussions.
By William Lindeke

It’s starting to feel like the internet is a machine uniquely suited to ruining great ideas before normal people can even understand them.
By Merlin Mann

The world seems pretty boring until you stop to think that there are 90-foot-long, 300,000-pound animals that just swim around singing sad songs.
By PartyTeeth

A, B, C, or D?! (The best statistical question ever?)


By Max Roser

Having to pay slightly higher taxes because you're rich is pretty much a sign you've already won.
By John Fugelsang

All of television: a neoliberal fantasy to fool the gullible into believing the wealthy just don't know how terrible capitalism is for them.
By danielle villarreal

There should be a bar for people who don't want coffee or booze.
By Patrick Steele

Why do we like kids who work hard regardless of the task vs. the kids that only work hard at tasks they deem worthy? We don't like thinkers.
By Sisyphys38

There are no sports coffee shops.
By Chris Steller

Remember, just because something is 'hard' or 'difficult,' doesn't automatically mean it's rigorous and challenging:


By Justin Tarte

I think I speak for all women when I say: we would ALSO like a pocket on the inside of our jackets.
By Felicity Ward

Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.
By Kurt Vonnegut

We tend to think of great cycle paths as inherently Dutch; a mass die-in circa 1970 shows the people fought for them:


By jennifer keesmaat

Also: nature builds incredible strength and resilience through diversity. Diversity always wins; monocultures always fail.
By Jonathan Foley

The powerful can cloak their politics in an air of centrist magnanimity then condemn the powerless for being "partisan" or "political."
By Ta-Nehisi Coates

Kids come to school and teach us what they learned at home.
By Sisyphys38

It's not so much what we do for those who are clearly deserving. It's who we consider to be deserving in the first place.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates

A somewhat flattened hedgehog:


By Halloween Costumes

Protecting free speech has to mean "enabling marginalized people to speak without abuse" not "letting hate speech & threats flow unchecked".
By Anil Dash

Would kids attend your class if they didn't have to? Would it matter in the scheme of things if they didn't?
By Sisyphys38

If we cannot stand beside each other in our respective struggles, we will never stand side by side in collective struggle.
By Kel

I should run for political office just to see what kind of scandalous dirt they dig up. It would be nice to piece together my twenties.
By AndreaSollys

Picasso Bug – Sphaerocoris annulus:


By Strange Animals

"It's A Wonderful Life: The Story of A Man Who Got Really Drunk While His Wife Solved All His Problems."
By Jason Sweeney

Boldest economic proposals: Universal basic income, free higher education, democratization of the workplace, nationalization of the banks.
By Nikhil Goyal

Being an economist means believing that everyone on the planet is much much smarter and more rational than you...except for sociologists.
By Noah Smith

"Dwell on the past and you'll lose an eye." But the proverb goes on to say: "Forget the past and you'll lose both eyes."--Solzhenitsyn
By Ta-Nehisi Coates

Sigourney Weaver testing the flamethrower for Alien on the lawn at Shepperton Studios:


By Film History In Pics

Found out last night our cat goes to the kebab shop down the road every day & they give him lamb mince. There’s a picture of him on the wall.
By Sam Kriss

You can't be FOR standards but against standardization.
By Sisyphys38

It turns out birds are good at avoiding wind farms. Which is good, because they're bad at avoiding climate change.
By Bill McKibben

Map showing the elevation of the United States:


By Amazing Maps

DN3 says: All of those lightest green areas will flood if the sea level rises enough. Ursula LeGuin's book Always Coming Home takes place in a post-climate-change Northern California that has an inland sea just like the one that this map shows could exist.

Since September 2001, terrorism has killed 4,300 civilians; the war on terror has killed more than 2 million civilians.
By Injustice Facts

If you plan a city for cars, you'll get more cars. If you plan a city for people, you'll get more people. There is no avoiding this truth.
By jennifer keesmaat

This isn't the Year of Outrage. It's the Outrage Era, the social turmoil that comes from heightened awareness of others through technology.
By Andy Baio

TV news' "whole goal is to raise enough anxiety that you tune in. It's not to inform or make society smarter."
By Anil Dash

How exactly does one come to "deserve" success? Surely if it were possible we'd have a shift in who's successful?
By KillerMartinis

“Scientists who popularize or make science too accessible are suspect by their research community."
By Katie Mack

Yunnan snub-nosed monkey:


By Strange Animals

A 2,500-cow farm produces the same waste as a city of 411,000. (But a city has sewage plants...) Via @Cowspiracy
By Seward Co-op

"Leon Panetta is on book tour. Chelsea Manning is in jail. John Kiriakou is in jail. Edward Snowden is in exile." – Jeremy Scahill
By Dirty Wars

Surveys find 80 percent of people would like a pension. High numbers also want Social Security expanded. And they want their humble tax break.
By Helaine Olen

Everything changes. Don’t be afraid.
By Erin Kissane

Ask that fool to account for all white affirmative action between 1619 and 2014. (Replying to Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jamelle Bouie.)
By Lawrence Brown

Hegemony is a hell of a drug.
By Matt Bruenig

I dreamt I gave birth to Bob Newhart. And that those two dudes from "Freaks and Geeks" almost started a war with North Korea. #HospitalFog
By Molly Priesmeyer

To people saying "pulling The Interview means the terrorists won": we have been taking our shoes off at airports for no reason for a decade.
By Laurie Voss

I am the Lorax who speaks for the street trees, which you seem to be chopping to make things as fast as you please.
By Nathan Leigh

Jabba the Ham:


By Halloween Costumes

Welcome to the flexible labour market. Works for the elites, but not for the majority of us!
By WK Grainger

Words I wish whitesplainers would stop using when talking about race: 'universal' 'objective' 'human nature.'
By Brittney Cooper

Argument that Grant is one of the worst presidents is why history education should not end with high school textbooks approved by Texas.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates

"Race isn’t injected into the conversation. It’s already there" – Jose Vilson
By Paul Thomas

Americans would do well to spend less time worrying about terrorism and more time worrying about their sugar intake.
By Josh Barro

He's making a database, He's filtering twice SELECT * FROM customers WHERE behaviour = Nice Santa Clause is Coming to town.
By M

hey … hey you know that thing you’re not doing but keep meaning to do [long pause] you should make sure you do that thing — nightbrain
By Ethan Marcotte

My sister is doing an experiment: Whenever men walk towards her, she doesn’t move out of the way first. So far she has collided with 28 men.
By Anna Breslaw

Americans know full well that our prisons are cesspools of abuse and sexual assault. They just don’t care.
By Jamelle Bouie

The Eucharitid wasp — amazing evolution!


By Strange Animals

Long story short: Adaptation [to climate change] is much, much more difficult & expensive than mitigation. And requires bigger, more intrusive government!
By David Roberts

Instead of using public money to lure capital to where it's needed, use public money to meet public needs.
By David Kaib

Statistically speaking, it makes FAR more sense to profile men for mass shootings, etc, than to profile either Muslims or the mentally ill.
By Saladin Ahmed

Show me the wealthy person that doesn't have vices. Poor people don't seem to be allowed to have any. – Linda Tirado (@KillerMartinis)
By Simona Combi

Obsession with winning (not excellence) explains the push for uniform standards. We must compare states and nations: Who's beating whom? Competition also explains creation of standard that all kids can never meet. Our idea of excellence = there must always be losers
By Alfie Kohn

"Every single child 13 or 14 years old sentenced to life without parole for a nonhomicide has been a person of color." – New York Times December 14, 2014
By Wesley Lowery

"Only 2 percent of members of Congress throughout history have come from working-class backgrounds." – Adam Lioz
By Demos_Org

I wonder if salesmen realize that women like to make major purchases online because we're so often treated like children in the store.
By Rainbow Rowell

Even when I agree with the politics, I've never seen a car covered in bumper stickers and thought, "I'd love to hang out with that person."
By Janine Brito

To me, “not making rape jokes” is a pretty minimal requirement for dudes who consider themselves feminists or allies.
By Erin Kissane

I appreciate when someone tells me they "like to argue." It's a reminder I should never discuss anything with them ever.
By Faith Erin Hicks

The Milk frog:


By Strange Animals

Position: Life Coach Qualifications:
1. Knows how to copy/paste quotes.
2. Is moderately attractive.
3. Cannot get real job.
By Chris Rock

BREAKING: Industry's Last Remaining "Copywriter" Makes Transition to "Brand Storyteller" on Linkedin Profile.
By Adweak

Apparently kids must be forced to take math in high school because "studies prove" it's useful preparation...for more advanced math classes.
By Alfie Kohn

Today I went and sat in really nice desk chairs and they were all for really tall people. So the patriarchy is getting great lumbar support.
By Rainbow Rowell

Amazon can deliver a product same-day in some cities but can't get its workers out the door in 25 minutes?
By Charlie Quimby [referring to this]

Congestion-free roadways and ample parking are to the United States what bread and circuses were to Rome.
By Strong Towns

A close-up shot of Swinhoe's pheasant:


By Strange Animals

The teachers I see being the most grumpy and "down on kids" are the ones who loved school. They can't seem to comprehend non-compliance. I think we need to hire more teachers that didn't like school. They can better relate to the majority of kids who are disenfranchised.
By Sisyphys38

Thanks, Angelina Jolie, for using your money and power to present the risky and rarely represented idea that Americans in WWII were heroes
By Conner Habib

Ever realised how fucking surreal reading a book actually is? You stare at marked slices of tree for hours on end, hallucinating vividly
By Katie Oldham

The rich are far more envious, it seems, of the distributions the poor receive than vice versa. It so obsesses them! Cut cut cut!
By Matt Bruenig

Excited to announce my latest venture, advising coffee shops on how to hide where customers are supposed to bus their dishes
By Chris Steller

Stones thrown through the windows of Buckingham Palace by suffragettes, 100 years ago today:


By Gavin Grindon

"Recall Cleaver's (or his ghostwriter's) view that European civilization was simply a form of domination. It is impossible to listen to the multiculturalists and not hear echoes of Eldridge Cleaver." The New Republic, 1991. That "or his ghostwriter's" crack is exactly how you get a "White's Only" sign hung above your publication. That's some Obama birther shit.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates

Treat me like I'm disposable, and see what you get.
By KillerMartinis

For starters, Alan Mills put it well: "Increased isolation [in prison] increases violence. Programs & responsibility reduce violence."
By JailsActionCoalition

I don’t have room for even one more smug statement about “girls’ natural preferences” in contradiction of so much data. Not even one.
By Erin Kissane

Kozol: "Charity and chance and narrow selectivity are not the way to educate the children of a genuine democracy."
By Nikhil Goyal

If the only way you can get behind an issue is if the axis centers on you, then you're neither an ally nor activist
By Odysseus Rex

You know what would be even better than pinning the health of all our institutions on the whims of billionaires? A robust public sector.
By David Roberts

Pretty sure there's not a single person on television who has ever used the word "humbling" correctly.
By evelyn pollins

When I was at Howard University, every Negro on the yard thought he woulda been Nat Turner, when all of us woulda been Kunta. And no shame in that. Same sin--no sense of "rape" and "enslavement" as institutional evils. Basically perceive them as individual acts, with no societal support. People who ask about Cosby, "Why didn't the women report it at the time?"recalls people who ask, "Why didn't all the slaves just rebel?" Think a large part of it is the discomfort with knowing YOU could enslaved, YOU could be raped. Better to think yourself superhuman.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates

To which, user Frank Alvarez replied:
@tanehisicoates “As someone who has never been in that situation, allow me to explain how *I* would handle it with ease!”

I have been asked by a fairly well-known publication to write a 1,500-word essay on labor exploitation for $50. Guess they want autobiography.
By Sarah Kendzior

"It’s kind of selfish to say you will only fight for a victory that you will live to see." – Ta-Nehisi Coates
By Andy Kroll

Buy a stick. This is what capitalism has done to us:


By Talen Lee

* I recently read a Washington Post article that deconstructed the "every 28 hours" claim and showed that it is not supported by existing statistics. That number includes people killed by security guards and "vigilantes," not just police, and also includes people who were reported to be armed. The article concluded that something like two unarmed people killed per week was probably more accurate. However, as the author of the original article points out, her estimate is most likely an under count of police killings, given the number of states (such as Florida) that don't report.