January is over. As some have said, it’s only January 31 and somehow the year is half gone! It feels like that, anyway, in the age of Donald Mulligan.
First, there's Mulligan in general, and his supporters:
Remember, same people who don't believe tons of research they've never read on climate change and evolution DO believe in:That doesn't include the stuff about Mueller, the FBI, and the Russians:
1. Secret societies
2. Deep states
4. Intel agencies lie.
3. Soros conspiracies
4. Agenda 21 to kill us
5. Obama was Muslim
6. Trump's a religious Christian.
Kurt Eichenwald
Reports in the last few days:
1. Trump paid 130K to a porn star to keep quiet about a sexual encounter.
2. Trump has been paid millions as president by untraceable shell companies.
Neither has rated as a huge story.
Judd Legum
If Trump is in excellent health, I better be able to taze any doctor who tells a woman she needs to lose weight "for her health."
@tressiemcphd
More than one-fifth of Trump’s U.S. condominiums have been purchased in secretive, all-cash transactions that enable buyers to avoid legal scrutiny by shielding their finances and identities, a BuzzFeed News investigation has found. His companies sold more than $35,000,000 in real estate in 2017, mostly to secretive shell companies that obscure buyers’ identities, continuing a dramatic shift in his customers' behavior that began during the election, a USA Today review found.
Kyle Griffin
Trump is a genius. Total genius:
Scott Cuthbertson
The reality is that if you're rich and sociopathic, you can hit innumerable homeruns from third base, regardless of how bad you are at the game. It's very, very hard for someone as immoral and rich as Trump to lose any skirmish, regardless of the tactics he deploys.
Cory Doctorow
Were America even slightly historically literate Trump's call for his own Roy Cohn would be a source of profound outrage, disgust and worry.
David Rothkopf
If you think one man is more of an existential threat to life on this planet than the ongoing, world-destroying practices of the military industrial complex, there is something really wrong with you. I suspect many liberals fear nuclear war because they imagine it's the only kind of warfare that might actually affect them. As opposed to the decades of ongoing wars across the globe, instigated by the United States, that have already obliterated millions of civilians.
Crystal @alwaystheself
So the DOJ just opened an investigation into the Clinton Foundation and whether they accepted donations for access to the President. Meanwhile... Mar-A-Lago!! Pay $200k fee for access to the president!!
Brian Krassenstein
Obama: [said “I” during his speeches sometimes]
Pundits: “He’s SoOooOoo arrogant!”
Trump: “I’m a very stable genius who’s, like, really smart, and I kept the planes from falling out of the sky!”
Pundits: “He’s a real man of the people.”
Parker Molloy
Media is expressing concerns about the mental health of the guy whose crazy unhinged speeches they aired unedited and uninterrupted 24/7 in 2016.
Frank Conniff
Somebody at the New York Times says trump has better people skills than "aloof" Barack Obama. Only in America can a white guy who mocked disabled man, bragged about grabbing pussy and insulted more people than Don Rickles get that kind of credit over a black guy who shed tears over lost children.
@KwikWarren
Trump keeps proving that if you simply refuse to be ashamed of your corruption and lying, there’s not much the media can do to you, and the conversation eventually moves on. It’s a real weakness in the system, at least while the opposition party is powerless.
Ezra Klein
Two things you can simultaneously believe:Or the ways the Republican Party enables Mulligan:
A) The FBI is not a benevolent institution +is guilty of abuses over the years.
B) Trump attempting to purge and cow federal law enforcement is an urgent crisis.
George Zornick
Remember, if you're grief-stricken and horrified when an innocent person is shot & killed by police, then you hate law enforcement. But if you want the the #2 at the FBI hauled out in cuffs because of his wife's political affiliation then you're a good law and order conservative.
Chris Hayes
Just to be clear: the country that hacked our election is being rewarded and the agencies that investigated those hacks are being investigated.
LOLGOP
Trump tells us not to trust the FBI, the Justice Department, the free press ... and now the courts. He is trying to undermine every independent check on his power. If that doesn't alarm you, it should.
Renato Mariotti
When a roomful of liars are promising to tell the truth about each other, this is useful to the extent that you can lock the door and hope they burn it down.
jay smooth
One legacy of this GOP is that they honestly don't care if the President was a Manchurian candidate as long as he's a Republican Manchurian and they can get tax cuts out of it. Better spoils to the one percenters under Putin than sustained democracy in any form.Immigration and the government shutdown were major topics this month, including some of the response to Mulligan’s “shithole” (an earlier post includes most of that):
Elizabeth Spiers
We are in the middle of learning that the immoral cannot do their work alone. They require the amoral.
Anand Giridharadas
Just to be clear: Republicans think the FBI should be investigating black people for peacefully protesting but not a white man for helping a foreign adversary undermine the entire US political system.
Samuel Sinyangwe
Republicans are struggling to govern now that they're in control of everything because the only thing that united them 2008-2016 was a hatred of Obama
Bree Newsome
Hold Republicans accountable. He's just their sideshow. Hold Republicans accountable. #BlueWave2018
George Lakoff
When they say “sanctuary cities” they want you to think cities not obeying federal law. What is really happening is city police departments are declining to serve as a federal deportation force, because it’s a stupid and inhumane law enforcement strategy.As always, I've curated a lot of tweets about climate change and sustainable cities (which includes housing for people and public transit). Some day, I'll figure out a way to break these various topics apart, but not this month:
Brian Schatz
Trump’s entire campaign – from calling Mexicans rapists to promising to build the wall – was a public expression of a white supremacist fantasy. We cannot give in to any part of this administration's agenda. #NoBanNoWall #BreakTheWall
The Leadership Conference @civilrightsorg
There is no immigration crisis in this country. There is only racism. The only "problem" with immigration in USA is white resentment and fear over the changing face of America (that is, America returning to being the nonwhite nation it was before European colonization and racist immigration quotas)
Bree Newsome
It feels like the GOP took DACA as a hostage without realizing that half of them are unwilling to see the hostage harmed, while the other half's actual goal is to have the hostage killed, and now no one knows what to do.
Susan Simpson @TheViewFromLL2
In 2020, when some Democrats will inevitably say that we can’t pay for things like free college and universal healthcare and the left needs to be more realistic or pragmatic, remember that they offered Trump 1.6 billion for a wall.
jordan_budd
It amazes me how people who are the descendants of those who came onto this land, engaged in genocide and built the country with slavery — two crimes against humanity — dare to say that Dreamers are illegal.
Rev. Dr. Barber
Campaign Trump: "Mexico will pay for the wall!"
President Trump: "I will shut down the government until America pays for the wall!"
Tea Pain
The March for Life, on the day they held kids health care hostage to deport other kids.
David Kaib
I basically see the Trump era as a big fight over whether nonwhite people get to be "real Americans." In the long run, the only possible answer is "yes," but guys like this are fighting like hell to delay the day when they lose:
Noah Smith (responding to a Tucker Carlson statement that Arizona is a Hispanic society where the border has moved north)
Trump's s***hole remark was not a slur against all immigrants and it's intellectually dishonest to claim it was. His statement was specifically anti-Black, and anti- people of African descent. Trump expressed enthusiasm for Norwegians to immigrate to USA so his statement wasn't a broad dismissal of immigrants. It was specific to immigrants of African descent. There's clearly an attempt--even by those critical of Trump's comments--to gloss over the blatantly anti-Black racism of his statement. But, of course, denying the existence of anti-Black racism is a daily thing in the USA.
Bree Newsome
On this "shithole" thing, once again, the right's triumph is not that it's winning the argument, it's that it has *made this into an argument*. We are debating, as a nation, whether calling nations of brown-skinned people "shitholes" is racist. Just think about that.
David Roberts
When people say "we are all immigrants" (or we all come from immigrants) they mean white people, and that's who "we" is.
Pat Thompson
On DACA, Trump is trying to pull off an amazing scam: (1) create the problem; (2) reject bipartisan solutions; (3) blame everyone else.
Steve Benen
When I teach immigration, I show students a list of the top sending countries of immigrants and ask them to pick the ones where the US military or CIA has NOT interfered in the democratic process. It's a trick question.
Tanya Golash-Boza
“Racist” FFS is not an epithet. It is not a controversial word. It describes an adherent to an ideology. Here are ways to use -ist words: Hillary Clinton is a feminist. John Dewey was a pragmatist. Donald Trump is a racist.
Virginia Heffernan @page88
No one who voted for Trump is shocked that he's racist. If they didn't vote for him because of his bigotry, they voted for him in spite of it. Stop giving these complicit pieces of shit the benefit of the doubt.
Lauren Duca
If you believe the presence of undocumented immigrants are driving down your wages, maybe you should organize with them to secure a living wage for every worker instead of being a lackey for the system that oppresses you.
Bree Newsome
A shithole is a nation that institutionalizes white supremacy and then blames those who aren't white for the barriers they face trying to live under a racist system.
@williamcson
Minnesota has 2% of the US population and is home to 13% of the country's refugees. I knew I liked something about this place.
Pat Thompson
We are a nation of immigrants...
& Indigenous Americans forced from their land by genocide & terrorism
& enslaved Africans whose descendants are still denied civil rights
& European colonizers who murdered Indigenous & enslaved Africans & established white supremacist systems
Bree Newsome
"Illegal immigrants drive down wages.” REALLY? It is THEY who drive down wages? They go to employers and say "I'm trying to support a family. Please pay me less than what you'd pay a citizen"? Or is it EMPLOYERS saying to themselves "How can I exploit this labor force?"
Bree Newsome
Trump loves Norway because we grow his hair:
André Ulveseter
Immigration policy in the USA has *always* been racist because it's part of the same white supremacist system. USA is majority white because of quotas that limited immigration from Asia, Africa & southern Europe in order to create a "white nation"
Bree Newsome
A shithole is an astronomically wealthy nation that refuses to provide healthcare for all people.
@williamcson
New York City, our most diverse big city, is down to less than 1 murder per 29,000 people and 1 shooting incident per 10,000 people. An 85 percent drop over 24 years. The people who say immigration causes crime are batshit insane.
Noah Smith
wild how ICE is essentially a secret police organization with deeply fascist goals and methods and nobody except those effected by those methods seems to mind
samantha carter @a_nice_frog
I like how we've divided the labor in US climate politics. Environmentalists work their asses off every day to make progress against this unfathomably large & powerful threat. Everyone else gathers around to lecture environmentalists about how they're doing it wrong.Once again, there were many tweets on racism, white supremacy, and police brutality:
David Roberts
I’ll say it again — we should stop referring to apartments in multi-family or higher density buildings as “units.” We should always call them homes.
Brent Toderian
The entitlement that white homeowners feel to dictate where poor people can live is disgusting and shameful.
Tony Damiano
Renters made up 97% of the population growth in America over the last decade. 42% of big U.S. cities are now majority renter, up from 20% a decade ago. Most public policy is still geared toward property owners, however:
Mike Rosenberg
You can’t deter poverty with prison. Most people can’t afford $2.75 to access jobs, appointments, child care, medical care. Prosecuting fare evasion = $1750 per arrest, up to one year on Rikers at $750/night. Providing subsidized/free fare for the poor is a viable alternative. Make sense?
Scott Hechinger
In so many cities, we have a big debate - and a user fee - when it comes to funding transit. But building new highways and roads? We assume the general tax base should pay for that. We need a new model that incentivizes what we want most: efficient mobility, sustainable choices.
jennifer keesmaat
“The wealthy developed world...is filled with liberals and environmentalists who are perfectly willing to drive a Prius and buy organic veggies, but raise holy hell if anyone tries to build a bike lane, light rail station, or new housing anywhere near them.” –Dave Roberts
Blake Trask
The notion that the elderly cannot walk any distance but can safely operate a 3,000 lbs steel box at 70 mph is fundamentally backwards.
Adam Miller
Always important to remember that rolling back air-quality regulations does not "reduce costs." It merely *shifts* costs, from industrialists to vulnerable populations.
David Roberts
It’s strange to me that Americans love to visit places that look like this but lose their minds if anyone proposes to build something similar:
The Taupe Avenger
Half a century of transportation research shows that there’s only one way to reduce congestion: charging people to drive.
Laura Bliss
If we actually charge per mile what it costs the government to operate highways, people will drive a LOT less. That will negatively impact revenue -- the opposite of the intended effect -- but perversely be a really good policy outcome.
Strong Towns
The city of drivers expands, inevitably, into sprawl. The city of pedestrians, cyclists, & transit-users contracts elegantly into itself:
Taras Grescoe
It's a little weird to me to worry so much about the ethics of self-driving cars when human drivers are such manifestly garbage ethical agents. I pretty much hate all drivers, very much including myself when I am driving. Something about the circumstances of driving ... it brings out the absolute worst in everyone. I can't wait for the robots.
David Roberts
OMG: ‘A member of Congress once said we don’t need weather satellites... we can just turn on the Weather channel.’ –Jonathan Foley
Emily Cassidy @EnviroEm
"We’ll never get to cycling normality (10%, 15%, 20% of trips) while most people see cycling as a sport for a subset of strangely dressed men, rather than how people like them, their mum and their grandma, go shopping."
Barb Chamberlain
What matters more: a fast commute or ensuring people won't get killed as they walk and cycle in our city? 80% of respondents support lower speed limits. (Who are the other 20%? That's quite a tradeoff.)
jennifer keesmaat
Saving water in the home is great, but it's important to understand relative impact of our choices. Average person halving shower time for 2.5 months = water equivalent of one hamburger:
Hannah Ritchie
People who think technology will save us would have wanted to liberate women by inventing a more efficient stove.
Existential Comics
electric car technology depends on this guy digging up cobalt in the Congo:
William Lindeke
The single most important measure of any city or metro region's climate plan is whether it actively encourages the building lots of transit-focused dense housing. That is by far the most powerful lever cities can use to lower per-capita emissions. All else is secondary.
Alex Steffen
I cycled past three schools this afternoon. Outside all of them was a line of parked cars with their engines running, in which parents were looking at their phones. Generating a great cloud of smog. The madness of our times.
GeorgeMonbiot
Policy ideas:
* like actually stop sprawl
* like actually promote city living
* like actually end dependency on fossil fuels
* like actually give the DNR even more funding
* like actually fund mass transit
neighbors for more neighbors
Global electric vehicle sales:
1st million: ~20 years
2nd million: 18 months
3rd million: 8 months
Colin Mckerracher
Bill de Blasio, who drives an SUV to work every day and opposes congestion pricing, is VERY angry at the oil companies, you guys! This brand of celebrity environmentalism has a very weird (willful) blind spot for the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions: cars.
Angie Schmitt @schmangee
In fact, 12.6% of all energy worldwide is used simply to mine, transport, and refine fossil fuels and uranium. This energy is no longer needed in a 100% wind-water-solar world
Mark Z. Jacobson
This is one of the first things I thought: "Protect wilderness and drive to it" traditions don't require any personal behavior changes.
Barb Chamberlain
One question is, why has transportation been an unfashionable issue for environmentalists? This could be a big winner: transforming our transportation network would create jobs, clean our air, protect habitat and farmland on city edges. But this is also a massive LT campaign and I know of no one even remotely interested in taking it on. That's not to say that it is impossible! There's a great message and campaign that could be made around making it easier to drive less in cities, and making sure the truly car reliant in rural areas have clean, safe vehicles. But it would be a HUGE effort. I was at a giant climate change conference a few years ago. Lots of funders and organizations. Lots of buzz that transportation is the biggest source of emissions. 99% of discussion was on the energy sector.The only transportation discussion was in terms of batteries to store green energy.
Andrea Kiepe
"Vulnerable road users" aka people outside of cars. Those of us who have not become one w the Borg.
@laflaneuse
US towns do not have the tax base to support the sprawl that was built before peak oil. Sprawl will end, gently if we intervene, or harshly, if we don't.
Free Public Transit
Something I’d love to see: stories checking back in on contentious development or transportation fights, and seeing, both with quotes and data, whether the hyperbole matched the reality.
Alex Schieferdecker
airport subsidies are a huge climate change-inducing travesty
William Lindeke
The best thing any city can do to encourage walking and biking is shorten the distance between destinations (i.e. increase density). Even the best infrastructure won't be used if the surrounding land use doesn't support it.
@reubencollins
"The argument against public transport is essentially the argument against cities" - @JananGanesh in the Financial Times.
Benedict Evans
Clover leaf interchange outside Kansas City compared to Firenze's historic city centre (same scale):
21st Century City @urbanthoughts11
We’re past the point where we can mandate low-density zoning near public transit. Near transit is *exactly* where we should be putting lots of housing. When we have low density zoning around transit, we limit who can use transit, force people to drive, & contribute to sprawl.
Scott Wiener
There are an estimated 8 parking spots for each car in the US. That shapes cities, & "drives" traffic.
Brent Toderian
If global warming reaches 2 degrees by 2050, 20-30% of Earth's surface, & 25% of its population, will exist in a state of perpetual drought.
David Roberts
Dear every driver complaining about road diets: We literally bulldozed whole neighborhoods full of people to build urban freeways so you could zip through our cities at high speed and no charge. What more do you want? What more do you fucking want?
Robert Prinz
“Disabled people are the canary in the coalmine for healthy streets – if disabled people are using your streets in high numbers, you are doing something right.”
Nose in the wind
When I argue for free transit, these are the people I'm thinking of: they're already paying with their time, spending hours commuting by transit. Charging them fare for the "privilege" is grossly inequitable
sarah iannarone @sarahforpdx
Historically, giving racists what they want has not been an effective way of reducing the political power of racism.And continuing with the recent trend, there have been almost as many about sexism, misogyny, and calling out sexual harassment. This month we also had tweets about the Aziz Ansari story:
Tom Scocca
What the alt-right explicitly mean when they say "cuck" is this: a white man who allows, through inaction, weakness, or political correctness, white women to be used by foreign hordes. Women as property and miscegenation are the subtext here. It means white men who don't subscribe to the white nationalist ideology. If you're not with them, you're a cuck who's letting the blacks, the muslims, etc, take *your* women. Sweden is "cucked" because they've allowed immigration. See, it's not a married man watching someone have sex with his wife, it's all white men, and they're allowing the other to take their women; their property. Now, they'll often claim that no, cuck means someone weak or emasculated, its not racially charged. And well, that's true that they mean it as weak or emasculated, but that doesn't preclude it from being primarily a racially charged term. After all, as they see it, letting "your" women be taken by the other, well that is weakness, that is emasculation. The charge that cuck means weak is still tied with racial prejudice and hatred, because what is it they're claiming cucks are too weak to do? You can see how this ties into their overall worldview, white fragility, and the paranoia over imagined "white genocide" unless someone does something, claims of soy making white men effeminate and weak. In conclusion, cuck is a dogwhistle for race traitor.
Crazy Sloth Lady @CaseyExplosion
racism is so wild, man, you got a black man who becomes president & some of these white evangelicals spend eight years calling him the literal reincarnation of the devil meanwhile trump is doing somersaults through moral scandals & they change it up to say “no one is perfect”
Clint Smith
83 people have already been killed by American police in 2018. That’s more than police in most nations kill in a decade. It’s more than police in some nations have killed in their entire national history. I know Trump dominates the news, but police brutality is roaring forward.
Shaun King
People giving me shit about my Apu documentary care more about this cartoon character than I do. My film is about why things are represented the way they are & its impact. Apu was the perfect example. Keep Apu. I don’t care. Just give us more opportunities to talk for ourselves.
Hari Kondabolu
All the stuff we see as hypocrisies/double standards/cognitive dissonances of GOP behavior (on the filibuster, court nominations, shutdown) are explicable if seen as a reaction to what the Right experiences as the really unpardonable sin that broke democracy "first": a black President. That is: by giving America its first black President, the Democrats violated an implicit norm that was the foundational prerequisite for already frayed norms of partisan tolerance and forbearance. In other words: from the perspective of people for whom American democracy was always supposed to be a hierarchical ethnostate (consciously or otherwise), the constitutional crisis already happened - in 2008.
Patrick Blanchfield
Racism is NOT a "mental illness." Nor is it "ignorance." Stop relocating this evil into a disability. The architects of slavery, segregation, eugenics and such were the most deviantly brilliant minds. Racial hatred is an informed choice, not neurosis or a physiological deficit.
Stacey Patton
74% of black parents said racial diversity was "very" or "somewhat" important in their own child's school. Only 31% of white parents.
Will Stancil
The stubborn refusal to acknowledge that white women benefit from the racialization of gender, that a true feminist movement must dismantle both patriarchy and racism at once, is a refusal to acknowledge the reality of structural sexism.
Bree Newsome
I'll say it again -- White America has a necrophilic relationship with MLK. It loves the King that washes its feet and forgives its sins. But not the radical King who admitted his fear that he had integrated his people into "a burning house."
Stacey Patton
Today, could someone please tell every elected Republican talking about "founding principles" that equality for black people was explicitly not one of them?
Adam Miller
"The number of white individuals who are practicing with even reasonable approximation the democracy and unselfishness of Jesus Christ is so small and unimportant as to be fit subject for jest in Sunday supplements.." –WEB Du Bois
Crystal @alwaystheself
“Our society is largely indifferent to racial inequality but is highly sensitive to accusations of racism.”
@jbouie
“If we were white — if we were Irish, Jews, Poles — Nat Turner would be a hero. If a white man stands up and says, ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ the whole world applauds. If a black man says the exact same thing, he is treated as a criminal” James Baldwin
@UnitedBlackout
What would Martin Luther King think of his birthday being framed by our open enemies as a day for acts of service instead of one for demanding that our stolen public resources be redistributed? MLK Day has become the biggest misrepresentation on the US public holiday calendar.
Greg Carr @AfricanaCarr
After my Trump-voting Grandmother told me I 'sounded like a black person' for voicing my disgust with Trump, I'm beginning to think they won't ever have that moment when the see him for who he is, because it's who THEY are, and they don't REALLY want to admit it.
Brooke Wise
Believe it or not, just being angry at other white people and making people feel wrong or foolish is not your movement work as a white person. All three pillars of white supremacy are yours to sort and white people are yours to educate and persuade. Dig deep.
Dystopian Scribe @MsKellyMHayes
"The function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining your reason for being." - Toni Morrison
Ava DuVernay
“No racist is patriotic,” Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund writes. “Period.” That may sound obvious to some, but not enough. Our misunderstanding of and allowance for racism has created a national emergency, and we need to behave accordingly. This actually is not a drill.
Jamil Smith
Feeling some kind of way about Trump's own policy goals being thwarted in the courts by his overtly racist statements, when those same policy goals have been allowed to proceed in the past because the racism wasn't so explicitly stated.
erica mauter
The existential angst that white supremacists feel about occupying a land where they are quite literally aliens, that was taken through theft, genocide and violence is precisely *why* they are obsessed with pretending that they -- and only they -- "belong" here. Obviously, white supremacists do not have any legitimate claim to "belonging" here. They're not from here. And so they must create an elaborate mythology, a set of alternative facts, that justifies their dominance and pathological violence.
Crystal @alwaystheself
The U.S. news media has historically aided and abetted official racism by omitting racist statements from coverage - to insulate readers/viewers from "shock"
Brent Staples
I don't know what's worse: The white hypocrites who call Trump "racist" without acknowledging their complicity, or the white hypocrites who refuse to call Trump racist at all. "I can't BELIEVE Trump said something that someone in my peer group or family has thought or expressed every single day of my life." What you all still don't want to admit is that Trump broke white folks' "gentlemen's agreement" (also known as "political correctness) to publicly disavow the racist views they privately express and actually act upon on a daily basis.
Crystal @alwaystheself
My theory [on why DJT won] is it was the racism. Trump fit the Archie Bunker archetype of “lovable bigot.” His racism signaled authenticity and a willingness to tell “hard truths.” Many Americans, in fact, see racial stereotypes as essentially impolite truths. Coverage reinforced this view.
jbouie
Working class whites are definitely capable of despising the ruling white elite while also aligning with them to maintain white supremacy. That's, like, the entire history of white America since the early colonial rebellions.
Bree Newsome
How come people who don’t believe in racism always believe in reverse racism? How does that work? That’s like believing in Santa but not in your parents.
Bunmi Laditan @HonestToddler
I present a motion we replace “diversity” with desegregation. And make it a legit priority in our planning.
surlyurbanist
Black women who graduated from college have a higher infant mortality rate than white women who dropped out of high school
Janelle Jones
The shift from "slave" to "black" attached attributes to Blackness: "subservience, criminality, lack of intelligence and dangerousness." (p. 31) What blows me away about this is that "criminality" became associated with Blackness because Black people were escaping.
âpihtawikosisân
There's a corrosive narcissism in the ways settlers claiming vague Indigenous heritage insist their family stories are sacrosanct and unquestionable, *especially* when no evidence/relationships support them. Such fetishizing entitlement to Indigeneity is colonial to the core.
Daniel Heath Justice
Never forget that for the past 30+ years marijuana laws have been used to criminalize Black people and send them to jail. Also never forget that over the last few years, marijuana laws have been used as a tool of capitalism and financial investment for white people.
PrestonMitchum
"The idea that inclusion and diversity is some kind of allowance being made to open our arms to more people — no. It is a correction of an error. It is a righting of a wrong. And it is going to be done." –Ava DuVernay
AvaDuVernay Fans
sometimes i just sit back and think of everything black people have endured in this country from slavery to jim crow to lynching to housing/school segregation to job discrimination to mass incarceration and consider how ridiculous it is that anyone would suggest we did this to ourselves
Clint Smith
"I have been described by you, for hundreds of years. And now, I can describe you. That’s part of the panic." –James Baldwin
No Time for Extra Folk @KidadaEWilliams
France charged Haiti money for the financial loss of slaves (who’d freed themselves). The debt + interest was not paid off until 1947.
Brigid Keely
It is not a dangerous time to be a politician. What nonsense. It's (finally becoming) a dangerous time to be a predatory male.There were a few tweets on class warfare and anti-poverty policies:
Bruce Anderson
Once you've said No and someone keeps going neither you nor they can pretend there's anything but assault happening. And once that has been established, things escalate very quickly. [So] Instead, you keep trying to give them outs where they can assure themselves - and you - that nothing bad was going to happen.
Ethelmonster
I have a proposal. When you’re inclined to say “people of color and women” instead say “people of color and white women” to avoid the implication that women of color don’t exist.
Imani Perry
When you say "home in on" in an email. And they (male) respond with, "There's a typo. You mean *hone* in on." And you respond: "Nope...you need to HONE your skills of not mainsplaining. And you need to HOME IN on why you consistently do it." BOOM! You. Got. Priesmeyered.
Molly Priesmeyer
Men: do you not feel insulted when you hear sexual abuse being excused as ‘just the way men are’? Is it not galling to be told it’s in your nature to be an entitled jerk? Plenty of men and boys are able to treat women like human beings. Excusing those who don’t demeans everyone.
Laurie Penny
The difference between men-only events and women-only events is that women-only events are designed to protect us from the kind of men that go to men-only events
Helen Saxby
Men have taken over most of the money and positions of power in the world in part because they have long had women to act as their muses, cooks, shoppers, breeders, caretakers, etc. All while exploiting poor people and people of color to do the work they don't want to do.
Jenn Stanley
I really think Garrison sucks.
All current fans are definitely schmucks.
He’s a big fuckin creep.
May we bury him deep.
Along all other creepy old fucks.
Tommy Dearest @tombasgen
Why do #MeToo critics keep doing this?
1. Argue that men are naturally violent and predatory (& acting like this is morally neutral & men have no agency over their eros).
2. Argue that it is irrational to say men are violent/worth fearing.
Does not compute! pick one!
Kate Havard
"Ask a man to tell you about his worst date and he’ll tell you a funny story about a lady who showed up dressed as a cat. Ask a woman to tell you about her worst date and she’ll tell you about a man who followed her home shouting that she was a whore.”
Aliette de Bodard
Just one last thing. "handsiness and groping and objectification and lust and aggression and passion and the ruthless pursuit of yet another conquest" are smokescreens. The issue isn't passion. It's consent.
Angus Johnston @studentactivism
Straight male hookup culture is spending all your time trying to figure out how to best get your foot in the door before it closes and none of your time figuring out why women are slamming the door shut in the first place.
Alexandra Erin
Feminism has gone too far. Men have been pushed to the brink of becoming nervous and considerate on their first dates. I'm so sorry for my hand in this dystopia.
Red Durkin @RedIsDead
“Women have been subjugated in almost every way for most of recorded human history, but after six months we have to ask: has this whole #metoo thing gone too far???”
Anne Thériault
I just hope folks are as committed to telling their actual sexual partners what they think about consent as they are committed to telling strangers on the internet.
Crystal @alwaystheself
"Demanding an expansion of empathy and responsibility when it comes to sex isn't regressive; it's a sexual revolution in its own right. It is silly to think we could have needed only one.” –Elizabeth Bruenig
Sarah Pulliam Bailey
It's wild to me how folks refer to #MeToo as a "witch hunt" and "lacking due process" as though #MeToo is a group of folks with uniforms & badges going around tossing men in prison without trial.
Bree Newsome
A woman: This specific thing bothers me.
The internet: But what if I construct an argument against a completely different thing that you weren’t even talking about and post it, and an insult, in response? Check mate little lady.
Ashley Nicole Black
Today feels like a good time to remind everyone that they have done studies on gender, miscommunication, and “soft nos.” And the overwhelming conclusion is that men claim ignorance when they are talking to women and the topic is sex/dating but demonstrate competence otherwise.
Jenny Kristine @jennygadget
"why didn't she leave" is such a convenient phrase to blame women for things that men did
Rachel McCarthy James
Here's a wild idea: Don't use "strictly speaking, have I committed a crime for which I could be convicted in court?" as your standard for whether or not your sexual choices are okay. Try instead, "did everybody involved have fun?" I know, I know, but just, I dunno, think about it
Red Durkin @RedIsDead
Men make fun of women for believing in tarot or crystals or astrology but think that things like trickle-down economics are real
Anne Thériault
We don't need a legal, economic and social system that ensures men get sex. We aren't in danger of not populating the earth. A hard-on isn't a crisis. Men getting to have sex isn't a social problem to be solved and protected.
@tressiemcphd
People who take a stand against sexual violence and harassment are not trying to roll back sexual liberation.
We are not fighting sexual freedom.
We are trying to make sure sexual liberation finally actually happens.
We *want* sexual freedom - for everyone, of every gender.
Laurie Penny
HINT: it's not "flirting" with someone if you could sub out their part with a broom with a forced smile painted on it
Aparna Nancherla
The resurgence of rape apologists and miscellaneous ladyhaters using "hysteria" to dismiss the frustration, anger, and grief of women is a little on the nose, guys. On the other hand, I am super ready to redefine "witch hunt" to be about sky-gangs of witches fucking hunting you down
Erin Kissane
The continued existence of straight women in 2018 should utterly disprove the idea that homosexuality is a choice.
@clapifyoulikeme
In this week’s New Yorker:
Jason Adam Katzenstein
"Because we commonly misinterpret displays of confidence as a sign of competence, we are fooled into believing that men are better leaders than women… Arrogance and overconfidence are inversely related to leadership talent."
Celeste Headlee
True story: I made 74 press requests for women & 15 for men on [topic]. No women give interviews (although several suggested other names). 11 men gave interviews, 2 stating they weren't experts. 5:1 ratio. Still failed.
Mika McKinnon
While DJT and his cronies enrich themselves with their racist, economically regressive and authoritarian policies, septuagenarians across America are working demoralizing jobs just to make ends meet. This is what cruelty looks like.There were fewer tweets on guns and gun violence:
@WaywardWinifred
The conservative movement is demanding increased work requirements for people on welfare just as we learn POTUS watches 4-8 hours of TV per day and doesn’t get to the Oval until 11 AM
Brendan Nyhan
Every business owner going on the news to say that paying workers at least $14/hr will dramatically affect their bottom line should be absolutely humiliated and ashamed to admit that all this time their profits came from paying people a poverty wage.
Kira-Lynn Ferderber @Cupcakes_n_Rap
Is it weird that more is being done to stop teenagers from eating laundry detergent than shooting each other?On voting and voting rights:
Simon Holland
I would like to see some research on what exactly people *mean* when they list terrorism as a top concern. What are they actually envisioning? What identity signals are they trying to send? Virtually no one in the US dies from terrorism, while we kill each other with guns and cars by the tens of thousands, day after day. And yet ...
David Roberts
Ever notice how no one seriously thinks we could stop gun violence by just telling people not to buy guns, but lots of folks seem to think we can address environmental problems with just green consumerism?
Tim DeChristopher
BREAKING: Thanks to the hard work of Floridians for a Fair Democracy, rights restoration for more than a million Floridians will be on the ballot in November. Nearly 1.5 million people in Florida are permanently excluded from voting because of a prior felony conviction.On education:
ACLU
Trump’s voting commission asked to see Texas records that identify all voters with Hispanic surnames, WaPo reports, according to newly released documents.
Kyle Griffin
Trump's base is miniscule. He's the most unpopular president in history. The question to ask is why a miniscule base is enough for them. They should want to broaden his base -- unless they're confident that voter suppression will render public will irrelevant.
Sarah Kendzior
If Puerto Rico had 29 electoral votes like Florida does, Donald Trump would help the people suffering there. That's the terrible, awful and tragic truth.
Michael Linden
Thousands of formerly incarcerated Arizonans who have served their time can’t cast a ballot. Joe Arpaio - a convicted criminal who never paid his debt - can be on the ballot. That’s wrong.
Jason Kander
Having high school seniors register, get involved in an election and actually vote as part of a required civics class would go a long way to having informed, involved citizens.
Al Romanski @skirom25
1. It's impossible to predict a good 2020 candidate in 2018. The US will change too much between now and next year.
2. Main priority should be stopping voter suppression. The appeal of a candidate is irrelevant if people can't vote. Focus on 2018 for now.
Sarah Kendzior
It's amazing that felon disenfranchisement still gets so little attention. In 2016, Clinton lost Florida by 112,911 votes. There are 499,306 black people permanently barred from voting in FL. Assume 35% turnout and a 95%/4%/1% vote split and you get a a net of 158,592 votes.
SeanMcElwee
"If we taught babies to talk the way that most skills are taught in school, they would memorize lists of sounds in a predetermined order and practice them alone in a closet." –Linda Darling-HammondAnd on health care:
Alfie Kohn
I sat with a group of students last week and asked them what the number one rule of the school was. Without hesitation, they said, “be quiet.” I don’t know about you, but I can think of about 1,000 rules I would rather be #1.
Tom Rademacher
it says a lot about america that "we should have schools instead of prisons" is considered the far left of mainstream rhetoric
@SeanMcElwee
A focus on increasing "rigor," "raising the bar," demanding "higher standards," etc. usually means teaching the same sorts of things in pretty much the same way, except now with fewer students being able to succeed
Alfie Kohn
My mom's a history professor and always complains that students worry about memorizing dates instead of understanding why those dates matter. Because high school education is set up as if it wants students to win on Jeopardy instead of understanding past and present.
marcelopoppi
Norway doesn't have "free" healthcare but their socialized system, paid for mostly with taxes, costs enormously LESS (9.7% of GDP) than ours (17.1% of GDP; both figures 2014). I don't think people realize this: socialized healthcare costs a lot LESS than our profit-sucking mess.Until finally, there are the best of the rest:
Chase Madar
There is perhaps no better example of the moral rot at the core of the Republican Party than imposing so-called "work requirements" on sick Medicaid recipients just weeks after passing a massive tax cut for rich heirs who literally did no work at all to inherit their wealth.
MichaelSLinden
The truly important things are often least noticed. Rather than rebuild the nation's schools, infrastructure, & provide health care & education for all, the USA has spent at least $5.6 trillion on its futile wars on terror since 2001
Langdon Winner
I’m not one to say that people’s politics can’t evolve over time, but it really is interesting to watch so many former Bush staffers become lifted up as moral arbiters of American political discourse after presiding over one of the immoral periods of modern American history.
Clint Smith
I'll trust “disruption” when it means literally anything other than "skirt existing regulations with no regard for the consequences."
Kelsey D. Atherton
Any worthwhile political beliefs recognize that your birth is a crapshoot, you could have easily been anyone else, and thus any suffering, lack of resources, etc. others experience might have been your own.
Thorne Melcher @ExistentialEnso
'Octopi Embedded in Ceramic Vessels' by Japanese ceramic artist Keiko Masumoto #womensart:
womensart1
I often wonder how much better the daily evening local tv news would be if they covered local art exhibitions, music gigs, author signings etc. And I wonder how much better society would be if they did that.
Paul Watson @lazcorp
it is almost as though nominally having ~all the information~ has broken our authority-fixated primate brains and resulted in the near-total collapse of our ability as a society to know anything at all
Erin Kissane
Professional interviewer tip: never ask a question you don't already know the answer to. And if you know the answer, don't ask the question. Never conduct interviews. Go live in a box. The box is your forever house now.
John Moe
I also find it telling that [right-wingers] are always talking about someone shoving something down someone's throat.
ProfB @AntheaButler
I bet if libraries rebranded as "coworking spaces," people would pay $100 a month just to sit there using WIFI among the books.
Sarah Mirk
I don't think you need to disbelieve life starting at conception in order to rationalize the good that can come from choice.
Claire Zulkey
People should unabashedly embrace folk arts, like coloring or singing around a piano. Constant exposure to professional quality art makes many reluctant to make art themselves, depriving people of the joy of creation and opportunity to develop personal artistic sensibilities.
JoshZ2012
on one hand, liberals want a country of racial and sexual equality where everyone has health care, but on the other hand conservatives want a racist police state with no social services. gotta tell both sides.
Oliver Willis
If we aggregate each land-use together, this is how the world would look:
Alfredo Romero
a quote that has stuck wth me is one from @prisonculture about how we can't organize people we have contempt for. marches are never perfect but we should look at them as opportunities for organizing + get people to expand their thinking, rather than an exercise in hypocrisy.
AShihipar
The folks who wrote the Bill of Rights understood the humiliation of being rousted by a cop because he can, what it does to your soul and your nerves. To my mind, the Fourth Amendment is one of the best and most beautiful passages in the constitution: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated."
Angus Johnston @studentactivism
My deep fear is that we'll ultimately defeat Trump but Trumpism — that toxic mix of structural racism, neoliberalism, militarism, and patriarchy — will barrel onwards. Our demand must be a radical redistribution of wealth and power to guarantee justice and dignity for all people.
Nikhil Goyal
It will be interesting to see if the 2020s is the decade when the trend of moving away from the people that love you so that you can go and die alone in Florida finally ends for good.
Jason Segedy
"Kicking the can down the road" doesn't even make sense as a metaphor. What's bad about kicking a can down a road? What are you supposed to do with the can instead?
Chris Steller
Creative fields are not a meritocracy. Being "good" is only ONE of the many barriers to entry, and acting like skill is the only measurable statistic to determine whether someone can have a successful a career or not is... extremely out of touch.
heyjenbartel
If you talk to the public as though they're children, they'll respond like children. If you talk to them as though they're adults, 60-80% will respond like adults. (The other 20-40% will still make all the noise, but a good process will bring out the adult majority.)
Jarrett Walker @humantransit
Stock photo of the day combines handshake cliche with jigsaw puzzle cliche:
Chris Steller
[preparing for a date]
me: what if she kisses me
roommate: you kiss her back, bro
me: ok
me: *thinking* but why her back though
rancheroni
I need some new pyjama tops and who are all these people who want strings and ties and ribbons on their pyjamas? Just give me a shirt that won’t poke me, ffs!
Sarah Mackey
When people say "grow up," they often seem to just mean "quietly accept things as they are."
Existential Comics
Remembering Ella Baker on MLK Day: "A strong people don't need a strong leader." This does NOT mean we don't need leadership. We need many leaders, ones who stand with us not above us. MLK understood this more than those who seek two deify him.
Barbara Ransby
I don't think most U.S. citizens understand that major corporations and news organizations decided a very long time ago that it is in their economic and political interests to willingly cooperate with government propaganda, covert operations and manipulation of the public. Many among the power elite view such collusion as a badge of pride and patriotic duty. For those seeking to acquire or maintain political and economic power, "national security" has come to justify almost any and everything. That was true before 9/11 and certainly is true today.
Crystal @alwaystheself
Never realized how much I don’t want a push notification to be the last thing I see before I die.
PJ Vogt
Design in Progress: Soy Boy:
Ryan Dow
The Hawaii false alert should be an early warning sign of what happens when the nuclear age collides with the digital age. Panic precedes confirmation; decision-times shrink. In Cold War we had more than a few false alarms, but they were detected before someone hit the panic button.
David Sanger
straight people: “LGBTQ people are sexualizing children!"
also straight people:
James Michael
Among the many other reasons to be depressed about America right now: where are the civil libertarians? Where is civil libertarianism in public sentiment? Why does ALL movement, no matter the administration, seem to be toward less privacy & more surveillance? Gah.
David Roberts
Earlier today I listened to someone talk about typography; she kept using the term "kegels" when she meant "kerning."
Carolyn Porter
I just realized that with the advent of self-driving vehicles, we may soon get country songs where your truck leaves you too.
Marko Kloos
We shouldn’t have to hope billionaires will invest in science, education, infrastructure, and healthcare and decide to be benevolent toward the rest of us. That’s why we have government.
Jared Yates Sexton
"Here’s how you make a dystopia: Convince people that when disaster strikes, their neighbors are their enemies, not their mutual saviors and responsibilities." –Cory Doctorow
Pavel A. Samsonov
"The dangers that men like Elon Musk pose are so much greater than a disdain for public transit. His remarks reveal a fundamental contempt for public life...and that contempt portends terrible consequences when held among political elites like Musk."
Strong Towns
I hate when people use an old famous person as their Twitter avatar because i'll be reading a book, see a pic of like Oscar Wilde and think "here's that asshole from twitter"
historyinflicks
Why can't billionaires simply enjoy their lives and their money? Why must they pursue the whole world domination thing too? Just revel in your money, sweetie. Stay in your lane. Stop trying to run/have/do everything.
Crystal @alwaystheself
Politics is now picking a billionaire and pledging fealty. Feudalism is back, baby, and it’s better than ever.
Patrick Monahan @pattymo
Regular reminder: the US is an enormously wealthy country. We could easily ensure that everyone in it has a place to live, enough to eat, and decent health care, without harming our prosperity. We choose not to. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
David Roberts
"Every known human society, every known tribe, has an official story about how the universe began....think about that. Human beings just seem to have a hard time saying, 'I don't know.'" –Michael Philips
@ maz_iqbal
Scary marijuana stats:
1. 88,000 deaths are annually attributed to excessive use.
2. Every day, 30 people in the US die in car crashes that involve a marijuana-impaired driver.
3.Teen marijuana use kills 4,700 people each year
4. Lol jk those stats are about alcohol
Brian Nichols @BNicholsLiberty
Insofar as we (any "we") happen to develop accurate, evidence-based world views, the explanation is not found in individual cognitive abilities but at the social level, among institutions and norms built to encourage and protect inquiry. Similarly, insofar as something's gone haywire in our collective relationship with truth, it's not that individuals are any dumber than they ever were, but that the institutions and norms that counterbalance individual failings are fracturing. What seems urgent to understand now is what kinds of institutions and norms preserve a cosmopolitan, multiethnic democracy's ability to determine truth and enforce accuracy - and how they can be protected against coordinated assault.
David Roberts
“The conservative turn in America has come from the constant use of conservative language in public discourse. So much so that progressives have often adopted conservative language, thus helping the conservative cause.” –GeorgeLakoff, The All New Don’t Think Of an Elephant.
Pat Fuller @bannerite
The book I’m reading just asked “why is the story of the boy who cried wolf told over and over in our society, and not the story of Cassandra, the woman who told the truth but was never believed?”
@kerra_henke
It’s fascinating that we have the word anthropomorphize but no word for UNDERstating the common ground between people and other living things
Saladin Ahmed
Fave quote of 2017: "If your belief is in disagreement with my humanity, I don't have to be tolerant of that. I don't have to make room for that. There's not room in a big tent for you to negotiate away my humanity and call it your political or ideological leaning." –Brittany Packnett
Meredith Ainsley @peacelovemer
Just saw an old white man chastise a young WOC for parking in a veterans spot so she whipped out her phone, showed him a picture of her in her army uniform and asked him “Did YOU serve?” which was just the perfect way to end 2017.
OhNoSheTwitnt
On looting during a crisis: "...goods left unguarded breed forethought, not greed, a hunter-gatherer's rational defensive fear of future chaos." –Ada Palmer, The Will to Battle
Pat Thompson
30 years ago, [a new shop would] just be a pet store, now it’s a “vegan” pet store. Mass consolidation of retail to big box/online has meant that small shops often need high margin, hyper-specialization to just compete.
Nate Hood
the most insidious thing about "startup culture" replacing "small business culture" is how it has convinced us that businesses are only succeeding if they are growing quickly, making big moves, and aiming as high as possible. that is not the way to make anything sustainable
Chelsea Fagan
twitter allows people from diverse backgrounds access into intimate interactions between people whose cultures may not be yours [jokes, conversations, arguments.] just because you can see them doesn’t mean they’re *for* you. It’s okay to quietly chill.
wikipedia brown @eveewing
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