After November 2016’s crushingly long Twitter round-up of dire sadness, I vowed to mark fewer tweets in December. (Retweet more, favorite less, I thought.) I was somewhat successful, but there are still a lot.
On Trump generally:
It is deeply troubling when you realize that the president-elect generally does not know what he is talking about and when he does he lies.On Trump and Vladimir Putin, and Russian interference in the U.S. election:
John Dean
We are in for four years of the most neglectful dad in the world as our president.
Anand Giridharadas @anandwrites
Trump with executive power is different from Trump as a civilian. Power will make him more paranoid, insular and cruel. Like all authoritarians.
Sarah Kendzior
Autocorrect wanted to use "president eject" when I was writing "president elect" and honestly, "President Eject Trump" sounds so much better.
John Scalzi
They said Obama should be evaluated based on how he helps all Americans. But Trump is only responsible for helping working class white folk?
Samuel Sinyangwe @samswey
Why every tweet in a tweet storm should be a self-contained sentence or thought:
Angus Johnston @studentactivism
Trump has trouble hiring fiddlers for the official burning of the USA; offers bookers diplomatic posts because we're way beyond banana republic.
Sarah Kendzior
Hard to process that the next president is both a conscienceless threat to the republic and also a heartbreakingly weak and sad broken soul.
David Frum
Every tweet from Donald says the same thing. "My father hated me and nothing I do will ever be good enough.”
Graham Linehan
I have to give America this much credit: They went through four election cycles with "reality TV stars" before they elected one President.
almightygod
Nixon was evil but he wasn't ignorant.
W was ignorant but he wasn't evil.
The incoming combo is unpresidented.
John Fugelsang
Everyone makes spelling errors. The problem is that certain jobs (i.e, the Presidency) require impulse control and thought before action.
Chase Strangio
It is weird to have a President-elect you would trust with absolutely nothing. Man would steal a pie from a windowsill.
Robert O. Simonson
An under-appreciated virtue of previous presidents was that you could forget about them for days at a time.
Bill McKibben
Once you see Trump's hair in the New York Times' typeface you can't ever unsee it (I'm so sorry):
Jennings Brown
It's good that Donald Trump keeps telling us he's a smart person. Otherwise we would probably forget.
Dean Baker
In my experience with genuinely smart people, they very rarely tell you how smart they are. In fact, it's the opposite. And unlike our POETUS, who actually appears to be genuinely dumb, the smartest people I've met are the most curious and read insatiably.
John Warner @biblioracle
It's notable that people who went into cardiac arrest over Obama bowing to Emperor Akihito have made peace with Trump’s slavish devotion to Putin.On Trump’s cabinet appointees (it amazes me that I don't have any about his nominees for EPA, HUD, HHS, and Education, let alone Bannon or Flynn, but it's all so overwhelming and they are generally covered in a couple of these that address the whole slate):
jelani cobb
Congratulations to everyone who had "one" for "How many black presidents would it take to get the GOP to side with Russia?"
LOLGOP
No republican/conservative that is sanguine about the Russian intervention in our election process can consider themselves a patriot. Recent events have proven that the Republican party would sell their own mother to have power, and evangelicals as well. Trump's presidency will always be suspect, tainted, and illegitimate. Full stop. There is no claiming of a victory here. I'll say it again for the cheap seats: White people who voted for Trump to protect their so-called interests will be hurt deeply... Authoritarianism is an equal opportunity offender, so if you think whiteness will save you under a Trump admin, you are mistaken. The biggest danger is how religion is going to be used in Trump's administration as a cudgel and a way to promote authoritarianism. I won't expand that all here on Twitter, but suffice to say that it isn't just about abortion, same-sex marriage or the court. Evangelical Christianity in the Trump administration will be used to promote a nationalist fervor against "threatening groups” and you can fill in the blanks about who constitutes "threatening groups.” Same way Putin uses Russian Orthodox church. Trump doesn't give two figs about religion, but it will get him where he needs to go, if we choose to ignore the signs.
ProfB @AntheaButler
It is possible to condemn both Russian electoral interference AND the U.S.’s own interventionist legacy. I refuse to choose one or the other. Not here for the performative left-ness, thanks.
Kevin Gannon @TheTattooedProf
A good lesson for Americans to take away from this is that it feels like shit to wonder if another country's influencing who governs you.
Jon Schwarz @tinyrevolution
Dear GOP,
Don't lecture others on patriotism when you knew a foreign leader was manipulating your own country's election — and did nothing.
Greg Hogben @MyDaughtersArmy
We are all discovering that what we thought of as democracy was actually just a fragile, eroding code of conduct among elites.
David Klion
Trump’s secretary of labor pick believes workers are ‘overprotected’ and shouldn’t get breaks.There were just a couple on the Electoral College, since I pulled a few out to write about earlier:
Raw Story
Jeff Sessions omits decades of records for his AG confirmation hearing - he once argued that doing this was a felony.
Katrina vandenHeuvel
As Attorney General, Sessions would oversee office responsible for ensuring that judicial nominees' records are complete for Senate confirmation hearing.
Leslie Proll
Trump is cutting out the middleman by putting wealthy donors directly in charge of agencies they want eradicated.
Demos
With Donald Trump's gang we'll have billionaires stealing billions, but at least we'll have fewer people improperly getting food stamps.
Dean Baker
If someone wrote a script about a high council whose job it was to make a planet desolate and lifeless like Dune? You'd have Trump's cabinet.
BigIndianGyasi
you won't find a better summation of the Obama-Trump transition than a nuclear physicist being replaced by a "Dancing With the Stars" washout.
Simon Maloy
we don't have slavery any more but we still have a system that was designed to make individual votes unequal because of it.There were lots of thoughts on living under Trump for the next four years, and how to resist:
Matt Pearce
The archaic, undemocratic Electoral College has about as much reason to exist as Trump University.
Steven Greenhouse
The president who won 5 million more votes in 2012 won't get to fill the Supreme Court vacancy but the guy who got 2.5 million fewer votes will.
Ari Berman
If you're deferring to the Electoral College in the face of such a resounding popular vote loss, you're deferring to systemic racism.
Propane Jane™ @docrocktex26
It continues to be the case that most people, across the political spectrum, haven't realized just how bad it will get.Then there was the nuclear threat, newly revived by Trump:
Christopher Hayes
JESUS: "love thy neighbor"
SOME: "ok but what do you mean by 'neighbor'"
JESUS: "everyone"
SOME: "that doesn't sound right"
Myq Kaplan
Republicans' answer to all damning questions about election: "let's move on."
Robert O. Simonson
I feel the "drain the swamp" rhetoric is going to morph from anti-lobbyist rhetoric into a purge of civil servants and public sector unions.
Lee Fang
I hadn't thought of it this way but the difference between a Trump presidency and a Pence presidency is kleptocracy and Nazism vs. a theocracy.
ProfB @AntheaButler
Break government.
Complain about government being broken.
Repeat ad in finitum.
Nebraska Appleseed (responding to a tweet about Kansas Governor Sam Brownback’s tax plan and its effect on the state’s budget and economy, now being considered as a model by Trump and the Republican Congress)
America is to be governed by something akin to a Mafia crime family, interbred with a genocidal Nazi televangelism cult.
Xeni Jardin
Under Trump, red states are finally going to be able to turn themselves into poor, unhealthy paradises.
Dr. Marc A. Weiss @marcaweiss
MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN is an anagram of KARMA ATE AGEING AMERICA.
Saladin Ahmed
So many fucks will need to be given, in 2017. Start growing yours now.
William Gibson @GreatDismal
I feel like a lot of people wrongly thought that norms are self-enforcing.
David Kaib
I have moments of despair, but I remind myself that despair is unproductive. It will do me no good. Nor anyone else. And I want to do good.
Ashley C. Ford @iSmashFizzle
"Why are you afraid of Trump?" "Because I read Octavia Butler.”
"Why are you afraid of Pence?" "Because I read Margaret Atwood.”
Emily Finke @seelix
Request as we enter 2017: Please stop eroding the norms that recently made it safer to be yourself in this country. Doing so can be deadly.
Phillip Atiba Goff
Defeatism and complacency are two sides of the same coin. They both shut us down when there's work to be done. Don't assume wins or losses.
flippable
Hmmm... Orwell: totalitarianism requires "the continuous alteration of the past, and...a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth."
Wayne Curtis
The fact that the stock market is doing great after the election of a fascist should remind you that capitalism doesn't need democracy.
Matthew Frost
I mean, do you know how bad this can get, America? Do you understand what a real war looks like? A real crash? The real end? This bullshit idea that True Reality is Rust Belt Decline and that denial was everyone who didn't see the appeal of Trump's snake oil there. Telling that story masks what is really at stake: what could really happen when the empire teeters, the seas rise and crops don't grow. What can happen when the most powerful, lethal, far-reaching imperial system in history is run by traitors, dilettantes and criminals. (And some, I assume, are good people.)
Jonathan M. Katz @KatzOnEarth
To understand what is happening I find it easier to think of the GOP as a criminal enterprise conspiring to enrich its leaders.
Bruce Bartlett
take the energy you are dedicating to dialogue with fascists and use it to help bolster the communities fascists seek to destroy. unlikely allies will be thrown together as the fascists try to crush us. gonna be hard enough working with each other. FUCK working with nazis.
Saladin Ahmed
I don’t think Trump is Hitler or that history’s a cheat sheet. I do think we’re morons if we approach each moment as though the world is new.
Erin Kissane
Anyone who treats the left and the right as the same isn't interested in fighting the right.
David Kaib
That awkward moment when you voted Trump for White supremacy's sake, but all he does is fail harder and debunk your mythology every day. Spend more money on education or psychotherapy. You don't need another gun or more ammo, you need a self-identity not predicated on hatred.
Propane Jane™ @docrocktex26
If you don't feel fear these days, [good for you]. But please avoid the classic error of the fortunate: assuming you're the rule, not the exception. The good news: not being afraid frees up a lot of energy. Please spend this energy on learning why others are afraid and on protecting them.
Anand Giridharadas @AnandWrites
The experience of being alive right now feels like the disorientation phase of brainwashing. Not actually joking.
Erin Kissane
Think Global, Act Loki.
Pat Thompson @pattho
Beginning to miss the last couple of decades, when active fear of nuclear war seemed lower on the priority list.There was a fair bit of Democratic post-mortem and why-why-why did Clinton lose:
Bill McKibben
Obamacare is too expensive but building up the power to destroy the earth a kazillion times over is a better use of taxpayer money.
@courtneymilan
The thing I'm terrified of is him getting to a point where he feels like he has to fire a nuke or seem "weak."
Josh Barro
It's almost like there are consequences to electing a viciously ignorant man-child.
Jamelle Bouie
please god let us be only a laughingstock for the next four years and not worse.
Erin Kissane
Seems like thought pieces on Democratic losses in the Obama era could at least note that this coincided with Citizens United + radical gerrymandering.The election post-mortem sometimes related to sexism, and a few others had thoughts on that generally:
Tom Perriello
Hate ran for public office and won. And now, those who ignored it because of "economic anxiety" want to pretend they didn't hear it. You heard it. You didn't care. Now his campaign lies are obvious to pretty much everyone, but the racism wasn't subtle. It isn't new. Please stop pretending ignoring blatant racism isn't a sign of racism. "It's fine he threatened all those groups, he didn't mean it.” Nope. Trump didn't con you. His supporters heard and repeated every word. They reveled in the idea of being free to oppress. Well, here we are.
Mikki Kendall @Karnythia
It's fundamentally undemocratic for extreme social change to hinge on 500 Floridians or 80,000 MI, WI, PA voters in a nation of 325,000,000.
section_sign
Wahhhhhhh I'm a white voter whose fee fees have been hurt by a black president not catering to meeeeee so I voted for a Russian puppet.
DC Women Kicking Ass
I don't know how you empathize with, reach across the aisle to, or "compromise" with people who BASE THEIR VOTE on not wanting you here. I grew up in the white working class, adopted and assimilated in every way but appearance, and I don't know how to do this.
Nicole Chung @nicole_soojung
Seems doubtful:
Pat Thompson @pattho
Republicans who won't cross the ethical line of choice/abortion but do not flinch at a candidate's racism, sexism, xenophobia, speaks volumes.
Paul Thomas @plthomasEdD
I truly think Trump unlocked the code to beating the media: Have so many terrible things at once they can't focus. Basically a DoS [denial of service] attack. Imagine if even Romney had a Trump U. That would have been a 12-month story. It was discussed less than Rev Wright! 12 women accused Trump of groping/assaulting them. They disappeared from media sight in a day. 12! Russia attacked us to get him elected! He has countless ties [to Russia]. It's only now getting decent coverage. He ran a fake charity and used funds to pay his legal bills and buy self-portraits. This is illegal. God bless David Fahrenthold [of the Washington Post] but that's insane! How much have you read about Linda McMahon? He appointed his largest donor to his fake charity to a post! That got 15 seconds of attention. Every person reading this pays more federal income tax than the next President. When is the last time the media hounded him for details? People have already stopped talking about him appointing a white nationalist to be his Chief Strategist. No hearings for that. By contrast, with few Clinton stories available, EMAILZ got what, 18 months of stories including a deluge in the last week? It's not that Trump gets positive coverage. He gets scattered, unfocused, normative coverage which turns it all into white noise. The closest we had to a story that stuck was his gross attack on the Khans. It killed his polling and lasted over a week. Compare tax return coverage of Romney vs tax return coverage of Trump. I swear the media asked more about dressage than about Trump's taxes.
Grudge @grudging1
My hot take is, one can understand people's material concerns without hand-waving away their investment in color caste. And that, in fact, taking the latter seriously is necessary if you want to address the former.
Jamelle Bouie
When I looked at the list of Obama states Trump flipped, I noticed they all had GOP governors, voter suppression laws passed. Hmmm.
Karoli
Once they decided that Jesus Christ was a hard-core angry conservative, it was pretty obvious that facts weren't going to matter anymore.
William K. Wolfrum
One can't overstate how much voters conflated the Wikileaks emails with the private email server. It's why those leaks were so costly to Hillary Clinton.
Alec MacGillis
Every time I hear a pundit say 'Hillary wasn't the right messenger" my mind translates it to "Hillary is a woman."There were just a few on education:
Peter Daou
one of the things I think people don't fully understand about patriarchy is how much men hate other men. there's definitely male solidarity around things like rape culture. but proving you're a man under patriarchy means hurting other men. that's what war is about. and of course there's a fairly obvious connection with Trump. voting for Trump was voting for traditional gender roles in a lot of ways. strong men (in theory), shows strength in part through gratuitous exploitation of women. men find appeal to male solidarity and exploitation of women appealing. but of course Trump is committed to exploiting men too.
Noah Berlatsky @nberlat
I love the need to say "Hillary was a flawed candidate." Yeah, unlike the guy who was caught on tape bragging about sexual assault.
LOLGOP
What if men had to correctly label a full diagram of a woman's reproductive system in order to introduce a law regulating it?
Laura Bassett @LEBassett
Tell me again how sexual assault allegations destroy men's reputations [accompanied by Time’s Person of the Year cover, featuring Donald Trump].
Dom @DomPerinyon
trying to explain the patriarchy to men feels like telling someone who has never heard of bones that there's a skeleton inside their body.
Emily Heller @MrEmilyHeller
When Sean Connery passes, I hope every outlet that used the shot of Leia in Jabba's chosen attire for Carrie Fisher’s obit uses this:
Alexandra Erin
High school biology student: “Apparently the way science works is if the results of your experiment aren't what you expected it means you did the experiment wrong and have to get the data from the teacher.”And more on climate and sustainable cities:
Alfie Kohn
Student evaluations of teaching are not only unreliable, they are significantly biased against female instructors.
Pamela Scully
Proportion of all U.S. public school students whose families are low-income: In 1989, less than 1/3. In 2013, more than 1/2.
Alfie Kohn
Imagine if reducing class sizes and eradicating testing were given as much attention as "teacher evaluation."
Drew Timmons
I paid off my student loans. But I don't feel slighted by anyone who gets theirs forgiven. My sense of fairness doesn't require your misery.
Sweet Cottonmouf @dtafakari
Living wall, France. Manage storm water, improve air quality and beautify, all in one go:There was a figurative boatload of tweets about racism, whether in the election, post-election analysis, or on the streets:
jennifer keesmaat
Free transit would cost $100/year per person in the U.S. The savings would be immediate. Congestion costs three times as much.
Free Public Transit
Is real estate speculation a right, or is affordable housing a right? A serious 2017 question in cities the world over.
jennifer keesmaat
"The average car owner in the U.S. pays $12,544 a year for a car that puts in a mere 14-hour workweek.”
Oliver Moore @moore_oliver
Your rights are also your neighbours' rights:
21st Century City @urbanthoughts11
Israel is criticized for doing on a small scale [settlements] what all developed countries are doing on a large scale.
Free Public Transit
We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.
Kurt Vonnegut
We, ourselves, have to choose between cars and biosphere. You don't think world leaders are going to save us do you?
Free Public Transit
Air pollution kills one in three Chinese. Let's be sure to rid ourselves of the EPA and its bothersome rules.
Bill McKibben
The more drivers there are, the less freedom drivers have. The more cyclists there are, the more freedom cyclists have.
Brooklyn Spoke
People Who Want to Drive Everywhere Upset That Others Might Too And That Includes Driving On Their Street
la flaneuse
One of mine, all the global temperature observations for 1850-2016 mapped in a single figure. Can you see a trend?
Ed Hawkins
Smog in Paris so bad this week that all public transit is free. Which would make sense everyday, everywhere.
Bill McKibben
To stop pipelines, stop driving cars, stop living sprawled.
Free Public Transit
Driving in winter isn't a great idea, but yet here we are, with a whole metro built around the automobile.
mike @mikesonn
Roads are engineered to be comfy driving 10 MPH above the speed limit. And you wonder why everyone drives 10 MPH above the speed limit.
Andy Boenau
the most common form of "manspreading”:
William Lindeke @BillLindeke
The bottom 3 billion account for only 5 percent of carbon emissions. The answer is to makethe rich responsible, not fewer of the poor.
Tony Annett
pet peeve is people who brag about their grandkids one minute and then talking about need to reduce pop growth the next
Atrios
Time out for a classic cartoon by John Cook at Skeptical Science:
J. Drake Hamilton
Everyone has been talking about the return of the robber baron era combined with the worst of the 1930s. But why are we here? I would argue that part of why we’ve gotten into this mess of civilization is because we’ve forgotten to build civic structures. There are few public squares, plazas, parks, piazzas being built. Combine that with the fact that we ghettoize the poor into industrial areas rather than build mixed-income neighborhoods. Add in the physical separation that car culture creates. And you get a culture where it is difficult to agree because you don’t see your neighbors unless they’re in your social circle. Only the most wealthy have a voice, both because of the physical proximity to power and because money buys a voice. If you really want to tackle representation, also attack zoning laws, fight for inclusive housing, build walkable cities. I would argue that, in part, the structure of American small towns and cities helped prevent a fascist takeover in the ’30s. One of the issues in much of America is that people are too spread (suburban living in rural areas) out to have access to services.
papabybike
If you are more worried about someone sticking their penis in an orifice, and not about black folks dying, you have no Christian Witness. Period. Caring more about who is fucking whom than black folks being murdered and abused is a sin. Stop preaching about fucking and start preaching about freedom. Work for justice. Stop holding up the construction of patriarchy.There was a subset of tweets in reaction to a controversial tweet by a Drexel University professor that was meant to mock the phrase “white genocide.” The professor faces sanction from his university:
ProfB @AntheaButler
The way to neo-Jim Crow is being paved with the intellectualization of racism.
Vanta Black
No point in American history has been lacking a white man prepared to explain to you why what just happened is ~definitely~ not about racism.
Wesley Lowery
I think American history education spends *a lot* more time on the Civil War and Civil Rights Movements than Reconstruction. It's understandable because Reconstruction is basically the story of a successful terrorist campaign and it's hard to know what to do with that.
Christopher Hayes
The country was born as a project of identity politics. How else to rationalize a "democracy" that allowed owning other people?
jelani cobb
Every holiday is made up. If you are not Black, ask yourself why you have a problem with one made up to celebrate Black people. For what it’s worth, Kwanzaa and 'One nation under God' are roughly the same age but a lot of white people think the latter dates back to the constitution.
Saladin Ahmed
The election has seduced people into believing that free speech means that all speech has the same merits, that ideas are suddenly equal. The KKK and its kin organizations are responsible for the murders of generations of black folks. We can never stop reminding people of this.
deray mckesson
How to tell a real monster: It tells you another human is not worthy of your love or compassion and it uses the word "Them" to get your rage.
Guillermo del Toro @RealGDT
If climate change or nuclear warfare ends Homo sapiens, then not only is White supremacy wrong, it'll actually prove to be maladaptive.
Ebony Elizabeth @Ebonyteach
The order of the day is not democracy; the order is to maintain the Traditional Order of wealthy white male dominance.
Bree Newsome
Since I began writing about injustice in academia in 2008, the critiques of whining and playing the victim card have been consistent. Colleagues in sociology -- a discipline that studies systemic inequality and oppression -- dismiss critiques of oppression as whining. Somehow, even Ph.D.-educated people are no better at discerning anti-oppression critique from whining about one's problems. But, it's not merely faulty logic -- it's an intentional effort to gaslight marginalized scholars who call out oppression. If you keep dismissing someone's narrative of oppression enough, you may successfully lead them to doubt whether they are truly oppressed. You may convince them that all of the evidence of pervasive oppression is not reflected in their supposedly trivial concerns. Naming one's harassment or discrimination is hard and can be painful.
EricAnthonyGrollman @grollman
America was built on the assumption of white male hegemony and pre-eminence. A racist proto-utopia constructed to serve their elites' needs. This is why race and power in the U.S. are often the same thing. Now challenged, what we are seeing is defensive white supremacism. Diversity, anti-racism, multiculturalism, etc. did not create more racism or the far-right. It merely revealed or provoked what was latent. It's thus likely that the "alt-right" will attempt to push racist pseudoscience into the mainstream next year. They need their beliefs about the "superiority of western civilisation" to be based on observable biological preordination. This has the effect of rationalising (a) atrocities or discrimination in the past, (b) racism in the present, (c) future behaviour/policies.
Liam Hogan @Limerick1914
white people on race are like that joke: "Enough about ME. What do YOU think about me?"
JessieNYC
Authors who complain about diversity in books are basically viewing diversity as a trend they're too racist to cash in on.
Jenny Trout
The most offensive thing about the wannabe neo Nazi fuckwits who hop in my mentions is their complete devotion to not knowing anything. They aren't poor. They don't lack access to education. They choose to be ignorant of anything useful. Or even interesting. It's pitiful. They are consistently cowards. Too craven to even read a real history book, much less think critically about the bigotry they are being fed. They are convinced that the problem is multiculturalism and not the fact that they are not prepared. White privilege can't insulate them. At least not in an actual merit-based society, so now they must fight to topple merit. And facts. It's not economic anxiety. It's fear. All those news stories about more Black women going to college. About successful immigrants. They can't keep up, so they wallow in hate. I'm sure it is hard to accept being such a sad sack that you can't succeed even when you have all the advantages. They should grow up. Because even if they got their mythical all-white homeland they couldn't run it. Couldn't build it or feed themselves. The fighting between the ones with life skills and those completely without them would make great TV. I mean, okay most would die of dysentery or cholera. Bunch more would starve. Grim TV, but the profits could go to education. And health care. These are people who don't want to have life skills. Or a basic grasp of the world around them. What else are they going to contribute?
Mikki Kendall @Karnythia
Largest police union wants Trump to lift the federal ban on racial profiling, which police unions say police never do.
Radley Balko
I find all of this talk about how "our institutions will protect us" to be bizarre. As if these institutions haven't facilitated oppression. This has been said before, but these institutions that we say will protect us allowed slavery, internment, lynching, and mass imprisonment. In case you forgot, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court doesn't even think race matters in policy anymore. As if history didn't happen.
Clint Smith @ClintSmithIII
So when people argue that "diversity" is an add-on or fad or "forced down my throat" there's a reveal there about their view of the world.
Kate Elliott @KateElliottSFF
yeah it turns out I'm really OK being in an echo chamber if the echo is “Hi Danielle you're human and you don't have to prove it.”
Danielle Evans @daniellevalore
the idea that people go to safe spaces because they don’t know reality is so dumb. they need safe spaces because reality is cruel.
trollhunters loser @angrysigh
I will always trust a fellow person of color's sense that a joke shits on them over a white joke-teller's insistence that we don't get irony.
Saladin Ahmed
Whites laugh at [the idea of safe space] because they think the notion of "protecting" People of Color is silly. Why shouldn't People of Color students stomach abuse 24/7? That's the stance. Never mind that Whites can't even handle being critiqued on racism. They can't handle that but People of Color should handle the racism itself. Ok.
Trudy @thetrudz
Amazing to see conservatives who hate the government and corrupt officials but take every word of police testimony as incorruptible iron law.
Vann R. Newkirk II @fivefifths
I guess the one-drop rule still applies. One drop at the top was enough to make these people rip apart the body politic to rid themselves of it.
Brittney Cooper @ProfessorCrunk
White supremacy hides behind masks, smoke, and mirrors. It cheats, steals, and lies. It doesn't fight fair. It goes nuclear in a knife fight. Now, Black Americans vote as a bloc not because we love Democrats (please), but because modern GOP politics crystallized around hatred of *us.* Most hypervisible Black writers, thinkers and activists who are using social media are living degrees of precarity. I've watched them work. Many of us on here are writing/talking/sharing for our *lives.* For if we had comfort, privilege and safety, why would we be tweeting?
Ebony Elizabeth @Ebonyteach
America isn't going to outgrow bigotry until we start talking about the way it is taught passively and overtly to every generation. We have to stop assuming humans are fundamentally altruistic. We're apex predators who occasionally act right. But to many? Hate feels good.
Mikki Kendall @Karnythia
I'm a psychologist of racism. [The idea] that calling someone racist is not persuasive is mostly irrelevant to why you do it. The argument: "the science says calling the racist doesn't change their minds, so don't do it" is an absurd overreach...from the science! The science says that it's not fun when people think bad things about you. That doesn't mean we shouldn't think bad things about people. What it DOES mean is that, if you thought educating hearts and minds was the strategy for change, you are likely frustrated by the Left. It ALSO means you need to update your strategy. Because the SCIENCE says that attitudes are a relatively WEAK predictor of behavior. Norms and situations are far more powerful. And labeling racist behavior as racist...sets the norm that it's unacceptable. That means there's good science to say that, sometimes, calling it racism helps reduce racism. Last point for now: science is NOT political strategy. People substituting one for the other, are being lazy, ignorant, or insincere.
Phillip Atiba Goff
Any ideological debate with someone denying the reality of systemic racism will inevitably become a debate over whether slavery was really so bad.
Bree Newsome
A HUGE part of institutional racism is the near-invisible act of siphoning off People of Color time as we repeat arguments over and over and over again.
Shaun | No, Totally! @NoTotally
If there’s one lesson of this election it’s that black people (hell any people of color) can’t save white people from their own stupidity and racism.
Darth Kriss @insanityreport
The liberal media bias claim originates with a belief on the right that treating Black and immigrant concerns as news violates whiteness. Breitbart?
Jonathan W. Gray @elmcitytree
We all have [this type of] classmates and coworkers. They say racist things and insist there isn't a racist bone in their body. They are "colorblind.” They never stop to think that needing to ignore someone's race to treat them like a human being is a problem. I like to point that out.
Mikki Kendall @Karnythia
Until we decide that all 7.4 billion members of our species are human with inherent worth, we can't have nice things. We can't even have single-payer health care in the USA because millions of folks think "those people" will have gotten away with something. Giving every member of the species enough to eat? Clean water to drink? A roof over their heads? Let's not get ahead of ourselves here...
"What's to guarantee they'll work?"
"Most work will be automated within the next 25-30 years."
"But they're getting something for nothing."
Ebony Elizabeth @Ebonyteach
(If someone is actively in favor of reducing millions of people's access to the ballot, can they reasonably be called a populist?) (The answer is only "yes" if you think the "white" in "white populism" is implicit and understood.)
Gene Demby @GeeDee215
Racists in my mentions LOLing it up about black people dying and I gotta raise a black kid among these dickheads and always take the high road.
Vann R. Newkirk II @fivefifths
If an unarmed man -- 15 feet from you and running away -- deserves death in the mind of a courtroom, then when could that man be safe? Without an answer to this, most reflections on policing sound like BS to the communities in which I work.
Phillip Atiba Goff (talking about the mistrial in the cop-killing of Walter Scott)
Confession: sometimes when I see the word "antiracist" I think it says "antichrist" at first.
Pat Thompson @pattho
When we see mental illness as a threat, we militarize psychiatric hospitals… Less than 3-5% of American crimes involve people with mental illness - a lower average than "sane" people.
Jess GS @JessGantt
White genocide is a fictional concept contrived by white supremacists and Neo-Nazis. It does not actually exist.There were a few tweets about health care, as the Republicans geared up to end Obamacare and maybe Medicare and Medicaid:
Shaun King
Folks, I've been trying to tell you what's coming, and if you haven't been listening, now would be a good time. I'm about to drop out of here on a regular basis after New Year’s, and start the serious work that needs to be done. Now, the new regime is going to use Breitbart to come after folks for tweets, articles, whatever is said that disagrees with them. These folks do not believe in First Amendment rights. If they did, they would simply disagree. They want to destroy dissent. My calculus in this new time is, if I am going to be vilified for my thoughts, then damn it, read my whole article, not a tweet. Which is why I am going to move away from Twitter as a daily means of communication. It's not worth the trouble going down over a tweet.
ProfB @AntheaButler
White genocide is a Nazi concept, comparable to eugenicist "race suicide," the only people who use it unironically are Nazis or ignorant.
Mazel Tov Cocktail @AdamSerwer
You have to tell a lot of lies to convince yourself that denial of healthcare is something a person deserves for not being rich.The press and media, generally, and specifically in our current predicament, were a popular topic, including fake news:
Salena @Salencita
There's been a spike in heroin-related deaths (now nearly 13,000). For comparison: annually there are 88,000 alcohol-related deaths.
Mary E. Harris @marysdesk
To hell with co-pays. Single-payer now!!!!
Nikhil Goyal
When your skin is in the game, it's not covering your body as it's supposed to.
Pat Thompson @pattho
So frustrated about the Affordable Care Act that literally every concession we made to fiscal conservatives and GOP to get the 60th vote eroded the ACA's quality and popularity. Less generous subsidies, no public option, no bargaining for drug prices. These weren't strategic errors. They had to be done.
Harold Pollack
A couple months ago I unplugged cable TV. Don't miss it, especially lap dog "journalist" rituals of Trump normalization.And finally, there are the best of the rest of my favorite topics and jokes, even as we go to hell in a handbasket:
Langdon Winner @langdonw
DONALD TRUMP ISN'T A MEDIA DARLING he is literally a monster put together by a fascist media junta tied to too many dying USA industries
Liza Sabater
they’re covering trump like the hollywood press does tom cruise. "just ask about the new movie, no scientology questions"
Oliver Willis
My worry is that the human brain did not evolve under the conditions that we are now facing: images that simulate and twist reality.
Ebony Elizabeth @Ebonyteach
What if...the news wasn't on...24/7?
Ashley C. Ford @iSmashFizzle
Question: if, in lieu of any real press availability, Trump just keeps holding these de facto campaign rallies. In which the only press role is being cast as the villain, as Trump points at them and exhorts the crowd to jeer them. Should the press really continue showing up to televise these events?
jay smooth @jsmooth995
(How cool would it be to normalise Muslims instead of fucking Nazis?)
Tauriq Moosa
the more I read the more concerning it is to me that the main beneficiaries of free speech absolutism have been corporations and Nazis
David Golumbia
The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.
Garry Kasparov
How TV has fragmented: The audience for the #1 rated show for the ’16 season (NCIS) would have been good for 106th place in 1987.
Steve Kornacki
America has proven what I learned in Russia: the people most skeptical and conspiracy-minded are the most easily duped.
Julia Ioffe
Man, how the right loves to cry "false flag." Two little words, and all reason and evidence is instantly banished from their minds.
Robert O. Simonson
People constantly calling events "false-flag operations" are telling you they are entirely capable of running false-flag operations. This is an individual instance of a general principle: people who habitually make shit up will always do what they accuse you of doing.
Erin Kissane
[The pizzagate conspiracy belief] is what a “bubble” looks like. If I said Romney was behind a child sex ring, my friends would push back. But conservatives clearly are more likely to live in environments where even batshit, off-the-wall beliefs get no challenge. I see this in my discussions with conservatives I know. They feel no compunction about disagreeing with my views. But if I push back, even gently, I get a brick wall. They are clearly unused to getting any kind of pushback and don't know how to take it.
Amanda Marcotte
Speed and exclusivity are out-dated priorities for news media. We need news sources competing not to report first, but to report best.
RedIsDead
*sigh*
I wish more of this year's news had been fake.
Les Lim @lesmana
[This includes one incredibly long tweet storm that I have grouped into seven paragraphs]:
Fake news was a core concern of New Deal media reformers [in the 1930s]. Newspapers owned by reactionary publishers constantly made things up about New Dealers. Like that Congressman didn't pay taxes. [One] particular newspaper was called the Paris News. It was…absentee owned. This is a core concept.
Absentee ownership meant that the owners didn't pay attention to how their institutions affected people where those owners didn't live. It didn't matter to a New York news magnate whether info put out by his chain about Paris, Texas, was true. He didn't live there. The basic idea behind media and telecom reforms was to keep institutions local, and keep them decentralized. Multiple structural barriers were organized to preserve truth. Newspaper unions, for one, fought publishers over editorial independence. A diversity of news sources, like union newspapers and newspapers in lots of languages, was another. The Communications Act of 1934 was a key law to block control of our telephone system by AT&T. All of these fights created a structure of New Deal news that people think of as objective. Nostalgia, like 'remember when Walter Cronkite told the truth?' When America was unified. But this was because of earlier political fights. The 1930s to 1970s news industry was structured to avoid fake news. It wasn't totally successful. But some of the protections held. There were other protections for media more broadly, like financial and syndication rules for TV and the antitrust suit against the studios. There were lots of newspapers for different communities, including ones that were key to the Civil Rights movement.
Fast-forward to the 1980s and 1990s. Media consolidation, deregulation, attacks on newspaper unions. Fox News and Rush Limbaugh emerge out of changes in regulatory policy by Reagan and Clinton. Financiers begin newspaper roll-ups. Newspapers begin falling apart, though the financials don't reflect it yet. The 1990s media landscape is insane with conspiracy theories. In the mid-2000s, Google and Facebook begin their march to monopolizing the ad networks. As corrupted as news has become, it still exists, somewhat. But the platform monopolists begin chewing up all their revenue. And the greatest absentee owned editor imaginable appears: The Algorithm.
The Algorithm is scalable, automated, and seems totally value-neutral. Right? It delivers everything everyone wants. Facebook and Google slowly become the editor for the planet through The Algorithm. New media outlets live and die by The Algorithm. But odd problems start cropping up. Facebook's The Algorithm censors a Pulitzer-Prize-winning Vietnam-era photo from Norwegian news. Turns out Facebook is misleading on traffic numbers for major news sites. Optimization, aka gaming The Algorithm, becomes an industry.
This opens the way for modern fake news. Completely made up, riding on The Algorithm, perhaps foreign propaganda, crops up like barnacles on the bottom of a boat. This is a function of the centralization of power in the hands of The Algorithm, aka Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page. No matter how competent, no one person can be the editor for all of humanity. The Algorithm is the mother of all absentee ownership.
The response to the 'fake news' panic has been authoritarian. It has been 'why won't Facebook censor things I don't like!?!' So Facebook announces it will censor. And it may engage in "policy enforcement actions" to cut off $$$ to media. Facebook acts as a sovereign power unto itself. It outsources censorship to sites like Politifact, a site with clear policy biases. Hoping that if it does this outsourcing, people won't notice Facebook’s total control over our free speech commons via The Algorithm. But fundamentally, such control is not consistent with a democracy, with a free press, or with freedom of association. There are many policy approaches to this problem. But it is not a problem of 'fake news,’ it is a problem of concentrated monopoly power. Fake news is simply the barnacles that aren't being cleaned out of the system
It's worse today, but this is a longstanding issue. Fourteen years ago, it was fake news around the war in Iraq. What we need to restore democracy is a wholesale anti-monopoly approach to our media ecosystem, starting but not ending with the platforms. Communities must have the ability to organize their own public commons for debate and speech, unmediated by private monopolies. Otherwise, we will not be dealing just with Fake News, but with a Fake Democracy as well.
Matt Stoller
People are right when they say that a PhD is as much a measure of resources -- emotional, monetary, etc -- as it is intellect or talent.
jelani cobb
Some copy editor's going to have a not-so-nice day:
Shikha @TheCommanist
Voting rights are just that - rights. There should be no difficulty in registering to vote. When everyone can vote, the working class wins.
Demos
Why can't we fight the good fight against the immediate crisis, live good personal lives, and face the future at the same time?
Ebony Elizabeth @Ebonyteach
Food stamp fraud costs the U.S. less than the cost to taxpayers for just three months of Trump's family living in NYC. But yeah, starve the poor.
Tom Bonier
Can't imagine folks telling Nabokov or Brett Easton Ellis that their protagonists needed to be "likable."
Kameron Hurley
I say that wealthy interests have too much power, that CEOs and bankers are generally not who should hold office, etc.
David Kaib
Florida drivers with poor credit scores and clean records pay $1,552 more for auto insurance than those with excellent credit and drunk driving convictions.
George Joseph @georgejoseph94
Humans hate what they fear and fear what they do not understand. And they understand almost nothing.
almightygod
I've been online since AOL was hot. So, I have seen pretty much every kind of scam. And I've seen the laws changing in response. I've said before I don't believe appealing to morals works on everyone. So I lead with self interest, follow with morality. That combo works.
Mikki Kendall
Study: inmates in private prisons get more conduct violations, increasing time served and prison profits.
sean. @SeanMcElwee
We don't need better science outreach. We need to fight corrupt wealthy interests from pushing self-serving disinformation.
Alex Wild @Myrmecos
Lord I love a competent person.
Tressie Mc @tressiemcphd
I don't care if it rhymes with "right," lyricists should be prohibited from using the word "fright."
Pat Thompson @pattho
All the technology we've developed as a species standing upon each previous generation's shoulders should make us all better off. Seriously, how shameful is it that poverty still exists in a world where cars are about to start driving themselves and our phones talk to us?
Scott Santens
Waiting for people to wake up and realize that Santa is just another giveaway program for the takers.
jelani cobb
Lattes aren't the problem:
Andrei Cherny
Am I the only one who consistently thinks references to AI [artificial intelligence] are about a guy named Al? Damn you, sans serif typefaces!
Pat Thompson @pattho
Report: 39 percent of American prisoners are “unnecessarily incarcerated” with “little public safety rationale.”
Jared Keller
If low-wage employers paid their workers a living wage, taxpayers would have saved $153 billion a year from 2009 to 2011.
Bernie Sanders
When we discuss immigrants as good or bad for the economy, we are judging other humans based on their economic value to us. THIS IS WRONG.
Hari Kondabolu
I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.
Kurt Vonnegut
Update: watching an entire episode of a TV show without looking at your phone now counts as reading a book.
Christian Hoard
Bernini makes this shit out of a rock and I can't fucken draw my eyeliner on straight:
Victoria the Undying @sailorbee
In 20 years a movie called “Aleppo” will win seven Oscars and everyone will say “Something like that should never be allowed to happen again.”
AYESHA @ayeshamirza_
“Poppycock” comes from the Dutch word “pappekak,” which means "soft dung."
Merriam-Webster
For me, "explanation" and "discussion" are not the same thing. The first I'm doing for you, the latter I'm doing with you. Different labor. If I'm the person showing up to the conversation with all the information and you're just there to ask me "Why?", that's not a discussion.
Ashley C. Ford @iSmashFizzle
How do we not have a word for when your snow shovel hits a crack or line in the sidewalk?
Chris Steller
I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of reward or punishment after I'm dead.
Kurt Vonnegut
The flying duck orchid is native to Australia:
Nature Is Weird
“Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” is my favorite Christmas story about how Santa's reindeer are bigots until they need someone’s help.
Elizabeth @Elizasoul80
Keep seeing these “Manchester by the Sea” commercials and I'm 99.9% certain I'm done giving my money to all-white movies. I just don't care about white dudes and their navels.
Mikki Kendall @Karnythia
Humans have a bad track record when it comes to dealing with who we perceive as surplus labor/non-contributors.
Ebony Elizabeth @Ebonyteach
"Tough" policies mean “repressive and discriminatory.” Tough is a euphemism.
David Kaib
"Form follows function" misled a century of architects into believing that they could really anticipate function.
Devon Zuegel
Do not crowd-source your opinions, values, and identity. Just read, y'all.
Ashley C. Ford @iSmashFizzle
People decide "moderate" is a normative praise term, then define the ideological spectrum with "moderate" centered on their own views.
Josh Barro
This graphic is mind-blowing: perceived size of Muslim population in France, U.S. and elsewhere vs. reality:
Leandro Oliva @lmoliva_
Teach microwriting (Twitter, email, etc.) instead of five-paragraph essay. I’ve never written an essay at work, but do microwriting all the time.
Shana Crosson
I would love if public radio got hyper-local and shed the "Prairie Home Companion"/MPR model of relying on national programming.
William Lindeke
whenever you feel inadequate, just remember you aren't ted cruz. wtf is wrong with that dude.
Nikhil Goyal
So when I hear someone say, “sorry to be un-PC, but…,” I hear a person, at best, apologizing for being linguistically inadequate. Generally, though, I hear a person admitting he doesn’t care whether he’s understood.
andrewkarre
someone in my town made a little mouse café! that's so nice:
Anna Syvertsson @sparkleboob
We GenXers are very much like "shit happens, that's life, get over it." Millennials are interrogating systems in a way that never occurred to us.
Ebony Elizabeth @Ebonyteach
"There's a fine line between a good hug that releases pheromones, and a court order." –BigIndianGyasi
Live Wire Radio
If scientists stayed out of politics we'd still be inhaling lead from fossil fuels and bathing in DDT.
John Maerz @MaerzLab
"what if dinosaurs were just fat birds”:
@FioraAeterna
Today I learned that Cantonese is so fond of metaphor you have to put the word "color" after color names if you're actually talking about literal colors.
S.I. Rosenbaum
Whatcha thinkin' about? Oh, just box things:
Faces in Things @FacesPics
The great irony is that the ethnonationalist, populist wave sweeping Europe and the U.S. is installing oligarchies, not populists.
Joy Reid @JoyAnnReid
The problem with Kate McKinnon's impression of Kellyanne Conway is it gives her a brain and a soul. #SNL
Robert O. Simonson
What could go wrong?
SciencePorn
All superheroes are kind of whiny and embedded with a colonial mindset and I don't care for that.
lyz lenz @lyzl
lol cheery seasonal promoted tweets amid uniform stream of doom
Chris Steller
No comments:
Post a Comment