July is over. I thought perhaps I had marked fewer tweets this month because I was really busy, but unfortunately, no. There are probably just as many as usual. Sorry about that.
On immigration and locking up children:
You know you’re on the wrong side of history when you have to arrest an artist for painting the face of a 16-year-old girl you have put in jail for resisting your oppression, on the illegal wall you built to divide and imprison millions of your victims:On Mulligan giving it away to Putin in Helsinki:
AmirAminiMD
what the fuck does it mean to “waive reunification rights?” no. no. this is called kidnapping children. this is called terror.
hoodqueer
The Trump regime did NOT reunite:
* 46 out of 103 children under 5,
* 711 out of 2,551 children 5 to 17,
and they consider themselves done?
How can this be humane or acceptable? They must reunite ALL families and these families should have a chance at asylum! Where is Congress?
Amy Siskind
I'm so tired of the *system failure* framing and language that is applied to every single OPPRESSIVE institution in this country. ICE is not a *system failure.* It's an institution that was created to do EXACTLY what it's currently doing. CRITICS OF ICE existed before its creation.
prisonculture
when you go into a chuck e cheese, they stamp the kid and the parent with matching numbers in special invisible ink so that a kid can't get separated from the parent and disappear. good job at being better than the government, chuck-e-cheese.
ManInTheHoody
The way many white people equate border crossing with trespassing is so telling. They really view the U.S. as private land belonging to them personally. Doubt they think they're trespassing if they vacation in Cancun, though.
Amanda Marcotte
Facts: immigrants into Europe in 2015 over a million; in 2017, 172,000; and halfway through 2018, 43,000. Scapegoating immigrants distracts Europeans from blaming a capitalism that failed all but their 1%.
Richard D. Wolff
The time for calling Trump's behavior "disgraceful" was three years ago, after his vile announcement address. Or five years ago, after his birther campaign. Or four decades ago, after his campaign of housing discrimination. We are so far the fuck past "disgraceful" at this point.On Mulligan (and Mueller) and everything else the former and his minions have been up to:
Shakestweetz
Reminder: many of those who are now outraged were just fine with him when he referred to Africa and Haiti as “shitholes,” emulated a reporter with a disability, bragged about grabbing women’s genitals and was accused of sexual assault 19 times.
jelani cobb
Doofus faces during the Hannity interview after the Helsinki summit:
pattho
Amazing that these are the same people who questioned Obama’s patriotism for not wearing a flag pin on his lapel.
jelani cobb
It needs repeating: mainstream media were active and eager participants in using stolen info from Russians. They should have known better, and rarely had second thoughts along the way. I fear it could easily happen again.
Norman Ornstein
Amazing how the Republican Party went from Tea Party Patriots to Traitors.
AntheaButler
Trump’s base mistakenly believes that the Russian fascist kleptocracy is some kind or paradise for white people when actually their life expectancy has declined by two decades
karl taro greenfeld
Today the US Government announced the creation of a ‘religious liberty task force.’ The prophecy is complete: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”On racism, white supremacy, and police brutality:
TheGoodGodAbove
People are always asking me to do futurist prediction so here goes. I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that the new Religious Liberty Task Force WON'T work on hate crimes and the surge in persecution of Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, and other religious minorities. OK, somebody pay me.
N. K. Jemisin
The Trump presidency can be seen as a deranged "reality TV" version of 1984 inflicted upon a hapless nation. The GOP faithful have yielded in much the same way as poor Winston Smith.
Langdon Winner
Trumps signature looks like a Klan rally:
stonecold2050
That 'Conservatives are better with the economy' bollocks needs to fuck off, for once and for all. They used to be good at rebalancing the economy in the favour of rich people and big businesses. Now, they can't even claim that - the current plan is simply wanton destruction.
j__a__i
Everyone appointed by this sham of a president should be removed from office. Every policy he’s enacted should be repealed. And everyone complicit in his collusion with Russia to rig the election should be prosecuted - from Mitch McConnell to the NRA.
Samuel Sinyangwe
“We don’t like the treason from a branding point of view but we love literally everything else and won’t risk even an ounce of this unearned power to consolidate more power.” –Jeff Flake, basically
yeahidrathernot
I fear too many still labour under the belief that these indictments will be released and Trump’s presidency will unravel of its own volition. This is not Watergate. He will not resign. He will force institutions to bend to his will or crack them outright. It will be extremely ugly.
Jasmin Mujanović
I've never seen this 2014 interview -- where Trump says an economic crash and riots will make us "great" and claims to have talked to Putin in 2013 and maintained some sort of contact with him -- mentioned by anyone but @sarahkendzior.
LOLGOP
"Rigged Witch Hunt"? More like "Wigged Rich Hunt" amirite? Thank you thank you I'll be here all night.
James Slegers
how is Goodlatte the name of a person in our government in some capacity and not the name of a shitty coffee kiosk?
RubyGraceLevine
The "how to boil a frog" parable but there's actually two frogs and one is desperately, helplessly trying to hop out of the pot from word go and the other is clinging to its leg, explaining in a robotically calm tone the other frog is overreacting and its hysteria is not helping
mcclure111
Kavanaugh could vote to enshrine my second-class status as a gay American. He could curtail women's reproductive rights. So don't muse about his "judicial temperament" as if you're umpiring a gentlemen's sporting match in 1872. Lives are at stake.
Mark Harris
Here's the thing about failing democracies: There isn't a clear "tipping point" or red line. If there were, democracies wouldn't fail because people would be jolted into action. The reason democracies fail is that it happens so gradually that no one notices until it's too late.
RVAwonk
Five men overruling Roe v Wade over the dissent of three women is going to be something…
Greg Lipper
Don’t forget to rub period blood on your doorpost tonight so Trump’s SCOTUS pick passes over your reproductive organs.
OhNoSheTwitnt
Please, stop telling me, a gay person, I have nothing to worry about. Like tolerance and progress towards equal rights always moves forward in history. Just stop. Just say you don't care, don't tell me I have no worries. It's an insult.
kar_nels
The president who won 5 million more votes in 2012 couldn’t fill Supreme Court vacancy but the guy who got 2.9 million fewer votes and is under investigation for obstruction of justice will name 2 to SCOTUS.
Ari Berman
the marginal Trump voter does have some real economic problems. but the *average* Trump voter is a jet ski dealer who listened to AM radio until his brain turned to spleurk
ryan cooper
I’m a Brit so help me out on this. The current US President goes to rallies where he knows he is popular to tell lies and bullshit his inbred base but won’t face any media interviews apart from Fox? And this is allowed?
Bakes_1
I just saw a poll that 56% of men approve of Trump,
My god we need more women in government
My fellow men are too stupid to govern
old_osc
Trump voters were never a majority and never will be. So, I have no fucking idea why the media seems to think that Democrats need to win loyal Trump voters back. We just need the regretful Trump voters to stay home. Let's remind them why they regret voting for him.
BravenakBlog
Rural and GOP voters experience terrorism and gang violence mostly through their television, and mostly intermediated by GOP propaganda, incentivized to play up every incident of violence as maximally frightening.
Michael T Sweeney
Thread. For any non-race-based explanation for Trump’s support, first ask: “would these same people support the same behavior in a non-white person?” If the answer is “no” — and it will be — then maybe that explanation is secondary to race.
John Pfaff
"Cambridge Analytica didn’t convince decent people to become racists; they convinced racists to become voters." From a brilliant piece by Cory Doctorow
rogue_code
Passed a white Trump supporter who had bumper stickers that said, 'Fight Crime: Shoot Back' and 'No Liberals.' I am more afraid for my children around people like this, than the caricatures Donald Trump is trying to make out of brown-skinned people from other countries.
John Pavlovitz
*trump gets 20k people at a MAGA rally*
media: wow, this is a movement here that can't be ignored
*millions show up to protest*
media: the democratic party appears to be struggling to gather support
ManInTheHoody
Okay, another white person just DM'd me, telling me to lighten up and stop talking about white supremacy, that's it's apparently "irritating to a lot of people." Do you know what's irritating? WHITE SUPREMACY.On sexism and misogyny:
saira rao
We have NOT used the word "racist" ENOUGH. And *that* has allowed racism to thrive.
magi_jay
Indigenous and Black people hold the keys to peace within the US. It will require White America, as an institution and NOT a skin color, to sincerely apologize and acknowledge its transgressions. And Indigenous and Black people to create NEW terms of engagement. A treaty. A covenant.
BigIndianGyasi
conservatives love dreaming up fake "no-go zones" while living in a country that enforces actual segregation with state and para-state violence
AllezLesBoulez
Seems weird that there are so many awful white women with nothing better to do than tattle on their neighbors when there's Hobby Lobby AND Michael's Craft Stores
BoobsRadley
White people: "Political correctness has run amok."
Also white people: "People who say 'white people' leave me no choice but to join the Klan."
lawrem_ebooks
i want to make this clear: there is no crime in only studying the white South. but you need to make that clear if that’s your intent, and you still need to account for how race and inherited deference to race hierarchy shapes the boundaries of politics for southern whites.
jbouie
if Obama was president and a tape existed of him telling a lawyer to pay off his mistress in cash the GOP would have repealed the Emancipation Proclamation by now
Matt Oswalt
One thing white people have never experienced is a poll on whether their presence in their own country is intrinsically detrimental.
David Roberts
You know I see a lot of people from Europe asking why Americans aren’t rioting in the streets, and one answer to that I rarely see is “our police are heavily armed and a not insignificant number of them are white supremacist thugs”
LouisatheLast
'Arab' and 'Muslim' are NOT synonymous. In fact:
- 60% of Arab Americans are Christians
- Only 15% of the global Muslim population are Arabs
- The biggest population of Muslims in the U.S. are Black Muslims
(don't confuse and conflate)
Khaled Beydoun
straight white guy: political correctness is why i'm afraid to share my opinion
everyone else: wow what a fantastic side effect
LLW90210
Picturing the marketing team for whom this subdivision name raised no red flags:
Lydia DePillis
As I’ve been saying, racism is a national security vulnerability. If you consider yourself a patriot, you should be fighting against racism.
Sherrilyn Ifill
Missionary work is a form of colonization and inherently racist.
charlotteirene8
“But slavery is hardly the root cause of America’s prosperity. If it were, then we would expect American states that practiced slavery to be richer than those that did not. Yet we see precisely the opposite.” If you are this dangerously stupid, please learn shame.
Phillip Atiba Goff
Racism is not a point of view that deserves consideration or time or respect. Pull your “civility toward racists” heads out of your asses.
roxane gay
The root of modern systemic racism is SLAVERY; there is no such thing as racial justice without economic justice. As long as wealth, resources and power are concentrated among the white elite with people of color representing the bulk of the exploited labor force, we're simply modifying forms of slavery
Bree Newsome
Black reporters were *not* surprised that white voters could vote for a black man (or have a black friend or like black music) and still hold racial animosity towards black people as a whole. This is the story of America. But (most) white journalists seemed completed perplexed. That's because their understanding of racism is literally black or white. You're either in the Klan or you are "colorblind." But, of course, most people fall in between and 60 years after the end of legal discrimination, most Americans aren't aligning with the Klan.
nhannahjones
Spent all day yesterday at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation. It was striking to physically experience the dissonance between his espoused ideals and his actual deeds, while walking on the land that had been toiled over by the 607 enslaved people he owned throughout his lifetime.
Clint Smith
White people are truly getting a taste of the moving goalposts of law and order that Black folks have always felt. Maddening isn’t it? Feels like someone should stop it huh? You’re wondering why the same rules don’t apply to the ones doing the most damage eh?
brownblaze
You’re going to see reports that people were throwing water bottles at the police, angrily cussing out the police, and that’s all true. People are angry that a man was killed. And here’s what they’re up against. Which, I might add, we pay for. But yes, I have different standards for the tax-funded gang than I do for the other gangs. Correct. When you say “why do you talk so much when it’s police but not about other violence” I hear “why do you believe you should have more oversight/accountability for the $1.5 billion dollar state-sanctioned militia than you do the 19-year-old on the corner” and you sound ridiculous. It’s reasonable to have different expectations of a state-sanctioned structure that commands OVER ONE AND A HALF BILLION DOLLARS of public money! That’s my money! Yes I should have higher standards for their behavior!
wikipedia brown (on the killing of a black man in Chicago by police because he was “exhibiting characteristics of an armed person”)
The goal of pointing out racism and sexism isn't to demonize or insult. Its to illuminate a maladaptive behavior that hurts others so the person can take action to fix it, or at the very least, inspect it.
absurdistwords
If I ever somehow end up arguing the superiority of the white race, I hope to god someone punches me square in the mouth. So the Golden Rule works perfectly well here.
Mike Sphar
If any white person thinks Trump is the reason that Natives/Black folks/Immigrants are treated as subhuman in this nation, they should slow their roll and read a book. The USA is literally founded on the notion that those groups are less than human & that treatment never stopped.
BigIndianGyasi
The black homeownership rate hasn't improved since housing discrimination was banned in 1968, helping keep wealth low for black Americans across generations, since homes are often passed down. Wealth is now 10x greater for whites than blacks in America.
Mike Rosenberg
a thing I've been thinking about is how it seems perhaps solid for writers (particularly writers of color) to reject the Voice Of A Generation branding, particularly when placed upon them by traditionally white spaces/establishments/etc. It furthers the scarcity model, sure. But it also places those writers of color as an authority of an experience for people uninterested in the vastness of that identity's experience from a wide range of voices. I'm barely an authority on my own experience, and I don't think anyone should desire to be the person articulating the complexities and layers of various experiences of marginalization for people who are using them as The Single Voice
NifMuhammad
Among the most bizarre misconceptions in American History is the idea that black people were “given” freedom by Abraham Lincoln. He represented the government that had stolen their liberty in the first place. At best he returned stolen goods.
jelani cobb
It’s amusing when people call critical race scholars racist or tag their institutions like “This person is speaking critically about race in ways that challenge me & make me uncomfortable!” This is literally our job. We should get bonuses every time someone tweets like this.
Sami Schalk
When someone asks you if you think something is racist, they already know it is. They’re really asking if you are offended by the racism and trying to figure out how much they can get away with or ignore without you moral judgement.
Charles M. Blow
White Friends: Don’t be a devil’s advocate. Find another job. Get another trade. @UPS is hiring. Be a cosmetologist. Take your talents to bartender school. We don’t need any more devil’s advocates.
BigIndianGyasi
I actually think bad history HAS to be shown...but it shouldn’t be celebrated or lifted up. There should be a disclaimer on all racist history: “racists used to think like this.” Having an award named for a racist like Laura Ingalls Wilder is celebrating bad history.
BigIndianGyasi
"Civility" = treating white people with respect.
"Political correctness" = treating anyone else with respect.
fawfulfan
“Political correctness” is when you have to treat people you don’t consider fully human with respect, “civility” is when you have to treat people who don’t consider you to be fully human with respect.
clarebear1060
“The national average sentence for men who kill their female partners is 2-6 years in prison. In contrast, women who kill their male partners are sentenced to an average of 15 years, despite the fact that many of these women killed in self-defense.”On the ways the Left is told it should talk to the Right and the mid-term elections generally:
Women's March
"Seventy-two percent of U.S. adults think a woman should give up her maiden name when she gets married. Half believe that it should be a legal requirement, not a choice." –The Atlantic. Which century are y'all living in out there?
Broderick Greer
I do not actually want to be treated the way I see thin women get treated b/c that also seems like bullshit to me. That's not what my activism is about. I want pretty to not matter so much. I want to open other routes for ambitious girls rather than just Be Pretty. I want pretty to be devalued to the point where it is like being really good at playing piano. If you're good enough, maybe you can make a living at it. That it's something that a person can enjoy for themselves, but that it doesn't belong to the whole world.
Artists_Ali
Gender-reveal parties are actually genital-reveal parties. Just think about how creepy that is...
RadRoopa
The limited definition of “masculine” is a problem. Instead of asking men to fit into a preconceived notion of “being a man,” let’s evolve the definition and create a world where every man fits.
Bonobos
Wow: The Census Bureau compared what people say their income is vs. their actual incomes. They found that when wives earn more than their husbands, the couple lies to the Census, saying the man makes more than he does and the woman makes less then reality.
Mike Rosenberg
I feel like pointing out that Congress is still 80% male. There are more men in Congress *right now,* this year, than there are women who have ever served in Congress since Congress has existed.
summerbrennan
Listening to many women writers interviewed about their experience as "women" writers. I do really want more men asked this question; same with white people. Invite everyone to interrogate how they experience world differently from others. White/male is also an experience. Not default.
Kameron Hurley
The Kardashians were born into middling fame and (quite cleverly) parlayed it into wildly successful commercial ventures. In terms of gumption and self-starting, I'd rank them ahead of ANY given dudebro who went straight from Harvard to hedge funds to his first billion at 30. I dunno, maybe I'm the only one irritated by this. But our whole culture is ridden and run, top to bottom, with dudes drinking their own "self-made" kool-aid. Now we're pointing and laughing at women who used what they had to make more and are proud of it? NOW that bugs us?
David Roberts
Guys will literally put their fist through a wall and break their hands then turn around and say women are crazy because we sometimes cry when we’re sad
kpfeffss
"There are two genders" is the Newtonian physics of human sexuality: it works most of the time but it's not the whole picture. It's pretty adequate for most people's needs but doesn't stand up to scrutiny and is riddled with so many exceptions as to be obviously untrue. Going "There are two sexes. It's basic science" is super accurate; it's BASIC science, not RIGOROUS science. It's science distilled down into stuff that can get you through your day, not science that describes this batshit universe we live in with any deeper degree of accuracy.
MagsVisaggs
16 year old kid: I’m gay
Straight parents: you’re too young to know that, it’s just a phase!
Baby boy: *stares at a little girl for no reason other than the fact that babies stare at everything*
Straight parents: what a ladies man! We’re gonna have to keep the girls off of you!!
kaitlinmaarie
never understood “grow some balls” because balls are so weak?? like one minor tap and the person is on the ground sobbing
yet I know three diff ppl whose period cramps are so intense that when their appendixes ruptured they were like “huh. bad cramps today.” after an oRGAN IMPLODED
Rebecca Mix
Imagine all the toxic behaviour we could relegate to the pages of history books if men spent more time calling out the behaviour of shitty men than reassuring women that not all men are shitty.
_ElizabethMay
I think I've said this before, but the reason "virtue signaling" is a thing on the right particularly is I'm pretty sure because the assumption is that racism/sexism is natural/right and anyone objecting is just doing so hypocritically.On climate change and sustainable cities:
Noah Berlatsky
“Daddy, why are so many Republicans Nazis now?”
“Well, son, it’s the Democrats’ fault. They wanted health care for poor people.”
Scott Shapiro
Pro tip: Don't vote for anyone who makes it difficult for you or your fellow citizens to vote. That's a very good sign they want to rule rather than serve.
John Scalzi
Single-payer healthcare: Exists in 16 countries
Tuition-free (or nearly-free) college: Exists in 15 countries
Major economies already running on at least 30% renewable energy: 4
Super spooky, right?
It’s not that the US can’t have these things. It’s that we choose not to.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
The fact that Al Franken resigned quicker than you could turn your head and Jim Jordan is running for House Speaker says pretty much all you need to know about the ethical parity between the two parties.
MrFilmkritik
I have been saying for ages Democrats win by fighting, not by being conservative light. People don't turn out to vote when the choices are far-right and not-as-far-right. Particularly true in the Midwest where conservative politics have devastated people's quality of life.
upsidedwnworld
The closing messages by the D and R candidates in Georgia's primaries kind of say it all about the current mood of the parties. Issues discussed in theRepublican ad: Personal faith, gun rights, standing for national anthem, saying "Merry Christmas," border security. Issues discussed in Democratic ad: Medicaid expansion, taxes, mass transportation
Dave Weigel
Census data shows 64% of black citizens in Florida were registered to vote in 2014 compared to 62% of whites. By 2016, black registration dropped to 55% while white registration increased to 69%. That’s over 200,000 fewer black registered voters. Were they purged from the rolls?
Samuel Sinyangwe
Authoritarian personality types a) are clustering on the right in the US, b) notoriously crave strong leaders who offer clear in-group/out-group distinctions. These are both known facts. So really, what else would we expect?
David Roberts
Dear Never-Trump Republicans:
It's understandable that, having watched your own party embrace actual fascism, you'd really like the Democrats to to embrace whatever it was you think the GOP used to stand for. But we're going to pass, thanks.
Naomi Kritzer
If you were invaded by an evil alien force that is genocidal and inhumane to your people for centuries, would you be upset that another colonizing force MIGHT do the same thing to those 1st evil and alien invaders? Asking for an ethnicity who has seen this before. #Indigenous #Karma
BigIndianGyasi
i suspect people who honestly care about politicians' personal morality were alienated from politics a very long time ago
Elizabeth Bruenig
Tonight my wife made a great point: all political polls of Republicans' opinions on Trump need to have a breakout for those Republicans who *exclusively* watch Fox News — as they're being lied to (admittedly with their consent) daily. We need to know what *other* Republicans think.
Seth Abramson
fun fact: Democrats could win the national vote by more than in 2006 (+8%) and by more than the GOP in 2010's red wave (+7%), and still barely get a House majority... IF they get one at all. contrast with: in 2012, the GOP *lost* the national vote by 1.5% but won 33 more seats than Dems.
Taniel
Also...how you gonna act like you care about “voter fraud” that doesn’t exist—then turn around and not fund defense against hacking elections WHICH IS REAL?!?!
Phillip Atiba Goff
It's kind of funny watching conservatives come down on Ocasio-Cortez for flubbing a question about unemployment when Trump spent the entire presidential campaign saying the "real" jobless number was 42%.
Jordan Weissmann
Predatory delay by high-carbon industries is about 10,000 times as big a problem for the future of humanity as everything the poorest billion people on Earth do or don’t do.On education:
Alex Steffen
The false narrative about the "war on the car" fails to understand that true multi-modal cities work better for everyone, including drivers.
Brent Toderian
There is a tragic irony to the fact that we built all this horrific car infrastructure without community meetings, then created a system of excessive community meetings to stop that, and now we can't muster the political will to undo it because we have so many community meetings.
NeverSassyLaura
Space colonization is a settler escape fantasy for poisoning the Earth.
KeInfoshop
Fascinating graphic from Europe.
• average car is parked 92% of the time.
• roads reach their peak use only 5% of the time.
• 50% of city land area is dedicated to vehicle infrastructure.
• 86% of a car’s fuel never reaches the wheels.
• average car carries 1.5 people/trip:
Brent Bellamy
If your downtown lost its largest office tenant tomorrow, few people would notice. And it would soon be forgotten. If your downtown lost its five most beloved small businesses tomorrow, almost everyone would notice. And it would never be forgotten.
Rik Adamski
Letting a handful of rich old men who are massively invested in the status quo define for us the range of futures we can have is probably a bad idea.
Alex Steffen
Today I learned that ‘Parking’ was originally the planting of trees along the road to green D.C. This lead to horses being tied to the trees. When cars came along cars would park next to them. So DC cut them down and widened the road for cars to park thus ‘parking’
James Gitto (linking to a post on the Morton Arboretum site)
they need to remake the movie Armageddon where the government questions existence of the astroid, media focuses 99% of its coverage on other things, and grassroots movements struggle to build political will to send Bruce Willis into space. everyone else complains about the cost.
Taharqa45
Municipal government: We must ban plastic straws and bags to save the environment! Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go dramatically stamp “APPROVED” on a bunch of drive-thru car-focused businesses on all our transit and bike corridors.
Tony Webster
Why does every conversation I have about me biking to work inevitably lead to questions like - ok, what would you do in torrential rain? - ok, what would you do if it’s -30 outside? We are not made of sugar nor do we experience daily natural disasters.
convertdcyclist
Congestion pricing in San Francisco’s urban core should be the milquetoast centrist position. The radical position is ban all cars.
graue
I'm seeing a lot of people admitting to being somewhat abashed that they're worried about the future. Don't be. The surest way to collapse is to do nothing. Be angry and unapologetic. Do not accept failure and do not accept silence. The very idea that you care about something so profoundly and so profoundly important will make people uncomfortable nonetheless. We live in an age of irony that pretends activism isn't important and that sincerity is embarrassing.
TricksyRaccoon
Appalachia is horrifically and permanently scarring itself so that a few more coal executives can get rich and a few more miners can get Black Lung before the whole thing collapses.
David Roberts
Freedom-loving people love being forced to use a car for everything
j3effcSTP
Former Vancouver Chief Planner Brent Toderian is 10 years car-less. "The benefits of a ‘car-less’ household are myriad, but few are as quantifiable as the dollars most people sink into a depreciating asset that sits unused for 95% of the time."
CompletedStreet
“I won’t take transit! It is [insert stereotypes]!” Cool, then don’t. But also don’t prevent it from being built because *you* won’t ride it. There are literally thousands of people in your neighborhood that depend on it. Stop being so selfish.
mikesonn
Henry Ford reportedly said "if we had asked what people wanted, they would have answered faster horses." Now would they say "more parking?"
Brent Toderian
"There is no conflict between sustainability and development. [...] The conflict is between sustainability and unsustainable industries that can be made profitable a little while longer."
Alberto Cottica
We have become completely desensitized to the absurdity of our habit of frequently climbing into large metal boxes and getting in each others' way, all the while killing each other and destroying the planet. We think it is the only way. We're wrong.
winkybiker
Thousands of climate/energy/sustainability professionals wrestle with this fear of being branded as unreasonable (perhaps even made unemployable) if they're honest about the magnitude of the planetary crisis we face. This is one of climate denialism's greatest victories.
Alex Steffen
The truth is you don't have much control when you are driving over how much time it will take you to get there. But you have a lot of control over how safety you travel.
schmangee
I get so frustrated at these [public] meetings, and really, it's because I feel sorta left out because I don't have a car. Like, my opinion about parking doesn't matter because I don't drive a car. But your opinion about increasing public transit sure does, even if you don't take it.
Amity Foster
Just imagine putting this much money, energy, political will and space into walking, biking and transit infrastructure. There are hundreds of these, maybe thousands. They not only induce driving, they make cities think they can’t afford solutions that would actually work:
Brent Toderian
I often wonder what tourists who are used to driving everywhere think when they visit walkable cities. Do they realize these places are walkable *because* they are difficult to drive in? I doubt most non-planners realize that.
Eric Fidler
Because most American cities are just parking lots sprinkled with housing and shops, we should just assign a required number of bedrooms to parking ratio... Me thinks 20 bedrooms per parking space might eventually correct for this madness.
Mike Lydon
As far as I can tell — and my job is to explore these things — the most challenging aspect of this planetary crisis is exactly this erosion of stability, of predictability, of continuity... not only of the loss of "normal," but the unlikelihood of a "new normal" arising.
Alex Steffen
Hypothesis: most folks saying “transit is obsolete because of robocars” probably never liked the idea of transit and aren’t great at capacity analysis
Costa Samaras
The "cycle of car-dependency" and public policies that subsidize suburban sprawl:
Brent Toderian
Movements against having billboards on highways is something I'll really never get. It's like, congratulations on your advertising-free 150-foot wide asphalt deathscape
Jacob Anbinder
just drove on lake street, which was all kinds of backed up and i just don't know how anyone can be made miserable by driving and not realize cars themselves are the problem
lieholepiehole
It's fun to appease the "road tax for cyclists" mob by proposing a fairer tax based on the road wear caused by each user. Perhaps an 80kg cyclist could start at £10 per year? Of course with wear proportional to 4th power of axle weight, a Ford Focus would be £1.7m but fair's fair
ormondroyd
India becoming too hot for human life is probably going to be the migration event that completely destabilizes global geopolitics
screenslaver
"More transit spending? This city isn't dense enough for transit to succeed!" Ok, let's get rid of minimum parking requirements to allow more density. "We can't get rid of parking requirements, you need a car to get anywhere in this city!"
WallaNWalla
capital accumulation promotes ecological destruction
capital accumulation promotes ecological destruction
capital accumulation promotes ecological destruction
capital accumulation promotes ecological destruction
capital accumulation promotes ecological destruction
jtbrg
If you think you're a progressive person, living in a high-opportunity US city, ask how 10 or 20 or 50 thousand climate refugees could find a home in your community. That's what's up.
Bryan Kirschner
So I'll say it again: making one mistake on the road should not result in someone's death. This is why we need safe streets.
Biking in Mpls
Sustainability (noun)
|suh-stey-nuh-bil-i-tee|
Treating the world as if we planned to stay
anderspreben
Free public transportation addresses multiple progressive values at once - equity and access, climate change, and of course traffic.
LindsayJS
Some good news: household energy use fell from 2009 to 2015. “While reductions in per-square foot energy usage occurred in all types of housing units, they were steepest for apartments or condominiums in larger multifamily buildings.”
Amanda Kolson Hurley
And no, targets -- 100% clean everything by 2050! No, 2035, you sellout! -- are not policies. They are promissory notes, pledges to eventually pass policies. But time is short. It's time to get to the actual policies!
David Roberts
Seattle has almost as many parking spots as NYC, despite having 12x fewer people -- more than 2 spots for every person in the city. Madness.
David Roberts
Crazy radicals at, um, Scientific American call for end to investment in new pipelines. Due to science.
Bill McKibben
Though I am all in favor of better science communication — and think we should be pouring resources into innovation there — entrenched climate denialism is 0% the fault of scientists, and 100% the success of one of the largest focused propaganda campaigns in human history.
Alex Steffen
If cycling produces economic gain, while driving produces social losses, why do we continue to design primarily for the automobile? Shouldn't we be rushing to gain this massive monetary benefit?
LdnOntBikeCafe
"The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use." –Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History
GodsAndRadicals
If I remember correctly, a simple freeway interchange alone costs around $60 million, without land costs. So any time anyone challenges the cost of walking, biking & transit infrastructure, note how much of it you could buy with the cost of 1 interchange.
Brent Toderian
Headwinds and Tailwinds:
Ken Avidor
“They found that roughly 45 percent of pedestrian fatalities go unreported in local news outlets, and that when they do, the details provided by police and journalists may be contributing to misperceptions about why pedestrians die.”
KostelecPlan
I can't drive nor could I afford to and I just want to get around without taking my life into my hands because someone driving 15 tons of speeding steel cannot be bothered to be a fucking human being. FFS.
SheRidesABike
if we want to keep below 1.5°C, the science says the entire u.s. needs to be 100% carbon free by 2035. 100% by 2050 is for the entire world. anything less is climate denial
Eric Holthaus
Wowowow! Seattle has 1.6 million parking spaces and… “Seattle’s population density of 13 people per acre is less than half its parking density of 29 parking stalls per acre.” Sure am glad people are fighting over the progressive cause of free and abundant parking.
Blake Trask
Single use plastics are bad, but the corporate interests that keep our entire society addicted to cheap, disposable plastics and fossil fuels and stymie a shift towards renewable energy and reusable goods are worse.
LuxAlptraum
Parking in a nutshell: "There's a lot of interest until they understand the price.”
Nate Hood (citing a story in the Mankato Free Press about a proposed parking ramp)
I’ve been so far able to avoid the bad scooter takes but they’re here in the Twin Cities now. They are good for transportation. Use them to open a dialogue about how unsafe our streets are instead of slamming them for being on the sidewalk. We have an opportunity here.
mikesonn
Tired: Humans are killing the planet
Wired: literally like ninety specific people are killing the planet and we literally know their names
the_bird_roads
“Drinking and driving is bad,” “texting and driving is bad,” you’ll say, maintaining that drinking and texting are the problems. But really driving is the problem. We’ve built our cities so people can only get around by polluting the atmosphere and endangering themselves/others
David Klion
"The legal system [in the Netherlands] automatically places all of the responsibility for crashes on the motorist, not the cyclist." "“The car is always wrong, by law,” said Amsterdam urban planner Rob van der Bijl." — "The car is always wrong" is a good slogan.
David M. Levinson
In the US alone, we use about 7 billion gallons of water PER DAY for lawns. About 1/3 of our total water usage. For... lawns.
Molly Priesmeyer
Even if someone uses a second vehicle they don’t quite need, it’s not considered elitist. Unless it’s a bicycle, at a fraction of the cost of a motor vehicle.
Rik Adamski
Veganism and plastic bans are nice, but have you considered dismantling the fossil fuel industry and redistributing their wealth to the communities poisoned by their reckless pursuit of profit?
hermit_hwarang
One of the things that keeps me up at night is my growing sense that many who rightly demand more justice in the world do not understand the unprecedented injustice of the crises we've set into motion (and are rapidly worsening through inaction on climate and sustainability). No belief in progressive politics may prove to have more regressive results than the idea that the climate crisis is an elite concern, distant from "real" people's lives — and tackling it demands foregrounding + prioritizing non-climate social goals, even at the expense of action. Especially since that perspective has been influenced by — and plays back into — an overtly anti-environmental message that we must "balance" ecological + economic concerns — the old "jobs vs. owls" argument. When, in fact, there can be no sustained economic progress without climate action. Saying "Of course climate change is a big problem, but we have this immediate human crisis on our hands, so it just can't be our top priority" is a form of denialism — doubly so when so many of those crises are already driven in part by climate change.
Alex Steffen
"Cyclists don't pay for the roads" is apparently carspeak for "I have no idea how infrastructure is actually funded.”
CarHelmets
Not enough people understand this: The consensus of the impacts of climate change and ecological destruction is subject to huge pressures, almost all of them tending to bias the final outcome towards conservative estimates, predicting the crises will be less severe than likely.
Alex Steffen
Our official traffic safety compact in the U.S. is like: Pedestrians, cyclists, follow every rule every time or you deserve to get killed. That is an insane. It's not compassionate. Even when pedestrians are drunk or break the rules or whatever, they don't deserve to be killed.
schmangee
Future generations will be scandalized by how much more time was spent debating the national debt in a period of low interest rates than climate change in a period of soaring temperatures.
Matthew Yglesias
So you can make a buyer feel better about a duplex by calling it a "Twin Home." What do we have to call them to convince cities to stop making them illegal on the vast majority of land?
Wedge LIVE!
what did we do to deserve this heat beside absolutely destroy the environment for the last century
jaboukie young-white
Transformative ‘underpass art’ in Toronto shows that we can soften urban places using paint and imagination. This piece is particularly heart warming since it was the outcome of a participatory budgeting and community process:
jennifer keesmaat
Wild theory: If you hate speed cameras but enjoy the convenience of EZ-Pass, your problem with speed cameras probably has nothing to do with fears of Big Brother.
BrooklynSpoke
Think your driving is not heavily subsidized? Think again. David Levinson (@trnsprtst) discusses the value of land dedicated to driving. Example: The value of land in on-street parking in Minneapolis could yield rents that exceed 5% of the city's annual budget.
Marlon Boarnet
Given the impending ubiquity of EVs and the often massive costs of soil and water contamination from leaking fuel tanks and spills—not to mention climate change—no well-planned city anywhere should permit the construction of another gas station. The vacant, toxic sites of former gas stations are great examples of abandoned private assets with socialized costs. As the Carbon Bubble pops, we're about to see a lot of those. Every city's goal should be to have as few of them as possible. That starts with not building more.
Alex Steffen
I see something that might be a bigger priority than building emissions:
typewriteralley
not tipping a server to make a statement about how restaurants should be paying their employees is like punching a fifth-grader because you don't like how public education is fundedOn income inequality, poverty, wage theft, and a better way to fund/run things:
Molly Priddy
the more i learn about the women's and civil rights movements as well as labor organizing and environmentalism the angrier i get about all the time we wasted being taught about random battles from us wars of the 1800s
lieholepiehole
When I was 17 I went to get a Limp Bizkit tattoo and when they wouldn’t let me because I didn’t have a guardian’s approval, I cried and punched a lamp post. 3 months later I was allowed to take on $119,000 in loans to go to art school.
Bill Dixon
It's not good for students that upwards of 70% of the teaching that goes on in colleges and universities is done by contingent faculty aka adjuncts
IBJIYONGI
reading this article from May about someone facing 12 years in prison for shoplifting $39.57 in goods from Walmart I’m reminded Walmart has paid out over $1,400,000,000 in stolen wages since 2000 & not one of its execs or managers ever faced a day in jail.There were several responses to Cory Doctorow’s post on “prepping” for that time when the shit hits the fan… will people come together or turn on each other?
Adam H. Johnson
If they didn't already exist, bright red trucks full of 1,134,400 unionized, pensioned public workers putting out fires for free would strike people as the most outlandish radical leftist idea.
rafaelshimunov
Stop trying to “change the world,” corporate America. Just pay your taxes and stop lobbying for cuts.
Anand Giridharadas
Capitalism has existed for less than 1% of recorded history and we might literally destroy the planet under it, but it's the only system that "works" and we have to keep doing it forever
Shuja Haider
Capitalism requires force. A lot of it.
David Kaib
If you are not radical in a world where millions of people are starving to death while 8 people have more wealth than the bottom 50% combined then what the fuck is wrong with you?
hansalexrazo
People will talk shit about socialism while never examining questions like why we just accept that every 12–25 years, there’s a total financial collapse under capitalism.
InternetEh
Every argument I hear against free public college, Medicare for all and a living wage is a dishonest platitude about how it’s “socialism.” It’s not. It’s a simple question of where a very rich democracy spends its money. Right now it is spent on war and low taxes for the rich.
Mikel Jollett
-Teacher given cash for supplies on a plane.
-Donating paid time off so an expecting mother can take time off.
-CEO giving car to kid who walked 20 miles to work.
None of these are feel-good stories, they're how much we have failed to invest in the lives and success of ordinary people.
Carl Atiya Swanson
Hi,
Just to remind you that communism is forever tainted by the horror of the gulag.
Yours sincerely,
Man who thinks the international legacy of the British Empire is mostly trains
PS I love the queen, the nation's kindly nan
Tom Munday
BREAKING: no one is "worth" a billion dollars in fact the very idea that people are "worth" a specific monetary sum is a lie made up by slavers and capitalists have a great evening everyone
Saladin Ahmed
The central tenet of Disaster Capitalism is that you strip government safety away until things collapse. Then, billionaires move in and get whatever they want when people are desperate.
Brianna Wu
If it is radical to believe in the inherent dignity and worth of every human being, to believe that all men and women are created equal and that we all deserve access to healthcare, quality education, safe communities. meaningful employment and housing, then yes I am radical.
Michael Tubbs
Left-Wing Utopia: Everybody on earth is safe, healthy, happy, educated, and free to pursue their ambitions.
Right-Wing Utopia: White Americans work sixty hours a week in a backbreaking job they hate with no healthcare and one week of vacation, and everyone else is dead.
Jules Suzdaltsev
I'm not a "leftist" or "socialist" so much as I'm just a "society is a construct and we've constructed ours into a pyramid scheme meant to exponentially help the small few at the top while crushing everyone else and it's dumb as hell and we don't have to keep doing it"
behindyourback
An upside to campaigning on relatively left-wing positions like Medicare for All or a Jobs Guarantee is that they are “interesting” enough to actually get media coverage of economic policy debates rather than culture war stuff.
Matthew Yglesias
it’s cool how people who want universal healthcare or free tuition are unreasonable and unrealistic and should modify their "refrains" in order to be taken seriously but everyone is supposed to befriend and try to understand people demanding an ethnically cleansed white homeland
Patrick Blanchfield
Sometimes I like to idly imagine a different politics, one that isn't primarily a desperate effort to stop horrible people from doing horrible things but instead is a collaborative effort among people of good will to improve the lives of ordinary people.
David Roberts
Among Very Serious People, social democratic economic policies are "silly" and "naive," but the entire conservative movement's devotion to ludicrous, serially discredited supply-side dogma is just taken for granted.
David Roberts
“I’m socially liberal but fiscally conservative” sure is a catchy way to say “yeah I guess I can pretend to care about marginalized folks as long as there are economic systems in place to keep them marginalized”
Emily Hoven
Prepping is just a reenactment of the Masque of the Red Death: a way to throw yourself an extravagant fin de siecle ball with MREs and cans of skunky beer while death stalks you.On the 4th of July/Independence Day:
doctorow
The only good prepper is the one figuring out how to dig their neighbors out of the rubble and the logisitics for a monster BBQ for the whole block when the power to their freezer goes out.
doctorow
It's tragic that people with the resources to make a difference in this broken system have instead decided to live a male empowerment fantasy that only hastens the distopia they fear.
Travis Leitko
A Black Woman in Handcuffs For Climbing The Statue of Liberty on Independence Day is a Perfect Metaphor For AmericaAnd finally, there were the best of the rest:
Not_Lebam
It’s wild seeing people celebrate the fact the US has the oldest constitution still in effect. Modern constitutions include the right to vote, the right to education and healthcare. Having the oldest model isn’t something to celebrate, it’s something to improve.
Samuel Sinyangwe
Ironic to advocate for monarchy of the least qualified on Independence Day
WhiskypalianEsq (reacting to a photo of Don Jr and Eric labeled 46 and 47)
I wonder if they’ll let the children out of their cages to see the fireworks or if they’ll keep them locked in while we celebrate how free we are.
emrazz
This nation was not founded by immigrants. Europeans squatting on already-occupied land with the goal of producing raw goods for the wealth of England is COLONIZATION, not immigration. Please stop rewriting history to fit a convenient modern political narrative
Bree Newsome
If you write out the basic facts of trees, but framed as technology, it sounds like impossible sci-fi nonsense. Self-replicating, solar-powered machines that synthesize carbon dioxide and rainwater into oxygen and sturdy building materials on a planetary scale.
CryptoNaturalist
While running for mayor in 1992, Giuliani incited a mob of racist cops to riot. When a report commissioned by his own campaign criticized him for instigating the riot, Giuliani had the report destroyed.
Radley Balko
One square yard of prairie soil may contain 20 linear miles of roots and root hairs! #prairiefacts:
Daniel Kinka
Man at bus stop seeing me, a wheelchair user: “I don’t have time to wait for a wheelchair to get on.” Wheelchair users know about waiting: The resistance to us riding buses kept them inaccessible for years. Your wait is minimal. Our wait for access persists.
Gregory Mansfield
friend of mine told me dealing with a ferret is like dealing with "a slinky with bad intentions"
Elizabeth Bruenig
The straights when you're childless: Oh you need to have children your life isn't complete without them you'll regret it the clock is ticking
The straights when they find out you're pregnant: LOL YOUR LIFE IS OVER FUCKER YOU'LL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN WELCOME TO HELL
ugobananas
Three things about active shooter drills in schools:
1. Mass shootings in schools are extremely rare
2. We don’t have good evidence that drills save lives
3. We don’t have good evidence that drills are safe for kids’ mental health
Why do we accept them so easily?
hardsci
If you put chalk under a powerful microscope—white cliffs of Dover type chalk, not the modern blackboard variety—you will see something like this. Because it's not just a rock. It's an accumulation of ancient skeletons: the armored husks of single-celled, ocean-dwelling plankton:
Ferris Jabr
Britain is finished. I'm ashamed of it. All of a sudden Europeans seem so modern and cool and I feel like I'm living nearer to WWII than the 21st century. Everything is broken. Everything is underfunded. Everything is closing. We are lied to incessantly.
flowerchucker
not only is USPS great on its own terms—i routinely ship things out with no problem, even internationally—but its wide reach and infrastructure ought to be utilized for things beyond shipping. like banking. and rural broadband.
jbouie
There is truly a gulf between those of use who hate telephones and those who don't. I'm not even sure language is capable of bridging the gap. The horribleness of talking on the phone just seems self-evident to me.
David Roberts
The number of people working at newspapers fell from 424,000 in 2000 to 183,300 last year. That's a 57 percent drop. That's fewer people than work at Aramark.
Alec MacGillis
“Tough love” usually isn’t love.
Matthew Desmond
When Your Pants Suspect Something...
BonafideBlack
When leading conservative figures tell you that racist provocateurs like Ben Shapiro and pretentious nitwits like Kevin Williamson are among the best their movement has to offer, believe them.
Matthew Yglesias
You can take your "the market should replace libraries" take and shove it up your oblivious libertarian ass. Wanna "save taxpayers money," start with prisons and cops.
Captain Awkward
The idea people should threaten, shun and cut off the people they love who have addiction problems is the importing of the logic of the drug war into our private lives. Protect yourself, for sure, but give the most love you can. The opposite of addiction is connection
Johann Hari
Life gets so much easier when you just lean into being the fucking weirdo you were born to be.
brittwastaken
Earnestness is a woefully underrated positive trait, and it’s a shame so many people are convinced intelligence or competence has to be wrapped in irony.
anildash
we don’t need “better” rich people to own the media, we need the media workers to own the media
Molly Lambert
Adults hit children because they don’t consider them to be fully human and worthy of the same right to bodily integrity as adults. And because kids can’t hit them back.
Stacey Patton
Demon pirate monkey in the carpet:
Faces in Things
Richard Dawkins, Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson walk into a bar. Everyone else leaves and goes to a different bar and has a nice night.
Andrew Mangan
|￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣|
History doesn’t
Repeat itself.
People repeat history.
History is a
human production
|＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿|
(\__/) ||
(•ㅅ•) ||
/ づ
PatríciaMMarcos
Did you know that bats make up a quarter of the world's mammals?
BloomingtonCVB
Facebook refuses to ban InfoWars, says it would be an infringement on the important principle of “we’re making a lot of money by turning your grandparents even more racist”
pixelatedboat
I love how to get any kind of job now you have to demonstrate an enthusiasm that borders on mania
fluff_weather
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery unless you're one of the so-called reporters at national outlets who rips off freelancers like me without attribution in which case you are sincerely an asshole
Sarah Smarsh
At this point, I would consider a post a failure if it did not solicit at least one email from an elderly white retired engineer with an AOL email address, asserting - with total confidence and zero evidence - that the post is completely wrong.
David Roberts
Whenever someone complains that liberals/progressives "hate freedom" they are talking about the freedom to hurt others with impunity, make no mistake.
Naamenism
Shorter FEMA: We weren't "sorely unprepared" for hurricane season, we just couldn't handle three hurricanes in a row with the resources of the richest country in world history.
Eric Holthaus
|￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣|
Technologies
are regressive
not "revolutionary"
if the same people
remain in control
|＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿|
(\__/) ||
(•ㅅ•) ||
/ づ
histoftech
If you were designing a democracy, would it settle some of the most urgent and deeply felt questions of rights through randomly timed, highly political, but not actually democratic fights over appointments to an elite caste of interpreters of a very old and brief civic sacred text?
Jedediah Purdy
"Those who most mock "safe spaces" are often the ones who've inhabited them all their lives." I love Stacey-Marie Ishmael because she tells the truth and her newsletter is fire.
iSmashFizzle
Someone asked me if I'd be willing to improve Amazon's working conditions if it meant we couldn't have Amazon Prime, as if they can't imagine a world where they aren't paying $100/year to get shampoo delivered like a day early.
CORPORATE_NAME
On voting: “there is nothing revolutionary about not showing up. I don’t know any revolution led by folks who stayed home.” –Brittany Packnett
Tamika D. Mallory
I've known a ton of "South Park Republicans" in my life. That show's cynical nihilism equated so quickly to mocking any earnestness or kindness and that influenced a generation of sociopathic dicks.
jonnyblackout
Do you enjoy being touched by GERMS and VERY SMALL KNIVES? Then you’ll love CAT PAWS! CAT PAWS are an easy, attractive system that delivers germs and knives to your skin any time, even to your face while you sleep! AMAZING! CALL NOW and get butt updates absolutely FREE! WOW!!
Theo Nicole Lorenz
If we are moving to a model where pricing for everything is managed algorithmically and peak times/items are subject to surge pricing, my salary should also "surge", so working during peak hours should get me double or treble my current hourly rate.
noveldevice
I never thought of "asymmetry of passion" as being important but it's a factor in all conspiracy theories that seek to overturn societal stores of knowledge. For example the fact that we went to the moon is considered an unremarkable fact.
Sally Adee
The Basque word for squirrel: urtxintxa translates as "walnut otter." Just something that came up somehow during my work day.
rjjago
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