Saturday, June 30, 2018

Tweets of June 2018

Remember the “summit” with the leader of North Korea? That seems so long ago. And there are probably four different sets of tweets listed below on the topics of immigration and civility, blending together under each of those headings but prompted by different outrages. Man. I just can’t keep up.

But I'll try anyway, starting with Mulligan and the Supreme Court, including the recent Supreme Court decisions:

A president who lost the popular vote is going to nominate a Supreme Court justice to a lifetime seat, confirmed by a senate in which the 40 million people of CA have the same representation as the 600,000 people of WY, and the 700,000  people of D.C. have none at all.
Michael Linden

Democrats have won the popular vote in 6 of the last 7 presidential elections, but still only have 4 seats on the Supreme Court. Democracy!
@ObsoleteDogma

There is no state in the country where support for banning abortion reaches even 25 percent. (Data for Progress analysis of Cooperative Congressional Election Studies, 2016):


Data for Progress

So Velveeta isn’t allowed to call itself “cheese” but an unlicensed crisis pregnancy center can pretend to be a medical facility. Okay.
@mizsant

Dem senators, repeat after me: “The President of the United States is under investigation for collusion with a foreign adversary and obstruction of justice. There can be no SCOTUS replacement until he’s been cleared.”
Christian Finnegan

There is no law. There are five Republican justices methodically implementing the agenda of the Republican Party from the bench.
SeanMcElwee

More: Gorsuch announces his belief that the Voting Rights Act does not prohibit racial gerrymandering, joining Thomas' longtime crusade.
mjs_DC

Reminder the current SCOTUS exists as it does only because Republicans refused to let Obama appoint someone. So the current SCOTUS itself represents a racist affront to the concept of representative democracy.
Bree Newsome
Then there are Mulligan's child jails and everything else wrong with this administration on the issue of immigration. Oh, and he’s threatening to do away with due process!:
remember that a few weeks ago talking about abolishing ICE was too radical for most of the folks doing so now? remember this the next time these same folks claim your demands for equality ‘aren’t realistic’. this is not hipster leftism (‘I was into abolishing ICE before it was cool!’) — it’s about remembering to imagine bigger, and remembering that some folks will try and keep you from doing that at first even if they come around eventually.
Saladin Ahmed

#FamiliesBelongTogther:


Angus Johnston

imagine if they accused us of wanting the borders to be open and we just said: yes
the prisons to fall and we said: yes
wages and medicine for absolutely everyone and we said: yes
fewer soldiers and more teachers and we said: yes
chick_in_kiev

Along the border there are CBP facilities known as "ice boxes," because they are intentional kept extremely cold. They are where newly apprehended people are first detained often for days. As far as I can tell, *no* independent entity has been inside them.
Chris Hayes

America, 2018: Guards telling child prisoners to keep quiet if they want to see their families again.
David Roberts

If you don’t believe in Due Process you don’t believe in America.
Tor Ekeland

The President of the United States is threatening to do away with the rule of law. His press secretary didn't get served at a Red Hen. One of these things matters and the other doesn't.
Ben Rhodes

“Infest.” “Breed.” “Invade.” This dehumanizing language cannot stand. Nazis referred to Jews as “rats.” Hutu leaders called Tutsis in Rwanda “cockroaches.” Slaves were referred to as “stock.” Dehumanizing language lays the groundwork for mass atrocities. The words are no accident.
brianklaas

There is no border crisis. There is no immigrant crisis. There is no crisis. They are making this up. None of this is real. This is white supremacists worrying about the demographic shift. That's it. That's all this is.
non_bona_dicta

If you think a white immigrant is preferable to a nonwhite immigrant, all else equal, because the former slows demographic change and the latter speeds it up, then you ARE trying to racially engineer the population. Is that the kind of country America ought to be??
Noahpinion

I would love to ask these law followers if they’ve ever driven after having a few drinks or gotten a speeding ticket or made a turn without signaling or trespassed. “We have laws” is simply cover for uglier attitudes and beliefs.
jbouie

In 2017, Trump ended an extremely successful program called the Family Case Management Program. It matched ~1,000 asylum-seeking families with social workers. The program had an overall compliance rate of 99 percent.
FCMP: $36/day per family
Detention:  $319/day per person
Trumpet1984

There is NO immigration crisis. Immigrants, including undocumented ones:
- have no impact on employment levels or increase the number of jobs.
- commit fewer crimes.
- pay more in taxes than they receive.
- help us with the public finance problems of aging population.
Adam Davidson

The President just said he wants to change the laws to dispense with the need for judges. That’s a completely normal thing and not at all authoritarian.
matt blaze

how do we get past like 30-40% of the country thinking anyone who illegally crosses a border forfeits all rights to anything including being able to know where their kids are
libby watson

people seem to think it's ~ironic~ or incongruous that these Trump people enjoy Mexican food, but that's the white person's fundamental relationship to non-white people, in general: service, contempt, extraction, betrayal
justincharity

Someone hacked the reader board near ICE headquarters in Southwest Portland:


Marilyn Deutsch

gaslighting is literally wearing the words "i don't care" on your back and acting like people are weird for assuming you don't care
Molly Priddy

There are currently private prisons and private immigrant detention centers that have established massive political action committees (PACs). We should end all three.
Beto O'Rourke

First-time illegal entry into the United States is a misdemeanor. Lying on or omitting materially relevant information from your SF86 (as Jared Kushner did multiple times by his own admission) is a felony. Guess which one's getting prosecuted?
Chris Hayes

It’s not an accident that the US government is making it so difficult for journalists, lawmakers, lawyers and others to bring you images and firsthand accounts from these separated parents and children. They are hiding the truth from you because they fear your reaction.
Jake Tapper

When Jesus said "Suffer the little children," this isn't what He meant.
Harry Turtledove

Let's put some blame where it belongs: the government renders people "undocumented" by actively dedocumenting them. "Document" is a verb. Immigration is the cure for cultural stagnation. America is not a pie that needs dividing. It's a whole kitchen.
HMAesq

I don't want to hear nonsense about this being an attempt to stem illegal immigration. Trump first went after Visa holders. Then he went after Dreamers. Then he went after asylum seekers. All legal. This is not about immigration. This is about publicly punishing brown people.
Max Sparber

remember when they said we couldn’t make barron trump jokes because he’s a child and now there’s children being stolen from their parents and locked in cages but they’re okay with it
jaboukie young-white

strange thing about the migrant panic in america is how relatively few people we're talking about
-legal immigration adds 0.3% to US population every year
-the number of undocumented residents has declined, is at 3.5% of total population
-2/3 of those have been here for more than 10 years
chris hooks

A literal Nazi saying that Italy is "90% white" is the perfect illustration of race as a social construct. A century ago, precisely zero American xenophobes would've considered Italians white.
paleofuture

Just want to point out that this administration has regularly used phrases like "protect our culture," "change our culture," and has referred to immigrants as "animals" that "infest." They are not hiding it. They're telling you everything you need to know.
Jared Yates Sexton

Why are you making me punch these children? –GOP, 2018
LOLGOP

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to be held away from their parents in a pen. Not a cage, a cage has a roof on it. I just think that’s an important distinction to make. We’re not monsters.”
Danny O'Dwyer

Remember the people worried about the trauma Barron would have from briefly seeing a clearly fake replica of his father’s head? Yeah, now those same people are cheering stripping 2000 kids and infants from their parents & indefinitely locking them in a Concentration Camp.
MuslimIQ

If you had predicted in 2016 that a Trump administration would build a new bureaucracy for separating thousands of children from their parents and detaining them in camps, the entire culture would have dismissed you as a lunatic. It would have ruined your career.
Jason Fagone

So weird how the same country that is quickly and efficiently managing to build tent cities for children at the border wasn’t able to provide quick relief for or save the lives of thousands of Puerto Ricans. #FamilesBelongTogether
Javier Morillo

Colonial states separate children from parents because they know it works. It destroys and traumatizes for generations. It's an attack on the future as well as the present. It's not partisan issue, it's a colonial one.
Jesse Wente

People who tore children from their parents in the Bible:
1) Pharaoh
2) Herod
3) Pontius Pilate
So, sure separating children from parents is biblical. But not sure you want to be counted with that crowd...
Jacob J. Erickson

I know my white liberal friends would love to BELIEVE separating children from their parents is unAmerican. It is not. Hundreds of thousands of Native kids stolen as a matter of American policy. So many Native kids stolen Congress HAD to pass a law, the Indian Child Welfare Act.
BigIndianGyasi

I also want to remind people that when Michelle Obama said kids should drink more water, they had literal "experts" on Fox shows saying too much water was bad, like we're all out here dying of water intoxication.
_ElizabethMay

I keep seeing this “What if someone broke into YOUR house?” line, but a more accurate analogy for how we’re treating asylum seekers would be if someone knocked on your door begging for help, so you stole their child, locked them in a closet, and patted yourself on the back.
E. K. Thiede

Donald Trump: Pretrial detention is appropriate only for the head of the Mob.
Also Donald Trump: Pretrial detention should be the universal policy for the most commonly prosecuted federal crime, even if it requires separating children from their parents.
Dara Lind

Reminder: citizenship is not a scarce resource. it is an invented category and its limits are equally invented.
Malka Older

Reminder that the people currently justifying tearing children away from their parents spend the last twenty years insisting "every child deserves a mother and a father."
Dan Savage

After SB 1070 was passed in Arizona, I spent the summer of 2010 in Phoenix, living on a couch and working overtime to resist Arpaio and the gross racism & cruelty of growing anti-immigrant politics. We marched, filed lawsuits, got past security to protest Arpaio at his own rallies. I walked side by side with men and women who made me weep with their bravery, Dreamers who dared show sit in McCain's office. I heard Arpaio spit bile. And yet I did not believe we would rip children from their parents and put them in cages. I saw what Arpaio did. I read the grotesque stories of how he treated people. But I believed we were succeeding in pushing it back. Clearly it takes more. None of us can be silent when Arpaio's policies become national policies.
Zephyr Teachout

The people who lost their shit when Michelle Obama said that kids should eat vegetables are totally cool with Trump putting kids in concentration camps.
OhNoSheTwitnt

*travels back to 2014*
Them: What's the future like? Do we have flying cars?
Me: Well, our child internment camps now have quotes from Art of the Deal.
Them: ...
Me: ....
Them: The Donald Trump book? Why?
Me: You're gonna want to sit down.
Them: Wait, child internment camps?


paleofuture

Just so everyone's clear, we are *well* past the point of "First they came for" right now.
Alexandra Erin

Wait until liberals find out that this country has been murdering, enslaving, incarcerating, raping and separating children of color from their families for nearly 250 years.
alwaystheself

There’s a sort of glaring contradiction involved in labeling MS-13 public enemy number one while also maintaining that people fleeing MS-13 aren’t legitimate refugees.
Matthew Yglesias

Can someone explain to me the dueling MAGA arguments that our economy is currently the best it’s ever been but also globalism is taking all the jobs so we need to crack down on immigrant job stealers including rape victims escaping terror.
Tim Miller

When someone calls ICE on a person, when someone uses calling ICE as a slur or as a taunt, they are signalling their support for ethnic cleansing. I don't think people realize how real that sentiment is and how quickly it is being weaponized with full force of the state.
SeanMcElwee

When the laws don’t fit for the times, we work to change them. We have changed many laws since the founding of this country. Our immigration system of laws is BROKEN. So let’s stop criminalizing immigrants and fix the broken system instead.
Linda Sarsour
In the midst of all that, one Trump minion was yelled at in a restaurant and another was asked to leave a restaurant, and a Congresswoman dared say it was okay to make your feelings known to fascists nonviolently. Which led to many tweets on civility, the Red Hen restaurant saga and Maxine Waters:
Maxine Waters has had to cancel events due to death threats. The Red Hen's owner has had to step down from a local leadership position due to death threats. 5 people working for a newspaper were murdered yesterday. Where are the lectures on civility for the right?
Romancing the Nope

WASP ladies: in order to get suffrage, your grandmas derailed trains. They burnt down dozens of buildings. They planted bombs. They smashed the windows of banks and businesses. They RIOTED, for your tone-policing asses. Don't talk about civility when everybody else needs rights.
Alison Kinney

What if instead of saying "fuck civility", we said "nonviolent protest IS civil", "demanding justice IS civil", "truth-telling IS civil"?
hoperhenderson

To Republicans saying Maxine Waters should resign: In the past year, a neo-Confederate, pedophile and torturer have been serious GOP Senate candidates. A pimp just won a GOP primary for a Nevada state seat. Steve King is retweeting nazis. Maybe worry about cleaning up your own party???
Adam Best

It’s fucking maddening to watch Democrats tsk tsk over civility as Gorsuch, the clearest consequence of Democrats’ commitment to “civility,” is proving to be the deciding vote in some of the most devastating blows to civil rights in decades
Nicole Silverberg

Imagine what it will feel like to one day tell your grandchildren, "I'm the one who told the freedom fighters to be polite."
Ijeoma Oluo

You know what was awesome about the suffragettes? They fucking punched cops and beat the shit out of dudes in public. Often called unruly and uncivil by the press. It was fucking great. Anyway their movement ended up in a constitutional amendment for women to vote.
royaltheartist

You know what's not very civil? Melting the damn ice caps.
Alex Steffen

The breakdown in civility and our politics occurred when a sitting President couldn't even get a hearing on a Supreme Court nominee for 8 months. Not when someone couldn't eat at Red Hen.
Ben Rhodes

Reactionaries aren't being inconsistent when they tell you they won't bake cakes for gay weddings but demand you serve them at restaurants. They have a consistent philosophy: everything for them and nothing for you.
CORPORATE_NAME

That Mitch McConnell's Supreme Court coup wasn't mercilessly dragged in the press as uncivil and un-American tells you a lot about the default assumptions in our system.
@Rschooley

Dear pundits, a reminder that the Tea Party spent the summer of 2010 showing up to town hall meetings across America brandishing loaded weapons. Excuse us if we find your new-found faux outrage about civility absurd.
Matt McDermott

If you find it more scary and more troubling when a random person disrespects a politician than when a politician disrespects a random person, mull on that.
studentactivism

THIS MACHINE LETS FASCISTS DINE UNDISTURBED IN ITS RESTAURANT. AFTER ALL, CIVILITY IS THE MOST FUNDAMENTAL (CONTINUED ON BACK OF GUITAR)
Dan Wineman

As this Sarah Sanders thing unfolds, remember a hallmark of a psychologically abusive relationship is that the abuser can do whatever they want, but you are still expected to be civil. They may be cheating or stealing, but you are expected not to swear or name-call. It's bullshit.
Wendy Molyneux

Everyone who's freaking out about the out-of-control anti-Trump resistance has the historical memory of a goldfish. A baby goldfish.
studentactivism

"Let republicans eat in peace!" is always a weird thing to say but especially when they're in the process of dismantling SNAP.
KivaBay

conservatives: fuck your feelings snowflake libtards. Trump is here to end your political correctness. lock up immigrants. trump that bitch. grab her by the pussy. fuck you
"I don't think I want you as a guest at my establishment"
conservatives: WHAT HAPPENED TO CIVILITY??
classiclib3ral

In an abusive household, there is often a divide between those who want to fight back & those who think keeping quiet will give respite.
Jeet Heer

I don’t recall a lecture from media about civility after:
• Inauguration crowd chanted “Lock Her Up” when Hillary took her seat
• Mueller accused of treason
• Athletes called “Son-of-Bitches”
• Adam Schiff called a “Monster”
• Maxine Waters called “Low IQ” OVER AND OVER
Philippe Reines

It’s encouraging that Sarah Huckabee Sanders was judged not by the color of her skin but by the content of her character.
Anthony King

Apparatchiks are not a protected class.
David Roberts

One of the core features of "civility" as conceived by DC elites: conservatives must never, ever be held accountable for the results of the policies they support.
David Roberts

Civility is the coward’s favorite virtue.
jelani cobb

I really don't know how to tell you, but you're not gonna get points for good form. It makes you look like children. Fascists know this weakness of yours, that you need to think well of yourselves while actually not taking much of a stand, so they exploit you.And you cannot -- I can't believe we are still going over this -- you cannot convert a fascist to a nonfascist by appealing to their empathy. No atrocity ever was stopped by a victim standing up and saying "please, understand, I'm just a human like you"
cricketcrocker

Has there be a time in history when citizens *overreacted* to encroaching fascism in their government? The dangers of caution and skepticism about Trump's cruelty right now seem far greater than the dangers of overreaction, but I'm prepared to be told i'm wrong.
Virginia Heffernan @page88

It positively chills you to the bone the degree to which white people will accept almost any atrocity if you convince them it’s only happening because THESE PEOPLE WILL NOT FOLLOW THE RULES.
Brandon David Wilson @Geniusbastard

It's an awfully weird time to be fucking tone policing, isn't it? "OH GOD I'M BEING EATEN BY A FUCKING TIGER FUCK FUCK OW FUCK" — “Whoa whoa whoa, Dave, maybe your *toilet mouth* is why the tiger has chosen to eat you. Try a little politeness from now on, fella."If they're turned off by a little smidge of profanity, but *not* considerably more off-kilter thanks to the ACTUAL VULGARIAN in the White House who is basically using us, the flag, the Constitution as toilet paper -- they were never gonna vote against him, not ever.
Chuck Wendig

Conservative: lets ethnically cleanse America
Leftist: are you fucking insane? We should fucking abolish ICE immediately
Centrist: lol why r you swearing
steak_ham
On the general malaise of these overwhelming days and weeks (and sometimes how to overcome it):
Our “Founding Fathers” enslaved people, sanctioned indigenous genocide, and subordinated women... but yes, let’s continue as they intended.
divafeminist

Our ancestors refused to be silenced and so must we. NOW is the time to come together, fight forward and build a long-term movement — not just for an election season. Remember the abolitionists, the suffragettes, the labor organizers and the civil rights leaders who put their bodies on the line. They fought, now, we must fight.
Rev. Dr. Barber

Sorry I’m late. I got stuck at the intersection of dead inside and burn it all the fuck down.
Molly Priesmeyer

The issue is not that liberals are "galvanizing" Trump voters. Be realistic. There is a billion-dollar industry, from Fox News on down, that takes ANYTHING liberals do and spins it to enrage conservatives. They'd be "galvanized" by Nancy Pelosi sneezing in public. The right-wing noise machine ensures conservatives are ALWAYS galvanized against liberals, whether or not they actually did anything wrong. Fox made a scandal of John Kerry being a decorated war hero. They made a scandal of Hillary Clinton running a charity that treated AIDS.
fawfulfan

No amount of compromise will win them over. Non-Trump Republicans will need to get over it, vote Democratic and leave the party that left them.
LaurieLK82

It turns out there is no ceiling on the number of things I can be very mad about.
Kara Lynum

The bad part about being the canary in a coal mine is that you have to die to get your point across.
jelani cobb

An environment in which journalists aren't safe to make mistakes and then correct them without being directly targeted by the federal government is not a safe environment for journalists.
chick_in_kiev

So this is really how America is going to react to having had one (1) Black president and one (1) female major party nominee, huh? By ending itself.
LouisatheLast

extremely sophisticated journalists: "look it's our job to tell our readers that trump says we've always been at war with eurasia, they can decide for themselves if we've always been at war with eurasia or not"
Michael T Sweeney

Two people ran the president's campaign. One of them just mocked the harrowing trauma experienced by a ten-year-old girl with down syndrome being forcibly taken from her parents. The other one is in jail. This tells us absolutely everything.
feministabulous

Being angry all the time is exhausting and corrosive. Not being angry feels morally irresponsible.
Tim Grierson

The Trump administration is doing exactly what it always said it was going to do. This is exactly what Trump ran on — some of you just weren't listening
WesleyLowery

The only alternative to this cruelty and chaos was to elect a person who used a personal email account for work, so you can see why it was a tough call for so many people.
Matthew Yglesias

It’s almost as if they didn’t mean it when they said “All Lives Matter”
Dr. Susie Meister

Again and again I see this reduced to the evils of Trump, or this or that Trump appointee. But the problem is that ~25% of the country supports this, and things like this, and probably things much worse than this. If a minority faction in a foreign country believed this much nonsense & supported this much evil, Americans would call them deplorable. Easy. But these are suburban white men and our entire culture is devoted to maintaining their innocence and shielding them from accountability.
David Roberts

The fundamental political dynamic of the Trump era — during the primary, general election and the presidency — is: shamelessness + negative polarization. Whatever he does, if he sticks with it and doesn't back down, will eventually get the support of about 40% of the country.We continue to see how powerful this dynamic is, and the abominations it is allowing and would allow are horrifying to contemplate.
Chris Hayes

At least the original Nazi social base went though World War One and the Depression. What are these people’s excuse? That Tim Allen show getting cancelled?
cushbomb

How can we stop this? I mean it. What can we do? We aren’t doing this right. Trump’s approval rating in Minnesota is 41 percent. So many people are okay with this. What aren’t we doing right that he is still in office and kids are in cages!? That is the most fucked-up thing I have ever written: kids are in cages. What can we learn from how others have used social media to overthrow governments? I am serious. What can we do? How is this even still happening in a country the size of ours?
Molly Priesmeyer

Behold the MAGA trifecta: racism, fake Christianity, illiteracy:


MuellerSheWrote

American culture is saying 'this isn't America' in response to approximately 90% of things America does
Send_Lwyds

Say, has anyone talked about how more Americans died from the incompetent response to Hurricane Maria than from 9/11 this week?
emptywheel

The most important lesson of this political era: shamelessness is a superpower.
Chris Hayes

Conservatives complained about bias in media. Then they created Fox News. They didn't want unbiased; they wanted biased in their favor. Now consider how the same dynamic will apply to, say, the FBI or the IRS. Media allowed right-wing critics to establish the following principle: "If you say that one side is worse, in any context, you are biased." Once that principle is in place, the side most willing to lie and cheat receives a kind of permanent, built-in immunity.
David Roberts

The *real* finding of the Horowitz Report? That Trump is only president due to some unusually stupid deviations from FBI policy. If the FBI follows its own regs, Clinton is president right now. If anyone asks you what the Report says, say that. Because it's the bottom line here.
Seth Abramson

If we "fail to come to grips with just how radically theocratic the Christian Right is, any kind of post-Trump soft landing scenario in which American democracy recovers a healthy degree of functionality is highly unlikely."
geeeeeeebee

If you, like me, are feeling outrage fatigue — Antarctica melt rate accelerating, kids being ruthlessly separated from their parents, state-sanctioned racism in post-hurricane Puerto Rico — know that billions of people, now and for generations to come, depend on what we do today. You have the knowledge, creativity, connections, and love to make a lasting difference. Care for yourself, stay healthy, ask for help, and get to work.
Eric Holthaus

It can almost start to feel at times like maybe the Tea Party wasn’t really about policy.
Chris Hayes

Getting help for mental health is not enough. We live in a world where people don't want to live in it anymore. We need to change the world.
Nikki Wallschlaeger

It’s just weird having a 72-year-old man who was born into millions — who became President of the United States despite being a functional illiterate who received 3 million fewer votes than his opponent — constantly whining about things being “unfair.”
Scott Charles

If Trump intended to work with others to get hacked emails to influence the election, he didn’t have to know or intend every step that gets the conspiracy over the finish line. It didn’t have to work to create a crime either. Being impulsive isn’t a defense.
Maya Wiley

I guess what's on my mind is: if pundits want Democrats to develop a message to appeal to racist whites in swing states, they should just say so. Quit pretending that the lack of such an appeal amounts to the lack of a "message to working class voters."
David Roberts

Weird how media spent 8 years asking if X event was Obama's Katrina but casually shrugs off 4645 dead in Puerto Rico, which is twice the number of people who died after Hurricane Katrina.
eclecticbrotha

Taxpayers have spent less for the Mueller investigation than they have for Trump’s trips to Mar-a-Lago.
John Nichols

Still trying to wrap my head around the fact that more than 4,000 people are dead in Puerto Rico due to willful disregard by their own government -- the worst disaster in modern American history -- and it's not front page news every damn day.
Eric Holthaus

The death of ACORN is the prologue to this whole rotten era; a genuine social good attacked in bad faith by a sloppy gimmick, then abandoned rather than defended in the interest of politely moving on.
Kelsey D. Atherton
On the now-mostly-forgotten North Korea story:
To state the obvious: diplomacy with North Korea (good!) in *no way* requires a 24-hour media tour filled with constant praise for the toughness, management style, leadership abilities, dynamic personality and caring heart of the dictator of totalitarian prison state.
Chris Hayes

I mean shit at least Neville Chamberlain signed a deal that Hitler had to violate
Kilgore Trout

Why would Trump care how North Korea treats their people? He’s cool with American kids being shot, Puerto Rican’s dying, Flint still having toxic water and nazis running over women.
irishrygirl

It amazes me that the same people who trashed the Iran deal — a deal literally written with countless verification and compliance measures because the West assumed Iran would try to violate it — are now celebrating North Korea's vague, non-binding "pledge" that recycles 1990s language.
Brian Klaas

Trump has sabotaged one agreement (Iran) that was actually working to make another (North Korea) which is worthless, all show and no substance and has given away most powerful bargaining chip for just woolly intentions. Seen that before with North Korea.
Simon Schama

If you announce you will stop the war games and concede they are “provocative,” what if you decide you need to do them in the future? Then you’re explicitly engaging in a provocation.
Josh Barro

If Trump can’t negotiate a deal on milk with one of our closest allies, how is he going to get a deal on nuclear disarmament with one of our greatest foes?
Michael McFaul
On racism, white supremacy, and police brutality:
White people, no one is asking you to apologize for your ancestors. We are asking you to pull down and dismantle the system they built.
@blackfamilyunit

Bigotry is all about systems of societal power, and helping one group live its best life while everyone else has to struggle. But even amid the privileged group, there are "winners and losers." Bigotry is a bribe for privileged losers Bigotry, remember, teaches you contempt, not empathy. Being able to write varied experiences is a skill. All writers who manage to do it have *learned* to do so. But the ability to learn this skill is contingent on your ability to empathize with all kinds of people. You cannot "get" people as a whole if you've preemptively decided that certain races, genders, etc., are inherently lacking intelligence, inclined to criminality, etc. You can't depict humanity accurately if you think only one group is worth paying attention to.
N. K. Jemisin

When it comes to social justice, "friendly debate" usually means "unpaid emotional labor in which you are pressured to be super patient and kind to me while I invalidate your humanity and the humanity of people you love." People's lives are not a thought experiment.
leeflower

Since white people were the ones who started this color classification system centuries ago, they do not get to opt out now and call it reverse racism. It's absurd.
BunneeShelton (in response to white people objecting to being called white people)

White dudes need to stop using “witch hunt” and “lynch mob” just because an asshole is facing public consequences. Invoking the methods by which women and POC were murdered to prop up white patriarchal society so you can roleplay victimhood is fucking obnoxious.
Salome Strangelove

it's probably good to keep in mind that most bugbears of the infowars set (government poisoning the land/water, extrajuridical arrest and execution, etc) are white fantasy transpositions of actual environmental and social injustices routinely carried out on communities of color
WarrenIsDead

I don't trust anyone who doesn't see that white capitalist patriarchy is organized around the oppression of black women or who fails to see how black men and white women benefit from patriarchy and racism respectively. I don't know why you're here, but it's not for liberation.
Bree Newsome

What's the origin story behind "right-to-work" laws? An alignment forged in the 1940s between segregationists and big business to squash worker power and maintain racist Jim Crow pay practices
Tamara Draut

When Obama won the electoral and popular vote (without Russians) it was said he must be "president of all" and not place too much focus on Black issues. Now that Trump is in the White House, all that matters is the opinion of the mostly white *minority of voters* who chose him. See how that works?
Bree Newsome
On sexism and misogyny:
The world to younger women: please go away, you're too young and don't matter.
The world to older women: please go away, you're too old and don't matter.
Summer Brennan

If you're a man upset at being lumped in with rapists, attackers and general arseholes just because of your gender, maybe take it up with the men who give us a bad name instead of women who have to be on guard 24/7 because of them.
Billablog

The wide and glorious range of the female experience:


Curtis Sittenfeld

I can't imagine looking at all the things one could possibly be outraged about and thinking "you know what really grinds my gears? I have one less opportunity to look at scantly clad women in the age of the Internet."
Ian Millhiser

Imagine thinking people who are offended by things that genuinely hurt people are "too sensitive," while you yourself are offended by an Asian woman getting to fly a spaceship in a made up movie.
Ken Cheng

I’m not being funny but if I was married to a man, and after some years we had a daughter, and then he started publicly announcing that he finally found a reason to see women as humans worthy of respect I would likely piss on his toothbrush
sweet_deezus
On capitalism and income inequality:
Capitalists: capitalism is the only system that lets you chase your dreams
Also capitalists: fuck art degrees, history degrees, literature degrees, or any other degree that’s not profitable for capitalists to take advantage of
pbnshah

“They call them ‘developing countries’ because ‘countries struggling to recover from being ruthlessly pillaged and systematically destabilized’ does not have the same ring to it.” –Bunmi Laditan
ThisTechGirl

We live in a country where billionaires make the decision to pay their workers less than minimum wage and then when they donate the most infinitesimal amount of their relative wealth to a decent cause they get buildings named after them & endlessly praised. It’s all so backwards.
Clint Smith

Right-wingers’ task: deflect mass anger at capitalism’s failure to provide all with decent jobs, incomes and futures. Save the 1% by urging its victims to blame refugees and immigrants instead of the system.
Richard D. Wolff

Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk do a ton of objectively bad stuff, but I just want to be clear that the mere act of holding onto that much money in a world with this much inequality is in itself a brutally evil action, and alone makes them bad people.
PlanetofFinks

The narrative that automation will lead to mass unemployment and inequality is false. It is our current institutional systems that will lead to greater unemployment and inequality with the rise of automation.
Roosevelt Institute

People:  LIVING WAGES FOR EVERYONE!!!
Also People:  I WOULD NEVER PAY THAT MUCH FOR A SANDWICH!!!!
Same people:  WHY IS THIS PLACE SO UNDERSTAFFED?
DBLK

Birth Lottery Winners Expect "Character and Values" Litmus Test for the Poor
Paul Thomas

In capitalism, we are forced to pay for advertising. Corporations’ prices cover their ad costs on top of real production costs. So we pay as they "compete" with useless, often misleading, costly ads. Gross inefficiency.
Richard D. Wolff

The last time America had such extreme levels of inequality it also had a cosmically corrupt political system awash in bribes and dark money. Just a total coincidence.
Chris Hayes
On sustainable cities and climate change:
“We assume that car use is an incompressible liquid that must be routed  somewhere. But it’s more more like a gas that fills whatever space it's given.” —Ian Lockwood on #induceddemand
Taras Grescoe

I don’t usually criticize how people spend their political advocacy time because there are so many important issues, but can you imagine looking at the US right now and saying, “My time is most valuable blocking fourplexes.”
Zachary Wefel

I have no time for people who focus on ride-hailing services as a problem without beginning their discussion with individuals commuting to work alone in their cars (and all the follow-on impacts on cities) — which is a societal problem two orders of magnitude bigger. Here in America, a great many huge, established patterns — from autodependence to climate emissions, collapsing education systems to credit-driven economic precarity, regressive tax structures to planned housing shortages — are profoundly problematic. Pay attention to what matters.
Alex Steffen

if we are going to do traffic enforcement at all, speed cameras are the most racially neutral way to do it. one reason (especially white) people get SO WORKED UP about speed cameras is because their privilege isn't working.
Peter Krupa

Fun fact: SimCity was forced to pretend that all parking lots were underground, because the game would be “really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.”
Devon Zuegel

Motorists: "It's not fair that we have to pay insurance, and cyclists don't!"
Also motorists:


@ormondroyd

It's very difficult to build affordable housing if the cost to build just one new home is between $200k and $250k. To compensate: lower cost of building, allow more people to live on one piece of land.
neighbors for more neighbors

Actively, rapidly and deliberately driving high-carbon industries out of business is an unavoidable step in every real climate action strategy. Those industries do not deserve our sympathy. It's their own predatory delay over decades that's lead to their on-rushing demise.
Alex Steffen

People who are adamantly against speed cameras are often the people who recklessly speed all the time.
William Lindeke

New revenue stream to invest in bike infrastructure: ticket ALL the cars parked in bike lanes.
LaurieLK82

A parking sign I can believe in:


DPsocialism

Every city-owned parking space should be metered or permitted.  If it isn’t in demand enough to justify charging for it then it isn’t worth spending city funds on it.
Zachary Wefel

Before you pay a consultant to do a study on the theoretical impact of some desired change to a street, get some orange cones and temporary paint and try it out. A fraction of the cost with far more definitive results and buy-in.
Strong Towns

People who prevent others moving in aren’t ‘neighbors‘. More accurate to say ‘incumbent property owners’
Rick Varco

the fuck are you honking at me for??? you're flying around in a climate controlled invincibility chariot while I'm out here on my hind legs propelling myself through unfiltered space one step at a time with only my muscles I don't give a SHIT about your hyperconvenience
pangmeli

every time it's even remotely relevant, I tell/remind people that their car commute is the most deadly thing they do. People are bad at assessing risk. "The train has brown people! Better go get in my 5000lb death machine."
lewismd13

Drivers love to concern troll about people with disabilities when infra for active transportation is built, but can you imagine how much safer our cities would be for blind people and people with mobility devices if they didn't have to worry about speeding cars all the time?
Alicia Valenti

Every great place has a parking problem, and trying to solve the parking problem often weakens the place. People come for place, not parking.
Brent Toderian

So the far right wing — the Koch brothers — are getting activated to kill transit projects. When is the left (from far to center) gonna get serious about supporting transit, instead of pandering to drivers?
Angie Schmitt

It’s ridiculous how measures to slow drivers down are interpreted as if driving were being banned. No one is taking your car, you just have to slow the hell down so you don’t kill anyone. Why is this so hard?
Janet Lafleur

Pardon the bluntness, but folks who live in inland regions that are already hot and/or semi-arid are whistling past the graveyard when they talk about how lucky they are not to live on the coasts in a time of rising seas. No place will escape the planetary crisis unscathed.
Alex Steffen

"Stockholm didn’t cut its fatality rate dramatically by educating people and more strictly enforcing laws. The Swedes did it by slowing urban traffic and by re-engineering their roads to reduce serious injuries and fatalities."
Jamie Hilland

Single family homes are fossil fuel infrastructure.
happifydesign

One of the best arguments I know for density is that it makes the option of using a bike as your key form of transporation a real choice. Density allows us to cluster people and uses and destinations within a reasonable distance of each other.
jennifer keesmaat

Genuine question: How come landlords are 'greedy' for charging what the market will bear, but not homeowners who sell their home for the highest price they can get?
geographyjim

"To walk or take transit is a public act which makes street a safer component of community. To drive is a private act which turns the street into a utility." —Peter Calthorpe
Taras Grescoe

New rule for community meetings: Whenever someone mentions how long they've lived in a neighborhood they must be asked how much longer they expect to live there. Plan for the future.
Ed Kohler

Funny how when a major interstate access point from the suburbs to downtown is shut down, we can suddenly find the resources to improve transit and promote carpooling and remote work, but not on a daily basis when those investments are crucial to climate resilience.
Alicia Valenti

No trucks should be allowed in city centres. None. We should be smart enough to find a better way to transport goods to our downtowns.
Nora Loreto

Argue against helmet laws in the media, and thousands of strangers are concerned for your safety.
Argue for protected bike lanes in the media; those same folks are suddenly indifferent about your safety.
It’s as if the former is a cynical way to marginalize a mode of transport.
Modacity

While biking with my child in our cargo bike today, I overheard a person say to her friend, “I don’t like those things…they are so dangerous.” Nope, lady, you’ve got it all wrong. Let’s unpack this a little, shall we? Nothing about having a kid on your bike is inherently dangerous. They are  protected by a helmet, held in by a harness, and the fastest we go is ~25 km/h. I'm a confident, cautious cyclist, very comfortable on my #cargobike, and extremely unlikely to fall over or run into things. The danger lies with drivers and cars. Unlike a cyclist, a driver can easily injure/kill vulnerable road users around them. Cars are designed to protect only their occupants. Drivers are WAY TOO OFTEN in a huge hurry, distracted by their devices, and ignorant of road rules. Our infrastructure is also dangerous. There aren’t nearly enough dedicated bike lanes, forcing us to ride alongside cars on roads that weren’t designed for our safety. The inappropriate speed limit of 50 km/h on res. streets also make roads dangerous for vulnerable road users. We made the choice to bike as a family precisely to help make the streets less dangerous for everyone. Don’t call my choice dangerous. Let's put the blame where it really belongs.
Oriana Duinker

"By taking all the standard business activity in a city — shopping for clothes and household products, getting a haircut, etc. — and moving them to the edge of town in areas built for and only accessible by car, we have robbed our communities of wealth."
William Lindeke

It’s often the drivers who tell me to use the bike lane when there isn’t one are the same people who oppose new proposed bike lanes.
Greg Billing

Budding urbanist 5th grader waiting for the bus: “why do we make so much space for people to drive on? People barely ever drive on this street. We could put a basketball hoop instead, that’d be way better.”
Agreed.
Shane Morin

There are inexpensive simple ways to reduce roadway deaths, increase economic vitality, and improve the health of residents.  They are to reduce speed limits, narrow car lanes, add bike lanes, and eliminate parking minimums.
Bombatta

Women and men move through cities differently. Complex trip chains with multiple stops are common among female inhabitants:

SUTP

Cities are inherently a resource-efficiency story. They exist to eliminate transportation costs.
jennifer keesmaat

Striking stat: In New York City, fully half of all miles driven by Uber/Lyft cars are without any passenger in them.
brad plumer

There are three privately run dockless bike shares in Seattle and it looks awesome. Yellow, green, and orange bikes are parked all over the city like this one, the apps tell you where they all are. You can hop on and drop it wherever you want to stop!
benreic

In the most car-dominated states, you have between a 1-in-40 and a 1-in-50 chance of being killed in a vehicular collision. That is an extraordinary prevalence  of a cause of death which overwhelmingly comes suddenly, unexpectedly and prematurely.
NQRW

Tips for Millennials to save money:
1) Don't eat
2) Live in your car
3) Don't drive anywhere, sell the car
4) Your only entertainment should be watching your own tears drip down your face into your bowl of ramen
5) Die as soon as possible if you get sick
nyhcmaven84

It's always a red flag when people talk about 'arrogant' cyclists. What they really mean is that they're annoyed that cyclists aren't being intimidated, not deferring to their greater right as a road user, and not getting out of their way. In other words; having the same rights.
velobetty

If you think plastic straws are bad for the environment, wait until you hear about SUVs.
Angie Schmitt

It’s illegal for Uber and Lyft to pickup at SFO’s arrivals level, so they pickup at departures. This has made congestion so bad, there’s now a sign encouraging drop-offs to go to arrivals. So now departures go to arrivals and arrivals go to departures because tech fixes everything.
Brian Janosch

Why are there state and federal tax credits to buy an electric car but not for a car-free family to buy an electric bike?
David Gouldin

Hemp can be grown to harvest on about half as much water as corn can, for example. Hemp also tolerates a wide variety of soils and temperatures, requires no pesticides, and grows extremely fast, soaring to as much as 20 feet in 100 days.
Pacific Standard

The lack of awareness among local hippies (my characterization, maybe unfair) is mind blowing. They want to save the bees while subsidizing driving
ajm6792

Ebikes are a game changer, best way to get people out of their cars  "some 28% said they made a purchase specifically to reduce their car reliance. Users further reported that, without their e-Bike, 76% of their trips would have been made by car"
kar nels
On health care:
My taxes shouldn’t have to pay for anyone else’s health care but your taxes should have to pay for the SWAT team I call in when a black kid sneezes near me.
rob delaney

anyone who uses the phrase "free stuff" to describe single-payer health care in a nation where poor people die of preventable illnesses while jeff bezos makes $230,000/minute can extremely fuck off
droz2020

Just so we are crystal clear: people with pre-existing mental health conditions have access to firearms but not healthcare.
alliewen21

Why is single-payer gaining steam? The last time Democrats debated health care in a primary was in 2008. Then, the average cost of health care for a family of four was $15,600. Right now it's over $28k. By 2019 it'll be $30k. This is no longer a leftie thing, and it's not about access.
Matt Stoller
On education:
Automated grading of student writing doesn't free-up instructors to do the "important" stuff. Working with students when you haven't read their writing is like asking a football coach to work with the team when they know the score, but haven't watched the game. It's nonsensical.
biblioracle

93% of NYC restaurants get an “A” from the health dept. Does anyone whine about grade inflation? No, those results reassure us. But in education a scarcity model of excellence persists: Many students getting A’s is thought to signify mediocrity. There must always be losers.
Alfie Kohn

Make me king of education journalism, and I would ban all op-eds that use a single example of a “good” charter school to represent the entire sector.
Jersey Jazzman

I think it's perfectly normal and reasonable to not respect a subject you're not interested in, when you're forced to spend several hours every week "studying" it. It's also normal and reasonable to not respect the people who are doing the forcing.
LesterJMilton

Every graduation I am tired, hot, don't want to go. I get there and it is the greatest day of the year. There aren't many careers where you can see the past, present and future all at one time. The joy of feeling important and significant at the same time is like standing at the ocean.
@tressiemcphd
And — finally — the best of the rest:
‘Mythology in reverse’ - Medusa with Perseus's head (2008), by Luciano Garbarti:


Whores of Yore

Let me say this loudly: I AM NOT VOTING FOR ANY 70+ YEAR OLD WHITE PEOPLE FOR ANYTHING. YOU SHOULDN’T EITHER.
LeslieMac

I am one of the 7 billion human beings alive today. We each have a responsibility to think about humanity and the good of the world because it affects our own future. We weren’t born on this planet at this time to create problems but to bring about some benefit.
Dalai Lama

"For years the far Christian Right has been warning us about Godless hordes coming to destroy America and it turns out this was true—it's just that the words were autobiographical."
John Pavlovitz

In all seriousness, was there a single article written in 2010 about how most Obama voters still liked Obama? I feel like if you pitched that you’d be laughed at.
Matthew Yglesias

Compass Plant is the heartbeat of our eastern Kansas prairies:


Prairie Czar

Run as you are.
Run as your whole self.
Reject the idea (often specifically heaped upon non-male, non-white candidates) that you have to be perfect to be good for your community.
Run for the best vision of our communities and what they deserve.
Run to bring everybody along.
Mitra Jalali Nelson

Just a reminder that a "tradition" is anything that happened to a Baby Boomer twice. (credit to XKCD)
danademaster

“We should not cut out all sugar and fat, and we should not ask a surgeon to remove the parts of our brain that deal with emotions. But we need to learn to control our drama intake.” –Hans Rosling
AshkanRezaee

89 today!


eric carle

It exhausts me that somehow the idea that we should trust young people when they assert their gender has turned into this absurd conspiracy theory where trans folks are out to recruit your children. We don’t want your cis kids to be trans. We want your trans kids to not be dead.
Mari Brighe

elon musk is what happens when the ghost of a 14-year-old who died in 2011 and the ghost of a 19th-century oil baron try to possess the same body
peanusts

It might be good if Elon Musk spent more time designing cars that don't explode rather than philosophizing on how we should structure the government
Dean Baker

Journalists! To review a little cognitive science: if you lead your story with a false statement, people remember that — even if you debunk it next. Do not lead your story with a false statement. pretty please?
Sam Wang

"Why didn't you just...?" is nearly always followed by a suggestion that is incredibly difficult to follow in real life. It may still be the best action to take, but the question itself snidely glosses over all the barriers that created the situation in the first place.
Michelle Allison @fatnutritionist

Journalists know how to use language perfectly well. So do editors. Use it to say the truth.
George Lakoff

It's always fascinating to me when people find societal critiques "misanthropic" or "nihilistic." I really do not get that thinking. Wanting a thing to be better -- and risking livelihood and life to agitate for this improvement -- somehow means you hate it? Whut? To be honest, I find relentless insistence on positivity to be more misanthropic. If you love a thing, but you see that its leg is broken, and you not only refuse to fix it but yell at anyone who points out the problem and the pain it's causing... Is that love?
N. K. Jemisin

One lesson of the last couple of years is that we are likely dramatically under-investing in investigation and enforcement of white collar crime.
Catherine Rampell

From the report: "Even 'progressive' states like Minnesota, with incarceration rates below the national average, continue to lock people up at MORE THAN DOUBLE THE RATES of our closest international allies." 


Better Futures MN

Hi. Are you a journalist who reported on the smattering of one-time bonuses that were announced a few months ago? Please write a follow-up story on the new BLS numbers that show overall wages for non-supervisory workers actually fell slightly this past year. Thanks.
Michael Linden

Physicist Niels Bohr is said to have said that while the opposite of a fact is a falsehood, the opposite of a profound truth may very well be another profound truth.
studentactivism

today I learned that there is a word for the fear of palindromes (aibohphobia) and that it was deliberately constructed to itself be a palindrome. this is truly the worst thing about the English language since whoever decided the word “lisp” should have an s in it.
polumechanos

Few things grate me so much as journals telling me that "in this journal we avoid writing in the first person of the singular because it's unscientific". GTFOOH. *I* did the research. *I* conducted the fieldwork. *I* designed the experiment. *I* deployed the research.
Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega

What if sexual immorality isn’t premarital sex or homosexuality, but not allowing others to exercise autonomy over their own bodies?
@DeLisaPerry_

Purple Milkweed row is also looking nice:


Prairie Czar

I deeply hate the expression ”the global south”! It’s just a misleading euphemism for “poor countries” bundling them as one group with geographic destiny... It’s the ”divided world misconception” again! Read Factfulness.
Ola Rosling

Fashion thing I hate: when pockets are sewn shut. STOP MISREPRESENTING YOURSELF, PANTS. BE PROUD OF YOUR POCKETS.
Sarah Mackey

Truth:


Nnedi Okorafor

A lot of people seem to think feathered dinosaurs sound more funny than scary, but frankly the thought of being chased down the street by a 40-foot goose is horrifying beyond words.
@pangopup

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