It's April 1, and I don't go in for fooling around, so I'll just do my usual round-up of the tweets of the previous month, March 2019. As usually happens these days, I can't believe the stories these tweets reminded me of. News that would have filled a week in other years, other parts of my life, are reduced to one tweet (for which I barely remember the reference). Astounding.
I'll start with tweets that discussed politics and our general state of things, sometimes including critiques of media framing:
The Constitution: It doesn't need to be rewritten. It needs to be reread.We're revving up toward the 2020 election, which means Democratic primary candidates:
Cliff Maloney @LibertyCliff
In 1928 Al Smith wanted to bring electricity to Rural America. The GOP called him a socialist. Nothing has changed.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish
Solidarity > “civility,” because you can be very civil while arguing for the inhumane and unacceptable. You can be “civil” while locking up kids and drugging them in detention camps, or stripping people of their insulin or civil rights. Civility is about appearance. Solidarity is about action.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Okay, GOP, you wanna keep going with this "Nazis have Socialist in their name; therefore, Democrats who are socialists are Nazis"? Let me introduce you to the Republican Guard in Iraq, which protected Saddam Hussein.
The Rude Pundit
The widespread use of the politically neutral term "Fake News" has been utterly self-defeating. Fake/real is a misleading binary. What we are dealing with is political propaganda. Nativist propaganda. Racist propaganda. Islamophobic propaganda.
Liam Hogan @Limerick1914
For all those people who claim gerrymandering doesn't matter: Republicans held 16 additional US House seats and 7 state legislative chambers in 2018 by controlling redistricting process finds new AP analysis.
Ari Berman
Pundits who are implying that eliminating the Electoral College is some sort of radical position should check the polls. Most people support a Constitutional amendment to change to a popular vote.
Nate Silver
Conservative arguments for keeping the electoral college boil down to: if rural and suburban white men and their wives lose their advantages and count only as much as everyone else, they are the victims and America is ruined. (See also: most other conservative arguments.)
David Roberts
Nobody actually cares about rust belt cities. As long as they don’t live in them, it’s just like this curiosity. Whole cities just failing and everyone’s just... It sounds dumb to say this is why we got Trump, but we need to rethink this every-place-for-itself attitude we have in this country.
Angie Schmitt
It’s easy to cling to respectability politics or free speech absolutism when you are not the target of a promised ethnic cleansing. The “marketplace of ideas” is a legitimizing myth and “debating” ethno-nationalism is nothing more than the gamification of another’s humanity.
Liam Hogan @Limerick1914
The vast majority of people who think of themselves as centrists, if you dig a little, position themselves between the left and right wings of the Democratic Party. The GOP has no coherent ideology beyond white resentment. What's the "centrist" take even supposed to be on that?
David Roberts
I don't trust anyone who identifies the most pressing issue of our times as being "division" and not things like racism, climate change, wealth inequality and various issues that have arisen from white capitalism and colonialism. We are not uniquely or more divided today than yesterday... We ARE however dealing with the consequence of ignoring these same issues and kicking the can down the road for most of the last century.
Bree Newsome Bass
a cool thing about the last few years is that the U.S. became the leading exporter of the intellectual machinery of western fascism and one of the leading domestic debates about it is whether undergrads are treating the people behind it politely enough
chris hooks
If the media doesn’t get some language other than left vs right and start challenging those who say people fighting for health care, living wages and voting rights are somehow extreme, they will again be enablers to the re-election of Trump.
Rev. Dr. Barber
The divide between the parties doesn’t get more starkly apparently than the fact that one party is fighting to get more people to vote and the other is erecting every law and using every manipulation possible to keep people from exercising their inalienable rights.
Jared Yates Sexton
Climate advocates saying we should make sure everyone stays employed and cared for during a rapid reindustrialization caused more genuine, deep, and heartfelt outrage among the US political class than it ever has when the US President called climate change a Chinese hoax.
David Roberts
Elizabeth Warren was raised in Oklahoma, where her dad worked as a janitor after a heart attack set the family back financially. Her chosen narrative isn’t the repossessed car or starting work at age 13 but rather that her family worked hard and got by, while they likely wouldn’t today. Meanwhile candidates born to greater advantage regularly spin their life story for some working-class “authenticity.” Warren’s humility and refusal to cheapen her family’s story — or deny the privilege that can exist amid hardship — is a beautiful, rare thing on the campaign trail.As always, there's the ongoing catastrophe of Mulligan and his administration (again, with some critique of media coverage):
Sarah Smarsh
If you think a 37-year-old whose sole political experience is being mayor of South Bend is better qualified for the presidency than a female senator who is a political visionary and has put forward a slew of detailed and thoughtful policies, you may have a sexism problem.
Jill Filipovic
Beto is that dude in your class that says the same exact thing you just said right after you just said it and gets told he's the smartest bestest guy.
@_celia_bedelia_
I really like Pete Buttigieg. He is intelligent. He is decent. He is curious. But when he says “I think that policy matters, I'm a policy guy,” but all of his policies are basically Warren’s (except less specific and less progressive), I wonder why he’s not working for her.
Jill Filipovic
If a Democratic candidate doesn't have the guts to reject the ~$1 million they'd probably get from the fossil fuel industry over the course of their campaign, they definitely don't have the guts to pass something as aggressive as a Green New Deal.
Emily Atkin @emorwee
Hickenlooper/Buttigieg would be the presidential ticket in a Roald Dahl novel.
Dave Weigel
Can we just call her “Cruella DeVos”?This month included the end of the Mueller investigation, Attorney General Barr's four-page selective summary, and the whole mess (and more media critique... it's becoming a theme):
Hari Kondabolu
The president and those around him have told thousands and thousands of demonstrable lies. Yet virtually all the political controversies of the day depend for their existence on the media extending the presumption of good faith to them. If the media would react to serial liars like an actual human being reacts — refusing to trust them absent extraordinary evidence — lots of what passes for political drama would just evaporate.
David Roberts
"At an Oval Office meeting on Feb. 22, Trump asked top advisers for ways to limit federal support from going to Puerto Rico, believing it is taking money that should be going to the mainland, according to senior administration officials."
Mark Berman
Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes. –The Washington Post
Chelsea Clinton
Do you ever notice that when it comes to the KKK, racists, white nationalists, etc., Trump always "doesn't know enough about it" to have an opinion? Which is funny because he claims to know more than military generals, etymologists, nuclear physicists, scientists. and doctors.
Asha Rangappa
Remember when Republicans lost their fucking minds over a fabricated conspiracy theory about a sex ring run by Democrats? Now there is an ACTUAL sex ring run by Republicans selling access to the President and they are SILENT.
Mikel Jollett (responding to the massage parlor owner/Mar-a-Lago attendee with ties to the Chinese government, etc. ...remember that flash-in-the-pan story!?)
occasionally I get an email from someone on the left, saying they're tired of the "trump bashing." Sorry buddy, ignoring Trump is like ignoring climate change.
Tom Tomorrow
I don’t know. Maybe it’s not a good idea to elect a president who lacks any ethics or morality and has at his disposal a criminal empire dedicated to grift.
Jared Yates Sexton
The total obsession that certain conservative commentators have with the very ill-advised words of Democratic female freshmen congress[members], given the words that come out of our POTUS on a daily basis, really should be studied in college psychology classes for many years to come...
John Ziegler @Zigmanfreud
The Trump Administration is so corrupt, so incompetent, and so unbelievably cruel that multiple scandals, crises, abuses are just going largely unnoticed and unaddressed. Any one of these would’ve created a national uproar in the past.
Jared Yates Sexton
Made my day:
Kelly Carlin
I've watched probably 30-40 pundits talk about the Barr letter and not one has actually voiced the possibility that a president who has been obstructing justice for two years just found an Attorney General fully willing to help. An insane level of blithe naivete. Astounding.Oh, and remember earlier in the month, there was the Manafort sentencing?
The Hoarse Whisperer
The only people buying the “total and complete exoneration” spin are the people who don’t care if he commits crimes in the first place.
Walter Shaub
The dreadful takeaways:
1. A hostile foreign power can hack our election and barely get reprimanded.
2. A POTUS can obstruct justice in plain sight, and it will be hard to prosecute.
3. A POTUS can surround himself with criminals and liars and expect us to believe he’s not.
Charles M. Blow
“I've been fully exonerated by a report I won’t let you see, but here’s a short letter by a man I installed as AG because he wrote an odd memo about how I couldn’t have obstructed justice after I spent a year pressuring my first Attorney General to violate a criminal conflict of interest law.”
Walter Shaub
Regardless of what's in Mueller Report, CNN and MSNBC speculating about it 24/7 while treating Trump kidnapping children and gutting Medicare as one-day stories is the latest example (like Iraq War and 2016 election) of them being shitty at their jobs.
Frank Conniff
Four years in a US prison is a severe penalty. The problem is not with that sentence. The problem is with the fact that so many people are sent to prison for so much longer, for so much less. In Germany, the penalty for intentional homicide is 5 to 15 years.As always, all of this takes place in the midst of racism, white supremacy, and police brutality:
Jason Stanley @jasonintrator
by the way, if you’re angry at the judge who sentenced Manafort, just wait for every case ever for the rest of our lives because Mitch McConnell stole the judiciary
Morgan Finkelstein @momofink
Apparently, the system believes rich people should own prisons...not be in them.
Hari Kondabolu
Every generation, something mysterious swallows up any Black wealth accumulated. It's almost like there's something... structural... about the phenomenon...Plus we had the white supremacist, anti-Muslim mass murder in New Zealand and the response to it in that country:
Ebony Elizabeth
Students of color are more likely to go to a school with police, more likely to be referred to law enforcement, and more likely to be arrested at school. Black girls are 4 times more likely to be arrested in school than white girls nationally.
ACLU
As reparations (thankfully finally) becomes a serious national topic of discussion, non-Black Asian-Americans need to speak out against the anti-Blackness of shoehorning in "Why not us?!". We can make other spaces to talk about how imperialism has harmed us. This is derailment. I truly believe we will never achieve what we're fighting for if we don't build up our own personal ability to exist in multiracial coalition with each other. We have to be able to do this without flattening and falsely equating each other's experiences.
Mitra Jalali Nelson
Again, excluding DC, there are 20 states where black people were roughly 10 percent or more of the population [in 2016]. Trump won 14 of them. No, we didn’t vote for him at a higher percentage than in blue states. Our presence totally coincidentally makes white people more conservative.
Stephen Robinson @SER1897
Reminder to white people: You will continue to mess up re racism. So continue to be teachable, open to correction from people of oclor, and vigilantly monitor yourself for defensiveness and white fragility. You never "arrive" as an ally, you must continually *practice* allyship.
@itsjacksonbbz
imagine being such an unaccomplished loser that the only thing you have to be proud of is the unearned color of your skin
Jeff Tiedrich
It’s funny how some white folks like to take credit for Obama’s elections even though he only got 41% and 39% of their votes. Also, he was never popular with white voters throughout his presidency (under 40% approval almost the whole 8 years).
Chris @Testudo23
Things white people think Black people get because of race:
- College admission
- Scholarships
- Athletic ability
Things white people think have nothing to do with race:
- Police brutality
- Incarceration
- Income inequality
- Health care disparities
- Employment
Selective colorblindess
Corey J. Miles
Jailed for life for nonviolent crime: 65% are African-American, 18% are white, and 16% are Latino. Some of the crimes with life sentences: stealing gas from a truck, shoplifting, possessing a crack pipe, $10 sale of marijuana, cashing stolen check
kar nels
Imagine if we treated black people's right to vote like we treated white people's right to bear arms
michaelharriot
Prison doesn’t accomplish anything productive. But if we’re going to employ a useless punitive anachronism that harms families multigenerationally, we’ve gotta do that equally across socioeconomic/racial strata. If folks are getting locked up, white folks should be too.
@BigIndianGyasi (commenting on a young white woman who got no time for killing three people with her car)
White Americans customarily frame Reconstruction as a project that simply fell apart instead of rightfully saying it was sabotaged by white Americans afraid of black reparations, power, wealth, and equity.
Broderick Greer
It's actually rhetorically astounding the way that the right has been able to turn the tables and rebrand opposing discrimination and bigotry as "identity politics" — which they have redefined, for their audiences, as some kind of very crude and distasteful thing to do. "We're not bad because we want black people to stop talking about racism, we're not bad because we think sexism should be ignored, we're not bad because we don't think gay people should have rights — YOU'RE bad (and SELFISH) for caring about these things or expecting others to.
Robyn Pennacchia
Heartbreaking: The home ownership rate for black Americans has fallen back to where it was before housing discrimination was banned.
Jonathan O'Connell @OConnellPostbiz
The GOP can’t decide between “we were the party that abolished slavery” and “confederates were true patriots.” All they really believe is that they wish modern-day black folks weren’t so uncooperative.
Francis Hwang
I feel like the concept of being close to black people as a way of mitigating racism is built around ignoring that we had centuries of men enslaving their own children.
Kaitlin Byrd @GothamGirlBlue
The height of privilege is offering up “thoughts and prayers” when people get murdered for how they think and pray.And the college admissions scandal involving two Hollywood families, bribing coaches, and faking test scores:
Drew Morgan
Violence against Muslims has become an engrained part of culture of the far right. I can go to TJ Maxx right now and spot a guy with an “Armed Infidel” shirt on, shopping for shoes for his wife. It doesn’t start with the mass shootings, it starts with the dehumanization.
Imraan Siddiqi
Around the world it’s becoming obvious that white people, when they feel threatened or insecure or like they’re losing power, lash out and kill. It’s been that way for generations, and until we see this thing for what it is that’s what’s going to keep happening.
Jared Yates Sexton
all these shootings taking place at places or worship, during services....white supremacy has a constant quest to control what is holy and destroy whatever else you have
vanessa taylor @BaconTribe
Maybe it's because NZ is a geographically small country that has shared extreme hardship (earthquakes recently and over time) that they are so clearly a community. Or maybe the US is contaminated by intentional, funded hatred.
@pattho
Bribing a guy to get your dullard kid into college requires two things:There were more than a couple of tweets about sexism, misogyny, and toxic masculinity:
A stunning lack of belief in your kid.
A stunning lack of belief in the right of anyone besides your kid to get what they earn if your kid wants it.
Anand Giridharadas
How come William H. Macy didn’t get his ass arrested? He’s all over the transcripts. I do think part of the reason this story has legs is that we like laughing at rich white women, culturally. Because no one cared when Daddy Kushner/Trump/Bush were buying their dumb sons Ivy seats
Catherynne Valente
Plot twist for White America: It turns out billionaires are actually the ones taking your children's spots at Ivy League schools and pushing opiates down your family's throats
Midwest Unrest
What a time to live in, that we get the gift of listening to Meghan McCain and Eric Trump discourse on the benefits of meritocracy.
David Roberts
Still amazed that rich people buying their kids into college is a bigger story than the president gifting security clearance to his kids against the recommendation of everyone who actually cares about national security.
LOLGOP
The real scandal isn’t all the unethical shit rich parents will do to keep their failsons and faildaughters from tumbling down the socioeconomic ladder — it’s that we use adolescents’ test scores to ration economic security in the first place.
Eric Levitz
The crux of the college scandal: Many rich Americans are no longer content with the generalized rigging of America in their favor. They want extra, private, bottle-service, bespoke rigging, over and above the unfair advantages they're forced to share with other rich people.
Anand Giridharadas
I’m still stuck on the suggestion that girls wearing leggings to school is problematic but boys being unable to control themselves in proximity of female legs covered in a full length cotton-spandex blend is not.And as always, there were many (many, many) about our climate crisis and how to create livable cities:
feminist next door
Researcher in Vienna studies parks and discovers girls over the age of nine were missing. Why? Park designers, often men, had not considered them. 6 parks are then redesigned with girls participating. A transformation of use takes place. Research matters. Who participates matters.
Jennifer Keesmaat
Talking to a technical educator. Told him I was a woman in construction, engineering and he said sincerely, "oh as a woman in these fields, you must be quite sought after." Yeah right, sheesh. All-guy work environments just love to have women show up and ruin their frat parties.
kar nels
You ever notice how when politicians talk about how government spending will create jobs, it's never like, Hire more social services employees or teachers. Instead it's always jobs in male-dominated fields like construction.
Angie Schmitt
If you feel like it's ok to depict rape for the sake of "realism" then you should ask yourself why you don't also want to depict diarrhea, which is also real. If your answer is "nobody wants to watch someone have diarrhea" take a moment to think about what you just said.
Lilah Sturges
When a room is 20% women, men perceive 50% gender parity. For groups in power, parity is perceived as defeat.
sarah jeong
Women: “please stop doing this thing that you believe is helpful or harmless because it is neither.”
Man [says]: “it was intended to be helpful or harmless though.”
Man [means]: “my ego and construction of your experience is more important to me than your actual experience.”
And by the way if asking for consent “ruins the mood” it’s because you were the only one in the fucking mood. Literally.
feminist next door
instead of taking the time to complain about a woman’s vocal fry, just admit you don’t like hearing women or listening to women instead, it’s the truth and it’s what we see when you say that anyway.
Molly Priddy
It's astonishing that white men have committed more mass shootings than any other group or demographic and people still make me explain why there's a crisis in masculinity.
Liz Plank @feministabulous
Fascism isn't an ideology. It's murder-suicide cult about a masculine aesthetic and eternal war.
Maddy @abhakhazia
I am told, usually by men, that simply teaching men not to rape is not a realistic solution; but I have to believe that if boys were taught accountability for raping as often and in as many ways as girls are taught accountability for being raped, it may really make a difference.
feminist next door @emrazz
For the Nth time, a world where Black male abusers can be as impervious to consequences as White ones is not one we should desire
@JamilahLemieux
If every mayor rode a bike to work each day, we’d have safe bike infrastructure. Even more true, if every mayor’s children rode a bike to school, we’d have 8-80 safe bike infrastructure.
Brent Toderian
I have never seen this version of the speed graphic that includes serious and minor injury. Useful visualization. (I assume these numbers are even worse for young, old, or already disabled folks):
Dr. Tara Goddard
The same people who say there can’t be free college or free health care keep insisting that we have to provide endless free real estate to car owners. It’s wild.
Anil Dash
Roads are like closets. The more space you have, the more you put in it.
Clair Marie Wholean AIA LEED AP
My quarterly reminder: Minimum parking requirements are more effective climate denialism than anything the Koch Brothers are doing, putting the irrational fears of the privileged ahead of the needs of everyoneAnd then there was economics, wage theft, income and wealth inequality, and redoing the whole system:
Jeffrey Tumlin
I want us to stop thinking about what’s possible and start thinking about what’s necessary and then let’s change what’s possible. Is that really so complicated?
Mary Annaïse Heglar
haha cool:
Carl Beijer
“In Copenhagen, that means changing how people get around, how they heat their homes, and what they do with their trash. The city has already cut its emissions by 42% from 2005 levels, mainly by moving away from fossil fuels to generate heat and electricity.” Copenhagen Wants to Show How Cities Can Fight Climate Change: The Danish capital wants to be carbon neutral six years from now. Its plan involves wind, recycling and a very innovative ski hill.
Brent Toderian
Cops on buses would cost more money and waste more public resources than fare evasion, likely by orders of magnitude. When people ask me "why don't cops do actual investigations of serious crimes?" it's because we waste so much on garbage like this.
@shadowfuzz
“People can’t take the bus because it’s dangerous.” Nope, you’re just a racist.
@ajm6792
A constant hobgoblin of soft denialists is that if we move "too fast" on climate, we'll "trigger a backlash." I find this mindbogglingly out of touch. Oil, coal and car companies started the climate backlash long before most people had even heard of global warming. For my entire adult lifetime, a big part of climate politics has been advocates for action coming to understand just how fully and deeply Carbon Lobby interests oppose basically all steps forward, and how early that opposition began. It is impossible to say anything meaningful about the climate crisis without beginning from this central fact: Climate change is now a crisis *because* of that opposition and predatory delay.
Alex Steffen
I love how we're all just going about our 9-5 jobs and normal habits while the fact that — short of immediate, transformative action — a near-term mass die-off alongside the collapse of civilization is the most plausible scenario.
@SydneyAzari
“Driving’s too cheap, housing’s too expensive.” The best 6 words in an incredibly dense National Geographic article on the future city.
Brent Toderian
"The US is too spread out for high-speed rail":
Ian Goodrum
Imagine stepping out your front door to a 2-way protected bike path that connected to a citywide network of other 2-way protected bike paths. Imagine how easy it would be to get anywhere. Now consider that our city instead uses that space to give a small minority free car storage
@travis_robert
My kingdom for a time machine to go back and erase the concept of “free” street parking.
@ajm6792
Just a quick reminder: people who want mandatory insurance, helmets, and licensing for cyclists don’t want safety or an even playing field... they want less cycling.
Martyn Schmoll
New rule: Engineers who design bike lanes must test them by having their children ride while traffic is flowing.
Harvey Miller @MobileHarv
Humans alive today are experiencing: a) the warmest global average temperatures that any human being has ever experienced, in the history of the species, and b) the coolest global average temperatures any human will ever experience again.
David Roberts
’Tis the season of people who drive 2-ton vehicles for almost every trip ceaselessly complaining about potholes in streets.
@MattyLangMSP
School climate strikes: 1.4 million people took part, say campaigners. Children walked out of schools on Friday in 2,233 cities and towns in 128 countries, with demonstrations held from Australia to India, the UK and the US.
Stefan Rahmstorf
Years it took us to drive up CO2 by 10 ppm:
320 → 330: 12
330 → 340: 8
340 → 350: 6
350 → 360: 7
360 → 370: 6
370 → 380: 5
380 → 390: 5
390 → 400: 5
400 → 410: 4
That’s making the climate crisis worse faster.
@Sustainable2050
"For each low-wage New Yorker who regularly drives into Manhattan, nearly 40 will benefit from better trains and buses paid for with the congestion-toll revenues."
@alexbaca [quoting The Nation on proposed anti-congestion pricing in NYC]
Whether you live in the suburbs or in the city it is not the city’s job to provide free storage for your car. Free car storage just transfers the enormous cost of driving from you to everyone else.
@travis_robert
It’s obvious, but I’m a planner so I’ll say it anyway. Traffic congestion is not caused by migrants. It’s caused by chronically underfunded public/active transport infrastructure and the dominance of a sprawling land use pattern that assumes car ownership and produces dependence.
Natalie Osborne
Wow! NYC says electric vehicles cost about $1200 to $1500 less per year to maintain than internal combustion engine vehicles.
John Raymond Hanger
Men are not manly without motors. Only wimps use their muscles:
Ken Avidor
Never forget that the people in power want you dead, because it will be so, so profitable.
Eric Holthaus
Cities that are rebuilding expressways (there is at least one) and widening highways (there are many, now sadly, including Portland) are on the wrong side of history. How we move and use land in cities is at the heart of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.
Jennifer Keesmaat
No money in the UK for councils to add charging points for electric vehicles but millions of pounds for them to build new roads to the delight of the ecocidal fossil fuel and auto corporations and the political parties that they "donate" to. #Rebel
Extinction Rebellion
Name one social or urban issue that isn't made better by reducing the number and speed of automobiles.
Tom Millar @transport_tom
Whenever anyone says “how are we going to pay for it” about an environmental or public health issue there’s like a 99% chance the answer is “people are already paying for it.”
Miles Keogh @kidcongo
One of the most bizarre features of our late-stage climate crisis culture is widespread hatred for 1,000-square-foot downtown "luxury apartments" and widespread tolerance of 5,500-square-foot exurban McMansions.
Michael T Sweeney
"It's unfair to have cities where parking is free for cars and housing is expensive for people." — DonaldShoup:
Taras Grescoe
There are fewer than 50,000 coal miners in the US and more than 350,000 solar panel installers. Individual-1 gave tax breaks to coal mines and put tariffs on solar panels. A backward, illogical, self-defeating policy.
Richard Stengel
Your periodic reminder: Boeing and the airlines are basically an extension of the fossil fuel industry. Airlines' main job is to convert jet fuel into dollars for the comfort and benefit of rich people. They are not your friend. They are a tremendous risk to public safety.
Eric Holthaus
We need winter reliability info for pedestrians in Minneapolis St. Paul. We measure travel time reliability for people in vehicles without blinking. Why aren't we valuing the reliability of being able to safely walk to bus stops and across intersections?
la flaneuse
New York started giving pedestrians a headstart of 3 to 7 seconds at crosswalks, before the light turns green for drivers. Deaths and serious injuries among pedestrians and bicyclists fell 40% at those intersections.
Mike Rosenberg
Imagine 21 fully loaded 737-8 MAX going down, with no survivors — every day. That's how many people will die in car crashes in the world in next 24 hrs. In spite of this week's tragedy, planes remain safe. The most dangerous part of any flight: the drive to the airport.
Taras Grescoe
You can fit this ENTIRE 18 story apartment building into JUST the parking lot of the Petco. One of these buildings is ILLEGAL. The other is not. Take a guess. #DoTheMath
Nate Hood
Sometimes we fall into the habit of describing urban interstates as a harm that *happened* to communities of color. But what this study should remind us is that the harms are still *happening* today.
Alex Schieferdecker (responding to the study that shows Black and Latinx neighborhoods bear a disproportionate burden from air pollution
"Wow, it's crazy these blueberries come all the way from Peru!" *sips Sumatran coffee*
Chris Steller
800,000 people dying in Europe, every year, from air pollution. Now imagine that terrorism was to blame — would governments continue to do nothing?
Gregory Norminton
I really think the popular understanding of climate change fails to fully appreciate its irreversibility. Every increment of heat, and every knock-on effect of that heat, is something our species will be dealing with, for all intents and purposes, forever. Can't "get to it later."
David Roberts
Closing Central Madrid to cars over the holidays resulted in a 9.5% boost in retail spending on its main shopping street. There was also a 71% drop in air pollution.
Brent Toderian
I'm a moderate!
Habeeb @FocusBreak
Local residents: we would like you to build sidewalks/expand bus service so we aren’t forced to be completely reliant on cars.
Officials: oh that’s so cute! Sorry, you crazy kids, that’s unrealistic.
Same officials: our region must be an early adopter of vacuum tube transport!
Angie Schmitt
A 16 year-old: “people tell me that I should become a climate scientist. But we have climate scientists. And nobody is listening to them. So I have to be here. We have to be out on the streets.”
Extinction Rebellion
Having 10 million underpaid unlicensed cabs circling every city in America undermines political support for transit. Especially by peeling off people who can afford it however. I don’t know how anyway can seriously doubt this.
Angie Schmitt
I'd almost forgotten about this. Transit is weird because if the supply increases (like, greater frequency), then the demand increases (more people want to take it if there's less waiting). We need public subsidy to get to the socially optimal level of transit service.
@scttdvd
imagine what kind of world we could live in if white people cared about social justice half as much as they do about free parking
@lieholepiehole
Republicans are dancing on the graves of their grandchildren with jokes about cow farts so they can collect a few million more dollars from the fossil fuel industry.
Kate Aronoff
I’m biased but I think people would be willing to pay more for sidewalks so their kids could walk to school and trails so they could bike and intercity rail. But no one even offers them that really. Just more of the same.
Angie Schmitt
U.S has had one death on airlines planes in last 9 years. If 100 people died in an air crash, there would be a study, finger pointing, changes. In last 9 years there have been about 50,000 pedestrian deaths cause by drivers. About 2000 kids a year under 16 get killed this way.
kar nels
Lyft lost about $1.40 per ride last quarter (net loss -$248.9M on 178.4M rides). That's better than in 2017, when it lost $1.82 per ride. For context, Uber lost $1.13 per ride in 2017.
Rani Molla
Uber/Lyft’s business is fundamentally just using venture capital money to subsidize rides until either (1) self-driving automation becomes viable in cities or (2) public transit declines so much you have no choice but to use them and they can jack up prices.
Nik Philipsen
If you can remember only one thing about transportation in cities, remember this.:
TODERIAN UrbanWORKS
WE DONT WANT TO GO TO THE MOON WE WANT PUBLIC INTERCITY TRANSIT SO WE CAN VISIT OUR GRANDMAS
Emily Leedham (a Canadian responding to to Justin Trudeau's announced investments in a space program)
Rich(er) people taking Uber and Lyft instead of the bus is like rich(er) people sending their kids to private schools vs. public. They don't have the skin in the game politically for essential public services and they suffer as a result.
Angie Schmitt
"Suburbia of the American type is composed of monocultures: residential, commercial, industrial, connected by the circulatory system of cars. Suburbia is not a sustainable human ecology."
Jason Segedy
I've been musing on the fact that sustainability (widely seen as a desirable but unattainable aspiration) is only the mid-point between destruction and regeneration. Conclusion: it's a lot more fun to aim higher! Besides, who wants to sustain ecocide?
Shaun Chamberlin @DarkOptimism
New York City's Taxi and Limousine Commission found that NYC Uber and Lyft drivers average $11.90 an hour and that 96% of drivers make less than NY's minimum wage. That Commission has sought to fix this by adopting a $17.22 minimum wage for these drivers.And guns:
Steven Greenhouse
'We find that financial sector growth attracts highly talented engineers into occupations that do not fully use their skills, which leads these engineers to engage in less innovative entrepreneurship in the long-run... people who in another age dreamt of curing cancer or flying to Mars, today dream of becoming hedge fund managers.'
Rutger Bregman [links provided in the original]
Going beyond taxing the rich, Dean Baker writes, “The rich wrote the rules…we have to attack these rules. Obviously they prefer that we would ignore the rules and just pretend that they got rich due to their talents and hard work.”
CEPR
I just want to say one thing clearly: Proposals to drug-test for social services are a direct result of the misconception that poor people are poor because they have done something wrong. This is an ideological framework that is blatantly untrue but persists because it makes people feel good. In a competitive race to stay middle class, it feels nice for folks to think "I could never be poor, because I Am Good." They will go to great lengths to uphold that idea. The other side of it — the belief that not-poor people are generally "good" and don't need to be policed — is why there are proposals to drug test for SNAP, but not to test middle-class white kids who get federal aid to go to college that their parents could probably afford.
Hanna Brooks Olsen
It's more expensive to do drug testing/means testing than it is to extend universal benefits to all who qualify. It's not about financial stewardship, it's about vindictive cruelty disguised as "moralism."
Kevin Gannon @TheTattooedProf
Most of what gets shared as heartwarming stories are usually temporary, small-scale responses to systemic failures. I wish we found it just as inspirational to make structural changes to unjust systems, but I don’t know if our culture knows how to tell those stories.
Anil Dash
The NRA opposes the Violence Against Women Act because “the legislation could lead to firearm confiscations over misdemeanor domestic violence or stalking convictions.” Why are we letting the gun lobby write our gun laws?And health care:
Shannon Watts
I've rendered assistance to 4 people attempting suicide. They all survived and were glad to survive. If they'd used guns, they'd all be dead. Suicide is actually a survivable injury — but not if guns are used.
@kujakupoet
Americans make up just about 4% of the world's population. In any given year, we also account for one third of the entire planet's gun suicides.
Patrick Blanchfield
More than twice as many American kids were shot dead in 2017 than active duty U.S. military personnel and on-duty police officers combined. Gun deaths rising at ‘alarming’ rates in U.S. among school-aged children, study finds.
MinnPost
If your response to calls for gun control is “Should we get rid of cars too?” the answer is, for you, yes. You should not have a gun or car.
rob delaney
A startling graph from Jonathan Metzl’s terrific “Dying of Whiteness.” 92% of gun suicides in U.S. were committed by white people. In other words, the demographic that the NRA energized with its “guns everywhere” message is turning those guns on itself:
igorvolsky
I was in the ER with a health scare recently and while they were taking blood and I was wondering if I'm dying, a lady came in to tell me my copay and I had to dig for my credit card. Every day this system continues to exist is a crime.And education:
@InternetHippo
In the US, people die of treatable illnesses because their gofundmes don't take off and teachers practice getting shot in the head. This country is a fucking monstrosity.
@MsKellyMHayes
90% of new jobs don’t come with health insurance. Americans will need a new paradigm for getting health care. States are already at it, looking to allow people to buy into their Medicaid program.
Andy Slavitt
There’s no protocol for how quickly doctors must respond to a woman expressing concerns that could show she has a dangerous pregnancy-related condition. But if a middle-aged man walks into an ER with chest pain, there’s a rule about how fast he’s seen.
Katie Zezima
Wealthy white people pay for and demand teaching and learning conditions (re: small classes, certified and experienced teachers, advanced and diverse courses) for their own children while also advocating for the opposite teaching and learning conditions (re: large classes, novice uncertified teachers, test-prep) for "other people's children." Bill Gates Betsy DeVosAnd — finally — the best of the rest:
Paul Thomas
"Direct teaching of vocabulary is not as efficient as acquiring vocabulary via listening to stories, and the effect of direct instruction...fades more with time. The time dedicated to skill-building wd have been better spent listening to stories and reading."
Alfie Kohn [link provided in the original]
The criminalization of truancy has exacerbated inequalities, stigmatized youth with the label of “criminal” and “delinquent,” pushed them out of school, fueled the school-to-prison pipeline, and punished families for the crime of being poor. It does not address root causes. I've conducted an exhaustive literature of truancy interventions. It is clear that there is no better solution to reducing truancy than social democracy: fair employment, living wages, affordable housing, equitable public education, climate justice, decent standard of living for all.
Nikhil Goyal
Friendly reminder: Children are people right now. They are not people in training.
Mother Bae I @tiersaj
I am tired of the argument that we have to teach canon literature in high school because "Kids won't get it anywhere else." When we read engaging books that reflect modern situations, we're developing readers. They'll find libraries all on their own.
Andrea Marshbank
Adults: let's give first-graders homework and make everyone do six-hour standardized tests once a month
Also adults: why are kids so depressed and anxious these days, is it their social media
Ryan Boyd
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by student loans
@sciliz
Straight people will say that LGBT education isn't age-appropriate but will ask toddlers if they have a girlfriend
@SAMiCURE
We have to recognize that two things can be simultaneously true: Dr. Seuss is a prolific children’s book author and global icon. And Dr. Seuss has a history of racial baggage that educators should understand when introducing his writing to their students.
Teaching Tolerance
The idea that America is a meritocracy is a scam. This is criminal.
Mark Elliott @markmobility (responding to a graph showing the highest-scoring poor kids have a lower chance of graduating college than the lowest-scoring rich kids)
People are against free college because it would make it harder to use having a college degree as a sign of class disguised as a sign of intelligence
Chad Vigorous @PrettyBadLefty
If you actually want to make our schools safer start off by reducing class size and paying our teachers a living wage. Militarizing our schools will do 2 things:
- Grow the school to prison pipeline
- Get more students killed
David Hogg
Nationwide, high-poverty white districts on average receive approximately $1,500 more per student than high-poverty non-white districts (although they still receive less funding than wealthier white districts):
Pacific Standard
I think a lot of people need to learn the fine art of “shut up and listen and then go think about it” when encountering cultures unfamiliar to them.
Nnedi Okorafor
Accepting the things you can’t change is hard.
@gabsthehuman
“This is fine”:
Alex Villegas @llegaspacheco
When plutocrats say they want to “do well by doing good,” what they’re often really saying is they think they deserve to profit from helping the disadvantaged. It sounds so great on the surface. But the other way to think about it: They are insisting on a kickback from bettering the world. They believe powerful people deserve to benefit from empowering the powerless.
Anand Giridharadas
People complain about Millennials paying lots to eat, drink out. But my impression is they bike to meet friends for avocado toast and a $5 craft beer and return quietly home while Silent Generation spent more $ bowling and drinking 5 crap beers with guys, and drove home piss drunk.
kar nels
Be your authentic self. Unless your authentic self is a rude, racist, selfish, sexist, homophobic jerk...then be somebody else.
Dwayne Kennedy
The inside of a rattle snake’s rattle is...empty:
Nnedi Okorafor
The answer to hate speech isn't "more speech" if that speech lies, and poisons, and twists, and kills.
Ebony Elizabeth
It’s nauseating how much money people are willing to pour into no-hope NIMBY lawsuits, and not into causes that might actually help people.
Alex Schieferdecker
Hey, just a reminder that we've spent $6 trillion dollars on the "War on Terror," which averages to A BILLION DOLLARS A DAY since 9/11. Imagine pumping A BILLION DOLLARS A DAY into schools, healthcare, infrastructure, and small businesses for the last 18 years. What a waste.
Jules Suzdaltsev
Out of sight out of mind, as prison Amerika continues to subsidize isolated rural communities built with the marrow of inner city women and men. Means local employment boom along with bus and train routes and motels profiting from costly family visits from afar.
@StanleyCohenLaw
Cages don’t make us safe. Cages don’t even make us feel safe. Cages teach us that there is something and someone to fear. So we demand more cages. And when confronted by the inhumanity of those cages, we call them something else.
Holly Krig @holidarity
I'm flying!!!
Faces in Things
[Tucker Carlson] was gifted nearly two decades worth of national exposure even though he continually scapegoated vulnerable populations and pushed blatant white supremacy. Every single cable network paid him. Every one let it happen. The problem isn’t just Tucker Carlson, it’s this cesspool of spectacle that breeds and aggrandize people like him. The networks spotlight provocateurs and idiots who shout louder and say dumber things. This can change. It has to change.
Jared Yates Sexton
Mainstream media: Democrats shouldn't shun our allies at Fox News.
Fox News: How Clinton, Obama and AOC are smuggling ravenous hordes of Mexicans across the border to murder newborn infants and implement full communism. We are a real news network.
Oliver Willis
I'm always confused by rich and powerful old men who in their 80s and beyond focus entirely on amassing still more wealth and power instead of playing with children, staring at clouds and flowers.
Ben Ehrenreich
ISLAMOPHOBIA IS WRONG. That's it. No excuses, no exceptions. Linking all Muslims to terrorism is just as wrong as claiming that Jews control the world. If your response to the attacks on Ilhan Omar includes a "But..." take a moment to reflect. We can't condone or excuse bigotry.
Bend the Arc: Jewish Action @jewishaction
When you ask powerful people about the consequences of their actions, and they respond by talking about their *intentions*, they have evaded the question and the questioner should persist. Most people have lovely intentions. It's consequences that matter.
Jarrett Walker @humantransit
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