It's June 30, Therefore Twitter

I've managed to keep a fairly short list of tweets for June. As always, the topics from early in the month seem as though they were ages ago.

Most recently, the Republican health care bill travesty was much in my feed:

Asking struggling people to put thousands aside in a Health Savings Account has a strong "let them eat cake" vibe.
Brian Schatz‏

He died doing what he loved: suffering from a preventable illness so that a millionaire could get a huge tax cut on investment income.
Leotard Cohen‏ @pharmasean

Problem isn't just 22 million uninsured. It's the vision of a system where average insurance has a $6,000 deductible and bad chronic illness coverage.
Atul Gawande

GOP Senators should start receiving coffins in the mail, representing the # of people they are killing with their bill.
@prisonculture

Someone told me socialism is "evil" on a tweet about universal health care & their pinned tweet is a Gofundme for their baby who has cancer.
@historyinflicks

Just to recap: A bill affecting 1/6 of the economy was written in secret by a group of white men without public input who want to vote in five days.
Clint Smith

Names for yachts billionaires will buy with tax cuts from Medicaid being gutted:
- Lucy's Kidney
- Mom's Insulin
- 10 thousand wheel chairs
Adam McKay‏ @GhostPanther

A dystopia where citizens are forced to call, en masse, and ask politicians not to kill them.
Elizabeth M.‏ @_ElizabethMay

STOP VOTING FOR PEOPLE WHO WANT YOU DEAD
Jesse Berney‏

A cabal of thirteen old, white, far-right men are meeting in a secret room to write a plan that will strip healthcare from 25 million of us.
Seth Abramson

I still occasionally think, "imagine being in college and standing around a keg fantasizing about ending Medicare."
Andy Richter‏

There were fewer general comments on Trump and the Trumps, but still a few:

Eric Trump looks like Voldemort crawled inside Michael Cera:


Ken Tremendous

It is incredible that Russia put a failed reality star into the White House. An unhinged reality star, whose only gift is destruction.
ProfB‏ @AntheaButler

Can we just take step back and realize how wild it is that the host of "The Apprentice" is under criminal investigation as our sitting president?
Clint Smith‏

This election was like "The Producers", except that Springtime For Hitler became a hit because it turned out people really loved Hitler.
AWhitneyBrown‏

There's nothing to this presidency but an unrestrained narcissist who's in way, way over his head. No philosophy, no principles, no purpose. Just a man posing for photographs and killing time while those around him unravel progress.
Jared Yates Sexton

What people mean by "white male privilege" is a billionaire who claims he is a genius and should run country, then cries "I'm new at this."
Kaivan Shroff‏

One suspects that the Trumps get positive pleasure out of cheating well-meaning people and getting away with it.
Paul Krugman (responding to a report that Eric Trump’s foundation was stealing money from children with cancer)

i can't believe the "trump stole money from kids with cancer" is like a second tier story today
@sarahjeong

Just imagine how Trump would have attacked and mocked Obama if Obama had gone golfing the day after the London terrorist attack.
Steven Greenhouse

It took Trump days to react to Nazi terror attack in Portland. With London, it took minutes for him to use it to up his poisonous.
Andrew Stroehlein 

There was more than usual general commentary on political parties and partisanship:

84% of Democrats say that voting should be made as easy as possible for U.S. citizens; just 35% of Republicans agree.
Pew Research Center

I’m a libertarian, so I believe the government’s only function should be to issue me a girlfriend
Hippo‏ @InternetHippo

GOP: less regulation on corporations; more regulation of personal liberties.
Bonnie Hogue‏

The extent to which people over-identify with wealthy people like the Kochs to exclusion of their own civil liberties is the problem.
@tressiemcphd


James Morrison‏

The "Pelosi must go" campaign reminds me that if Republicans demonize a successful woman enough, Democratic dudes will eventually join in
@CandyAppleAlly

Don’t forget all these competitive special elections are for seats of Cabinet members Trump picked bc he thought the seats were a GOP lock.
Sarah Mackey‏ @sarahjanet

Yep, that's the GOP mantra alright:


philip harris‏ @pharris830

About 50% of accounts demanding a Julius Caesar staging be closed because it offends them have "not politically correct" in their profiles.
Dan Murphy‏ @bungdan

Nothing the Left ever proposes is crazier than saying we should all work unto death so that a hereditary elite can afford luxuries
@ConnorSouthard

We have to end voter suppression because it's impossible to convince enough white Americans that the GOP is literally out to kill them.
Sir James The Second‏ @JKH2

A lot of pro-capitalist talk is based on the notion that corporations ought to bear no risk but humans should.
David Kaib‏

Terrorists and fear-mongering conservatives are twin halves of the same two-stroke engine.
William Gibson

The GOP is no longer an American political party but a collection of white supremacist Nazi-style oligarchs.
Frank Schaeffer‏

Trump uses an unsecured phone. Mishandles intel. Surrounded by collusion scandals. Don't let GOP ever tell you they care about security. It's all a game. A big con. Republicans don't help anyone, don't protect anyone. The party literally does nothing but serve its wealthy base
Jared Yates Sexton‏


i
just want
a country

where affording
health care
is easy

and getting shot
in the street
is hard

why
is that
so much
to ask
Greg Greene‏ @ggreeneva

This country has a bad obsession with turning any and every crisis into a call to patriotism, when it should be calls for self-examination.
The Slaves Singing‏ @williamcson

The religious left didn't get the financial support it needed from wealthy Democrats that the religious right got from the wealthy GOP over last 40 years. It also wrongly believed that gains were sustainable without vigilance and it was weak in developing simple but strong religious frames. That enabled the religious/capitalism-driven philanthropic activism of the right to flourish. Now the religious left is left to play catch up. One other thing: The religious left never had its version of the Christian Broadcasting Network. CBN totally advanced religious right politics.
MiLO‏ @milo_phd

On the shooting in Alexandria, Virginia, where Republican members of Congress were playing baseball:

Ironic. Members of congress who routinely vote with the NRA to allow guns everywhere are moving their offices to courthouses out of fear.
Joy Reid‏

My thoughts and prayers go out to those who seek unity after mass shootings, but division and radical inequality the rest of the time.
Langdon Winner‏

Folks who advocate guns as defense against tyranny never say who gets to say what is tyranny and who gets to shoot whom.
sberfield‏

people have drawn analogies between social media and road rage, like something about being physically in your own space leads to hyperbole
kantorovich normie

Through June 14, 2017:
- Americans killed by guns: 6886
- Gun Reform Bills: 0
- Americans killed by Muslim refugees: 0
- Travel Ban Attempts: 2
Qasim Rashid, Esq. @MuslimIQ

I'm more worried re: effect of sentiments that institutions are illegitimate and can't fix our problems, than about "violent rhetoric" as such. One thing that stops people from political violence is a sense that we have a process for redressing grievances & honoring the public will.
Josh Barro

On the Comey hearing (gee, that seems so long ago already):

Not understanding how "I hope" can be coercive is the kind of problem we should expect when a nearly all-white-male panel investigates. If you've never been on the wrong end of a power equation, you can tell yourself that a "hope" is just a hope. The female grad student whose creepy male mentor "hopes" they can get to know each other personally doesn't have that luxury. The soldier whose superior officer "hopes" he can let the incident go and not report it doesn't have that luxury. The employee whose supervisor "hopes" he doesn't mind working just a little overtime at regular pay doesn't have that luxury. So if you think a president saying "I hope" to an employee he later fired isn't coercive, the problem is you, not the English language. And it underscores why the Senate cannot resemble a 1950s country club if we are to have any chance to get where we're going as a country.
Anand Giridharadas @AnandWrites

I'll take Comey's alleged preening self-righteousness over the conscious abandonment of ethical standards in Trump's GOP, all day long.
Josh Barro

Things that undermine a democracy:
- $ in politics
- voter suppression
- election interference
- turning a blind eye to all of the above
#Comey
Demos‏

Whatever we learn from Comey Day, we know this: racism hacked American democracy long before Russia.
Rev. Dr. Barber‏

As usual, there were many about racism, white supremacy, and the police state that enforces it, including the trial of Philando Castile’s killer (though many of those tweets were included in a post that day):

People act like black folks have the same opportunity to own and roam the land in this country like anyone else, and that's just not true. I wish it were true. I have a real wanderlust, and an outdoorsy streak I have never felt safe enough to indulge. I feel limited. Stuck. Some will remind me of my rights, call for me to be brave in the face of real dangers, but they will not do what it takes to make me safer. There are people reading this right now who believe I'm limiting myself. They can't handle the truth & are part of the reason I am unsafe. I'm going to travel, camp, and hike. Because I want to. But I can't forget that the stakes are different for me. My life depends on that.
Ashley C. Ford‏ @iSmashFizzle

Most voter fraud charges are equivalent to driving with a burned-out taillight. Reason to stop someone who's looks you don't like.
Charlie Quimby‏

Irony is that Obama did everything in his power to save this white supremacist capitalist state from collapse and was still seen as too black. Obama was a centrist who bailed out the banks and enacted a conservative healthcare plan while projecting image of traditional family values, which makes the racist backlash to his presidency and the election of Trump as a response even more ridiculous and obviously racist.
Bree Newsome‏

So, can I register as a race traitor in advance, or do I need to wait for the barricades?
Cindy Londeore‏

Some white folks would vote against air if they heard black folks were getting it for free. The obstacle to America having a social safety net like other wealthy nations is the racism that allowed America to become a wealthy nation.
Mat Johnson‏

The first example of white privilege you learn about:


Conscious Hulk Hogan‏ @Laughin_Man

hey white people who pretend you'd act calmly in the face of police injustice: I've seen you at airport counters.
@smithboyrd

twitter creates a weird sense of intimacy but it is still soooo weird to roll up on a black person who isn't your friend and expect answers.
black ivy carter‏ @polumechanos

the castile footage is all the final proof you need that we have legally reified any fear of black people as a complete defense to homicide
gun control atheist‏ @2dAmMuslim

I am beginning to suspect that what white leftists mean by "new alt right racism" is the "kind of racism even may simple ass can see.”
@tressiemcphd

A licensed gun owner who did everything right was killed by a cop, who later got away with it. And the right is protesting Shakespeare.
Jamil Smith‏

Under bad SCOTUS decisions police violence is sanctioned based on what we think a hypothetical cop could have felt.
pdx law grrrl‏ @pdxlawgrrrl

White Supremacy will be the death of America. Not immigrants, not Black Lives Matter, not foreign powers. White fearful "Americans.”
ProfB‏ @AntheaButler

Saw this a few months ago and saved it. Read this as news comes that protesters are now on I-94 in St. Paul:


@LindsayMpls

Sharing truth about past and existing racism in the U.S. does not = being divisive. You know what's divisive [and lethal]? Racism.
Be A King‏ @BerniceKing

Study shows the likelihood of receiving job interview:
White without criminal record: 34%
Black without criminal record: 14%
White with criminal record: 17%
Black with criminal record: 5%
Clint Smith‏

'Confederate' flags are really 'Segregation' flags to celebrate the "victory" of Jim Crow.
@effdot

I wish we would stop depicting enslaved persons as losers or failures or even weak. If our ancestors were weak we wouldn't be here.
Bree Newsome‏

The same people who want to be unquestioningly commended for their bravery are so fucking *terrified,* so often.
N. K. Jemisin

That Arizona even has Confederate monuments, despite not being a state for another 50 years, tells you this has never been about the war.
Drew McKevitt‏

"Forced diversity."
"Diversity shoved down our throats."
"Pushing political correctness."
(Why is our existence characterized as violent?)
Ebony Elizabeth‏ @Ebonyteach

If you're white and don't mind me talking about "white people," it's because you know it's not about you. If you get mad, it's because it's about you.
Hari Kondabolu‏

Several on sexism and gender:

I've never seen a one-sentence headline contradict itself:


Ari Fishbein‏

Men on prescription testosterone were more likely to make mistakes, and more likely to be confident nonetheless.
NYT Opinion‏

cause gay marriage is championed by white guys with money
D1 Gkells‏ @Gkelly20 (responding to a tweet by Josh Barrow that read, “It's kind of amazing how quickly the wind went out of the sails of opposition to gay marriage. Not like abortion at all.”)

Did I just take a bunch of NASA tank tops from the boys section and put them in the girls section? Yes. Yes I did:


Katie Hinde‏ @Mammals_Suck

Folks are madder at Hillary Clinton for the carceral ’90s than Biden, who wrote the crime bill, Bill Clinton who signed it and Sanders who voted for it. HRC's rhetoric about prison labor is racist and abhorrent, but if you aren't mad at the white *male* architects of that shit, sit down. Basically, y'all want to hang the carceral state on the back of a woman who didn't create it, but have no outrage for the white men who did. And I'm tired of folks being more outraged at white women for racism than at white men.
Brittney Cooper‏ @ProfessorCrunk

Pro Writer Tip #1. How to describe:
A) Female Protagonist - "beautiful but doesn't know it"
B) Female Antagonist - "beautiful, and knows it"
Warren Leight

funny hearing these men who are clamoring for a religious inquisition and criminalizing women complain about witch hunts
Saladin Ahmed

An quite a few on sustainable cities, public transit, and climate change:

If you want to put out the fire, take fuel away, don't add more. The #autosprawl system is the biggest waste of fuel.
Free Public Transit‏

"Automobiles prevent casual contact with others unlike oneself...meaning there are fewer limits to our aggressive tendencies." —Ronald Bruel.
Taras Grescoe‏

A recent study found a 1 percent increase in traffic for every 1 percent in added highway space.
Streetsblog USA‏

Homo sapiens have been here over 200,000 years, cars less than 200. We don't need them.
Free Public Transit‏

stopping climate change involves parking meters
William Lindeke‏ @BillLindeke

Here's an annoying dynamic in US politics. It goes like this:
a) pigeonhole climate change as an "environmental problem."
b) In polls, ask people to rank what they care about most, "the environment" vs. "the economy" and "national security."
c) When people inevitably rank their *own personal financial and physical security* higher than an abstraction ("the environment"), use polls as evidence that "voters don't care about climate change."
d) Use the "fact" that "voters don't care about climate change" to justify ignoring or playing down climate, or spinning it as a lefty interest-group issue.
e) Voters, who generally follow elite cues see that their respected leaders & media figures don't deem climate important, so they continue to box it up as "environmental" and rank it low on their list of concerns.
f) Rinse, repeat, forever.
David Roberts‏ @drvox

People who don't take transit don't understand that getting to a bus that runs every 30 mins with a child is really difficult.
Hecate‏ @danademaster

Not cyclists... People on bikes. Not sport... Transport:


Chris Bruntlett‏ @modacitylife

Paris is almost entirely about 6 stories. If San Francisco were built to that standard, we'd have 3x the housing supply.
Devon Zuegel‏

Car users get much more of public space for free than their numbers justify.
Free Public Transit‏

Could reporters stop asking if political leaders "believe" in climate change and start asking if they understand it instead.
Megan Collins‏ @megan_styleGF

This is what Pittsburgh looked like back in the heyday of coal:


Binyamin Appelbaum‏

My generation has to live on this planet for decades to come and we're going to remember which party made it so damn hard for us to save it.
Jason Kander‏

When it comes to climate change, lots of little things add up. Work on the local level - stop passing the buck because it’s 'too big to impact'
Father Sonn‏ @mikesonn

Baby Boomers vs. Millennials will seem really trite compared to how much these yet-to-be-named generations will hate all of us.
Joel D. Anderson‏

Roads don't pay taxes.
Rik Adamski‏

Americans complain that their cities are too crowded, then spend thousands of dollars to visit actual crowded cities:


Geoff Boeing‏

Even if cars cost $1, most of the world cannot tear down 90% of their cities to build roads/parking for everyone to drive. So what's Plan B?
Rik Adamski‏

I think this may be the first time there was a noticeable number on income inequality, corporations, wage theft, and treatment of workers:

This should have been the headline of every newspaper every day for the last 150 years:


Erik Loomis‏

A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
Wendell Berry‏

Am I 100% sure a $15 min wage won't hurt some biz? No. Am I 100% sure we need to start erring on the side of helping people? YES #livingwage
Steven Kranz‏

When you hear 'let's get rid of red tape', it's worth remembering that safety laws usually exist because something fucking horrible happened
Malcolm Tucker‏ @Tucker5law

every startup is just "[thing that already exists] but with skirting labor laws on a technicality"
girth brooks‏ @adequateGF

[Each year in the U.S.], failure to pay minimum wage is equivalent to the value of all merchandise lost to shoplifting.
Demos‏

"The median American estimated that the CEO-to-worker pay-ratio was 30-to-1, and that ideally, it’d be 7-to-1. The reality? 354-to-1."
Sarah McCammon NPR

And then, finally, there are the best of the rest:

Violence isn't lower in the suburbs because suburbanites are somehow more *moral.* It's because they have fewer disputes, with far lower stakes, and official avenues to adjudicate them.
Gene Demby @GeeDee215

the four genders:


blocked thot‏ @chaeronaea

The world is not as it seems. The ordinary world is invisible, in a flow of news events which are selected for being extraordinary.
Ola Rosling‏

Most common age in U.S. among:
Whites: 57
Asians: 28
African-Americans: 26
Hispanics: 10
Bi- or multi-racial: 0 [meaning under age 1)
as of June 2017.
Jed Kolko‏

Islam gave women the right to choose marriage or divorce, get an education, own property, vote, and inherit in 610
UK gave women these rights ~1920
Qasim Rashid, Esq. @MuslimIQ

Strong panel data and synthetic control study finds that adopting a Right-to-Carry law is associated with a 13-15% increase in violent crime.
Chris Uggen‏

Adults with college degrees in America:
Hindus 96%
Jews 75%
Muslims 54%
Buddhists 53%
No religion 44%
Christians 36%
Conrad Hackett‏ (citing the Pew Forum)

"I support marches and free speech but not in a way that inconveniences drivers."
Those are parades. You support parades.
Carin Mrotz‏ @mrotzie

Yup, one of the most precious resources for organizing: Free Spaces to Meet.
@prisonculture

More people work at Whole Foods (~90,000) than in America's coal industry.
Danielle Paquette‏ @DPAQreport

The U.S. spends $107K over a refugee’s first 20 years in the country. During that time, refugees pay $130K in taxes.
FiveThirtyEight‏

The purpose of abolishing tuition fees for all is to decommodify education and build middle and upper class support for universal programs.
Nikhil Goyal

In 1970, the US spent 3X more on welfare and food stamps than prisons. By 1996 this was reversed. From the first page of Getting Tough, by @julillykh
Alan Mills‏ @alan_uplc

Perhaps instead of giant corporations patronizing the arts they should pay taxes.
Matthew Yglesias (commenting on Delta removing funding from Shakespeare in the Park)

The problem with “norms” is they’re just held together with common sense and a fear of shame. When people have neither, it all collapses.
@goldengateblond

Often you can't convince someone they are wrong without first convincing them that you have understood their thinking.
Ola Rosling‏

The number of White nationalists and Nazis on Twitter have multiplied 600% in the past four years. True for followers and tweets:


Dr Zuleyka Zevallos‏ @OtherSociology

This idea that working hard, making sacrifices, and being ethical are attributes belonging solely to the winners in our society? Toxic.
Ebony Elizabeth @Ebonyteach

i am fairly certain, if there is life on another planets, we are seen as the Florida of the universe.
Aparna Nancherla @aparnapkin

Mass incarceration has raised the American poverty rate by an estimated 20 percent.
The Crisis Magazine‏

If you've never seen a husky with absolutely no body hair then here you go. Enjoy:


OmonaKami

One of the best ways to resist these days, I find, is just to behave as ethically as you can in your daily dealings. It is maddening to the other side, who can not fathom the use or motivation of such behavior.
Robert O. Simonson‏

I don't want to waste a penny of taxpayers' dollars, but let's be sure to tell them we're fighting over a penny.
Dean Baker

Maybe mainstream media won’t keep claiming "Muslims need to condemn terror more" if they'd interview Muslims instead of white men about Islam.
Khaled Bey‏

Everyone should work hard and do a good job, sure. But hard work + a privileged background gets you much farther than hard work + poverty.
N. K. Jemisin‏

To be great, America must be kind. To be great, America must be empathetic. To be great, we Americans must act when we see oppression.
Anne Frank Center

I just want my son to grow up in a world where people have healthcare, a living wage, can't easily get guns, and don't see hate crimes as normal.
Clint Smith‏