February 2018. Whew. There were lots of tweets about gun violence in schools because of the Parkland, Florida, shooting, of course. Including commentary on the Parkland students, the NRA, and the idea of arming teachers:
The way every gun owner imagines themselves as the “good guy with the gun” is the same way everyone thinks they’re an awesome driver and everyone else is the problem.On Mulligan and his latest antics, some of which overlaps with the NRA and Florida shooting:
Angie Schmitt @schmangee
Every person who complains that the phrase "assault weapon" is misleading or meaningless has used the phrase "partial-birth abortion."
Osita Nwanevu
*hiding in a closet from an active shooter*
Me: This psycho has a machine gun and he just loaded another clip. Somebody help!
GOP: We’re here to help! It’s actually a semi-automatic rifle and they’re called magazines, not clips. Okay bye!
@mtobey
*Cop shoots unarmed black person* "You don't know what he was going through. He was in fear for his life."
*Cop fails to approach armed white shooter* "What a pussy. It's his job to risk his life."
Jay Kirell
look on the bright side: every armed teacher gets us that much closer to Starship Troopers
Elizabeth Bruenig
If owning a gun was an effective means of self-defense, your insurance rates would go down when you bought one. But they go up, because actuaries have proven that you’re far, far more likely to shoot yourself or a family member than someone attacking you.
@jndevereux
It is notable that most of the NRA's public messaging isn't even about firearms anymore. It's mostly culture war agitprop about fake news, Trump, obedience to the flag, feral leftists, socialists, antifa street gangs and other similar incitement. This is for a clear reason. The terms of the gun debate have become so extreme that a) there's no many more 'rights' to argue for and b) it's hard to argue the absolutist case on the merits. The goal is increasingly to permanently and inextricably embed maximalist gun rights into the country's partisan polarization. So whatever the merits of particular merits of an argument, any defeat for guns is a defeat for Trump, the flag, the police, traditional families, racial order and all the rest. The culture war and partisan polarization now backstop maximalist gun rights. Ergo, any intensification of the culture war and partisan polarization protects gun maximalism.
Josh Marshall
skip gates [Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates], one of the most well-known black educators in the world, was arrested for trying to get into his own home so excuse me for having a difficult time imagining what they would do to a black teacher who they thought was about to reach for a gun much less their own keys
Clint Smith
I have a note over my computer that reads "save your contempt for the powerful." These teens are living my maxim way better than I am.
@kevinbaker
The School Resource Officer in Parkland who stood outside while a mass shooting took place was suspended and resigned. Why should any Member of Congress who stands inside the Capitol and refuses to protect our kids keep their job?
Adam Schiff
No, gun-humpers, I'm not going to learn all the names and distinct functions of all the guns to earn my right to express the position "killing machines = bad." There's no secret nuance here.
Kate Harding
The NRA has 5 million members. That is LITERALLY ONLY 1.5% of the U.S. population. How dare they presume to rule us. Make their money toxic, take their power. I’m so grateful to these teens for showing us just how small those assholes actually are.
Joanna Robinson
parkland is the first mass shooting in memory where i know more about the survivors than the perpetrator
SeanMcElwee
After Columbine over 10,000 school police officers were hired just in case a school shooting happened. Two decades later, they haven't stopped a *single* school shooting. Instead they've arrested over 1 million kids, mostly students of color, for routine behavior violations.
Samuel Sinyangwe
You know, when I said I wanted the real world to be more like Harry Potter I just meant the teleportation and the magic stuff, not the entire plot of book 5 where the government refuses to do anything about a deadly threat so the teenagers have to rise up and fight back.
@MrFilmkritik
Chris Kyle the greatest american sniper in military history was shot and killed when confronted by a "crazy guy" with a gun. So we just have to train the teachers a lil bit better than Chris Kyle.
@TimfromDa70s
The posture on the Left cannot be that there is *no money* to arm teachers. THERE IS. Our posture needs to be that we OPPOSE militarism on its face and refuse to allow our children to be educated in prison prep and in fortresses.
Prisonculture
Yeah... this idea that people secure freedom by gaining the empathy of those oppressing them is ahistorical and will lead movements astray. You have to shift power and make it untenable for status quo to remain.
Bree Newsome
The NRA is like if there was an insane car lobby that was so powerful we couldn't have seat belts, speed limits, traffic lights, DWI arrests, licenses, or vision requirements because of "freedom," that kept pushing for a Formula One racer for every 14-year-old.
Summer Brennan
the fact that we're so awestruck by someone (a teenager) publicly asking Marco Rubio if he'd stop taking NRA money tells me we haven't been asking politicians tough enough questions in public
@jpbrammer
Ronald Reagan was surrounded by Secret Service agents when he was shot.
The Hoarse Whisperer
I think it's pretty clear that maintaining an armed constituency is a key part of Republican strategy. Democracy.
Michelle Allison @fatnutritionist
For a lot of people on the right, they aren't talking about taking up arms against the government when they're talking about fighting tyranny, they're talking about Jews, and people on the left, and LGBT folks. That's who they're fantasizing about killing when they say tyranny.
@CaseyExplosion
FYI, nearly every police chief I know wants fewer guns and fewer assault weapons on the streets. Hard to be pro-law enforcement and pro-gun proliferation. Jus sayin.
Phillip Atiba Goff
The NRA doesn’t work for gun owners. They work for gun sellers.
Brian Schatz
There is no anti-racist lens being applied to this national gun debate right now. This is by and large white America having a conversation with itself about preventing gun violence from penetrating affluent communities.
Bree Newsome (referring to Philando Castile)
The teens are seeing conservatives for what they are: an enemy to defeat rather than people who can be won over with magic rhetoric.
@samknight_one
School teachers carrying firearms and readied for gun battles in grade school classrooms is a level of social pathology that signals the end of any viable, coherent society. Travel such a path, and the barbarism and fearmongering of the American abattoir can only accelerate.
David Simon
All this talk about tightening school building security five months after a guy shot 500 people at an outdoor concert. Schools have courtyards. Schools have playgrounds. Schools are just one of a long list of places where children congregate in large numbers, and school shootings are just a fraction of mass shootings.
Angus Johnston @studentactivism
Why would anybody become a teacher if your $30,000 job includes paying for your kids’ school supplies AND training to be a paramilitary fighter expected to face down homicidal maniacs spraying the school with assault rifles? What kind of armed camp country do these people want?
Joy Reid
The idea of arming teachers is terrifying. Can you imagine how many guns would end up pulled on students? Or worse. Outbursts that should end up being suspensions or detentions could end up being death sentences. Especially in states where "fear" is all you need to shoot/kill.
Trymaine Lee
Gotta say, Republicans and right-wing media are not doing a great job of ensuring that an entire generation doesn’t grow up politically driven and wholly determined to end them. Not a hell of a lot of foresight happening here.
Rebecca Traister
Right now in America there are Republicans who received millions of dollars from the NRA accusing CHILDREN who survived a massacre of being PAID to speak out on guns.
Mikel Jollett
y'know I didn't think conservative media could go lower than "arguing in favor of electing a child molester," but "publicly smearing the teen survivors of a massive school shooting" is a shining achievement in douchebaggery
andi zeisler
on guns, david brooks proposes a bridge to nowhere — with lots of safe spaces along the way for gun owners to feel unthreatened while the people who don’t like being shot dead apologize for antagonizing them by advocating for life-saving policies
Philip Gourevitch
If "thoughts and prayers" are good enough for people who've lost their families then it's good enough for people who've lost their guns.
Erica Buist
My favorite thing is when the conservatives who scream about supporting the troops and are mad that people protest the police then insist that they need guns because they may need to kill all the troops and police.
LOLGOP
if you would sincerely rather send your kid to rikers island middle school in a kevlar backpack than simply give up one of your fucking toys you are unfit to be a parent
rob whisman
I wish, for once, instead of ambushing survivors for interviews after they've been traumatized by a mass shooting, members of the media would ambush politicians in their most vulnerable moments and demand to know why they haven't done anything to prevent this.
Charlotte Clymer
The moral perversity that allows one to think that universal healthcare is tyranny but dead school children are the price of freedom is what is corroding the soul of the United States.
Christian Christensen
A shameful distinction: The United States has become the most dangerous affluent nation in the world for children. Why? Because the U.S. is an outlier when it comes to the number of kids who die from:
1. Infant mortality
2. Car crashes
3. Guns
David Leonhardt
Fox News just had an “expert” on to discuss how AR-15s are misunderstood and not as bad as you think. They think Muslims are all the same, but guns deserve to be treated as individuals!
Hari Kondabolu
BREAKING: DC area man with five draft deferments who mocked tortured war hero John McCain for being captured says he believes he would confront an active shooter—with an AR-15 assault weapon—unarmed.On Mulligan’s appointees, policies, and the Russian conspiracy to interfere in American elections:
Brian Klaas
He woulda killed Hitler too. Could probably handle the devil with his bare hands
Adam Miller
Evangelicals created an atheist strawman, arrogant and selfish, consumed by greed and materialism, who will lie about anything, even belief in God, if it's to his advantage. Then they found him and voted for him.
Jools Chadwick
You couldn’t design a worse president for a time with more critical, pressing issues. Just worthless.
Jared Yates Sexton
Most high-level politicians are psychopathic narcissists, but having spent a career trying to curry favor with voters, they learn how to approximate empathy. Trump, having been a real-estate crook and media huckster his whole life, never had to develop those skills.
Matt Christman @cushbomb
"Putin didn't pick Donald Trump because he thought he'd be great for America. He wanted someone who was going to do the most harm to his adversary. And boy, did he pick the right horse." –Phillip Reines on All in with Chris Hayes
Pat Thompson
Trump's total capture of the Republican party and its base fits a pattern. Just like he has done for decades, Trump took a garbage thing and put his name on it, sold it to rubes, and is collecting as much money as he can from it, before he declares bankruptcy and discards it.
Wil Wheaton
It costs $200,000 to join the Mar-a-Lago Club, then $14,000 a year in dues. Pretty cheap way to get access to a sitting president and influence his agenda. Doesn’t hurt either that it’s unregulated by any of those campaign finance rules or that it goes straight to the president’s pocket.
Jared Yates Sexton
The message of Trumpism is Good Things should happen to people we like and Bad Things should happen to people we don’t like, and we’ll fill in the petty details about how the “law” works later. It feels almost like missing the point to call it hypocrisy.
Benjy Sarlin
The president’s chief adviser, a general, has allowed the president’s unqualified daughter (who lacks permanent security clearance) to brief a key ally on diplomatic decisions involving the risk of nuclear war. This snapshot belongs in an authoritarian banana republic.Oh, yeah, the Rob Porter domestic abuse story! Remember that? Also wiped out by the Parkland story:
Brian Klaas
Imagine a Muslim head of the EPA saying that the Quran inspired him to— you know what, I think imagining a Muslim EPA chief is challenge enough.
LibyaLiberty (responding to EPA head Scott Pruitt saying the Bible inspires him advocate use of coal)
One shocking aspect of this is the overall state of white collar crime enforcement is so lax Manafort and Gates only got caught because of the special counsel.
Matthew Yglesias
Oh yeah, I keep forgetting Scott Pruitt is stealing money from us as well as stealing our future. So many things to remember these days.
Pat Thompson
This Russian operation had staff in the hundreds, and a monthly budget of $1.25 mil PER MONTH by Sept. 2016 -- for context, this is more manpower and resources than most Republican presidential campaigns.
Elise Jordan
What the indictment reveals is that there was, essentially, an entire shadow campaign - money, structure, organization, ads, metrics, all of it -- run by the Russian government. And it spent much of 216 trying to elect Donald Trump president.
Chris Hayes
Silly white liberals, quit trying to polish turds to prove a political point: the FBI is just as corrupt and evil and oppressive as Donald Trump says... Just not against him. #FredHampton #LeonardPeltier #MLK #COINTELPRO #Panthers #AIM #MMIW
BigIndianGyasi
You all should be thinking about what these immoral, law-breaking men do after they leave the White House with state secrets many hostile parties would find valuable.
Sarah Kendzior
Republicans just passed a law that allows rich kids to inherit 135 times the average American income tax-free without ever working a day in their lives.
LOLGOP
The GOP dismantling of Medicaid deserves more attention. It's a brutal retrenchment of the welfare state at a time of unrivaled prosperity, with the sole purpose of immiserating the most vulnerable.
SeanMcElwee
It needs to be said: Donald Trump was put into office with the knowing help of a foreign enemy who sought to weaken our world leadership and has succeeded. Trump is now undermining our institutions and democracy. He is a traitor to America.
Amy Siskind
We know now the FBI was actively investigating both campaigns during the 2016 election but only chose to publicly announce (repeatedly!) their investigation of Clinton while keeping the Trump campaign investigation *completely* secret the entire time. If *anyone* working on the Trump investigation wanted to hurt Trump in 2016 they could have leaked details of the investigation. They did not. In fact, FBI sources went so far as to tell the Times there was no Russia connection! And all this is, apparently, evidence that the FBI was engaged in a conspiracy to get Clinton elected? Literally none of this makes any sense and it's an insult to everyone's intelligence. And it's depressing as hell to watching smart people pretend to be this stupid.
Chris Hayes
Trump Gives Wife Beater Praise He Usually Reserves for Child Molesters and NazisThe state of conservatism and our politics in general:
Susan Ohanian
Prediction, we'll recall this line from @Dahlialithwick often: "[To the Trump administration], women are to be cherished and protected right up until the moment they stop being docile and decorative, and then they are to be dismissed and humiliated."
Monika Bauerlein
for the morally dense: This is why you don't elect a president who abuses women -- he will tolerate it in others, give cover to the abusers and demean women brave enough to come forward. Oh, and since abusers lie you'll have someone dishonest to the core
Jennifer Rubin
A lot of pastors have to encourage women to stay with abusive husbands because if they taught women how to recognize abuse and leave it, women would be leaving their churches too.
@TenaciousMandy
I'm very shocked that the guys who wanted to jail a woman for using personal email are very cool with men who abuse women.
LOLGOP
35 years of hostility to women, black people, immigrants, and gay people, while happily rolling back democracy just to win elections isn't just some fucking up. It's a bad legacy of bigotry, and if there's anything to salvage in conservatism it will take more than Never Trump.Racism, white supremacy and police violence:
frannypak
Boy, it's sure really convenient for fascists that it's not reasonable to talk about fascism until things reach the point where we're literally not allowed to talk about it.
Alexandra Erin
Folks, if you're a political party who can't win elections without suppressing the minority vote, gerrymandering the shit out of districts and having Daddy Putin step in to lend you a hand, maybe you don't deserve to be at the table right now. Which is to say, we see you, GOP.
John Scalzi
i can’t relate to anyone who thinks political disagreements shouldn’t ruin friendships. we could get nuked at any point i’m not making time for catch-up brunches with My High School Algebra Classmate Who Thinks Welfare Is For Lazy People
@electrolemon
A good time to recall the three core arguments of reactionaries:
Perversity - attempts to solve problem will make it worse
Futility - attempts to solve problem will fail
Jeopardy - attempts to solve problem will cause other problems
David Roberts
Just wanted to get on and remind you that "fiscal conservatism" is social conservatism, and anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is trying to bring about a certain social outcome without admitting who that outcome will harm most.
Ja'han Jones
"Trump won white voters at every level of class and income. He won workers, he won managers, he won owners, he won robber barons. This is not a working-class coalition; it is a nationalist one."
Richard Florida
Conservative critics don’t want mainstream journalists to be better or more balanced. They want mainstream journalism, as an institution, to fail.
brianbeutler
What Fox tells us about conservatives is that they don't win by having serious ideas, they win by being a well-funded, sleek propaganda machine that stokes the fears of stupid older white people with disposable incomes. That's what conservatism is.
David Klion
“Even dictatorships are dependent on the population and societies they rule...People are never as weak as they think they are...[but if they resort to violence, they’ve] chosen the very type of struggle with which the oppressors nearly always have superiority” –Gene Sharp (1928–2018)
Alfie Kohn
The State of our Union is fine. It’s these Confederate-minded bastards I’m worried about.
John Dingell
When a cop is so afraid he won’t go into a school after a shooter, he’s a coward not doing his job and blamed for the loss of life. But, when a cop is so afraid he shoots an unarmed black man dead in the street, he’s a hero doing a tough job and his actions are justified.On feminism, toxic masculinity, misogyny…
Brett Erickson
People don’t want to be criticized for what their ancestors did, but they surely want to hold on to the profits their ancestors left.
merelynora
I love y'all, but I need y'all to understand that white racists are going to white racist and it's not a matter of your ability to prove that black youth are as human as white youth. They don't care about stats or facts. They care that white supremacy remains status quo. People have been engaged in the process of proving to racists that black people are fully human for hundreds of years. Racists do not care. They are aware that they benefit from the status quo and uphold it out of self-interest. Again, this idea that we gain freedom by gaining the empathy of those who hate us is not how this works.
Bree Newsome
Presidents Day is a great day to remember that many of the people who founded and led this country were brilliant but also deeply flawed & deeply prejudiced. When we celebrate the social contract they created for this country it’s always worth remembering who they didn’t include in that vision
Clint Smith
I very much support LeBron James and his refusal to shut up and dribble. But could we please implore him to set aside the "beating the odds"/outlier fantasy that fuels racism in the U.S.? Dear LeBron, let's create society of equity instead
Paul Thomas
terrorism is one of the only areas where white people do most of the work and get none of the credit
Ken Cheng
*whispers in your ear* white nationalists murdering people will never be called terrorism in America because terrorism implies its a threat to the state apparatus but white nationalist violence only reenforces the state apparatus in America
@PeopleRepellent
“Wealth is how history shows up in your wallet.” - Connie Razza
Angela Hanks
Racial dot map of Detroit. Dividing line is 8-mile road. Think of the forces that must be in play to maintain that strict a level of segregation:
Angie Schmitt @schmangee
"...the first enslaved African in Massachusetts was the property of the schoolmaster of Harvard. Yale funded its first graduate-level courses and its first scholarship with rents from a small slave plantation it owned in Rhode Island..."
@NewBlackMan
Dear White People:
People of color know "not all white people” are white supremacists and not all white men are mass shooters. People of color don’t push blanket travel bans, house raids, and border walls. We need y'all to work with us to dismantle white supremacy — not worry that we can’t distinguish a white guy from the KKK.
MuslimIQ
OVERPOPULATION IS A MYTH. Western powers consume disproportionately, then use colonialism/the IMF to impose their unsustainable systems on the global South. Anyone pushing the overpopulation line either doesn't understand this, or is seeking control over brown mothers' bodies.
shaadieali
Obama faced such racist backlash that white America elected Trump to undo his presidency because no matter how much he approximated whiteness biologically (his mother), educationally (Columbia & Harvard) or behaviorally (suit, tie, English) his skin tone was too much. And he chose to marry an unambiguously Black woman and embrace his Black identity in ways that made white America uncomfortable. One of the greatest amounts of backlash he faced was for saying that if he had a son, his son would look like Trayvon Martin.
Bree Newsome
The median wealth for black people is projected to be $0 by 2053. $0. Yes. You read that correctly. And it is not that blacks just didn’t *work hard.* The legacy of both being property AND later not being allowed to own property PLUS Jim Crow = $0 wealth. The response of white people that they “work(ed) hard” as a way to dismiss every aspect of systemic and structural racism is one of the few things that pushes me over the edge.
deray
Are you sitting having milkshake poured onto your head? Are you pouring the milkshake? Egging on the friend who is? Are you casually observing? Looking away, disgusted but not saying or doing anything? When we look back ... who will you be in this image?
Dr. Courtney Cogburn
Isn't it fascinating that Europeans, who are, after all, descendants of African migrants, work so hard to exclude African migrants?
Crystal M. Fleming @alwaystheself
If you're upset at the way rural white people are being discussed, hi I would like to introduce to the way that Black and Brown people in the inner city have been discussed forever. Maybe you could challenge that rhetoric going forward?
Mikki Kendall @Karnythia
The fact that RACE is a social/political construct doesn't mean RACISM isn't real. It simply means the ideology and pseudoscience upon which racism was developed is false. Again, racism is a system organized around oppression based on ancestry and appearance. The system is very real. There's literally no equivalent between the political repression experienced by Black Americans and whatever form of prejudice white people occasionally experience. Literally the whole economy and political infrastructure is built on anti-Black racism.
Bree Newsome
White sports fans damaging property after a game is a *RIOT*. Black people damaging property after centuries of oppression and yet another racist police killing is an *UPRISING* against white supremacist capitalism .
Bree Newsome (responding to the Superbowl in Philadelphia)
In 1944 a sixteen-year-old black student in Columbus, Ohio, won an essay contest on the theme 'What to Do with Hitler after the War' by submitting the single sentence. "Put him in a black skin and let him live the rest of his life in America."
Jemisha
I will never say Black History month isn't important because I think visibility is important. This month shows just how inclusive people can be when they feel like they need to be. Can you imagine how awesome it would be if we felt like we needed to be inclusive all the time?
Cacje
A lot of movies are basically 'wouldn't it be great if something happened to your wife/daughter thereby justifying the commission of mass murder.'Climate change and livable cities:
David Kaib
Queer Eye is fine but I would like a companion show with butch women helping straight women who want to feel comfortable being less performatively feminine
Hannah Goldfield
There are a lot of white women for whom equality means being equal to white men in power, wealth and the ability to oppress others and dassit
Bree Newsome
All I want is for men to do better. That's all. I've never thought that it was too much to ask, although all my life I've heard, "That's why you're single!" But why is a modicum of respect -- from one human to another -- so darn difficult? I'll never understand. Look, I don't want to be worshipped, and I don't believe that men should be doormats. But not being violent in your actions or language? What's wrong with that being the bare minimum for human interaction?
Ebony Elizabeth
BRB: going to whisper "burn down the gender dichotomy" to my sleeping children:
Maggie Koerth-Baker
Women are often told to avoid "weak" language like "I think," but the truth is it's often more accurate. I find it more troubling when people state their opinion as if it's an undisputed fact. We don't need to fix women; we need to appreciate what they're already doing.
April Wensel
Baby Boomers: You young people should rebel against society like we did!
Millennials: Okay, I don't fit into a rigid gender binary, I'm not strictly heterosexual or monogamous, and I think we need to dismantle capitalism and kyriarchy
Baby Boomers: no not like that
Doubting_Tom
I'd love to see the chattering classes switch from "Why don't men believe women?" to "Do men actually think these things are wrong?"
Erin Bartram
Women: Dear men, please treat us with respect
Too many men: FINE, I GUESS I'LL NEVER SPEAK TO A WOMAN AGAIN EVER
@_ElizabethMay
Explaining emotional labor to my mother so she can figure out why she is so tired. "Wait a minute! I need a pen to write this down."
Tressie McPhd
"girls don’t mature faster than boys, girls are punished from an early age for the same behaviour that boys are allowed to indulge in well into adulthood.” LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE AT THE BACK
EVA_SlVE
Normalize women not being baby incubators by showing them in pregnancy test commercials celebrating negative results
Rachel Fisher
People: ummm queerness in children's media is INAPPROPRIATE like we don't want to RUIN our children's INNOCENCE with this SEXUALITY NONSENSE
People: oh look at that infant wearing pink and that other infant wearing blue in close proximity to each other THEY'RE GONNA GET MARRIED
@ellle_em
Vienna, regularly ranked as the Most Liveable City in the World, is growing faster than any other city in the European Union. More roads to accommodate all of this growth? No, residents can access *all* transit for just 1 Euro a day.On the current administration’s proposal to gut SNAP and replace it with a box of commodity food (remember that issue? it was right before the Parkland shooting):
jennifer keesmaat
In an era of planetary crisis, walkability should be the top transportation priority in every city. Walking is itself a major means of transport in any coherent city, but walkability is also the underpinning of good transit and biking, sensible car ownership and vibrant density.
Alex Steffen
THE NEXT BIG THING in transportation isn't the Hyperloop. It's buses. The task at hand right now isn't building a new big thing. It's making the big things we've already built work better for everyone. These things require humility and hard work and focus and leadership.
Angie Schmitt @schmangee
I find wealthy old people blaming the environmental crisis on poorer young people having families extremely distasteful, even vile. (Doubly so since longevity gains, not birth rates, are the main drivers of population growth now!)
Alex Steffen
Congestion is a reason to oppose car infrastructure and free parking, not housing. Congestion is a reason to support dense, walkable neighborhoods. If you oppose housing because of congestion, you're admitting that car-centric models only work if we exclude people.
Zachary Wefel
We are only at the start of the great migrations of the 21st century. Some will be obvious — streams of refugees fleeing flooding shorelines and withered fields. Others will be hard to see — wealthier people moving to places they expect to be less hard-hit in the future.
Alex Steffen
If you want to live in a congested & irrelevant city 20 yrs from now — keep on building freeways to the suburbs. If you want to live in a prosperous & efficient city 20 years from now — invest in best transit you can today.
Taras Grescoe
The fact that nobody goes to jail for dangerous driving and people go to jail for transit fare evasion doesn't have anything to do with the relative harms of those activities. It has to do with who has political and social power in our legal system.
Angie Schmitt @schmangee
If you think the kids are pissed off about what gun manufacturers have done to their schools, wait til they find out what fossil fuel industries have done to their entire future lives.
Alex Steffen
Many people today are caught in a mental trap of thinking that since travel time improvements brought us economic growth in the past, greater travel time improvements will bring us even more economic growth in the future. The urban challenge of the 21st century is to take those (very real) improvements gained between 1870 and 1970 and leverage them by restoring the urban design wisdom, gained over the last 5,000 years, that we largely discarded in the late 20th century.
Jason Segedy
The high in Washington DC today is 78. Here’s a friendly reminder that humanity will ONLY be saved with large-scale economic planning & mass carbon capture. Otherwise, most of us die. The poor ones. The brown ones. The wealthy will survive; they have no incentive here. They’re your enemy.
peg_mclaugh
Some people argue that the interconnected nature of high carbon industries makes them less likely to change — I think a more accurate assessment is that it makes them one large, brittle system, ripe for profitable disruption. If I had more time, I'd go into how many of the component parts of the high-carbon economy face viable and rapidly scaling competition now. Building a carbon-zero world is completely within our technical and industrial capacities.
Alex Steffen
PSA: in the downtown area you may not always be able to park in the precise location you desire, which may lead to side effects like walking. Please pardon our success and vibrancy.
Tony Kroeger
If this were a drug it would make world wide headlines: British study demonstrates that cycle commuters had a 52% lower risk of dying from heart disease, 40% lower risk of dying from cancer. A 46% lower risk of developing heart disease, 45% lower risk of developing cancer at all.
jennifer keesmaat
me, a dumbass: "smart cities" are cities with great transit, affordable housing, divested from fossil fuels
you, supreme tech genius: no "smart cities" means your car can mine bitcoin and there's an app for dialing an immigrant to do your chores for free
@mcmansionhell
It’s pretty extraordinary how people at public meetings treat the danger of crossing busy streets as a feature of nature, like a rushing river or a steep ravine.
Alex Schieferdecker
The ideal climate for us is a stable climate. The whole infrastructure of our civilisation has evolved around the climate that has existed in the past millennia.
Stefan Rahmstorf
Today’s Climate Fact: Air pollution was responsible for 6.1 million — or 12% — of all deaths in 2016 around the world. Another reason to transition to 100% clean and renewable energy.
Senator Jeff Merkley
One potentially positive outcome from the Amazon shakedown is broad cultural disgust for the use of development incentives. Huge opportunity for political leaders to fill an intellectual void and promote a vision of strength through incremental development.
Strong Towns
The last time Earth was as warm as it is now was about 125,000 years ago. And we know sea level was 6 meters higher than it is today.
InsideClimate News
"Think of an e-bike as a replacement for a car, not a manually powered bike, and suddenly it seems cheap. It seems easy. It seems green. Parking is a piece of cake. And unlike a car, it never gets stuck in traffic."
HFrazey
There was just 4 hours and 20 minutes of coverage on climate change in 2017 -- in total -- on the four major TV networks. That is completely unacceptable. We're plummeting headlong into one of the greatest challenges in the history of our species and almost no one is talking about it.
Eric Holthaus
One thing we don’t talk about much is that the US now has tens of millions of people that only have ever known a lifestyle built around driving to everything. So the idea of walking, biking - it all seems not just foreign but also absurd. Anytime I leave my little walkable bubble in Savannah, I’m reminded of just how much of the country is complete auto-oriented suburban sprawl, and how futile it seems that it will change in significant amounts. We have what we have, to a large degree.
Kevin Klinkenberg
Can we get an acknowledgement that bike/pedestrian projects are actually car projects? If no cars, no separation from cars is needed and we have all the infra we need. Bike/pedestrian projects are $$$ because cars. Therefore all bike/ped projects are for traffic throughput.
From the Crosswalk
Stock markets slide for a day. Result: mass panic and wall-to-wall coverage. Soil is sliding off the land worldwide, threatening the entire basis of human survival. Result: indifference, no coverage. What is salient is not important What is important is not salient.
GeorgeMonbiot
Auto-oriented spaces rob children of "everyday freedom," the ability to have independence for daily activities. We can't expect young people to suddenly become self-sufficient when we deny them a childhood of practical experience.
Strong Towns
Land is the most valuable asset a city has. We should maximize use of it by building narrow streets.
Strong Towns
IDGAF if a microscopic portion of people commit food stamp fraud. I CARE ABOUT PEOPLE NOT GOING HUNGRY. And the cost of that fraud? MINISCULE. It's a fraction of a drop in the bucket. *stares at trillions of dollars of tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires*On immigration, DACA, and ICE:
Chelsea M. Cameron
conservatives: socialism is bad because we need to be able to choose from 35 brands of bread or freedom dies. also conservatives: a box of government selected monthly rations sounds good
@EternalBusboy
None of the problems our country is facing can be blamed on poor people getting too much.
Rainbow Rowell
Proposing that we cut food stamps and ship a box of government canned goods to poor families to save money right after they pass a $1.5 trillion tax cut for corporations and the wealthy is so vulgar and obvious I don’t know what to say.
Jon Lovett
so the guys who got upset because Michelle Obama changed nutrition requirements for school want to literally mandate what poor people eat and deliver it to their homes?
Caitlin Legacki
Under the Border Patrol’s expansive definition of the border zone, the entire states of Massachusetts and Florida and the city of Chicago are border areas despite not actually bordering any foreign countries.On education and children:
Matthew Yglesias
This administration is literally rounding up and detaining more undocumented parents for traffic violations than white supremacists for training and arming terrorists.
Samuel Sinyangwe
The Republican Party's platform in 2018 is that the country has too many legal immigrants, too many poor people with subsidized health insurance, too many rich people paying punitive tax rates, and too few guns.
Ezra Klein (written before the shooting in Parkland)
ICE is engaged in an ongoing, large-scale ethnic cleansing campaign right now, and it's incredible how little most people have to hear about it. 143,470 arrests just last year. 226,000 deportations.
@joe___nelson
I don't want to hear one more fucking word about how stopping immigration is supposedly for the safety of Americans, when the GOP absolutely refuses to lift a finger to try and prevent 35,000 yearly firearm related deaths
Alt Fed Employee
Is fascinating that when people suggests ICE be abolished the reaction by some is to say “but what would you replace it with!” as if ICE was a part of the constitution & we’ve never operated without it. It was created in 2003. It’s far from a requisite feature of our government.
Clint Smith
There are MANY things in life that are counter-intuitive. One is that the solution to low test scores is NOT more drilling but more recess.And the best of the rest:
Alice Keeler
wait i'm sorry why are we not talking about this more when we teach american history? a) kids would be so much more engaged if they knew these people were also kids b) why are we so obsessed with what these 20-somethings thought was a good idea 300 years ago?
@RubyGraceLevine (responding to a tweet that listed the young ages of Lafayette, Monroe, Hamilton, etc. in 1776)
The voting age should be whatever age the youngest person tried as an adult in that state was
ramsincanon
Hitting children should be ILLEGAL just as it is illegal to hit adults, prisoners, folks in the military, and animals. People don't think hitting kids should be illegal because they don't view children as fully human. They believe that children are natural objects of violence.
Stacey Patton
Y’all, being able to look at a news story on the internet and figure out if it’s real or fake is JUST AS IMPORTANT as knowing how to sound out words in a sentence and decipher meaning. It’s a different kind literacy that affects our ability to navigate the world.
Kimberly Nicole Foster
At age 12, my English teacher told me I had a shallow intellect and would "never be a deep thinker". Was angry/devastated until the poetry unit, where he made us read *HIS OWN* (terrible) poetry, and I realized adults can be idiots.
Holly Krieger
“It really bothers me that as I do research regarding empathy in schools, everything I find is about teaching kids empathy instead of teaching adults empathy.”
Sisyphus38
If the Supreme Court is going to rule that government workers don't have to pay any fees to the unions that represent them because of political differences, shouldn't SCOTUS rule that shareholders can insist on repayment for any corporate political spending they disagree with?
Steven Greenhouse
A 144 year-old wisteria tree from Japan:
Nature Is Weird
I can honestly say in my almost 7 years as a public defender in Brooklyn, I have never ever had a misdemeanor marijuana case that began as a 911 or 311 complaint- it is always cop-initiated and largely cop-created (“empty your pockets”) #EndBrokenWindows
@brooklynPD
Pro tip: Deeply question any prediction of a catastrophe whose precise shape just happens to force society to conform to the ideological preferences of the predictor—and cast it aside completely when those preferences are socially reactionary.
Alex Steffen
I'm not really interested in African apologies for complicity [in the trading enslaved people]. This is a human problem. Europeans enslaved and raped and exploited their "own" people too. Otherness is a liquid category and it's flexible enough to accommodate all kinds of violence.
Crystal M. Fleming @alwaystheself
I saw a heartfelt apology [for the slave trade] circulating around Facebook, written by (I believe?) a Nigerian-American. A lot of us were moved and said so in the comments. Reconciliation is important. But I'm kinda ready to move on. *None* of us are our ancestors. I'd rather join hands and kick ass. Instead of endlessly examining all these deep cross-Atlantic wounds (again, important), I want to know how I can turn away from a lifetime of unquestionable allegiance to a nation-empire that'll never accept me, and turn toward building something new. How can we build together?
Ebony Elizabeth
Oh cool, an escalator to Twitter:
Holly Nielsen
Someone recently argued that we need a new Billy Graham; I wish Graham’s urgent public Evangelicalism had died with him. America needs a new Fred Rogers. His Christianity I can approve of. It wasn’t a spectacle; Mr. Rogers just genuinely cared for people. We didn’t deserve him.
Christopher Stroop
What have I done to deserve being on a plane with a bunch of young conservative missionaries wearing T-shirts showcasing their most recent “saving” of people who don’t need their “saving”?!
Molly Priesmeyer
Just spotted a cat on someone's porch, miaowing to be let in. Without thinking, I walked up to the door, rang the bell, nodded to the cat and left. It was only I rounded the corner I realised what I'd done as I heard the owner shouting FUCK ME SARAH THE CAT JUST RANG THE DOORBELL
Philip Larkin
There is no way to craft a real health care proposal that won't cause serious pushback. Because serious interests are at stake.
David Kaib
It is hard for me to fathom how anyone who deals with private companies on a frequent basis - which is to say, anyone at all - can walk around believing that the private sector is generally better at doing things than the government is.
Ben Spielberg
Prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse
The Economist
What's up book nerds? I made a quilt I think you'll dig:
Kady Yates
Nazi/stasi/slaveowner heroes are a reminder of how willing we are to bestow Happily Ever Afters and applause and cookies on white men who briefly stop being evil whereas marginalized groups must be perfect at all times or they're too unrelatable. Redemption plots are very popular as long as it's a (rich, cis, het, white) man who is being redeemed. Nobody else gets redemption. About five nazi heroes ago, somebody was like "actually redemption plots are popular because it's an important element of Christianity" which might be plausible if literally anybody other than white men got redeemed (usually by a less privileged woman, because of COURSE.)
Cat Sebastian
The neeeeeeeeed to be seen as hyper-rational...does not necessarily come from a super rational place. The need to be seen as unemotional (whether appropriate or not) can be complicated by irrational family of origin baggage unaddressed...
@gdtrble
Y'all, did you know that "free" government services are actually paid for by taxes?! I didn't until 437 conservatives mansplained it to me on Twitter.
David Roberts
it's amazing how willing people are to admit that their business models will fail if they can no longer exploit their employees. capitalism is flawless
ben wyatt, human disaster
Just a reminder that Uber has about the same farebox recovery ratio as WMATA, NY MTA, or Sound Transit, while underpaying its employees.
Christof Spieler
No matter how many plausible psychological explanations I read, I cannot overcome my deep-seated contempt and alienation toward people who respond to anxiety by clinging to an authoritarian.
David Roberts
I love this idea that we can't enact any kind of change that moves us towards a more structurally just society if even a single person is harmed by it, no matter how much the inaction harms that same person
@fishmanpet
The beautiful colours of the rose finch!
Strange Animals
That federal "tipped minimum wage," passed in 1991, was separated from regular minimum in 1996 — the year I began a decade of waiting tables and bartending for $2.13 an hour. Utter scandal that it hasn't been raised in 27 years. Idea: Shift our elected officials to a tipping system?
Sarah Smarsh
The road to hell will be paved with mealymouthed privileged peoples' unwillingness to be inconvenienced, while democracy is dismantled around them piece by piece and their fellow citizens die.
N. K. Jemisin
Giving money to the poor is the most magical thing you can do for society and for business. People whose basic needs aren't being met will spend 100% of the money they get, which means it goes right into the economy. And the money they spend? Will likely get spent again. And again. The further from the top you place the money, the more times that same money will be spent. It's like magic.
Alexandra Erin
"Socially liberal but fiscally conservative”:
@casual_front
None of this "access to quality, affordable health care" nonsense. Guaranteed universal health care free at the point of use.
Nikhil Goyal
will there ever be an act more heroic than a white dude playing devil's advocate?
ben wyatt, human disaster
I'm being snarky, but a lot of the fortunes made by Web 2.0 "disruption" are textbook examples of what Naomi Klein called "disaster capitalism.” Paul Graham fucking admitted his strategy was to see any heavily unionized industry as having "potential energy waiting to be liberated.” You say potential energy waiting to be liberated, Marx says surplus value waiting to be extracted, potato, potahto, let's call the whole thing profiteering bullshit.
Arthur Chu
PSA: "use" and "utilize" are not the same thing.
Claire Major
Wouldn't it be easier and cheaper for the country to just write the Koch brothers a check each year for a couple billion dollars and ask them to stop fucking with our economy?
James S.A. Corey
This is the greatest humanitarian achievement in history:
Jason Pontin
I tossed something that said “best before November 2016” today and all I could think was, man, me too, buddy.
Sarah Mackey
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