Grueling, Grueling October

Ah, October. A beautiful month of low-angled sunlight through leaves. And debates. Lots of debates.  Oh, and Halloween, so first, here are two holiday-themed tweets:

Some are born grate. Some achieve grateness. Some have grateness thrust upon them:


Melissa Snit ‏@NotDrSnit

Dress your kid up as a marginalized pedestrian everyday! [Photo by AAA, recommending how to dress for safe trick-or-treating.]


@mikesonn

This month has been so long, I forgot to remember that all four of the presidential and vice presidential debates were in October. Doesn’t the first one seem as though it was a few months ago?

These tweets, as usual, run in reverse-chronological order, so for the election that means we start with the latest FBI/email travesty and head back through several debates, the Trump sexual assault admission on the bus, the veep debate, the first debate, Trump's leaked tax returns… it is never-ending. I’ve separated the tweets related to sexism and sexual assault, though, because there were just so many of them.

A foreign government opposed to U.S. is systemically targeting one presidential campaign and yet Clinton's emails are the scandal. Unreal.
Ari Berman

"There's a sucker born every minute" may be an apocryphal quote but Trump has certainly demonstrated the underlying truth of it.
Tom Tomorrow

I spent some time this morning trying to decide the most shocking part of Trump’s candidacy but got depressed before I reached a conclusion.
Sarah Mackey ‏@sarahjanet

Well it wouldn't be America if Democrats weren't freaking out a week before Election Day about a race they're going to win
Michael Cohen ‏@speechboy71

"Do as I say, not as I do" sums up Trump, his campaign and a significant portion of his voters.
Clare Worley

Trump says racist, sexist, hateful stuff all the time, I'm just glad he doesn't do it on a private email server, that would be immoral.
Frank Conniff

Just occurred to me that election is divided between people who think Clinton is Hermione Granger and people who think she's Dolores Umbridge.
Maggie Koerth-Baker

Trump, yesterday: "Windpower kills all the birds." Well, almost all:


Bill McKibben

Trump and Biden talking about having a fist fight - this is what it's come down to. Women in power can't come soon enough.
Michael Moore

Every now and then I think back to when we expected a tedious, predictable election featuring Hillary vs. Jeb, and laugh bitterly.
Tom Tomorrow

In 2011 white evangelicals were the group most bothered by sin in leaders. In 2016 they're the least bothered by it.
almightygod

Photos from Trump rallies are starting to combine Poe's Law with Godwin's Law... when you can't tell if a Nazi reference is a joke or not:


Pat Thompson

Trump mostly represents a shift on the right from elaborately deceptive narratives to very simply deceptive ones. Instead of having a fancy model that lies with math to say tax cuts pay for themselves, you can just say "I'll make us so rich, believe me." And instead of an elaborate story about why the poll samples get the electorate wrong, as Rove et al told in 2012, you can just say "rigged.” And a lot of the "smart" conservative alarm over Trump really just entails wanting to go back to the smarter bullshit. There is a reason libertarians always loved Austrian economics, and the reason is that Austrian economics is anti-empirical horseshit. But what Trump realizes is you don't even need the horseshit framework. Say whatever you want, offer no justification, works just as well!
Josh Barro

"The media takes Trump literally but not seriously. While [his] voters take him seriously but not literally" -@brianstelter
facepaulmrevere

Soviets learned if no one trusts anything those in power win. Attacks on sourced journalism, government statistics bad for democracy #FactsMatter
David Cay Johnston

Why is Trump concerned about dead people voting? His only chance to win is if the dead supporters of the Confederacy are able to vote.
@Deanofcomedy

Underrated factor in "What made Trump possible?": years of arguing that business experience is equal/superior to all other qualifications.
James Poniewozik

Trump is the Beetlejuice of American politics summoned by desperate people, totally out of control.
Billy Bragg

TV: [treats politics as entertainment for 25 solid years]
TRUMP: [provides entertainment]
TV PANEL: what is fueling the Trump movement?
Jason Fagone

David Frum tweeted:
Trump may not accept the results of the election. But the courts, the civil service, and the security guards at the White House will.

Sarah Mackey ‏@sarahjanet replied:
It’s not actually Trump people are afraid of if he rejects the results, for god’s sake. It’s his gun-toting unhinged supporters. Honestly. Straight white dudes smugly saying “don’t worry, the system will prevail” is so narrow-minded I don’t even know what to say. Yeah, I’m pretty sure YOU will be fine no matter what the outcome, David Frum.

But juxtapose reactions to Trump’s refusal to accept election results with his refusal to accept the exoneration of the Central Park Five.
Joel D. Anderson

The real question is how many state governors are willing to secede from the union if trump loses? Only need one really.
@supership79

Trump will concede because he's a lazy coward. He will no sooner create an actual constitutional crisis than he would actually sue the New York Times.
John Hodgman

Trump isn't just saying the election is rigged. At rallies, he's specifically pointing to predominantly minority polling places as the issue but we'll just skip over that part and continue acting like there's a lot to decipher in the words of a man who talks like a 5th grader.
Bree Newsome

There will be no accountability for Trump, for what he has wrought and almost wrought. It will disappear down the George W Bush memory hole.
Christopher Hayes

Refusing to take "no" for an answer is really a running theme in Donald Trump's life.
Hemant Mehta

Chris Wallace did a good job managing [the third] debate, but many of his questions (to both) have been: Why aren't you promising Republican orthodoxy?
Justin Wolfers

Trump: "I'll tell you at the time. I'll keep you in suspense." Democracy isn't a reality TV show.
Jessica Taylor

Trump's worst line of the evening: "Nobody has more respect for women than me."
Everyone dialed it down... Even his own supporters. #debate
Frank Luntz

The Wall Street Journal says "big labor" political spending at "unprecedented rate." BUT they fail to note business outspends labor by 18X.
Steven Greenhouse ‏@greenhousenyt

One of the few upsides of this election is that political scientists have gotten significantly less condescending and smug.
Josh Barro

The gall it takes for a party that still engages in strategic voter disenfranchisement to talk about vote-rigging: infinite.
Josh Greenman

Yes, by all means, let's give nuclear codes to a guy who can be easily egged on by the star of Access Hollywood.
Frank Conniff

Angry white men said Obama wasn't a legitimate president. Now they're saying Hillary is rigging the election. Notice a pattern?
Kaili Joy Gray

Saying that fair elections are rigged is as much a crime against democracy as saying that rigged elections are fair.
Garry Kasparov ‏@Kasparov63

If Trump says the election is rigged, and Trump is a projectionist, then who do you think is trying to rig the election with their Russian friends?
David M. Levinson ‏@trnsprtst

I'm voting for Clinton, but once she's elected our job is forcing her to keep promises, not fretting about some imaginary troglodyte revolt. I can already hear mealy-mouthed motherfuckers telling us we have to 'support president clinton' because like deplorables or something. No.
Saladin Ahmed

Shouting fire in the crowded theater of democracy. [Responding to a Trump tweet that read “Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!”]
Steven Johnson

No get-out-the-vote effort. No debate practice. Poor fundraising. Few ads, most in wrong states. But a conspiracy will cost Trump's election.
Kurt Eichenwald

anyone genuinely contemptuous of capitalist 'democracy' should be able to see a vote as a tool rather an oath of fealty
Saladin Ahmed

CBS findings: Latinos optimistic, socially mobile, pro-immigrant, anti-Trump. No wonder Trump, GOP base hates them.
Frank Sharry

It's sobering that in white America, Trump wins in a landslide.
Nicholas Kristof

If you do comparative study of Canada and USA, I suspect Canada’s stronger welfare state does insulate us from Trumpism.
Jeet Heer

Reminder: a major party presidential candidate is signaling in advance that he will not accept the results of the election if he loses. This utter shitheel of a human being is willing to risk literal civil war in order to salve his fragile ego. Thanks, Republicans. This democracy of ours is deeply flawed, but if it were to collapse, I'm pretty sure you would not like what comes next.
Tom Tomorrow

this election has terrified me in how the mainstream media refuses to call bigotry bigotry. a more slick trump could win with them.
Oliver Willis

Trump is the inverse of a Trojan horse – an invading army that the GOP believed would magically transform into a gift.
Chris Arnade

"Lock her up" is about Clinton's email server in the same way the Tea Party was about the deficit.
Christopher Hayes

Donald Trump will forever be a crass loser with bad taste.
Josh Barro

You cannot say your opponent is a criminal, there's a national conspiracy in her favor, and the election is rigged and not foresee violence.
Jill Filipovic

It's as if Dr. Frankenstein wanted to see if he could create a creature that embodied every disgusting male trait all rolled into one guy.
Michael Moore

Listening to this [Trump] crowd is scary but it answers a lot of questions I have always had about how bad things happened in history.
Julia Ioffe

You all get it now why we said "religious" objections to LGBT rights were a pretext for bigotry, yes? Forced to choose between bigotry and what were nominally principles of religious morality, 75% of white evangelicals are choosing bigotry. This is why peddlers of bogus natural cures want to rent Mike Huckabee's mailing list. The whole thing is a con, including the churches.
Josh Barro

Trump will lose because minorities will bail out the overwhelmingly Trump-heavy white vote. The neglected constituencies are SAVING THE COUNTRY.
Derek Thompson

When people tell you that print journalism is dead, just remember who it is that's broken every major political story of this campaign.
Maer Roshan

One thing you can count on Trump for, at least, is he's not going to ever pay all the advisers who are still defending him.
Tom Scocca

funny watching people blame 'rednecks' for a New York City billionaire whose political feasibility was essentially a gift from elite media.
Saladin Ahmed

The GOP spent the last 16 years vilifying the "elitism" of education/intelligence, but now they're surprised their base nominated an idiot.
Propane Jane™ ‏@docrocktex26

In 1973, McCain was a tenant of the Hanoi Hilton, while Trump was making sure his properties had no black tenants.
'He Zedd, Ominously' ‏@ZeddRebel

11. In Trump’s wake roughly a quarter of electorate, including some GOP leaders, will have zero respect and immense anger towards society.
12. This is dangerous stuff. When citizens no longer feel an obligation to be “good” to larger society. That is how countries break apart.
13. The sad irony is, this behavior. This decoupling from polite society. Is exactly how GOP leaders have long described inner cities
14. They talk and warn about a culture of poverty. Of no respect, and violence. No decency. Thugs. Hip-hop and low slung jeans.
15. Yet what the GOP has created in its own base is a culture of aggrievement. One that feels no attachment or obligation to larger society.
Chris Arnade

Clinton continuing to put out serious policy proposals even as we drown in memes and rage is probably the best argument to vote for her.
@anamariecox

Republicans in Congress should be doing some soul-searching about whether they deserve to retain the majority. I mean, look at yourselves. Should you run a government? You can't even run a political party.
Josh Barro

Clinton giving a wonky speech on climate change while hecklers scream "Bill Clinton is a rapist!!!!" is the election in a nutshell.
Christopher Hayes

Trump to Brooks Brothers Rioters: We're getting the band back together!
Chris Steller

definitely nothing cultlike about this:


Saladin Ahmed

As one in the entertainment biz, I see Trump as a result of 20+ years reality TV sunk into collective consciousness.
tony basq leonardo ‏@leobasq

Ah, an entitled old white man who compares having the backing of a major political party to SLAVERY. Shackles? Shackles??? [In response to Trump’s tweet that said, "It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to."]
Anand Giridharadas

bragging about assault = "just words," but being condemned for those words = "getting beaten up"
what a fucking crybaby
Saladin Ahmed

Christians in voting booths: Helping the poor is the church's job!
Christians in churches: We can't help all the poor. Government should do it.
almightygod

you know what's cool is the 2020 election is probably gonna be worse and last longer than this one
Tom Tomorrow

Media treatment of Paul Ryan: his motives assumed pure and noble no matter how vile his actual behavior. Exact opposite of treatment of Hillary Clinton.
Paul Krugman

This election has demonstrated that if the central axis of your politics is being against the Establishment you can end up in some dark places
Christopher Hayes

Actual Trump debate quote: "Russia is new in terms of nuclear and we are old and tired and exhausted in terms of nuclear. A very bad thing."
Michael Crowley

Amazing how "lock her up" went from a chant at the fringes of Trump's crowds to an official policy position.
Christopher Ingraham

Trump's candidacy demonstrates the true (and maybe only) value of political parties: to blunt the rabid desire of millions for a dictator.
Craig Mazin

I found this in the dictionary under "false equivalence”:
IMAGE
Jeff Shesol

Also the "inner cities are hell" is typically used to attack democrats. But no comment on GOP control of the poorest states in the US.
jelani cobb

so trump talked for 40:10 and clinton talked for 39:05, yet he threw 47 tantrums about not getting equal time. men think equality = oppression
Lindy West

Trump wants to put another Scalia on the court. Clinton wants to appoint another Ginsburg. That's the election in a nutshell.
Ari Berman

So Hillary bringing up Spielberg's Lincoln may have sounded silly, but that's *literally* what she was talking about in the speech.
Caroline Siede

"Why didn't you unilaterally solve everything?" is such a perfect window of how he thinks this works.
Christopher Hayes

If all muslims have to report "suspicious activity" then all white men need to report things they hear in the locker room
Harvard Democrats

I am so sorry for Hillary Clinton that she has to appear in public with this man and dignify his statements with responses.
Jeff Zentner

This is the lowest point in our recent politics. Candidate on debate stage threatening to arrest his opposition once he's in power.
Rob Schenck

You can feel this air of almost grief-stricken sadness in all the answers. It's like everyone's at a funeral for American democracy.
Christopher Hayes

agreeing to appear on the Howard Stern show should disqualify you from the presidency
Chris Steller

Pence says Trump needs to show what's in his heart. Hasn't Trump already shown us what's in his heart: lust, pride and vanity.
Steven Greenhouse ‏@greenhousenyt

Reading *die-hard* Trump feeds right now is super depressing. I don't even have that much faith that every can of Bud will taste the same.
Big Scary Jeb Lund ‏@Mobute

Trump's campaign hashtag for Make America Great Again is #MAGA. "Maga" is the Yoruba word for "idiot."
Ivie Okechukwu-Ani

This Trump "apology" has me thinking about how much Black people are expected to forgive white people's sins while ours are never forgiven.
ProfB ‏@AntheaButler

You want to cackle in delight watching Trump finally melt down but his impact has been too devastating so your cackle is just a sad whimper.
Caitlin Doughty ‏@TheGoodDeath

Mike Pence is an earnest man who simply wants to electrocute LGBT children until they're straight. Shame he's been dragged into this mess.
jpbrammer

“I've never... pretended to be someone I'm not,” says Donald Trump, forgetting he's called reporters posing as his own publicist.
Ron Hogan

As racism and sexism came to be considered impolite, a lot of Republican voters decided politeness itself was a problem.
Josh Barro

Whites who live in the town where they grew up: Trump +26. Whites who live more than 2 hrs away: Clinton +6. People who live far from hometown are more educated, on average. But does education make them open, or does openness make them get educated?
Josh Barro

Your occasional reminder that in this year of the outsider somewhere around 95% of incumbents on the ballot in November will be reelected. Which says less about how satisfied people are with their government and more about how structurally deficient our democracy has become.
Christopher Hayes

Dear debate moderators,
#Climate change is a far worse threat to us than terrorism, economy, or anything else.
ASK A DAMN CLIMATE QUESTION.
Peter Gleick

People hammering Kaine for interrupting while Pence told lie after lie is kind of how we wound up with Trump this close to the presidency.
Brooklyn Spoke

Big take-away from debate is the political class worries about the wrong issues: debt and terrorism instead of climate change and poverty.
sean. ‏@SeanMcElwee

Mike Pence is a fierce defender of your right to practice his faith.
LOLGOP

Every time a Republican mocks a Democrat for preparing for a debate I see a jock shoving a straight-A student into a locker.
Catherynne Valente

For all our fetishizing of outsiders, maybe "politician" is a job that benefits from talent, expertise, and experience, just like any other.
Squarely Rooted

If you're applauding Trump's gaming of the [tax] system, I never want to hear your thoughts about who's taking advantage of welfare again. Ever.
Ben Moser

a little much for conservatives who have complained about "welfare queens" and "takers/makers" and to now be the "tax avoidance is fine" people
@theshrillest

what if hillary *is* the time traveler sent from the future to stop trump but ppl from the future forgot that sexism still exists in our time
@jonnysun

Do you need a Wharton degree to learn how to lose a billion dollars running casinos?
Matt O'Brien ‏@ObsoleteDogma

Anti-Trump conservatives are in the same boat as Jon Snow trying to convince his ppl that there really was something worse than Wildlings.
jelani cobb

I don't just want Tr*mp to lose. I want him to lose by a margin unseen in modern U.S. political history. I want him to be a cautionary tale. I want Tr*mp to lose so thoroughly that for the next 25 years we'll refer to a humiliating event i.e. "You really Tr*mped that one, dude." When my grandchildren ask why we refer to a humiliating loss as "getting Tr*mped," I want to have to explain who he was. And laugh and laugh.
Tananarive Due

It's amazing that, with all that money, Donald Trump does not own a single pair of big-boy pants.
Josh Barro

Hillary can pander all she wants. I'm not worried she'll turn the Supreme Court into a club for the Christian Right.
Hemant Mehta

Here are the tweets related to Trump’s sexual assault bragging, the women who’ve come forward to confirm his bragging, and related topics:

2016 lesson: You can dump oppo that someone is a sexual predator and hasn't paid taxes for 15 years and it will be forgotten in 3 weeks.
Patrick Ruffini

A woman married for decades to a famous and visibly sexist man once explained it to us as young activists like this: Sexism was so pervasive that women of her generation often had to resort to finding a sexist you could at least work with. What I know of racism is that it specializes in offering you an array of suboptimal life choices. I have no doubt sexism does the same.
jelani cobb

That feeling when you can't sleep because everything from the day before has stuck with you and it is TIME TO END THIS WHITE PATRIARCHY BULLSHIT FOREVER. Who's with me
la flaneuse

Donald Trump's words about women enables and normalizes ways of thinking that are at the root of domestic violence.
Christopher Emdin

It's really hard not to view this election as a national referendum on how women should be treated.
Hope Jahren

Will this be the November 9 headline? Putin’s puppet paid a price for pawing pussies.
Pat Thompson ‏@pattho

Only a man would say that a women steps forward with an assault story for the fame. Only a man.
Abigail Disney

America's denial of racism and rape culture are burning down in a raging Trump dumpster fire and I GOT MARSHMALLOWS PEOPLE LET'S DO THIS.
@xeni

"My husband is functionally a small child who only brags about assaulting women to sound cool" is not a great argument for electing him.
Jill Filipovic

Why is it, when men get caught doing sexually abusive things, people quickly liken them to children/little boys?
I Will Block Ya Mama ‏@FeministaJones

JEB: "I don't understand Professor Trelawney, your prophecy said that a Bush would take down Trump. If not me, who?"
Ryan Teague Beckwith

Can we stop with the powerful-woman-crushing-tiny-men-under-her-heel thing? It's never not gross. Please do better:


Rachel Sklar

I love these lectures that women molested by Trump should have spoken up earlier, from Republicans who lack the guts to stand up to him now.
Will Saletan

When Trump said "nobody respects women more than me," he meant he thinks everybody respects him more than they respect women.
Josh Barro

"Well, he didn't rape ME," is not a viable argument against another women's account of being sexually assaulted. Isn't this obvious? A man sexually assaulting one woman does not mean he's done the same to every woman he's ever come in contact with. That proves nothing. I know y'all really want to believe if someone would do something like that you'd see it coming, but they count on the fact that you can't.
Ashley C. Ford ‏@iSmashFizzle

Girls Just Wanna Have ... The Fundamental Understanding That They Are People, Not Objects
Kate Sheppard

One striking thing about anti-feminist female Trump supporters: feminists actually have a much higher opinion of men than they do.
emily nussboo

Still waiting for someone to introduce me to the woman who profited from reporting her rapist.
Katie Klabusich

imagine being an editor at People magazine and your reporter tells you trump assaulted her and you publish a whitewash profile of his marriage anyway
John Cook

Think about how terrifying Trump supporters have been online and at rallies. Now think about how brave these women had to be to come forward.
Jessica Valenti

Man boasts on tape of committing sexual assault. Multiple women say he committed sexual assault. Millions will question women. What a world.
Jeet Heer

Lol:


mh ‏@thematthinrichs

For Trump supporters, the question about women and sex is purity, not agency. Talking about sex disqualifies you from objecting to assault.
Clay Shirky

Kind of amazing that this election is turning into a literal referendum on toxic masculinity.
Josh Barro

Lots of men sounding VERY worried about having a president who doesn't share their gender, but it gets easier after the first two centuries.
Chloe Angyal

Just saw a promoted tweet for The Handmaid's Tale, 2017. New title under Trump, 2017: The Handmaid's Tail.
Pat Thompson

My husband: "When our third president literally owned a sex slave, I am not sure Bill Clinton counts as 'the most predatory president'."
Maggie Koerth-Baker

behind every strong woman is a man wondering why he can't grab her [commenting on the image of Trump stalking around behind Clinton during the second debate]
Aparna Nancherla

Trump's instinct is to abuse whatever power he has, whether groping women's genitals or using FBI to punish his political opponents.
Laurence Tribe

Sorry, the 2005 Trump-Billy Bush conversation did not happen in a locker room. It was in a company vehicle during an episode taping, i.e., *at work*
Jonathan Metzl

"Locker room talk" is the same "boys will be boys" rhetoric that perpetuates and condones sexual assault. We are better than this.
Sara Ahmed

Character is what you do when nobody’s watching. This is Trump sober, mid-day, with someone he barely knows, while wearing a mic.
John Avlon

For perspective, when my homeless, black, schizophrenic client kissed and groped a woman, the DA suggested a six-year prison sentence.
Renate Lunn

Hillary Clinton, if she wins, won't just be first female POTUS. She will be winner of a referendum on a woman's right fully to exist.
Anand Giridharadas

With this election we're simultaneously breaking through the glass ceiling and the rock bottom. We got a really big room now
Megan Amram

Every time I hear "All men act like Trump" I'm more convinced that it's high time America was led by a woman.
almightygod

I keep thinking about Paul Ryan saying women should be "championed and revered." How about you just give me my rights, motherfucker.
Emily L. Hauser

I'm not sure a news cycle has ever made me feel so sad, and so tired. And my guess is that a lot of women feel the same way.
Annie Lowrey

The Trump women learned long ago how to protect their privates parts when Trump is around them:


PatsyLong ‏@SweetPeaPatsy

When thinking about women and sex, the right doesn't care about consent, they only care about purity.
Clay Shirky


"I hate women unless a foreigner is near them, then they MUST BE PROTECT FROM RAPE'S." —every Alt Right Twitter feed
Wendy Molyneux

Huckabee said dirty Beyoncé was ruining America and teaching girls to be strippers. He has nothing to say about Trump though. Huh.
Kaili Joy Gray

As the wife of a beautiful little husband, I believe that we owe our men better than this.
Rachel Fershleiser

If you have to know or be related to people with other statuses than you to care about their human dignity, you are deplorable
Paul Thomas ‏@plthomasEdD

I'd like to hear just one Republican say he's disavowing Trump to set an example for his son.
Angus Johnston ‏@studentactivism

"Women are to be championed and revered, not objectified," Ryan said.
Dude. "Championing" and "revering" ARE objectifying. #evolve
Susan Schorn

"i have a wife and daughters" is the sexist version of "some of my best friends are black." you should hate bigotry regardless of family ties
unpforgettable pfire ‏@firefire100

1. Dear Fathers of Daughters,
I have 4 daughters.
It's (slightly) problematic to say you are against sexism b/c you are a dad to girls...
2. I get what you intend to say (that being a dad of daughters makes you more sensitive to women's issues), but just be pro-women/girl 24/7.
3. The inference when we use daughters as rationale for speaking out on sexism, is that we value women mainly b/c we (barely) helped make 1
Shaun King

Q: How is Trump still in this race?
A: That is how strong misogyny is.
Now stop asking.
Monica Byrne

"My record of sexually harassing women is a distraction from the real issue, which is my record of racism and xenophobia."
Jeffrey Goldberg

Trump denying climate change — which could wipe out humanity — was less damaging to him than an Access Hollywood video. Meditate on that.
David Sirota

So much of the GOP's racism, etc is couched in the idea of protecting conservative white women
Jessica Valenti

Speaker Ryan says women should be "championed and revered." Just treat us like adults, thanks.
Tina Liebling

For my fellow men: It really is OK to be disgusted without referencing women you know. None of your best friends have to be Black either.
Phillip Atiba Goff

remember that this is the sack of shit insisting we can't let immigrant men in because they'll assault women
Saladin Ahmed

If the RNC abandons Trump now, it's because they thought Trump could win despite racism, but realize this likely just cost them white women.
Alan Kestrel

when Trump is alone with the guys he brags about assaulting women. when women are alone together we warn each other about men like him.
Amanda Hess

 On voting rights and voter suppression specifically:

Voting is not a use-it-or-lose-it right, but states like Tennessee continue to treat it that way.
Demos

In 100 years, historians will look back at Shelby County, gerrymandering and voter ID and consider this to be the second age of voter suppression.
Ian Millhiser

i still can't get over trump complaining about rigged elections when republicans used data to eliminate voting methods used by black people
sean. ‏@SeanMcElwee

GOP kills Voting Rights Act, enacts voter ID laws and gets Wikileaks hacks from opponent. But Dems are rigging the election.
Keith Boykin

Unbelievable that party that is literally disenfranchising people right now is claiming election is rigged.
Ari Berman

How wild is this election? A white candidate urges his white supporters to intimidate black voters at the polls and it's not leading headlines
igorvolsky

Meanwhile, native people and their allies have been occupying part of North Dakota near the Standing Rock reservation, protesting and blocking a pipeline that would connect the Bakken oil fields in northwestern North Dakota to refineries in Illinois:

Dakota Access Pipeline was originally slated to pass north of Bismarck but was deemed risky to the city's water so they moved it by the Rez.
Ruth Hopkins

The Sioux are literally being forced at gunpoint to accept ecological risks that North Dakota's white residents refused.
scare-acotta warrior ‏@suntzufuntzu

imagine if all the thousands of Cleveland [baseball] fans went to North Dakota to support a real tribe?
William Lindeke

Can we REALLY be surprised when white folx work to steal Native land using the force of law of a white supremacist system? #NoDAPL #History
BigIndianGyasi

"The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism." -@rdunbaro
Maya Schenwar

To charge a reporter filming a protest with "rioting" is an affront to freedom of the press, the First Amendment and the U.S. Constitution.
Steven Greenhouse ‏@greenhousenyt

Which segues into the topic of racism and policing:

Media says: If white men are not living the American Dream then the system must be rigged. For everyone else, failure is our own fault.
Stacey Patton

"222,505,049 hours of forced labor were performed by slaves between 1619 and 1865, when slavery was ended." [citing Tom Dispatch]
Nikhil Goyal

If there's one thing that really bugs me, it's people insisting oppressed groups get all their praxis correct before they can be listened to
S.I. Rosenbaum

Dear white people: we are not the good guys. We have never been the good guys on this continent. It's time to change.
Carol Black ‏@cblack__

The white NIMBY cry of "I'm woke in my heart even if I don't want an integrated neighborhood" has profound echoes in how we talk about 2016. This idea is that racism is an intrinsic personal trait that you can have or not have even while doing things that are, objectively, pretty racist.
Ned Resnikoff

if you're white and armed:
nobody will call you a "bad dude" and murder you on a highway.
nobody will call you a "bad hombre" and deport you.
profloumoore ‏@loumoore12

We live in a nation where armed white terrorism is legal, but being black, 12, and with a toy gun will get you murdered by the state.
profloumoore ‏@loumoore12

Remember: It's not terrorism when right wing militias do it. #oregonstandoff
Occupy Wall Street

When people assert that Latinx is an ethnicity not a race, what are they presuming about "real" racial categories?
Jonathan Rosa

"This idea that black people have had no impact on history is one of the foundational ideas of white supremacy.” — @ProfessorCrunk (Brittney Cooper)
TED Talks

Even lots of white liberals owe apologies to people of color for complaining about "always making it about race." Plot twist: it is.
Vann R. Newkirk II ‏@fivefifths

Dear racists: How can black people be "lazy" AND taking soooo many jobs away from white people via affirmative action programs?
Stacey Patton

The problem with diversity in publishing is NOT Kansas. It's NYC.
The problem with diversity in entertainment is NOT Mississippi. It's LA.
Ebony Elizabeth

The Constitution was written by slave owners. Flawed from the start. SCOTUS must interpret it for now not then. [from the third debate]
Judith Browne Dianis

to the guy in college who dropped out of a Black Arts class because it was about black artists and not dark magic: i hope you're well
chris ‏@funkyassdg

What would happen if we treated black men as the most likely victims of violence and not just potential perpetrators?
Gene Demby

"Understanding emancipation [after 1865] as a refugee crisis helps us better understand what it was like to exit slavery."
KEW ‏@KidadaEWilliams

When one side wants the other side not to exist there is no "Both sides are equal" but y'all keep pretending. "I want you to stop being a bigot" and "I want you to die" aren't things that can coexist peacefully. Just saying.
Mikki Kendall ‏@Karnythia

James Elder @jamesofputney wrote:
Woah. 30% of the black male population of Alabama has *permanently* lost the right to vote, owing to a criminal conviction.

Wreck Of The John B ‏@johnb78 responded:
for newcomers to US politics: yes, this is why most ex-slave states with huge black populations aren't swing states

black people are always right about racism. women are always right about misogyny. don't ever fucking doubt us again.
@carvellwallace

Black immigrants much more likely to be deported over criminal offenses, data shows.
Left of Black

Many whites make a strong distinction between two categories — 'the blacks', and black people. 'The blacks' are associated with usual negative stereotypes held by whites. Black people are neighbors, co-workers, maybe someone at church. This lets whites avoid modifying prejudices based on blacks they know personally, and to associate blacks they don't know with stereotypes. Many many — like 10s of millions of — whites feel this way. Black people they know are sympathetic, but 'the blacks' are gaming welfare, etc.
Clay Shirky

A job guarantee is a vital part of the Black Lives Matter platform. Unemployment and poverty are policy choices.
Mark Paul

I am deeply ashamed that so many in my country think asking for police reform and basic accountability is anti-cop. Says a lot, really.
Julian Darius

What makes communities safer is not the police at all. It is strong social community ties. Mass incarceration destroys those ties.
Alan Mills ‏@alan_uplc

Few terms irritate me more than “race relations.” There is no such thing as “race relations” just the relative absence or presence of racism
jelani cobb

People of color: Why weren't we included?
Klandom: Stop complaining and make your own.
People of color: *makes own*
Klandom: Why aren't we centered in this?
Mikki Kendall ‏@Karnythia

Philip Atiba Goff made a great point about this in the Harvard Gazette last year. "Injustice is criminogenic; it creates crime."
Dell M. Hamilton

objective journalism rule: white identity politics must always be framed as race neutral, and then justified in the strongest terms. above all: there are no "average" or "working class" people of color, these terms must always refer to white people
Adam Servianski ‏@AdamSerwer

Chicago's liberal #NotAllCops types are now faced with evidence that 90% of of our cops are downright Trumpian. And they won't care. Because they don't expect to be the target of state violence, anti-Blackness is a topic, not a crisis. To them it's not worth a traffic jam.
Kelly Hayes ‏@MsKellyMHayes

On sustainable cities and climate change:

I say, drive like there are kids everywhere. They're the ultimate distracted pedestrians.
Stephannie Roy @DocSteph

"Pedestrians first" is a two-word law with the power to transform communities; any size, income, location, etc. Healthier and vibrant for ALL.
Gil Penalosa

Since the 1950s most workplaces have been designed to be inaccessible by any reasonably efficient transit. Never imply this is transit's fault.
Jarrett Walker

On the benefits of walking:


Greg Vann

People don't want pipelines, but won't join a campaign to get rid of cars. Mixed message.
Free Public Transit

Of the many things one hopes future humans will exist to look back on with horror, fracking is really up there.
Sarah Smarsh

There are many good people in public service. But as long as people aspire to leafy, car-dependent suburbs, they will be ineffective.
Free Public Transit

Imagine a world where instead of the media whining about "transit freeloading" we complained about legislature's inability to fund transit.
☈↯an ‏@pyry

If the sign looks like this, then perhaps we need to consider more substantial protection for people who walk:


Don Kostelec ‏@KostelecPlan

"In Latin American cities cars do 32% trips BUT generate 72% of CO2 AND use 85% of street space" No equity. Un-democratic. Must change now. - Margarita Parra
Gil Penalosa

Isn't it weird that everyone agrees this is hideous but somehow can't stop replicating it?
Alex Forrest ‏@380kmh

Same issue in every city: businesses totally over estimate link between car and customers:

Ludo Campbell-Reid ‏@AklDesignChamp

I believe the children are the future /
Teach them well and when they get in the way
run them over b/c cell phones
William Lindeke

Illustration from "Visualized Civics" (1962), warning suburbanites of being lured to the exciting city.


David Mann ‏@PlannerMann

Driving with a phone in your hand is the functional equivalent of driving with a beer in your hand.
William Lindeke

Observation about San Francisco: the roads seem to be similarly sized compared to Twin Cities, yet they support several times the density.
Buffaloman ‏@reubencollins

There's a big myth that fighting climate change costs money. Not true. Just stop subsidizing cars. Low-hanging fruit.
Free Public Transit

Traditional commercial streets host vital economic and social activities. But planning only for cars limits the former and kills the latter.
Rik Adamski

When all else fails, use emergency response times to keep wide, fast, dangerous streets open for zoomzoom.
@mikesonn

Every time a new building includes space for cars, it passes those costs on to tenants.
CityLab

"Piggy-back" with successful events. All marathons should end with Open Streets along the route + more for the day. Open major intersections
Gil Penalosa

"Parking is a necessary evil but we wanted to make it as uncomfortable as possible." From an Oakland developer.
Allison Billings

Two words would make our cities more livable: Pedestrians First.
Gil Penalosa

Great if you know that only 16 cargo ships emit as much sulphur as all cars in the world. Revolting how well this dirty secret is kept.
Stein van Oosteren

A tale of two cities. Create war zones and people will dress for battle. Create pleasant spaces and people will dress how they like:


Toby Edwards ‏@IsSaddleThereIs

Unimpeded automobility and ultra-convenient access to parking should not automatically trump all other considerations in our civilization.
Rik Adamski

We can do things differently instead of doubling/tripling down on car-centric waste and destruction. It is possible. It feels like small local changes aren't happening bcs of larger national inertia when small local changes could create new national inertia
@mikesonn

Portland's fine grid of streets: apparently conceived by speculators who reasoned that more corner lots would yield higher profit. #Walkable
jennifer keesmaat

There were a few tweets about education:

"do not treat me like a child!"
what does that mean? To be treated like a child…
@Sisyphus38

We just completely infantilize, degrade, disempower teenagers. It makes them INSANE. Then we say: that's teenagers.
Carol Black ‏@cblack__

why do we continue to "teach" organizational skills to kids that don't want them? We act like they really care but just can't organize.
@Sisyphus38

The $80 billion we spend each yr on incarcerating people could double the salary of every high school teacher in America. #SchoolsNotPrisons
Michael Skolnik

Today I'm going to teach you how to assemble a piece of furniture you may or may not receive three years from now. Pay attention just in case.
@Sisyphus38

And finally, the best of the rest:

When you hit your child you are the first person to teach them how to rationalize oppression.
Stacey Patton

There is no "PC culture." There are people who care that their words are received the way they were intended, and the rest of y'all.
Ashley C. Ford ‏@iSmashFizzle

Nygreen: "A consequence of meritocratic ideology is that people with insufficient amounts of merit get positioned as undeserving citizens."
Nikhil Goyal

A man was sentenced for shouting “Take it off! This is America” and forcibly removing woman’s hijab on a flight.
MEND Community

The most daring thing to do with your life is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
Kurt Vonnegut

I have never understood so many writers' obsessions with trainwreck authors like Thompson, Kerouac, Bukowski, etc.
Robert O. Simonson

The phrase “manufactured homes” makes no sense to me. What, like other houses are just found in the woods ready to go?
Sarah Mackey ‏@sarahjanet

Nostalgic westerners: Drop the superiority illusion! The tech-talented in India, China, Brazil, Malaysia, Russia... outnumber us = will do most innovation.
Ola Rosling

Ironically, the word "classy" is not classy.
Chris Steller

Important read from @thinkprogress—this is what women are forced to do to avoid street harassment:


Kyle Griffin

"Wrong track" just isn't a useful tool any more. It's mixing different grievances of Democrats and Republicans.
Aaron Zitner

Yes, I've heard of work-life balance. I gave a workshop on it last week and am co-editing a related special issue to which I'm contributing.
Shit Academics Say

Too many women characters are made "complex" by sexual assault.
Nasty Woman Alexia ‏@lextopia

In a relatively short time we've taken a system built to resist destruction by nuclear weapons and made it vulnerable to toasters.
Jeff Jarmoc

Two rules for email:
1. Never put anything in an email that you wouldn't write on a postcard.
2. What is a postcard.
Chris Steller

If elites let things continue to fall apart, people will continue to radicalize or acquiesce to radicals.
Joseph Nathan Cohen

I feel like I have Injustice Attention Deficit Disorder. What do we focus on? #NoDAPL #racism #poverty #incarceration
Linda Sarsour

Look, I don't know why I have to know all the boroughs of your dumb city [while New York]. You don't even know the name of mine. This has been your Iowa gripe of the day.
lyz lenz

"88% of adults who are incarcerated report being a part of the foster care system." —Risk and Criminal Justice
Jennifer Viets

This "tip" is Christians in a nutshell: I know nothing about you, but let me tell you how to live your life.
almightygod

There are some things that must be said. English/Philosophy/History majors: you did nothing wrong by making those choices. Debt is wrong. A world that makes people majoring in critical topics regretful about their investments is a world going nowhere good.
Sara Goldrick-Rab

If you think a huge group of journalists can pull off a long-lead, multi-publication conspiracy, you've never met a huge group of journalists.
Helen Rosner

The pink katydid has erythrism: a rare genetic mutation that produces large amounts of red pigment in their bodies:


Nature Is Weird

"What are you doing to earn your citizenship?" —Julián Gustavo Gómez @ittakesii
Breeanna Pierce

The U.S. spends far less than other developed countries on job-training systems and retraining.
EHRP ‏@econhardship

We can’t grow from fear — it shrinks us and our world, making us more insular and isolated from perceived “others.”
Demos

a reminder that the scientist who coined the term 'alpha male' to describe wolves abandoned it as useless years ago
::flexes fathering muscles, howls::
turns out being a good parent matters more to the wolfpack than being 'strong' does
Saladin Ahmed

Part of leadership is just being straightforward. We need more of that.
Zephyr Teachout

Being exceptional is like being wealthy or good looking: generally better to let other people say it about you than saying about yourself. On a related note, I think this is the problem with teaching history as a series of inevitable triumphs. We lose track of that fragility.
jelani cobb

"How different our policy prescriptions [would be] if we began viewing poverty as the result of a kind of robbery."
Nikhil Goyal

Poll: People vastly over-estimate fraudulent welfare claims and dependence on welfare:


sean. ‏@SeanMcElwee

When life hands you lemons, pelt them at the houses of the bourgeoisie for being draped in luxury and privilege.
@janinebrito

Politicians should spend far less time focused on reviving manufacturing and far more on helping health care aides
Rachel Cohen ‏@rmc031

Scientists gave squirrels fitness trackers and found that males are lazy and females do all the work.
Michiko Kakutani

Here is dirty secret about financial crises. Countries get in trouble not when they spend too much, but when citizens don't pay taxes.
Chris Arnade

4 regions with the same GDP:


Amazing Maps

time to burn down the insurance companies and redistribute their profits for a single-payer system
Michael Witchney

Of my friends and acquaintances, I can easily think of 25 people who are bigger Hamilton fans than I am. I think the main reason is that 'Hamilton' is so close to perfect. It gets so many things so right that my brain disappears into it. And that's a deeply powerful thing, to be able to accept something so completely into your head and heart. Especially something of this scope.
Rainbow Rowell

In Alton, Illinois, at the monument for Elijah Lovejoy, the abolitionist journalist killed here in 1837 by a pro-slavery mob. He was 35:


Sarah Kendzior

Me on Twitter: "We must dismantle white heteropatriarchal capitalism."
Me on Facebook: "Here is a photo of me in 1st grade in a cardigan."
@BroderickGreer

Infographics from the Wall Street Journal show how downwardly mobile white rural America is killing itself off. Purple=awful on maps:


Charles Jaco

Little kid runs up to the dog as I'm walking her. "Let him smell your hand!" the father yells to him. Kid holds his hand up to me.
Philip Bump

Weltschmerz: mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state.
Merriam-Webster

Skulls for Hallowe'en E'en

If you don't know about art cars... well, you should rectify that omission right now. (Here's the Wikipedia page and the Minneapolis Art Car Parade page.) But for now, here's an art truck I saw today in St. Paul:




It's all done with a black permanent marker, freehand, from what I could tell up close.






That last one could be wallpaper, I think.

Happy Halloween!

North Branch Library

Today I stumbled across an architectural gem in North Minneapolis. Of course, I was first drawn to it by the lettering over the door:


Just south of Broadway on Emerson North, the red brick former library was a surprise to me:


The Wikipedia tells me it's been closed as a library since 1977, when it was also put on the National Register of Historic Places. It was designed in 1893 and is the oldest library building in the Twin Cities. It's thought to have been the first branch library in the U.S. with open shelves for people to browse without help from a librarian.

I was glad to learn it's currently owned by a nonprofit organization called EMERGE Community Development. They use it as a Career and Technology Center, which isn't far afield from the kind of use many urban libraries are put to these days.

__

The second photo is by McGhiever from the Wikimedia Commons.

Sad Iron

I found this little bit of history recently, and it's now out in my garage serving as a doorstop:


I figured it was something to do with ironing, but wasn't entirely sure until I read this. The name "sad iron" is an alternative to the more common "flat iron," where "sad" means "solid," differentiating this heavy piece of metal from the lighter, flat irons that were in common use.

This particular product came with several of these sad irons, plus an asbestos-lined cover with a handle that had two purposes: it kept the iron hot longer and prevented the handle from heating up.


We can all imagine that would be more comfortable for the person using the iron than the typical single-piece iron with handle.

The Asbestos Sad Iron was made from the late 1800s until the 1920s, when electric irons ran them out of business.

How to Lose the Message

There must be a special hell experienced by the graphic designers who make signs for shopping malls. Is the result of their work always stupid, or is it just me?

This is the latest from Rosedale Mall in Roseville, Minnesota:


Here's the brief: Make a sign telling visitors the mall has free wifi. Sounds simple, and the bottom part gets to that message pretty directly.

But what is that thing at the top? Is it supposed to be a heart made of a phone and a price tag? With wifi waves emanating from it?

And who thought "ShopPings" was an effective slogan or name or whatever it's supposed to be? When I first saw this, I thought Pings was the name of a store in the mall (Shop Pings!) even though I'm familiar with what ping means. What percent of the mall-shopping public knows what ping means?

And even if someone does know, is pinging what 99.999% of shoppers would plan do with the free wifi at a shopping mall? Are there many developers hanging out in the hallway pinging devices?

I can only imagine that shoppers look at the sign and ignore the top part completely, or perhaps they don't even see the key message about free wifi because it's overwhelmed by incomprehensible stuff above.

Son of Baldwin

Today I am inspired by the writer who creates the anonymous Twitter and Facebook accounts called Son of Baldwin (as in James Baldwin). He posted this to Facebook:

You know what I'm tired of?

That when a black person shares their experience with casual racism, folks can't wait to come into the discussion to implicate the black person.

"You sure you're just not being too sensitive?"

"How do you know it was racism? You don't know that lady's heart!"

"Why do you have to make everything about race???"

"You sure you're just not misreading the situation? I mean, if you look for racism, you're sure to find it."

Yeah, well, you're sure to find it because, in America, it's ALWAYS THERE.

Like Melissa Harris-Perry said:

"In a nation with the racial history of the United States I am baffled by the idea that non-racism would be the presumption and that it is racial bias which must be proved beyond reasonable doubt. More than 100 years of philosophical, psychological and sociological research that begins, at least, with the work of W.E.B. Du Bois has mapped the deeply entrenched realities of racial bias on the American consciousness. If anything, racial bias, not racial innocence is the better presumption..."

Black people don't make everything about race. White people made race about everything. This is THEIR invention. THEY were the ones who blanketed it over everything living and not. They can't get mad at black people for noticing the blanket. Well, they can get mad; and they can stay mad, but it doesn't at all alter that irrefutable truth....

Racism in America is as pervasive as air, and as natural a response for racists as breathing.

Racists don't even have to think about it. It's automatic.

"Black people don't make everything about race. White people made race about everything."

Sick at Heart

This morning, Minnesota Public Radio woke me up (in more ways than one) with a story titled Anti-Islam speakers urge rural Minnesota crowds to prepare for Muslim attack. It's even worse than it sounds.

Two different speakers are highlighted, one an ex-FBI agent and the other the son of a Baptist missionary in Egypt. They appear at churches, mostly, all over the northern two-thirds of Minnesota, warning

that refugees from Somalia, Syria and other Muslim countries intend to wage holy war on the United States, and overthrow the government and the justice system. He claimed that Muslims are buying up gas stations and working at airports to pave the way for a violent takeover. And told the crowd to prepare.

"You're essentially getting the county fortified," he said.

That's the FBI guy. The Egyptian guy is, maybe, worse:

"Islam is not a religion," he said, highlighting one of his frequent talking points. "It's a savage cult. Therefore, it is unconstitutional for a Muslim to practice Islam in America."

Dakdok argues for the mass deportation of Muslims from the United States. He wears a Donald Trump pin on his suit jacket. He warns of the end times.

This was both the stupidest and the most awful part of the story:

Dakdok holds the bulk of his Minnesota events in small northern towns — places with few, if any Muslims. So does Guandolo, and he said that's intentional. The Twin Cities, he told the Warroad crowd, are overrun with Muslims.

"Minneapolis is lost," Guandolo said. "Gone." A woman in the crowd asked if there was no hope to get it back.

"No I didn't say that," he said. "I'm telling you. Marines, we fight for hills. We take them back. It's time to put freedom back on the offensive where it belongs."

Let me tell you, Minneapolis is not "lost." I worked for more than a decade in an area of Minneapolis these hateful people would consider "lost" and it's completely fine. This is a new form of Fox New's "no-go zones" — completely made up.

The absurdity continues:

Paul King sat in the first row of Guandolo's audience. He's a former Air Force translator and coder for Marvin Windows. He's been researching Islam for years and said people in rural Minnesota are in a better position to recognize what he called the threat posed by Muslims.

"If you're rubbing shoulders with a lot of Muslims," he said, "there may be an immediate dismissal as, you know that's just racist, or that's just xenophobic, or that's hateful. So, there might be more of an open-mindedness to look at what's a possible threat up here."

Yes, you become more open-minded the less you know about something. Knowing people makes it much harder to hate them.

Meanwhile, Anthea Butler pointed out on Twitter that "A majority of white evangelical Protestants (62%) and white mainline Protestants (54%) favor the temporary ban on Muslims," according to a PRRI poll released today.

Gee, I wonder why that might be?

___

Treat refugees as human beings and they will love you forever. —Yanis Varoufakis 

Homemade Hillary

The number of political lawn signs in St. Paul this fall is definitely lower than in the past.

One recent Star Tribune letter writer said she's going without because her car was vandalized in 2012 just after she put up a Romney sign. So that was a vote for fear.

I tend to think it's because people hate this election — not only for its agent orange provocateur but just for the sheer length of it — so much that they don't want to be associated with it. Which doesn't mean they don't have an opinion on the candidates, or don't plan to vote, though.

But at least one household in my neighborhood cares enough to have made their own sign for Hillary:


It took me a few trips past this yard to notice it in all its subtlety. So I'm not sure it's effective as signage, but as art...it's nice.

David Duke, Meet Clay Shirky

I've been saving this screen snapshot of a David Duke tweet:


In it, Duke conflates "Western civilization" with a doe-eyed blonde gal, the classically virginal white woman who must be protected from rape by black and brown men. "This,"  he says with an unclear antecedent, is worth preserving.

The words superimposed over her photo say Western civilization, but the image says white womanhood, especially when Duke continues by saying he plans to "guide our people up the evolutionary stairway to the stars." Jeez louise. The evolutionary stairway takes us to being blonde and porcelain-skinned? And here I was hoping it would take us to more empathy and the ability to get along with everyone who doesn't look like us.

More recently, Clay Shirky responded to a Vox first-person story that has this headline: I’m voting for Jill Stein. It’s a moral choice. It reflects who I am as a person.

This is everything wrong with third-party voting, in one succinct headline.

A vote is a choice to join a power-seeking coalition. It is not a personal affirmation of a coherent ideology. It is not a moral choice.

Voting can never be a reflection of any individual voter's preferences, because those preferences are too varied between voters. There is no correlation among voters' ideal policy choices for economic vs. social vs. international issues.

If you want legal marijuana, I have no idea what you think of Syria. If you want a Syrian no-fly zone, I don't know what you think the top tax rate should be.

An imaginary world with only three issues — Legalize / No Fly / Raise Tax — and only Y/N preferences would still need eight parties to represent voters. A world with six issues and a moderate position between Y and N would need over 700 such parties, each representing ~0.1% of the electorate.

Even multiple parties can't represent most voters' preferences most of the time, and the U.S. system limits viable parties to two at a time. A strong Presidency and winner-take-all voting has cemented two-party politics since before the first competitive election, in 1796. This is a Constitutional issue, not an electoral one. A third party could only succeed if the Constitution were re-written.

Since democracy prevents the government from being run by a coherent ideology by design, it can only ever offer choices among lesser evils. Under these circumstances, all a Presidential vote can say is "This politician will use power in ways I marginally prefer over that one."

And all a third party vote can say is "Whatever everybody else decides is OK with me." It's a refusal of political engagement altogether.

"This politician will use power in ways I marginally prefer over that one" doesn't make for much of a slogan that appeals to our evolution-derived brains, however. Our brains vastly prefer a simple story with a clear moral, and tribal thinking like that displayed by David Duke.

One more piece of evidence against the idea of a divine creator.

Old Stuff

I didn't intend to go antiquing, but there they were: about a dozen high-quality dealers set up adjacent to my noon commitment today. I bought a few things, but took more pictures.

First, two sides of a crate from Griggs, Cooper and Co. coffee roasters:


"Makes the best drink." Now there's an assertive slogan.


Check out the shapes of the letters in COFFEE. Pretty crazy!

Then there was this litho stone:


Be sure to click to enlarge this one because each part of it is a different logo for a local business, and there's some cool type and lettering in there.

I couldn't resist this sign as a name that may have been bad for business:


For the next time you need an image to go with your thoughts about how so much of modern culture has turned to pablum:


etymonline.com informs me that pablum is a form of the Latin pabulum, which meant fodder, food, or nourishment. Its more current, negative connotation derived directly from this product, sold starting in 1931, and was first attested as used by Spiro Agnew in 1970.

Finally, this amazing box:


It still has the Belgian (or maybe French?) price tag on it. I have no idea what the product is; searching "ouate revulsive" leads me to believe it may be cotton soaked with capsicum (pepper oil). Maybe for muscle pain?

What Will the Rollout Look Like?

As seen on Twitter today, here are a few thoughts from Tony Dutzik, a senior policy analyst at Frontier Group, a progressive think tank. He was ruminating about the path we may or may not take toward automated vehicles:

Fleets/networks have two big advantages over individual ownership.

1. Fleets/networks can deploy a lot of vehicles in a defined market quickly. Turnover in personal ownership model is slow and scattered. 
2. Fleets/networks are far better equipped to capture efficiency/utilization gains from automation than individuals.

In other words, there is a strong case for shared/mobility-as-service models benefiting disproportionately from automation. It’s not for nothing that the first deployment of (sorta) autonomous vehicles was with Uber in Pittsburgh. Even Tesla itself is planning for its autonomous vehicles to be part of a proprietary ride-sharing network. And the fact that most mass automakers have shared mobility partners suggests they get this, too, at least enough to hedge bets.

Does that mean the fleet/network model will inevitably win out everywhere? Heck no.

Why? Look around. Our existing transport system is already loaded with inefficiency, irrationality and waste. Path dependencies and bad policy could make the automated future look as problematic as the manually driven present.

But we need to understand how automation can change the game if we’re going to pull the right policy levers to get a better result. Policy nudges – taxation, pricing, parking policy, access restrictions, etc. – can go a long way to move things toward "heaven.” Automation provides a sense of urgency to do those things, many of which we should’ve been doing all along.

If advocates and officials get educated and organized, automation can be lever to achieve long-awaited public-interest goals.

When self-driving cars are everywhere in 10 years or so, remember you read this here. If it hasn't happened in the way that's most spatially and energy-efficient, you'll know what went wrong.

After the Debate

If you stay up late enough watching MSNBC after a presidential debate, you get to hear some off-the-wall stuff, such as Hugh Hewitt saying Al Franken's election in 2008 went Franken's way because of election fraud (by election officials) in Minneapolis, and that Democratic voters in open-primary states got Trump elected to the Republican nomination. Yes, he really said those things last night.

But you also see footage like this, in which Rachel Maddow says the following about Trump's perpetual claim that Clinton should have changed the tax laws to stop him from paying no taxes or stopped Chinese steel imports:

The problem is, when [Trump] said, You should have stopped me from doing it, you should have passed a law to ban me from doing it.... Well, if you're conceding that you'll act as badly as you can, as immorally as you can, in your own interest, whenever you can — why should we elect you to be president of the United States, where there will be fewer constraints on your power as a human being than any other human in a nondespotic country on earth?

A good question, Rachel. So much of how civil societies run is premised on the idea that people will mostly do the right thing, even if it's not written in the law. Sociopaths take advantage of that. But usually, we don't elect one to be president.

How Geology Affects Voting

If you've ever seen one of those county-level presidential voting maps, this may look familiar:


What's up with all of those red counties across the South, except that curving belt of blue? I've always assumed those counties had more black people, but I didn't think too much about why until I saw this tweet by Nick Baumann today:

See the blue belt on the Obama/Romney map? That's Cretaceous coastline. Fertile soil later led to high cotton production + high slave population.

And that high enslaved population led to a higher number of black voters today.

Here's a map, also by county, showing the concentration of enslaved populations in the 1860 census:


It's not completely one-to-one, but I'd be willing to bet the counties that were black or dark gray in 1860 and are now red are ones where black people were run out of the county during Reconstruction or had extra-large outflows of black people during the Great Migration in the early 20th century.

But you can definitely see that most of the blue counties today were among the black and dark gray counties on the 1860 map, even though the white people in those counties are the least likely to vote for a modern-day Democrat.

Term Limits and Lobbying Bans

You may not hear about it, since he can't help going off his script to talk about rigging the election and Crooked Hillary, but since yesterday Donald Trump has put out some actual policy proposals.

He wants to impose term limits on members of Congress and ban lobbying by former members and administration officials. His proposal would:

• ban executive branch employees and members of Congress from lobbying the government for five years after leaving office
• prohibit senior executive branch officials from ever lobbying on behalf of a foreign government
• expand the definition of lobbyist to include people who label themselves “consultants” or “advisers” while helping clients access Washington elites and craft federal policy.

Trump's term limit proposal is vaguer than that; no number of years is given. Term limits sound like a good idea, and may even be something we could find common ground on between right and left. But of course, it's not that simple, as shown in this article from Governing magazine, which describes in detail the problems with term limits since they were imposed in California in 1990.

Still, I could imagine some form of term limits, just not extremely short ones like California's eight years. But surely, three or four six-year U.S. Senate terms and 20 years in the House is enough? I believe our elected representatives need time to become experts, but two decades should do it.

As for the lobbying ban, again, I think that some workable system could be figured out to decrease if not stop the revolving door. Decreasing or ending our current Supreme Court-endorsed legal assumptions — that money equals speech and corporations are people — would help.

Any lobbying restrictions will have to be modified once people figure out how to game the new system, but it's worth trying, and updating to improve it.

Clinton already has some similar proposals, though they're never covered in the news (though I bet they're on her website). According to USA Today:

Clinton has promised to call for a constitutional amendment overturning the Supreme Court’s [Citizens United] decision in her first 30 days as president and has endorsed legislation by Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., that would clamp down on lobbyists posing as “consultants." The measure also would bar former executive branch employees from taking a job at a company they regulated for two years after leaving the government.

Those are obviously less extreme measures than Trump has proposed. I wonder if anything will come of any of this, though, since there is such a fox-guarding-the-hen-house reality when it comes to Congress regulating itself.