August just ripped past me. It seems as though it was only a week or two ago that I was writing about July. But here we are on September 1, 2019. Let's see what went down the memory hole in the last 31 days.
Let's start with the Democratic primary, its candidates, and their debates:
Idea: Reality show where Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson flip houses together.Then the election generally, including voter suppression, the Electoral College, and whether we have/should have majority rule:
Josh Barro
"Instead of carrying Warren's remarks live, here's five clips of Trump calling her Pocohantas." –the news
Brian Beutler
The fact that the grotesquely racist "Pocahontas" attack has become a political liability *for Warren* represents a failure of pretty much every US civil society institution. I realize she screwed up with the DNA test, but the fact that it got that far at all is already a failure. A sane and healthy society would have responded to Trump's very first "Pocahontas" with overwhelming mockery and scorn. "Oh look America's racist uncle is ranting again."
David Roberts
A Joe Biden vs Donald Trump presidential race would be the perfect monument to a dying empire. Two melting Boomer brains yelling at each other about how they're the tough one who is also awesome at golf.
@acceptedmystery
i'm not trying to start nothing but i hope that Dem leadership realizes that all of the people of color in the country – folks they need to vote in 2020 – are watching them allow a virulent racist to remain in office without so much as an impeachment inquiry and won't forget come Nov 2020.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright
Marianne Williamson is an unserious, dangerous candidate, but Dems could learn from this. It’s not hard to understand why she got attention. She addressed America as riddled with institutional problems instead of portraying the country as fundamentally sound. For way too long candidates have had to perform gymnastics to talk about reform while basically saying nothing’s wrong. The electorate knows something is seriously wrong. They’ll reward candidates who admit it. Trump profited from this even if he didn’t mean to fix anything. Williamson can make the case because she has nothing to lose. It conceals her ridiculous philosophy and plays to electorate. Democrats with actual plans can give up the dog n pony show of pretending this system is sound or historically fair and benefit.
Jared Yates Sexton
Joe Biden's climate plan: Well young lady I'll be dead
@bridgetgillard
In both debates Biden looked like the only candidate who *can’t* beat Trump
Adam Jentleson
"Has your party moved too far to the left?" has become almost a robotic question the press asks Democrats (Republicans rarely if ever get asked "has your party moved too far to the right?" -- even as white nationalists flock, visibly and openly, into the GOP.)
@JoyAnnReid
If you adopt the radical goal but shy away from the radical policies necessary to achieve it, you're not being more "moderate," you're just hiding the ball. You're failing to be straight with people and prepare them. THAT is where Biden and Dem "moderates" deserve criticism.
David Roberts
AT LEAST half the country CONSISTENTLY sits out most elections. If elections are your jam, one would think you would humble yourself and think of ways to get more people to join you in voting. Perhaps you would ask if there are barriers you should be organizing to remove.This was the month of the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, so there were more tweets than usual about guns and reforming our gun laws:
@prisonculture
Allowing the 49% to boss around the 51% is no remedy for the 51% bossing around the 49%.
Angus Johnston @studentactivism
The canard of "limited government" has always meant "rule by the wealthy few." Please don't persist in pulling the Koch bros wool over our eyes.
Langdon Winner
Somewhere along the line, Republicans saw the same polls everyone else did, which confirmed that when asked about policy preferences a majority of Americans pick Democratic policies, and instead of changing their philosophy the GOP decided to eliminate their opponents' voters. If you understand that America is a nation governed by its minority party, the Republican Party, which stacks courts to ensure voter suppression and systemically uses disinformation to mislead voters and now uses immigration policy to keep America white and Republican, you get it
Seth Abramson
How sad it must be to be a Trump supporter. Believing that scientists, scholars, teachers, economists, and journalists have devoted their entire lives to deceiving you, while a reality TV star with decades of fraud and documented lying is your only beacon of truth and honesty.
Alex Cole @acnewsitics
You may also be interested to know that the government is composed entirely of lazy, incompetent bureaucrats who ruin everything they touch, except massive conspiracies kept utterly secret, at which they are AWESOME.
Obi-Wine Kenobi
My father is a diehard Fox News watching Trump voter. Let me tell you: it is not a good use of time to try to flip Trump voters. No amount of logic or humanizing or anything else works. Just move on and mobilize and stop voter suppression.
Chase Strangio
The BIG LIE in American politics is that Democrats have gone too far to the left & this lie helps cover up the BIG TRUTH that Republicans have gone so far to the right that there are children in cages and a white supremacist in the Oval Office.
@ProudResister
Keep your eye on this ball - the Supreme Court decided 5-4 that they couldn’t do anything about the “unjust” rigged system of Redistricting — said politicians needed to do it. And now in MI and MO, GOP politicians are trying to undo the will of the people to keep the system rigged.
John Avlon
Remember when dozens of people were murdered with military-style firearms in a single weekend and everyone (even Trump) said we need to do something and then Congress just stayed on vacation and Trump called the NRA and nothing happened and everyone stopped talking about itWhich segues neatly into our Dear Leader, his administration, family, and what have you:
Judd Legum
You know who’s not afraid of the gun lobby? Moms. If we lose our children, we have nothing left to lose. See you in 2020.
Shannon Watts
LET THIS SINK IN: 1/3 of adults are so stressed about mass shootings they avoid visiting places or attending certain events. That’s how common mass shootings have become in America. —It doesn’t have to be like this— Still waiting on you, Mitch McConnell.
Gavin Newsom
There’s no data showing active shooter drills are effective, but there is data showing they cause anxiety and depression in kids. Schools can opt to train adult staff, but let’s stop traumatizing kids. And let’s keep guns away from dangerous people.
Shannon Watts
It’s utterly surreal watching the American establishment NOT issue a mass unified call to urgently impeach and remove a president who’s literally at this point inspiring supremacist mass shootings.
@umairh
The right-wingers have been telling us for years that we need lots of guns to protect ourselves from “tyrants.” But the minute a tyrant shows up, they support him and happily offer to end democracy just to please him. So WTAF did they stockpile all those damn AR-15s for?!
Tennesseine
I will probably regret asking this question, but ... how is it that conservative "originalists" and "textualists" have ignored the "well-regulated militia" part of the 2nd Amendment? Do they have some theory for why that means "unrestricted guns for every individual yahoo"? I finally got around to reading "To Keep and Bear Arms," by Gary Wills - fascinating breakdown of 2nd Amendment scholarship and ideas, along with an explanation for how transparent right-wing bullsh*t triumphed in the courts and public opinion. The story of how an absurd right-wing take on the 2nd Amendment became the standard is the story of the last-half century of U.S. politics in miniature. Terrible arguments, but repeated endlessly, linked to one another, echoed by right-wing think tanks and advocacy groups, backed by big $$. Gish gallop writ large.
David Roberts
The fact that we’re discussing creating a mental illness database, which would involve massive HIPAA violations, rather than a white supremacist database, which would involve a few hours on Twitter, is telling.
@maxsparber
Seriously. The President of the United States of America inspired people to kill Americans and then turned it into a campaign ad.
Jared Yates Sexton
Folks are ready to stigmatize mental illness before they're ready to stigmatize racism & misogyny.
Bree Newsome Bass
We need to call it out: Fox News is a hate-for-profit machine that gives a megaphone to racists and conspiracists.
Elizabeth Warren
Let's all be really clear on this: The shooting in El Paso was a terrorist attack targeting Latinx people. It was spurred by the same white nationalist ideology that is promoted by the President of the United States and mainstreamed by Fox News.
Leah Greenberg
If your ideology insists that particular groups of people are undesirable and superfluous, you are already on the expressway to mass slaughter. See Richard Rubenstein's The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future #TrumpsTerrorists
Langdon Winner
These killers are so fucking young. These aren't old white men losing it, these are young white men, who feel it is their birthright to dominate others. The age of these killers is sobering as hell.
@blackgirlinmain
Because the latest mass shootings are opening a tiny crack of a conversation about white supremacy in the United States, remember that climate change and white supremacy are also connected.
Elizabeth Sawin
In between mass shootings, the President of the United States dropped in and gave paying customers their money's worth, during one of his stays at the luxury golf club he still profits from
Robert Maguire
Americans are delusional. This is textbook fascism. It’s not white supremacy anymore when the supremacists are a political wing who occupy high office and incite mass violence and murder. It’s...fascism.
@umairh
This is from the murderer’s Facebook page. #ElPasoShooting
Morgan J. Freeman
Framing white supremacist terrorist acts simply as "hate crimes," divorced from a political ideology, is a way of denying the existence of white supremacy as a mainstream ideolog. This pattern of white men going on rampages with guns is about them reasserting white manhood as it has traditionally been defined in the USA: they are the ones entitled to guns, the ones entitled to the land and the ones entitled to employ violence against women and ethnic minorities. Can't address the plague of mass shootings without confronting white patriarchy and its relationship with the gun... which is why it goes largely unaddressed by a white male-dominated government. Folks instead spend time debating whether it's "terrorism" when it obviously is by definition.
Bree Newsome Bass
Texas is an open carry state. Which made it perfectly legal for the shooter to walk across the parking lot and into the store with an assault rifle and made it illegal for anyone to challenge him until the moment he murdered them.
Don Moynihan
The El Paso shooter was in high school just three years ago. He targeted latinxs and immigrants specifically. He calls for people to join him in the fight for “his country.” Now come and tell me that anti-racism work is not needed in schools. This work saves lives and that’s that.
BGarayuaTudryn
I’m depressed as fuck. More than I’ve ever been in my life. I have anxiety, suffer from PTSD, and am battling an eating disorder. Guess how many fucking people I’ve shot and killed. Zero. Don’t blame mental illness. Blame toxic masculinity, white supremacy, & easy access to guns.
Danielle Campoamor
The “shooting” term is starting to feel inappropriate for a planned attack on random people. If they were reported as “Terror attack in Texas” followed by “Terror attack in Dayton,” the throughline would be a lot clearer (and I think, more instinctively alarming).
Will Stancil
Of the 13 deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history, 9 have now occurred since 2007. No major federal gun legislation has passed during that time.
@ChrisLu44
funny how in Chicago where intracommunity violence is actually very much bound up with untreated trauma, depression and PTSD no one ever says shooters were mentally ill. it’s an ableist red herring used to conveniently absolve white supremacists while also reinforcing stigma.
wikipedia brown @eveewing
Keep ‘em coming!
almightygod
If nothing else, Trump is living refutation of any belief in white male superiorityThen there are all of my usual subject areas, including immigration:
Langdon Winner
Can’t believe this needs to be said, but it’s not normal to have a President who wants to nuke a hurricane.
David Cicilline
Remember when the president declared Jews disloyal to Israel for not supporting him and it wasn't a half-day news story
Will Stancil
The president to date has spent 278.5 YEARS of annual presidential salary in taxpayer money to play golf.
S.V. Dáte
What better way for a President to show a lack of concern for workers than to name someone who has led the corporate charge against worker protections to the federal government's top position where the the No. 1 responsibility is to protect workers.
Steven Greenhouse
Even if we are lucky enough to get rid of Trump in 2020, this country is going to be recovering from the damage he's done for a very long time. And it's not like this country was some ideal land of harmony and rainbows to begin with.
Tom Tomorrow
*Jared Kushner repeatedly gives classified intelligence to the Saudi Crown Prince*
Conservatives: *silence*
*Joaquin Castro posts public information about donors*
Conservatives: THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE
@MrFilmkritik
More voters think Donald Trump is a racist than thought George Wallace was in 1968.
andrew kaczynski
If Trump gets another term Roe will almost certainly be overturned is a pretty succinct message that has the virtue of being true. A reminder that overturning Roe v Wade, which was Trump's explicit promise in 2016 and what he ran on, is probably more unpopular than any single thing Democrats have discussed and that includes reparations.
Chris Hayes
So you know how rural towns want to have prisons and immigrant detention facilities in their area for the jobs, economic gain. Can we just imagine how much better if instead we spent public dollars there instead on a community college/trade school, building clean energy etc.White supremacy, racism, police brutality, and this month, including the hysterical response to the New York Times 1619 Project:
kar nels
Wow. Just... wow. Just went through LAX immigration. Presented my journalist visa and was stopped by the CBP agent and accused of being part of the ‘fake news media’.
James Dyer
hey everybody, the guy who inherited 400 million dollars from his father and turned it into a billion dollar loss says that legal immigrants need to learn to stand on their own two feet if they want to stay in America. sounds fucking fair to me
Jeff Tiedrich
Ramon Torres, a U.S. citizen, was detained for four days — despite carrying a U.S. passport, a driver’s license, and a Social Security card. The sheriff’s office explained that they had a policy of detaining all Latinx people for immigration review.
ACLU
So are immigrants taking our jobs or becoming public charges? Which one is it? We saw in El Paso what terrifying consequences this kind of rhetoric has. It needs to stop.
Jessica Cisneros for Congress
Here's acting USCIS director Ken Cuccinelli saying on NPR this morning that the Statue of Liberty plaque should be changed to read, "give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public charge."
Aaron Rupar
My great-grandfather was a shoemaker. His wife was illiterate. They arrived from Latvia in 1892 with 4 kids and had 6 more in NYC. Some of them lived temporarily in an orphanage after their mother died. Their great-grandson is the editor at large of New York Book Review. #seehowthatworks
Jennifer Mendelsohn @CleverTitleTK
Real world impact of the public charge regulation from today: multiple clients calling my office today to ask if they should unenroll their COMPLETELY ELIGIBLE U.S. citizen kids from health insurance and free/reduced lunches.
Kara Lynum
This is what the 837-page final #PublicCharge looks like printed out. Immigration lawyers can barely figure it out. How are immigrants supposed to sort through all this when making a decision about whether or not to provide their children/families with food, housing or medicine??:
Jackie Vimo
Melania Trump is an immigrant who worked here without documentation and now lives in public housing. Apparently, she has no problem with other immigrants and their children being starved and left to die.
LOLGOP
Again, the system is not broken. The system is slavery. Human suffering is part of the operation. If we understand that the system is not broken but rather operating as designed, we'll stop trying to fix what can't be repaired and instead create a new system designed to honor human rights and liberty. I'm still stuck on folks arguing that complaining about oppression is equivalent to the violence of oppression itself. This is an argument people make repeatedly everyday and it's like they don't stop to think about how illogical that is.Sexism, misogyny, and toxic masculinity:
Bree Newsome Bass
A racist capitalistic system LOVES parents who hit their children into obedience and submission. Just look at how our society has “turned out fine.”
Stacey Patton
America has more governors who’ve worn blackface than black governors.
Samuel Sinyangwe
Still don’t understand how the government called the Black Panthers a militant group and did everything in their power to get rid of them, but yet the KKK still exist
@naturallygenia
Every few months some researcher releases a “study” claiming police shootings aren’t racially biased. The findings get massive coverage, undermining efforts to stop police violence. Then, like clockwork, the study gets debunked. This is how 21st century scientific racism works.
Samuel Sinyangwe
“Racist ideas make people of color think less of themselves, which makes them more vulnerable to racist ideas. Racist ideas make White people think more of themselves, which further attracts them to racist ideas.” — @DrIbram in How to Be an Antiracist
Deborah Archer
When tourists come to South Africa they always ask if the crime is bad, so I tell them, yes, crime is terrible in SA. The whole country started when the English stole it. A map of Africa is a crime scene and the lines are to let us know which European nation stole what.
Chester Missing
It's amazing that racists never find it at all suspicious, or overly convenient, that the world keeps confirming their priors. "Everywhere I look, I see what I already think. I guess what I already think is true!"
David Roberts
We need something similar to the 1619 project to be published every month. The conservative movement may be completely melted down in 6 months time if this happens. Come through Black literati
Bree Newsome Bass
This is the Six Grandfathers. It was a Lakota sacred site located in the Black Hills, ancestral lands promised to the Lakota in the Fort Laramie Treaty. The Six Grandfathers was destroyed to create a monument to colonizers after the Black Hills were stolen when gold was found.
Ruth Hopkins
charles murray's dressed-up phrenology? we must take it seriously. a grounded, historical look on the legacy of slavery? radical nonsense.
@jbouie
A funny observation: I RARELY get the compliment from wypipo [about being so articulate] when the subject of my speech is focused on White Supremacy.
Dallas Goldtooth
If learning U.S. history is traumatic, imagine our ancestors who had to live it.
Tananarive Due
Just so we're clear, conservatives argue that America was more united when we were literally segregated and that things are more divisive whenever Black people assert our citizenship or humanity. Just so we're clear, that's white supremacy.
Bree Newsome Bass
Conservative intellectuals: Facts don't care about your feelings! Man up! Also conservative intellectuals: Please don't talk about slavery, it makes me cry.
Jeet Heer
The only way you can argue that Black writers publishing a collection of essays on slavery is disruptive/divisive is if you acknowledge the society is organized around white supremacist ideology. But they insist it's not. LOL Can't have it both ways.
Bree Newsome Bass
“Proud boys!” continues to sound like what you’d caption a picture of twins who just slept through the night without wetting themselves.
Jennifer Wright
All you need to know about Republicans is that they’re losing their minds over an objective, fact-based history of American slavery and denouncing it as a partisan attack.
Jared Yates Sexton
I am truly sick of hearing fellow white people say: "I don't care if you're black or brown or white or purple or green" or some variant. If someone is green, give them an alcohol wipe and a bucket. If someone is purple, they're probably choking. You're still racist.
@grimalkinrn
“blue lives” aren’t a thing. they’re uniforms that they sign up to wear knowing they could get shot. People of color don’t get to take off their skin at the end of the day. they didn’t ask for this.
@ginakoko6
why didn't these neighborhoods already have street lights? I'm tired of basic things being denied to our comunities and then y'all get paid to study how it'd be great if we had them.
@grisuy (in response to a study that showed randomly placing streetlights at public housing projects led to almost 60% decrease in serious crime, suggesting that spending on improved living conditions may be more effective in reducing crime than increasing police presence)
Just a reminder that the entire bedrock of intergenerational economic prosperity across white america is built on the government having given white people centuries of “free stuff” while purposefully not giving those same resources & opportunities to others.
@ClintSmithIII
“A report ... found that 95 percent of African cultural heritage was held outside the continent and that most of it was obtained by theft, trickery or under egregiously unfair terms.” Roughly the same numbers hold for mineral wealth, etc. Oh glorious Western Civilization sing to us about the rule of law ...
Ben Ehrenreich
In 2016 the FBI showed up at my door and the doors of many black organizers trying to interrogate us about “the plan for the RNC” based on a photoshopped tweet published on a white supremacist site. Meanwhile, white supremacists have been buying AR-15’s with no questions asked.
Samuel Sinyangwe
I toured this plantation today. A white lady told the tour guide she thought the slaves were treated kindly and probably sang while picking cotton. You should have seen her face when he called the white slave-owners “white” and called their actions “terrorism.”
@sairasameerarao
Folks wanna act like these persistent attitudes around slavery, glamorizing plantation life and the myth of contented Negro slave isn't directly connected to modern systemic racism. Folks say "get over slavery" but want to vacation at plantations and fantasize about being an O'Hara. There's no moral difference between all these glamorous plantation tours in the South and having a tour of a concentration camp that focused entirely on the glamorous bungalows and dinnerware used by the Nazi guards. LOL Folks keep saying Democrats need to offer an alternative to Trump's populism-- which isn't really populism, just racism-- then criticize Democrats for being too progressive with policies that actually address conditions of the working class.
Bree Newsome Bass
Hey, Bigelow Tea - do you think naming your product after slave labor camps is a good marketing idea? I will never buy this tea:
Pat Thompson @pattho
Whenever people talk about Europeans coming to the Americas and finding evidence of human sacrifice, I'm like, WTF do you think the Spanish Inquisition was? Or the Reformation? The Europeans were massively into human sacrifice.
@charliejane
Eric Garner’s death was horrible and infuriating but it was inspiring to see his daughter Erica fight for justice on his behalf. And after her untimely death his daughter Emerald came to the foreground in that fight. They keep coming. Somewhere in here is a definition of family.
jelani cobb
"The average wage for college-educated women is $28.77, compared with $39.47 for college-educated men. For full-time workers, this translates into over $22,000 in lower pay for college-educated women."Climate change, ways to address or not address it, and activism around it:
Economic Policy Institute
boomers be like “tattoos? ha. unemployable! now let me get back to tolerating workplace sexual harassment because that is normal and fine.”
@molly7anne
Fairly astonishing: in the past decade, white men have fallen from 60% to 39% of all House Democrats. Meanwhile, they've risen from 87% to 90% of all House Republicans.
Dave Wasserman @Redistrict
A man who takes no shit is steadfast, confident, and strong. A woman who takes no shit is humorless, mouthy, or out of line. The first three are traits necessary for success. The last three are reasons people fail. That is by design.
feminist next door @emrazz
The Epstein scandal, our mass-shooting epidemic and the crisis around women's reproductive rights all share a root: The perception and treatment of females--sexually, violently or both--as objects without humanity or autonomy, whose bodies and existence should belong to men. We know we are making gains by the gruesomeness with which misogyny lashes out in response. Keep going.
Sarah Smarsh
“it’s troubling to have to tackle the “not all men” objection every time we try to critique masculinity. It puts the spotlight on men who aren’t a problem, rather than men who are, and serves as a distraction tactic which trivialises the original grievance.”
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
The Bible says rape victims should have to marry their rapist. And people still look to this book for sexual ethics in 2019.
almightygod
There's no shortage of men who hate teen girls that are "frivolous," loud, girly, and animated. And those same men hate Greta Thunberg for being committed to a serious cause while being "dead-eyed" and "creepy." Maybe, just maybe, they hate girls and women.
Katherine Cross @Quinnae_Moon
Men who refer to their players as "the females" should not be allowed to coach women's soccer
Molly Hensley-Clancy
Since we find misogyny at the root of almost every mass shooting, why is no one proposing a national moral/educational push against misogyny at a solution?
David Roberts
There are a decent number of areas where the economy really is over-regulated but everything the GOP does in practice is just MOAR POLLUTION NOM NOM and nothing to address real problems.Prisons, jails, and criminal justice reform. (There were more here referring to Jeffrey Epstein, but I deleted them):
Matthew Yglesias
"Under the contractor business model, truck drivers least equipped financially to buy and maintain clean vehicles bear the financial burden of attaining the state’s climate goals in this sector."
IRLE UC Berkeley
I am not "into" or "passionate" about climate change. If you see a ticking time bomb about to explode, it's not about you being "passionate" or "into" ticking time bombs or particularly enjoying thinking about them, but it is your duty to prevent an explosion from happening.
Jamie Margolin
It's super important to understand that leveling the Amazon destroys our chances for a working future. It's super important to understand that digging up coal beds and tarsands and shale deposits destroys our chances for a working future.
Bill McKibben
Take care everyone. The world hasn't ended yet. That means we have another chance to do what we can to reduce suffering.
@prisonculture
if you ask me: the wrong Amazon is burning, the wrong ICE is dissolving, and the wrong class is in power
Kristian Steffany
12 per cent of the world's electricity now comes from renewables. Imagine how much more would have been coming from renewables if our governments were representing us rather than the fossil fuel corporations.
Extinction Rebellion
"2019 exceeded the value we expected for the worst-case scenario in 2069.” #climate.
Cal Perry @CalNBC
Anyone who calls a wind turbine a "windmill" is not an an expert on wind energy so nothing after that is worth reading. A wind turbine's energy payback time is 3-6 months (out of a 30-year life), so wind turbines are 98.3-99.2% carbon free in their lifecycle.
Mark Z. Jacobson
Literally every news story should end with “For context, climate change remains an existential threat to humanity.”
Kasey Klimes
Wondering if your work matters? For decades Exxon was the biggest company on earth. Now it's slid out of the top 10.
Bill McKibben
Face reality, take action. Remember:
1. We have to get rid of most cars.
2. We can't just keep mining.
3. We must produce food differently.
4. We have to change construction.
5. We must make clothes that last.
6. We can't travel by air in this way.
7. We must use less energy.
8. We must protect everybody.
@ClimateBen
The only way out of climate despair is by getting to work. There is no hope without action. No shortcuts, no hope by association. Sorry.
Mary Annaïse Heglar
shouting "learn to code" at the melting ice caps
@qubeofweed
Communities of colour and other marginalized groups have been functioning alongside uncertainty and existential crises for centuries. Don't tell me it's too late. Don't you dare tell me that colonialism and white supremacy has won. That the patriarchy has killed us all.
Meg Ruttan Walker @TricksyRaccoon
Our job to ensure humanity's survival is simple: End the fossil fuel industry's business model as quickly as possible by literally any non-violent means necessary.
Eric Holthaus
Five times more people are sent to jail each year than are sent to prison. Jails are usually run by county sheriff’s with no oversight or accountability other than having to run for re-election. Yet most sheriffs get re-elected because they run unopposed. Pay attention.Which relates to but is not quite the same thing as livable cities and sustainable transportation:
Samuel Sinyangwe
I am often astonished by the casualness with which many people discuss prison, in a way that makes clear they’ve never been in one. Prisons are inherently violent institutions where we place human beings in cages and some for the rest of their lives. There’s nothing casual about them.
@ClintSmithIII
"The right to access every building in a city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city." —Lewis MumfordEducation:
Taras Grescoe
People driving a Prius are seen as virtuous "green" beings but a person on a bike is seen as a nuisance.
@PurpleFemmedigo
We know speed and red light cameras can save lives. We also know there can be problems with the way they are employed. Design speed camera programs carefully, justly. Spare people from death, serious injury. The whole idea that the first time we find any issue with speed and red light cameras we should abandon the whole effort, comes from a place of just lack of concern about safety. I am certainly not arguing speed cameras have always been perfectly employed. They haven't. What happens is we have whole lengthy discussions where these folks who are dealing with serious injury or death as a result of these policies won't even come up. How would a just traffic safety enforcement system operate? My top reforms:
-optional classes instead of fines for minor offenses
-no taking of licenses for non-driving offenses
-more aggressive impounding/revocation for serious repeated safety offenses
Angie Schmitt
The "No Bicycles Allowed" sign at the scene of yet another car-crashes-into-building incident is priceless irony. A society so beholden to cars that we completely lose sight of what is actually dangerous. Hint: it's cars.
Dean Reimer
In 2017 63,200 Californians moved to Texas. Most did so in search of affordable housing. When they lived in California their per capita greenhouse gas was 9 tons, in Texas it jumped to 26 tons. That's over a million tons of greenhouse gas from just one year to just one state. BUILD MORE HOMES, CALIFORNIA! #housingcrisis
Matt Regan
same scale:
@sea_Baugruppe
The idea that speed through the city should be a priority over safety is just so overwhelmingly archaic. A city’s first and foremost responsibility should be making sure its residents and visitors are safe. The convenience of a few shouldn’t outweigh the safety of the many.
@rawales2
In 1970, 10% of residents in Copenhagen commuted by bike. Today: 62%.
Marlon Boarnet
Tried an electric cargo bike this morning and bloody hell nobody should own a car. Thought it would take some effort to get the heavy monster up a hill, but it's like cycling a normal bike downhill.
Amber Griffiths
The costs of motor vehicle crashes are 3Xs the costs of congestion ($242 billion vs $85 billion). But traffic engineers spend virtually ALL their time trying to solve the latter problem. The only time they pretend to care about safety is when they can use it as a pretext to widen a highway interchange.
Angie Schmitt
If you flip off a driver for not stopping for you crossing the street and they get mad you flipped them off, they saw you and should've stopped
@mikesonn
"Ironically, delaying 50 bus passengers by temporarily parking in the bus lane is punishable by ticket, but boarding that same bus with an expired pass can trigger jail time." (p74)
eric jaffe
"Using infrastructure to make the masses conform to one vision of how to live." How that sounds bad. I wonder if anyone has ever tried that before?
Angie Schmitt
When it rains, the daily normalized oil spills collectively from millions of cars becomes more apparent. Like here, where it leads straight into a catch basin leading to a fish habitat. "Do Not Pollute — unless driving":
@itsjim84
What is the safe speed for cars in front of Elementary Schools? Zero, of course. Which is the speed in front of many Scandinavian schools. #NoCars. Now Glasgow, Scotland trials car-free zones outside primary schools. Like 'magic,' more kids walk and bike to school.
G_Penalosa
Works out to about $1 per month per resident...in case you’re wondering if creating bike-friendly cities is expensive
Chris N. Morfas
The total spending on bicycle infrastructure in Copenhagen in the last 16 years is £240 million — the same price as just two miles of tunnel for motor traffic!! @mortenkabell on the Velocity Series podcast
Alex Bradley
When you take a housing-strapped city that makes it notoriously hard to build new units, and then insist on devoting tons of land in that city to *parking*, of all things, are we really shocked that lots of people live in their cars? #endparkingminimums
Strong Towns
Congestion pricing is amazing. It's like building a new highway that never fills up with traffic, but costs almost nothing to implement and instead of debt it generates revenue.
@enobacon
I wonder why cyclists and pedestrians are dying at increasing rates:
@MobileHarv
The U.S. highway-car transport system has been associated with freedom. But it’s oppressive in a lot of ways. It’s oppressive not to be able to take a safe one-mile walk to the store. It’s oppressive to rely on a bus in a landscape dominated by surface parking lots and drivethrus
Angie Schmitt
It's not true that we never solve problems in this country anymore. The United States is eternally, relentlessly, indefatigably good at solving any problem that will minorly inconvenience people who spend four hours a day in an eighteen-month-old Toyota 4Runner
Connor Wroe Southard
I wonder if anyone every tried transportation demand management as an alternative to a highway project. Instead of spending $1 billion widening an interchange, take $100 million and just give it to people that will switch from driving to taking the bus.
Angie Schmitt
What are the odds scooters on sidewalks get more citations this year than motor vehicles blocking bike lanes or blocking intersections combined.
Anondson @xeoth
One reason I think it is so difficult to limit vehicle speeds in cities -- through speed limits, street design etc -- is cars are simply WAY overpowered now for what people use them for.
Angie Schmitt
It's weird how much Americans LOOOOOVE driving but don't want to spend any extra minutes doing it unless it means a bigger house
Cathy Reisenwitz
No, you're not imagining things. Pickup trucks have gotten a lot bigger in recent years. Since 1990, the average weight of pickups has increased by 1,256 lbs or 32%. (Data: Oak Ridge NL)
Kevin DeGood
Crazy thing: If we would just drive a little slower in cities then children, all of us really, could walk and bike places from time to time and a bunch of people wouldn't have to die. And it would probably require little to no extra time. But everyone HATES this idea SO much
Angie Schmitt
Real talk .... Can we make tricycles trend independent of age? We know a dog that would totally dig a tricycle ride to the beach. Soooo much cheaper than a cargo bike. #theyseemerollin #thenewgrocerygetter
Bike Lane Uprising
This week, the City Council of Iowa City declared a climate emergency, then rejected a street design change near downtown that would’ve allowed bike lanes because a handful of residents objected they would need to walk 100-200 feet to their vehicles. Free, convenient parking is nice, but people who are just trying to get around—and taking traffic and emissions off the road—are getting killed. We design our streets to be dangerous for people who aren’t generating a ton of carbon, then wonder why we generate so much carbon.
Greg Shill
Brussels to remove a quarter of all on-street car parking spaces by 2030. Residents to park in parking garages. Visitors should park at the edge of the city and then take public transport to the center.
Mark Wagenbuur @BicycleDutch
New Euro study finds e-bike riders get as much exercise as regular bike riders; they go farther, ride more often, and use them when they used to drive cars or take transit.
Lloyd Alter
It should be a scandal that Uber was allowed to operate in the first place, and that venture capital money could basically fuel the takeover of an industry that paid living wages and replace it with something that squeezed drivers, jeopardized the safety of riders, and eroded public transit.
Kevin Cashman
From 1990-2016, total enplaned passengers increased by 76% while aviation emissions fell by 11%. By comparison, VMT increased 48% to **3.2 trillion** miles annually with emissions rising 29%. We need to reduce per capita driving and vehicle emissions fast.h
Kevin DeGoodUber is expected to lose billions in one quarter but the Amtrak Hoosier State can't be subsidized $3 million a year.
Ken Avidor
Silicon Valley could be out there curing cancer whatever with $10s of billions of dollars. What do they do? Use their smarts and treasure to figure out how to turns millions of walking and transit trips in Manhattan and San Francisco into car trips.
Uber has lost $17 billion since 2016. $17 billion dollars. While undermining labor protections, road safety, the environment and transit. Nobody cares because -- LOL -- they make it easier to get to the airport. People still just give these Silicon Valley guys a pass like they know what they are doing. They are just as stupid as all the rest of us! They just have been given too much money and power. And we're all just along for the ride.
Angie Schmitt
Every criticism of bikes or scooters is a million times more applicable to cars
Avocado Elite
People: “That bus is empty, it’s a waste.”
Me:
Tom Hewitt @thewyjr18
Uber and Lyft’s whole game is just figuring out how to pack more car trips into the few tiny pockets of America where there are good alternatives to driving.
Angie Schmitt
Uber and Lyft came along and undid all the work overnight bike advocates did in a decade and then some, trying to reduce driving trips in the city. All so venture capitalists could... lose billions.
Angie Schmitt
"If pedestrians know they’ll never get run over, jaywalking could explode, grinding traffic to a halt." Sounds good to me.
Northwest Urbanist (responding to a story called "How Jaywalking Could Jam Up the Era of Self-Driving Cars")
the great American pastime is driving your car entirely up the ass of the car in front of you if it is doing anything less than the speed of sound
thomas violence
It doesn't cost much to redesign streets for pedestrians. From Halifax, paint + bollards act as 'bump outs' that shorten the distance to cross, and slow down turning cars. Dangerous intersections and many suburban streets require this simple intervention.
Jennifer Keesmaat
There are few things I hold as absolute articles of faith, but I believe with all my heart that 100 percent of people who claim American teachers are grossly overpaid couldn't survive a complete school year teaching a single class of 4th graders.Health care:
Bilal Dardai
We're enrolling my youngest son in public schools. And it's mind blowing. We get all this for free?! Lunch? Awesome building? Amazing teacher!? Holy shit. Like I get that we pay for it with taxes but still. After paying for daycare for 4 years, it's like WHAT IS THIS? Heaven!
Angie Schmitt
Surveyed my new seniors. 72% of them cannot identify a single author they like. Two-thirds of them “never” read in their spare time. Never. I know there are many factors behind this, but I can’t help wonder what role schools have played in killing the love of reading.
Kelly Gallagher
Kids at wealthy schools get extra time on college admissions tests twice as often as others. Highland Park High School has 0% poverty & 12.8% w/ test accommodations. W.W. Samuell High School has 98.5% poverty but only 1.6% accommodations
Ed Law Blog @DerekWBlack
At core, parents accept that there's something natural and inevitable about the sorting of students by ability, the sorting of schools by the race of their student bodies, and the sorting of school attendance zones and districts by socio-economic status and property values.
Tom Sugrue
"There are no education miracles, and we don’t need any. What students and teachers need is the opportunity to succeed — an opportunity well-funded public schools could provide."
Bob Morgenstern
baffling to me how hospitals are treated like normal businesses and not vital public infrastructure. imagine someone bankrupting the fire departmentIncome and wealth inequality, wage theft, and better ways to run an economy:
@haircut_hippie (responding to a story about how a Miami entrepreneur amassed a rural hospital empire and drove it into the ground, devastating towns across the country.
Don’t let people get away with claiming that healthcare is only “rationed” under socialist/single payer systems. We ration it under the US system too, but it’s not rationed by who needs it most or any other sensible metric. It’s rationed by how wealthy you are. That’s it.
@LouisatheLast
Yes, poor people can become writers, if they work hard and are lucky. (Hello.) But it would be a lot easier if they didn't have to fight the universe in between every short story. We should do better by our poor in the US, but we're too damn racist and up billionaires' asses.And, finally, the best of the rest:
N. K. Jemisin
An accelerated culture where history and context evaporate instantly is pretty handy if you want an economy you can repeatedly plunder for vast wealth before it predictably crashes time and time and time again.
Jared Yates Sexton
Maybe i'm just financially illiterate (very possible) but it seems to me the whole idea of "financial literacy" is premised on tips and tricks for wriggling out of the boot on your neck, without directly challenging the premise of a boot
@telushk
Compassion works. Kindness, mutual care, loving solidarity - they work. They are more practical, more hard-headed, more cost-effective than their opposites. We pass punitive policies because they satisfy our atavistic impulses, not out of "realism." One of the most memorable points Raj Chetty makes: policy interventions meant to boost the welfare of children generally pay themselves back many times over. Pre- and post-natal care, nurse visits, free preschool, tax credits for kids - all these things MAKE US RICHER.
David Roberts
Tiling turtles and shadows. @MathOnAStick at the Minnesota State Fair:
Peter Hoh
Just once I'd like to see an article like "Extroverted? Here's Some Tips on How to Be Quiet and Reflective"
Tom & Lorenzo
Hey, normal people? I know you mean well sometimes. But when you make a BIG DEAL out of a fact that a normal kid was nice to an autistic kid? Turning basic decency toward us into an act of heroism? That... doesn't really make us feel wanted or welcome.
Sarah Kurchak @fodderfigure
maybe if millennials didn’t buy an avocado toast every single day, then they could afford to purchase a house in 1955 like everyone else.
Myq Kaplan
I’ve always been fascinated by history, but damn, I never wanted to live through this much of it.
Megan Smolenyak
Truly remarkable rose from the recreated 17th century garden next to Adam Smith’s house in Edinburgh:
Ada Palmer
It feels relevant today to mention that Koch Industries was founded by David and Charles's father Fred specifically to serve as an oil refinery to the Third Reich, with personal approval from Hitler. Cool company history and a great way to make a fortune!
Becca Lewis
How to take a great baby photo. #WorldPhotographyDay:
TwistedDoodles
I'm starting to suspect that you can be really stupid and still receive a law degree
SETH A QUIMBY
Weird how so many of the edgelords who grew up on South Park's "ironic" antisemitism turned out to be unironic antisemites, huh
Yes, You're Racist
Conservatives have been slashing the IRS's budget for years. It is not intended to, and does not, save the public money. It just makes it easier for the wealthy to cheat on taxes.
David Roberts
Just a reminder that any Jewish person can become a citizen of Israel in like a day even if they have no family there while Palestinians like Rashida Tlaib, who has family still in Palestine, can be banned by the Israel from returning to her family’s home (it’s called ethnonationalism)
@esorfasal
I’m lowkey side-eying every person who sews but doesn’t call themself a sewer (I see you, “sewists”!). Why distance yourself from such magical infrastructure? Why not let two wonderful things be drawn together by language?
@happifydesign
This is an owlfly:
Nnedi Okorafor, PhD
When non-disabled people say ‘I can’t see you as disabled. You’re incredible!’ it isn’t a compliment. What you’re saying is that disability and achievement are mutually exclusive. You’re saying disability is negative and you’re respecting someone more by not labelling them it. It assumes that people don’t want disability as part of their identity - because you can’t understand why anyone would want to identify with something you’ve been socialised to see as bad. It’s not bad. Disability is not bad.
Frances Ryan
It used to be the idea of 24-hour news would give us broad coverage of a lot of subjects, and/or in-depth coverage of some stories. Now they talk about the same three to five things round the clock. They’re like top-40 radio. Rotation, rotation, rotation.
@resistandshare
I hate to see people get too cynical about politics, even though it's understandable to be cynical. What you do still matters. Don't let people convince you it doesn't.
Angie Schmitt
I've always been deeply mystified by the notion that horrible opinions, instincts, and behaviors somehow become less horrible because they are "religious." I think it was the great Immanuel Kant who said: an asshole is an asshole is an asshole.
David Roberts
Good job, graphic designer:
Chris Steller
Hillary Clinton could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and do nothing, and they would say she shot Jeffrey Epstein.
Andrea Junker
An economist once said to me: time is one resource they’re never making more of. We get one life, and it would be nice for everyone to spend more time with their loved ones and less time at work. We should figure out how to make that happen! Lots of other places already have.
Chris Hayes
Parenting basically seems to be the art of overcoming blinding fear that something will happen to your kids, in order to constantly teach them bravery, independence and self-sufficiency. Or something like that.
Brent Toderian
Sure, the Bible is wrong about slavery, genocide, gays, women, history, and science, but you can DEFINITELY trust its claims about what happens after you die.
almightygod
I know there are more important wrongs to right in the world, but right now I can't get over the capitalization of the second T in TelePrompTer.
Craig Eliason
The comet moth of Madagascar. Males have a wingspan of 20 cm and a tail length of 15 cm! (Photo: thrumyeye):
@StrangeAnimaIs
Feeling a strange pity today for the white nationalists who imagine themselves patriots but reject all the most profound and vital things Americans have ever created (jazz, hip hop, and everything bagels for starters). What a barren world they’re left with.
Ben EhrenreichThis is your reminder that you should not play devils advocate on Twitter. The devil can afford to pay you. Doing it for free demonstrates bad labor solidarity.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish
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