FInal Words from John Lewis

John Lewis's entire final essay is inspiring, but this is my favorite part:

Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we call the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.

Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble. Voting and participating in in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.

You must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time. People on every continent have stood in your shoes, through decades and centuries before you. The truth does not change, and that is why the answers worked out long ago can help you find solutions to the challenges of our time. Continue to build union between movements stretching across the globe because we must put away our willingness to profit from the exploitation of others.

I had heard most parts of the essay quoted here and there, but that part about history and solidarity against exploitation around the world, I had not heard.

He was a man who thought wide and kept building, one of the latest survivors of the constantly strong. Respect and rest to him.

Eve Ewing Schools Us

Chicago-based poet and professor Eve Ewing, whose Twitter handle is some version of wikipedia brown, had an interesting thread yesterday about the history of public housing in Chicago. She was moved to write, of course, because of Mafia Mulligan's vile, racist tweet about protecting their "Suburban Lifestyle Dream" by precluding low-income housing.

I just wanna talk real quick about how we get to "public housing" as a highly stigmatized, not-so-subtle dog whistle for "low-income Black people," instead of what it could be -- a public good benefiting people of all backgrounds -- in the context of Chicago history.

In 1937 the Housing Act provided federal support to locally established housing authorities. In Chicago we got the Chicago Housing Authority, CHA. It was headed by an ambitious woman, Elizabeth Wood, who thought public housing could help people of all races who needed assistance.

If you think about this premise, it's a powerful, radical idea. Housing for all who are down on their luck! Not vouchers. An actual place to live. Not only that, but this had the possibility of promoting racial integration. Because anyone can be down on their luck!

Many people don't know that the first three public housing projects in Chicago were for ~White people.~ The Lathrop Homes, Jane Addams, and Trumbull Park.

The Ida B. Wells Homes were the first to be built in a Black community and didn't come along until 1941.

Some people at the CHA were like "hey we could use this public housing thing to promote integration! everybody needs housing!"

let's guess how that worked out!

1953, Betty Howard, a lightskin Black woman, goes to the CHA to apply for housing. The clerk mistakes her for White and puts her in Trumbull Park. When their White neighbors saw them, they set fires and threw bricks at people for several days. The family was trapped in the house.

Policy also played a role too, to be sure. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes* established the "neighborhood composition rule" that said the racial makeup of public housing had to match its surrounding neighborhood, reifying segregation.

*Chicagoans will find this ironic

Throughout the 1950s, whenever the CHA presented proposed construction sites for new public housing, the City Council nixed the ones that would have been in White neighborhoods. In the ruling in the 1966 Gautreaux case, the judge said: “It is incredible that this dismal prospect of an all-Negro public housing system in all-Negro areas came about without the persistent application of a deliberate policy to confine public housing to all Negro or immediately adjacent changing areas…. No criterion, other than race, can plausibly explain the veto of over 99 1/2% of the housing units located on the White sites, which were initially selected on the basis of CHA's expert judgment, and at the same time the rejection of only 10% or so of the units on Negro sites.”

The Gautreaux case was a class action lawsuit claiming that the CHA was racially discriminating, which it clearly was. The idea was to get them to go back to building public housing everywhere, for everyone.

In a consent decree after Gautreaux, instead of bringing back the idea of using public housing to maybe desegregate the city and provide a public good for *everyone* the remediation was that some Black CHA families got vouchers to go live in the suburbs or in nice apartments.

People's current attitudes toward public housing, which carry a racial and class stigma, hurt everyone.

They hurt the mostly low-income Black people (often elderly and/or disabled) who live in public housing, who deserve dignity and respect (why does this need to be said?!).

Beyond harming the people who live in public housing -- racism, contempt, and stigma toward public housing hurt our whole society, because people turn their noses up at something that WOULD BE VERY HELPFUL RIGHT ABOUT NOW if we valued it more highly

[looks around at pandemic?!]

If you want to learn more about this history, you can read it in my book Ghosts in the Schoolyard, or I highly recommend the book Blueprint for Disaster by Bradford Hunt.

[could write a subthread about how the Gautreaux consent decree, by giving individual families the chance to "win" vouchers for the private market rather than providing high-quality housing for all, is an important benchmark for the neoliberal era to follow. but, bedtime!]

...Moving to the voucher system where low-income people have to find housing on their own in the private market leaves them subject to widespread discrimination that usually goes unpunished.

In theory vouchers could erode Chicago's housing segregation by providing low-income Black people the means to move into majority White neighborhoods, but it doesn't work that way because landlords discriminate, as Natalie Moore writes. "It's a stigma attached to Section 8 that we don't want to work, we're nasty, we're not educated, we don't take care of ourselves, our children are just reckless."

imho this kind of stigma is sadly often internalized by Black people as well, even other low-income Black people.

k i'm done now, goodnight for real, let's all try not to be disrespectful racist classist jerks

As with all things, "just add racism" — especially when it comes to housing — is a quick way to hell in a handbasket.

Documenting the False Equivalency

Some time in mid-July, climate writer and thinker Alex Steffen tweeted,

In far too many institutions, enterprises, and communities, the political midpoint of debates about climate, strategy and risk is very often an almost fringe position, when framed against the actual evidence.

By coincidence, Grist just wrote up a recently published content analysis that found exactly that. The study, published by the National Academy of Sciences, looked at 30 years of climate coverage in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. The author compared press releases from companies, advocacy groups, and government and then looked for how much their words were used in the three newspapers:

She found that even though 10 percent of the press releases contained messaging against climate action — arguments like, “It would be too expensive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions” — 14 percent of them wound up in print. By contrast, the more prevalent press releases arguing for personal, corporate, or political action to tackle climate change were only covered 7 percent of the time. And the least-covered press releases came from groups with the most expertise on science and technology, such as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and IBM.

The time period studied ended in 2013, and possibly the amount of climate change denial written up  in these newspapers has lessened since then, but instead arguments for climate delay have filled the gap:

Jennifer Marlon, a senior researcher at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, acknowledged that the media environment has changed since the mid-2010s — The New York Times in particular has ramped up its climate coverage — but she suspects that false balance continues to influence the national conversation. For instance, newspapers might be better at contextualizing opponents of climate action, explaining that their views are outside the mainstream. “But those arguments are still out there and are very much in play,” Marlon said.

This media focus on false equivalency or "bothsidesism," as the article calls it, is unacceptable, and one thing I greatly appreciate about Minnesota Public Radio is that they will not broadcast any form of climate denialism.

Time for an Orange Car Break

I can't deal with any of reality today, so here are three photos from a road trip in April 2017:






It's not readable in this version of the photo, but that back nameplate says Subaru.

IMHE Looking Ahead to Deaths

Back on July 21, I made this screen snapshot while watching a Rachel Maddow show:


The reason Maddow shared these numbers was that the predictions were made by IMHE, the research institute that used to present rosy predictions that were favored by Mafia Mulligan and his pet epidemiologist, Dr. Deborah Birx.

Some time in May or so, IMHE's predictions — which the institute had always said were premised on a coordinated federal response and cooperation from individual Americans — took a turn for the worse and Mulligan and Birx stopped citing them.

Right now, a week after I made this snapshot, we're already approaching 150,000 deaths. Does it seem likely we will have as few as 175,000 deaths by the end of the year, more than five months from now?

I don't think so.

Words from the Other Melvin Carter

If you're not from the Twin Cities, or maybe even from Saint Paul, you may not know that our mayor, Melvin Carter — the city's first Black mayor — is Melvin Carter III.

His father is a Junior, and also a now-retired Saint Paul police officer, having served almost three decades. The mayor's father recently had an op-ed in the Star Tribune that didn't get enough attention, in my opinion. It was called Define policing, once again, as a peacekeeping endeavor.

The subtitle was "Over the past century, the term "law enforcement" has hijacked the mission" and that gives you the gist. He lists the principles of community policing, established in London in 1836:

1. To prevent crime and disorder as an alternative to suppression by military force.
2. To depend on public approval and to maintain public respect.
3. To achieve police objectives by means of public cooperation.
4. To earn public trust and cooperation, which declines proportionately with the use of force.
5. To nurture public favor by means of fairness and good-faith services.
6. To always use the minimum degree of force, and only after persuasion, advice and warnings fail.
7. To recognize that police are the public and that the public are the police.
8. To refrain from corruption.
9. To evaluate police effectiveness as the presence of peace, not on the visible use of aggressive enforcement.

I propose these principles as irrefutable, a foundation upon which to rebuild a principled model of peacekeeping. If it ain’t community policing, it ain’t policing at all.

Compare these principles to today’s professional law enforcement. How many, if any, of these nine principles do you see locally or nationally?

I took my oath of office as a “peace officer” in 1976. Nowhere in the oath was the term “law enforcement” mentioned.

The foundational principles of our democracy are sound, but they were written during the time of American chattel slavery, when the Constitution counted African descendants as three-fifths of a human, so none of the good stuff ever applied to Blacks in America.

Peacekeeping. Peace officer. What a difference mindset from law enforcement.

Words are not everything, but they are something.

Evidence of V

I've alluded to my to-be-read pile in past. Today I grabbed a book that's been on it for just a little while, Evidence of V by Sheila O'Connor. I picked it up because it recently won the Minnesota Book Award for Novel & Short Story and the brief description I read sounded intriguing.


It's a slight book in terms of length and verbal density (it can be read in just a few hours), but not in terms of content. I can see why it won the award. I would pair it with it with Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, which I also read not long ago and highly recommend.

So much harm, so beautifully described.

Lost in Translation

Today I saw these instructions on the side of a steam table while waiting for some takeout food:


"The body must be earthed" seemed a bit ominous. What body? Were they storing bodies in the steam table?

I wonder if it it's supposed to mean "The plug must be grounded"? (Earthed? Is that a verb?)

The second line is almost a miracle of clarity, in comparison: "Prohibit burning heater in dry" must mean "Don't run the heater without water in the trays." Right?

And, "Do not wash the electric box," well, that seems a bit unclear since the whole thing is electric as far as I can tell, but I guess there's some part that's particularly electric and it shouldn't be washed. Okay, I'm sure I could figure that out.

A Red Oak Tree

Every day in my back yard, I get to look up at this. Well, at least in the summer it looks like this:


Today I am grateful for trees and especially oak trees. (Despite the aphids.)

Thank You, Andrew Benjamin

I don't read the paid newspaper obituaries, but I do usually check the "Remembering" stories that are written by journalists, whether reprinted from other papers or by Star Tribune staff. Today's paper contained one about Andrew Benjamin, 85, who was a 37-year volunteer at a local organization now called Prepare + Prosper.

During his working years, Benjamin was an accountant, a controller, at a local company, and as a volunteer at Prepare + Prosper he did pro bono tax prep for low-income people so they didn't get ripped off by all the for-profit tax prep companies that have sprung up to take advantage, especially since the Earned Income Tax Credit came into existence during the Reagan years.

At first he put in two days a week, but after retiring, he volunteered 40–50 hours a week.

"After finishing a five- or six-hour shift," said [Katy] Schultz, "he would be running out to a second location for another shift."....

In a story published on the nonprofit's website in 2017, Benjamin estimated that he had prepared 26,000 returns as a volunteer over the years.

It's a blessing to learn about such specific good work among the wider good work of an organization like Prepare + Prosper, which was already one of my favorite local nonprofit social service groups.

If Wrong, To Be Set Right

You know that expression, "My country, right or wrong," which is generally used as a bludgeon by apologists against anyone who points out whatever is wrong? It turns out there was more to it.

Carl Schurz is the source. He was a mid-19th century German immigrant, early Republican, and Union Army general. He later represented Missouri in the U.S. Senate and was Secretary of the Interior. (While he was often admirable, he was clearly wrong on a couple of major issues, too, if you read the linked Wikipedia page.)

Here's the context for the famous quote. It was part of a speech he gave in the Senate on February 29, 1872. In it, he referred to a then-famous slogan by early 19th century naval Commodore Stephen Decatur,  who had originally said some of the words as a toast: "Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong."

Schurz was responding to another Senator who must have echoed that idea in a speech, because he said,

The Senator from Wisconsin cannot frighten me by exclaiming, "My country, right or wrong." In one sense I say so too. My country; and my country is the great American Republic. My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.

Like so many things these days, it seems so obvious, and at least some people thought so even in 1872. But I guess not for some of the people I share this country with. 

Dr. Maga

I've never followed the work of artist Sue Coe very closely, though she's been in my awareness for a long time, probably originally from The Progressive magazine back in the 1980s.

The Minneapolis Institute of Art has this recent print of hers in its collection:


(Apologies for the bad reproductions... it's a photo of a halftone on newsprint from the Star Tribune.)

It was a good reminder of the power Coe brings to her work.

But What Do You Really Think of Libertarianism?

Anyone who reads my Twitter round-ups knows I have a weakness for the thoughts of Dave Roberts, who writes for Vox and used to write for Grist. Climate change and renewable energy are his beat, but long before that, he was a philosophy major. His talk with Chris Hayes on the "Why Is This Happening?" podcast about our country's epistemic crisis remains one of my favorites.

Yesterday, while waiting for his frozen pizza to bake, he put out a 33-tweet thread about libertarianism worth reading in its entirety. The gist is that the interactions of different people acting freely create externalities (like pollution!), which need to be managed by some entity, but libertarians pretend that inconvenient things like that don't exist. With freedom of speech,

If I'm on top, "everyone's free to do/say anything" sounds great to me. If I'm suffering from entrenched power relationships, the appeal is rather diminished. I can say whatever I want, but I could be risking my job, physical safety or tenuous social position. And I have no access to any microphones or op-ed pages anyway. The freedom is notional.

And later in the thread,

Powerful incumbents are heavily incentivized to view their own power as a result of merit. This is why every rich person is convinced their wealth is a result of their cleverness and hard work alone. The same is true of powerful demographics. History is packed with dominant groups justifying their dominance as natural and proper -- then it was divine right of kings, now it's free markets. But true democracy, much like a truly competitive market, is anathema to incumbents! A truly level playing field terrifies them.

If you want to maximize freedom in a democracy (or competitiveness in a market), then no freedom can be absolute. Maximizing total freedom always involves *balancing* freedoms, with everyone agreeing to some constraints and sacrifices for the larger good.

Absolute freedom is an illusion of power, a notion that's only plausible to someone observing the world atop a mountain of accumulated privilege. This is why 99.99% of libertarians are upper middle class white dudes. (Don't they ever wonder why that is?)

If you already have power, "leave me alone" sounds like freedom. If you suffer under a grinding legacy of historically entrenched structural disadvantages, "leave me alone" sounds like "leave me alone to suffer and die in powerless silence."...

[Libertarianism] says, "shrink government and leave me alone to enjoy my power." It is a defense of power masquerading as procedural neutrality.

This entire thread also serves as an explanation for why the GOP has drifted so far away from its "small government" quasi-libertarian rhetoric. When white male patriarchal Christian culture was firmly at the top of U.S. culture, "leave us alone," as a philosophy, appealed. But when culture and demographics started reducing the primacy of white male patriarchal Christian culture, the language of procedural neutrality declined and white supremacy rose to the surface -- because social/political/economic dominance was always the real motivation.

In a pluralistic, multiethnic, multicultural society, maximizing the freedom and welfare of the most people requires active government and active measures to reduce entrenched privilege. Passive, hands-off government appeals to those who'd just as soon hang on to those privileges.

This thread reminded me of some posts I've read over the years by Matt Bruenig, and it looks like I have scattered links to a few of them here and there on this blog but not all, so here's a more concise list:

• Environmentalism poses a problem for libertarian ideology
• Capitalism Whack-a-Mole
• Real life capitalism Whack-a-Mole
• How did private property start?
• Sorry, John Stuart Mill was not a Libertarian

He Must Be Emulated

A few thoughts to pass along about John Lewis (from Twitter, of course).

Waking up devastated by the news of John Lewis’s passing
He was the greatest human being I’ve ever met
There would be no Voting Rights Act without John Lewis
He literally put his life on the line to make America a democracy
We must all continue his fight


Ari Berman (author of Give Us the Ballot, which I've written about here and here)

The "good trouble" made by John Lewis and the civil rights movement was extremely unpopular in its time:


Waleed Shahid

Freedom Riders arrested on the same day in 1961 and they died on the same day in 2020. Rev C.T. Vivian and Rep. John Lewis:


Yashar Ali

John Lewis should not only be mourned. He should not only be remembered. He must be emulated.
Maya Wiley

____

While looking for past mentions of the Freedom Riders on my blog, I found this post from 2010, which quoted a Leonard Pitts column, and I recommend it again today. Ten years have gone by since he wrote it, ten more years of forgetting, purposeful amnesia, and forced claims on the good while bringing back the bad.

Face on a Box

I know it's just a tag, but it's a stylish one:


As seen in Saint Paul.

It's Not Just You

This is about where I am these days, in the words of misha fletcher, author of a book called Cooking Is Terrible (which, as an aside, I really should look into):

I don't know who needs to hear this, but honestly, no one is getting anything done right now. You're not uniquely useless or broken. The bar is "Are you eating at least once a day? Are you showering maybe once in a while? Are you staying home when you can? You're doing amazing."

I'm sure that someone is going to show up and tell me about how great they're doing and you know what, fine, maybe you are.

But I've talked to a lot of people about it this week, and the *vast majority* of us are not, and everyone is miserable and upset about it.

The goal right now is stay alive, and to do your best to protect other people in your community by staying home when you can and wearing a mask when you have to go out. That's it! That's the bar.

And to be clear: I hate that this is the bar. I'm struggling with it, and I don't think that I'm special or unique in that. Sometimes clearing this bar means you're spending the day crying at every cute animal and eating fistfuls of dry Cheerios.

You're still clearing the bar.

I don't have anything insightful or uplifting to end this thread with, because, like everyone else, I'm...you know. I'm here. I did dishes today. I contemplated the futility of everything I've ever done. I cried in the shower.

I just wanted to tell you that it's not just you.

Thems the Berries (or Not)

Everyone more or less knows that tomatoes are fruits and not vegetables, botanically, though we treat them as vegetables culturally.

But did you know that tomatoes are botanically classified as berries? I didn't until today.

I was originally going to write this post about just strawberries, because I had seen something about their oddness, but then it turned out while they're weird, they're not the only strange thing about berries.

First... strawberries are not berries. This post on livescience.com is the best thing I found that gives a good overall explanation about berries and fruits. The basics:

• Berries contain their seeds inside a fleshy layer, surrounded by an outer skin. Sometimes that skin is soft (as on a tomato) and sometimes it's hard (as on a watermelon) or kind of tough, requiring peeling (as on banana). Peppers and eggplants are a couple of other surprises I found in the berry category. Others are more expected, like blueberries, cranberries, or kiwis.
• Berries are a kind of fruit that has an additional bit of definition, requiring that they come from a single flower with just one ovary that produces at least two seeds. So you can see how tomatoes fit into that set of characteristics. 
• If the plant only produces only one seed per flower, that is called a drupe instead of a berry. A cherry is an example of a drupe. 
• Strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries have flowers that have more than one ovary. The little segments that make up raspberries and blackberries are each formed from a separate ovary. Each one is itself a drupe.
• Strawberry flowers also have multiple ovaries, but they don't result in multiple drupes. Each of their seeds is held on the surface of the fruit as something called an achene. Strawberries (and raspberries and blackberries) are called aggregate fruit.
• Don't ask about citrus. But here's another fact I didn't know: They are also considered berries.

That's probably enough fruit oddity for one night.

Three More from the Bulletin Board

In this age of Zoom calls, it's hard not to become self-conscious about the background behind your head. In my case, there are two wooden doors, a bit of wall, and three bulletin boards full of stuff I've posted over the years because it meant something to me.

I've posted about a few of the items over the years (here, here, and here), but it doesn't look like I've shown these three before, so here goes:


A Jenny Holzer T-shirt promo clipping from a Walker Art Center newsletter. This is pretty old... probably from the early 1990s.


A sample of four-color chromatic type printed by Paul Akin, which he gave out at the Hamilton Wood Type Museum's Wayzgoose in 2010.


A small but meaningful tagboard print by Amos Paul Kennedy of Kennedy Prints! One of the newer pieces on the bulletin board, probably from 2017.

I also have quite an array of nametags from various conferences, but Daughter Number Three is not the name on any of them so I can't share them here.

It Can Be Done

My monthly Twitter round-ups always include a lot of tweets about sustainable cities and transportation, but they aren't the best place to show the before-and-after photos that I see go past, usually from European cities.

It's common for Americans to assume that places that have good transit or biking infrastructure have always been that way, but they haven't. Here's an example from an urban planner named Fouad:

Two girls stand in the same location in Utrecht between 1982 and 2020 (38 years). The difference is clear, not only in the street components which can be implemented and achieved by designers, but the real development is the urban mobility modes:

Which version of the city would you rather live in? Which one seems like it will have a chance of working in our climate crisis world?

Stained Glass Chalk

One of these days I have to get some chalk out and sit on the sidewalk.

Until then, I'll let this spot I saw on one of my local sidewalks be an inspiration:


Where are you walking these days?

Sleep Can't Solve It

I'm in the midst of reading the eight books (so-far) upon which the well-regarded television series "The Expanse" is based. I have about 2.1 books left. If you haven't watched it, I recommend it, and the books as well.

Rather than writing about the story itself, I wanted to share one bit of writing that spoke to me particularly.

One of the characters is the head of the UN. As things in the solar system are going about as badly as you can imagine, she's having trouble sleeping:

She didn't sleep anymore, or at least it didn't help when she did.... And sleep was supposed to mean rest. There was no rest anymore. She closed her eyes and her mind stumbled on like it was falling down stairs. Mortality rates and supply windows and security briefings — all the things that filled her so-called waking hours filled her nights as well. Being asleep only meant they lost what little coherence they had. It didn't feel like sleeping. It felt like going mad and catatonic for a few hours and then regaining enough sanity to push through for eighteen or twenty hours more before collapsing into herself again (Babylon's Ashes, page 100).

With everything happening in our country and world today, that's kind of how sleep seems to me. The mind in sleep keeps trying to solve the problems, big and small, that can't be solved. And it's really bad at it, no surprise.

Another Post on Cancel Culture, But More Than That

After posting yesterday's cartoon from Jen Sorensen, I saw this thread by Slate writer Lili Loofbourow that also captured my perspective on the whole thing.

I get the longing--I even share it--but the naivete is annoying. Online pundits should know (and factor in) that social media as a "public square" where "good faith debate" happens is a thing of the past. Disagreement here happens through trolling, sea-lioning, ratios, dunks.

Bad faith is the condition of the modern internet, and shitposting is the lingua franca of the online world. And not just online: A troll is president. Trolling won. Perhaps we can agree that these platforms aren't suited to the earnest exchange of big ideas.

Of course that's frustrating, especially to those who wish to debate things like abortion. But there's a history here: platforms got flooded by devil's advocates who wasted the time of people with real investments--cruelly, for sport. That tends to weed out good-faith engagement.

Add to this that most arguments worth having have been had and witnessed 1000x already on these platforms, in several permutations. We know their tired choreographies, the moves and countermoves. At this point we mostly enjoy the style of whichever dunk we happen to agree with.

Does that lead to paranoid readings and meta-debates that seem totally batshit to onlookers who aren't internet-poisoned? Yup! "All Lives Matter" sounds perfectly reasonable--as a text--unless you know the history of that discourse. (And you'll sound pretty weird explaining it.)

"Why would you refuse to debate someone who's simply saying that All Lives Matter?" is the kind of question an Enlightenment subject longing for a robust exchange of ideas might ask. Well, the reason is that most of us know, through bitter experience, that it's a waste of time.

It wouldn't be a true exchange. We know by now what "All Lives Matter" signals and that what it signals is orthogonal to what it says. Your fluency in this garbage means you take shortcuts: you don't have to refute the text to leap to the subtext, which is the real issue.

To outsiders, that leap will look nuts. That's obviously what all the coded Nazi shit is for and about--the 14 words, the numbers, the OK hand sign that both is and isn't a white power sign, the Boogaloo junk. They're all ways to divorce surface meaning from intentional subtext.

Yes, this is bad for discourse! Yes, it inhibits intellectual exchange! Yes, it makes productive dissensus almost impossible. But that's not because of "cancel culture" or "illiberalism." It's because in this discourse environment, good faith engagement is actually maladaptive.

It's possible and likely that knowledge gaps between people who are online too much and folks who aren't are making things worse. If [Margaret] Atwood (or whoever) isn't online much, she might be shocked to see people accuse a nice-looking boy in a Hawaiian shirt of wanting a second Civil War.

It might indeed look like cancel culture gone mad. He's just standing there! Civilly! Offering support to Black Lives Matter protesters, of all things! Can't we all, whatever our disagreements, come together in support of a good cause?

It's *also* possible that people who've learned to read *through* stuff (to whatever bummer of a subtext we're used to finding there) sometimes overdo it. Some of us might reflexively ignore the actual text--fast-forwarding to the shitty point we "know" is coming even if it isn't.

"Free speech defender," for example, will mean something different to an idealist than it will to someone who watched reddit hordes viciously defend revenge porn and sites like r/beatingwomen, r/creepshots, and r/Jewmerica while people whose pictures got posted there begged for help.

Free speech! they were told.

Anyway. Sure, good-faith debate would be nice. Instead, the internet pressure-cooked rhetoric. Again: people can watch the same argument be conducted a million times in slightly different ways, and that's interesting, and a blessing, and a curse.

It produced a kind of argumentative hyperliteracy. If you can predict every step of a controversy (including the backlash), it makes perfect sense to meta-argue instead--over what X *really* means, or implies, or what, down a road we know well, it confirms.

This isn't great. People talk past each other, assume bad faith. But it's not the fault of "illiberalism" that good faith is in short supply. And if that's where your analysis begins, I can't actually tell whether you're naive or trolling. And I'm no longer sure which is worse.

There are so many great quotes in there. I made myself resist adding emphasis to the ones I particularly liked because there were too many. So I'll just call out one of the last phases: "argumentative hyperliteracy." Yes, that. That's a state I feel like I have reached or am on the edges of, even though I'm mostly a spectator/reader in these social media discussions.

Jen Sorensen on Cancel Culture

Another great cartoon from Jen Sorensen (in case you've forgotten about her, here's an earlier one):


Maybe you're lucky enough to not have read all the agita about so-called cancel culture... I've found it hard to avoid.

I tend to agree with this thought from essayist and poet Isabel Rae MacKenzie:

after my recent experience with nazis/the alt right online, i’m even more wary of any/all arguments being made about how free speech is under attack, etc.

free speech ideals are weaponized as a MAJOR coded alt right platform point and many do not realize this still.

Should we all have free speech? Sure, and other people get to say what they think of it, too. And if our free speech includes calling police to fake being hysterically afraid of a Black man who's birdwatching in Central Park, and as a result we lose our job over that... I am not sad.

The Dumbest Mask I Can Imagine

I saw this ad somewhere online the other day:


I don't know if this mask is actually made of bandana fabric, but if it is, it's almost worthless as a mask, as you probably know from the various mask studies you've seen. (Bandanas rank near the bottom of effectiveness, just above pulling up your T-shirt, if I remember correctly.)

Second, why would you want to cover up any more of yourself than you absolutely have to?  The idea is to cover your nose and mouth. Am I the only one who gets hot from wearing a mask? I don't want it covering up my neck and chest for absolutely no reason.

Standing Up in a Small Town

If you haven't already read this article about a small demonstration organized in the southern Ohio town of Bethel in support of Black Lives Matter, I highly recommend reading the whole thing. The writer, Ann Helen Peterson, spent three weeks reporting and writing it.

The demonstration took place on June 14, 2020, almost three weeks after George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police, during a period of many other protests but well after some devastating property damage had occurred. It was organized by a couple of women from the town (who grew up in the town, live in the town, work in the town). Several of them are teachers at the local school, which didn't surprise me, because it reflected the way teachers in my own conservative small town were often more aware of social issues than the other residents.

They went out of their way to call it a demonstration in solidarity rather than a protest because even the word protest, they sensed, was inflammatory in the Fox News-drenched world they live in. I was not aware of that fine-grained difference, myself. I guess the time-honored concept of protest is inherently associated with violence now. Thanks, right-wing propaganda!

Bethel doesn't have a local newspaper anymore, just social media. All of their community events have died, as have their "third places" like the Blue Haven restaurant, famous for its pies. As one person quoted put it, "Now it’s just a bunch of people loosely living together in the same place."

Yet the organizer were immediately told in the comments on Facebook, where they put the word out: "You can't bring this into our town." This. A demonstration? This. Looting? Riots? Busing in anarchists? It's sad that so many people are being brainwashed by propaganda.

Another local resident, known for railing against "political correctness," used his own Facebook following to urge people to turn out in opposition, and defined the demonstration as "hate":

"Sunday at 3 o’clock, they’re supposed to be bringing a Black Lives Matter,” he said. “I’m gonna tell you right now, I hope that everybody that feels like me, I hope we outnumber those people a thousand to one, and not let that shit happen here in our little town of Bethel.”

“You’re not going to bring hate to our town,” he continued. “We don’t have hate in it right now. You’re gonna bring hate.”

On the day of the event, he went on Facebook Live and exhorted people to show up and "protect your community," claiming to have seen multiple "antifa people" scoping things out.

The upshot is that the 50 to 80 people who came out to demonstrate and say Black Lives Matter were met by more than almost 700 counter-protesters, including armed biker gangs, who tore the signs from their hands. One person was sucker-punched in the head. Meanwhile, the "handful of cops" present did nothing about it. (I guess we should be glad they didn't make it worse.)


A Black Lives Matter sign that was ripped up by counterprotestors in Bethel, Ohio, June 14. Photo by Maddie McGarvey

Most of the attackers were not from Bethel, according to the demonstration's organizers, though they recognized some faces in the crowd.

Some quotes:

The people who showed up to “protect” the town say a Black Lives Matter demonstration doesn’t belong in a place like Bethel, Ohio. There’s no need, they say, for those sorts of conversations. Others blame the demonstrators for giving Bethel a bad name: for the dozens of articles in the national press, the outsiders flooding local Facebook comment sections, the Wikipedia entry for the village briefly changed to describe it as “composed of many, many racists.”

"...was it really the right thing to do, bringing that protest here? It’s okay to have one of those in the city, but in a predominantly white town — what they were doing was basically doing was inviting racists in.”

If there hadn’t been a protest, the reasoning goes, there wouldn’t have been a problem, and everything in Bethel would’ve been like it always has been: just fine. But what happened on that Sunday afternoon showed just how unsustainable that belief has become.

The middle part of the story is about a Black man who grew up in the town and is held up as kind of a "black friend" example by the jerk who incited the counter-protest to prove that Bethel is not racist. Well, the reporter tracked this Black man down and found that he does indeed think Bethel was (and probably still is) racist. He hasn't been back to find out, though.

I hope you take the time to read the whole story. 

__

This cincinnati.com story has additional reporting on what happened on June 14, including police estimates on who was there, such as 250 people on motorcycles, and that there were six cops and one sheriff's deputy total.

Quoting that story:

The Facebook video [co-organizer Andrea] Dennis recorded shows a woman trying to wrestle a BLM sign away from one of the demonstrators. One man repeatedly shouts, “Don’t put that in my face” at the demonstrators. Another man with his face covered by a confederate flag rips a poster to the sound of cheering. Two men can be seen down the street carrying semi-automatic rifles.

All the Same, Sort of

In case you didn't already know this, here's a nice graphic depicting one of the fun facts you learn soon after you start vegetable gardening:


I already knew this, but what I like about this graphic is the way it points out the specific part of the parent plant that was enlarged to create each of the different plants we all know and grow.

Coping in the Emergency Room

In some alternate life, I would be writing academic papers about all of the systems humans set up in different settings. Emergency rooms are an example, where elaborate methods are carried out day after day with specialized equipment and supplies, all stored and disposed of in standardized ways. I'm sure recording the details of a single ER would fill a book.

But for today, I have just one small example: The triage nurse's station at a Level 1 Trauma Center comes equipped with one of these:


It's a "Cope Tote," and as the handwritten note to the right says, "These items should NOT be handed out for toys in Triage. DISTRACTION ITEMS ONLY."

All of those notes adhered to the bag tell a story about a perceived system failure: the toys are given out to children and they don't find their way back to the bag. Someone thought that applying strips of all-caps type and then an extra note would make it more likely there would be less material loss. Maybe the parents would make the kids give the toys back more often because of the notes?

I wonder if it works.

Mount Rushmore Shouldn't Exist

I used to be a fan of Mount Rushmore, probably as a kid or a teenager. The idea of the human achievement involved in blasting and carving huge faces out of a cliff impressed me, I guess. The romantic story of sculptor Gutzon Borglum, as spun by the government PR machine, got me too: "Man vs. nature" and all that, as we were taught in school.

I'm from the East, so I never saw it in person until I moved to Minnesota and then not until well after arriving in the Midwest. I think it was in the late 1990s, while we were on a trip to Colorado, taking the South Dakota route. I remember not liking the jingoistic accoutrements that filled the public spaces where you have to stand to view the giant heads, but the memory is vague.

I don't know if I knew at the time that the mountain was sacred to the Lakota people, or that it was called the Six Grandfathers and looked like this:


I knew about the Crazy Horse monument, not far away, and we visited that as well. (That has its own problems and its completion is not a solution to balance out Mount Rushmore.)

Now when I hear people say things like, "We should add a woman to Mount Rushmore" (once we have a woman president), all I can do is shake my head. Mount Rushmore shouldn't exist, and adding a woman to it won't change that fact. It's a symbol of white supremacy, blasted into rock on unceded Lakota territory. And even if it wasn't, as this Guardian article recounts, Borglum was a member of the Klan. The presidents depicted and honored were enslavers and Indian-killers.

In some ways Mount Rushmore is a perfect symbol of this country: permanently defacing other people's sacred places, while thinking it's a way to honor the heroes who really matter. Creating a spectacle to visit while driving a polluting car so someone can make money via tourism. Hubris, once again, writ large.

This final observation is a small bit of comfort:

never realised how gross and sad mt rushmore looks when you can actually see the whole mountain:


@AndyAstruc

__

Sidenote: In case you've ever wondered who it's named after, you won't be disappointed because the answer fits squarely with all the other ways the sculpture is a perfect symbol of this country. From the Wikipedia:

In 1885 Charles E. Rushmore came to the Black Hills of South Dakota to check the titles to properties for an eastern mining company owned by James Wilson, following the 1883 opening of the Etta tin mine. How Mount Rushmore came to be named after Charles is subject to contradictory recounting [two possibilities are listed in the footnotes], but the United States Board of Geographic Names officially recognized the name in June 1930, five years after Rushmore donated $5,000 (equivalent to $72,894 in 2019) towards Gutzon Borglum's sculpture.

So basically, Rushmore was a rich business guy who bought the naming rights. 

Infinite 12

So many Zoom calls (I know, right?) and while they continue, I bend twist ties. One day I noticed they were starting to look like numbers. Soon I had assembled this:


I think it means something, maybe more to some people than others.

Jury Selection

There was a tweet in my Twitter round-up yesterday that said,

Each time I've been called for jury duty here in Manhattan, defense inevitably gets to "Do you think that the police always tell the truth?" and each time I've honestly answered "No," and so the last time I was on a jury was 1985.
Jack Womack

I had already read that tweet when I came across this thread from an East Oregon defense attorney later in the month:

Since we're going off about lying cops today, let me add to it stupid things prosecutors train baby DAs to do. Here I present training materials that define inquisitive people that care about the process as bad jurors. Literally.






I particularly like that being "overly conscientious" makes you a "bad" jury. And that they don't want people that pay attention to process, but then tell you that form is every bit as important as the actual substance of your case against a person.

It was at this DOJ-presented training where an experienced DDA trainer from the Bend area kept talking about a car wreck that had a bunch of tweakers and was thankfully "NHI" when all but one person died.

I finally asked what NHI meant: No Humans Involved.

So, someone asked about what good jurors are. Apparently, middle aged and middle class or blue collar.




This is from a training I attended as a prosecutor. It was really telling me how to pick juries. They didn't need to have racially neutral excuses because getting rid of the ones they suggested would have the same effect.

But they also really believed this.

The obvious bias toward male and white jurors is clear in all of this, of course, especially in the "good" attributes, without even getting into who's more likely to distrust cops or be selected out for cause as in this example:


But getting back to the original point of the post, which was about cops lying and its connection to jury selection. (Several people in the comments gave examples of being removed from the pool because of their opinions on whether cops always tell the truth or not.) Today, KPCC reporter Josie Huang reminded me of these related facts:

In initial police statements...
- Breonna Taylor’s injuries were listed as “none”
- No mention of officer kneeling on George Floyd’s neck
- Older Buffalo protester shoved to ground had “tripped & fell"

She linked to a Washington Post story with this headline: "Journalists are reexamining their reliance on a longtime source: The police."

If journalists are reexamining their reliance and belief in the truth-telling of police, how can jury members — who lock people up because they're found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt — still be selected based on whether they believe the words of people who have been proven to lie systematically? 

___

Afternote: I learned this fact from one of the other commenters in the main Twitter thread cited here:

In the UK the jury is randomly selected and only dismissed if they have a connection to the case.

Twitter, June 2020

Another long as hell month, and now to add to our raging pandemic and long-needed but obviously painful reckoning on all things related to white supremacy (in policing and everything else), we also have straight-up treason from Mafia Mulligan.

So let's start with that. After everything we've been through, is anyone surprised that Mulligan has known for months that Putin had put a bounty on the heads of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and our president not only did nothing about it but made positive overtures to Russia?

Read this again: "the President naively elevated Russia -- a second-rate totalitarian state with less than 4% of the world's GDP -- and its authoritarian leader almost to parity with the United States." The harm that has been done is incalculable.
Anne Applebaum, quoting a Carl Bernstein story summarizing Trump's interactions with foreign leaders, including Putin

Remember when Republicans spent $25 million investigating Benghazi because they thought the black President (and the woman Secretary of State) MIGHT have been negligent? Now we have EVIDENCE that the white male president let Russia PAY for the MURDER of US soldiers and they are SILENT.
Mikel Jollett

This morning I made a drawing of Trump and Putin sitting on an American coffin. Please retweet this image; I want Trump to see what treason is:


Mark Dolk @vrjrdgstknng

**Kaepernick kneels to protest police murdering black people**
REPUBLICANS: “you’re disrespecting our troops!!!!”
**Putin hires Afghan militants to murder U.S. troops**
REPUBLICANS: “invite him to the G8 summit!”
Kaivan Shroff

It’s pretty clear now why trump kept saying Obama committed treason. He knew the story about him being ok with Putin putting out a bounty on our military would become public soon. It’s ALWAYS about projection w him.
@Grtseeker

So trump signed up off on both the Chinese concentration camps and the Russian murders of United States soldiers?
Molly Jong-Fast

I would have never said anything like that on Twitter before, but people need to wake up and realize the president is killing Americans at home with ineptitude over the virus, and abroad by his devotion to Putin. He is destabilizing the nation he swore to protect
ProfB @AntheaButler

Of course, not only was Mulligan committing treason with Russia, he was betraying his oath domestically and in other ways around the world as well, and his lackeys were devolving things, too:

It took hours for Trump to delete his "white power" retweet. The claim now is that he couldn't be reached while golfing. This leaves two horrifying possibilities: (1) his staff wouldn't know how to reach him in an emergency or (2) it took hours to persuade him to delete the video.
Walter Shaub

Remember that the guy who tweets "LAW AND ORDER!" is the same guy who tweets "White Power." Those two concepts are connected for him.
Chris Carfizzi

Never before have we lived in a time when the vast, gigantic reserves of American stupidity have been so closely wed to political power and public policy.
jelani cobb

It shouldn’t be hard to have leaders who:
- aren’t completely corrupt
- don’t commit crimes
- don’t deliberately divide us with fear, hate, and ignorance
- don’t put lives at risk by ignoring science and medical advice
- aren’t sexist jerks
- aren’t racist a**holes
Dr. Jonathan Foley @GlobalEcoGuy

It is going to seem very strange to future historians that anyone was surprised making the Iran-Contra coverup man [Bill Barr] attorney general turned out badly.
Adam Serwer

This presidency is one long never-ending Saturday Night Massacre
Virginia Heffernan @page88

When weird ideological theocrats rise to power, uplifted by a small minority of voters, bad governance happens.
D.A. Bullock

Ilhan Omar made a misjudged remark about "Benjamins" and for weeks we talked about her alleged antisemitism, the left's bigotry, and Congress passed a resolution. Trump told the president of China he was ok with him locking up a million Muslims in concentration camps. Silence.
Mehdi Hasan

I just saw someone refer to the fenced-in area around the White House as "Tinyman Square."
@Mocraig13

As we get closer to November, Trump WILL get more divisive and dangerous. He planned to get re-elected on the economy, but that's out the window now, so the only thing that he has left is othering marginalized groups to gin his base up, and this othering includes stoking violence.
@Freeyourmindkid

BREAKING: Man who thinks a mask makes him look weak is now erecting a baby gate around his entire house.
Andrea Junker @Strandjunker

The one thing I will never, ever understand is how people can look at Trump and see strength. Every single thing he does, including surrounding the White House with a #babygate, just reeks of fear. It drips off him.
David Roberts @drvox

melania married an aging, obese amphetamine tweaker who lives on fast food and hasn't exercised in 50 years, with the perfectly reasonable expectation that he'd be long dead by now and she'd be in the "rich widow" stage of her life. she did not expect to still be doing this shit at 50.
lieutenant winslow

Getting an 8 pm curfew alert on my phone during a pandemic and Depression while Trump invites Putin to the US is about where I thought we'd be in year 4 of Trump.
Ben Rhodes

Comments on Republicans and Trumpism more generally:

Really, with rare exceptions, the Republican solution to every social problem is “the more marginalized you are, the more exceptionally successful you must be at ~everything.”
@csilverandgold

rich retirees cruising in golf carts yelling “white power” is the essence of trumpism
@jbouie

VP Mike Pence and Second Lady Karen Pence voted absentee in Indiana this April and listed the Indiana Governor's mansion — where they haven't lived in almost 4 years but are still registered to vote – as their address
Grace Panetta

Something everyone in US politics should understand: the GOP is the farthest right major party in any developed democracy. To find analogues you have to look to splinter neo-fascist parties in the EU:


David Roberts @drvox

Somebody pointed out that the GOP nominated the last FOURTEEN out of eighteen Supreme Court justices. Holy shit.
@csilverandgold

Answer to the classic question is increasingly obvious.
Q: What are "conservatives" conserving?
A: White wealth and privilege!
(You're welcome.)
Langdon Winner

Since the Republicans have such a hard time getting the name of the Democratic Party right, maybe we should return the favor and just call them the "Racist Party." It would be interesting to see, if Democratic politicians used the term "Racist Party" to refer to the Republican Party, if media just reported it without comment, the way they do when Republicans politicians refer to the "Democrat Party."
Dean Baker

The GOP position (at least in Georgia) appears to be in-person voting is both a sacred right and something that should be made as hard to do as possible.
Sam Stein

You guys do realize that if Trump is voted out of office, Republicans (including Never Trumpers) will go right back to normal and actually try to pretend like the last four years didn't happen. Right?
chris evans @notcapnamerica

It was a hard month to compile all the tweets on racism, white supremacy, and police brutality (big surprise!). I've separated a couple of the subtopics (policing and statues) out after this general part, which covers mostly racism and white supremacy:

I say this at the end of ALL my talks: There is NO FORM of protest that white supremacy will approve of. None. March, take a knee, throw a rock, boycott, vote, let it burn...you can always bank on resistance. Freedom won't be given, it must be won.
K Carter Jackson

When a black person says “Black Power” it means let us live and take your knee off our neck. When a white person says “White Power” it means let us kill and put our knee on your neck. See the difference?
Arjun Sethi

I think having a Black POTUS broke white people forever.
@hyster181

For people crying that the name Karen is "ruined" because of jokes: Research has shown that African American names like Lakisha and Jamal have stopped Black people from getting *hired*. Black parents have stopped naming their daughters with names that indicate they're Black.
@IDoTheThinking

Recent student evaluation stated that I should never teach again & I had committed malpractice since I made race central to American history. And my worst stated that I should be ashamed that I was pregnant & Black with no husband as I was a walking stereotype. #BlackintheIvory
@BlackDigitalHum

Black people's journey to transcending racial oppression (and race itself) involves a struggle for equality and basic respect which white people have never had to wage _on racial grounds_. That's why "white lives matter" and "black lives matter" aren't equivalent.
Nicholas Guyatt

Clear Language on Slavery:
Slaves = Hostages
Slave Owners = Human Traffickers
Slave Catchers = Police
Plantations = Death Camps
Mistresses = Rape Victims
Discipline = Torture/Murder
Overseers = Torturers
Trading = Kidnapping
Profit = Theft
Middle Passage = Genocide
Make a note
5'7" Male Black @absurdistwords

They want to keep the racist stereotype of a fictional Aunt Jemima on the pancake syrup but they don't want put real life freedom fighter Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill.
Keith Boykin

so many white people talk about having a “racist phase” and we have just decided to accept that’s part of a white kid’s childhood without once thinking about the black kids who don’t get to be children because of racism
@comradevenustas

Was asked about allyship and white saviorism. Allyship isn't self-declared, but a process. A process of learning, privilege deployed, welcomes critique and actively demonstrates growth. Saviorism seeks external affirmation, resists critique & often walks around as performative ally.
Beronda Montgomery

When you replace "Owned slaves" with "Was an active and willing participant in a vast conspiracy to kidnap children from their families in order to force them into industrial and sexual servitude" it becomes harder to write slave owning off as just a blot on one's record. For instance: George Washington was our first President and was an active and willing participant in a vast conspiracy to kidnap children from their families in order to force them into industrial and sexual servitude.
5'7" Male Black @absurdistwords

racists on long island will be like “my ancestors were here first” but will live in towns like Amagansett or Wantagh or Commack or Hauppauge or Massapequa or Wyandanch or Bohemia or Ronkonkoma or Quogue or Nissequogue or Mattituck or Mineola or Sagaponack or Asharoken or Yaphank
@kkaylarenaee

Juneteenth shouldn't be a national holiday because of the way class is racialized in this country. White people will take the day off and Black people in the service industry will still be working.
@Naimaism

Replying to Jason Lewis [Republican candidate for Congress in Minnesota]:


@bornhereinTexas

For Juneteenth, white people should be required either go to work or to attend seminars on Black history. Everybody else gets the day off.
@kateschmidt

I cannot think of one historical example where policy was formulated to accommodate the fascists’ demands and the fascists didn’t instantly demand the next fascist thing on their fascist list. The appeasement of fascists never ever works. Never, ever.
Alex Andreou @sturdyAlex

don’t buy anti-racism books from Amazon are you fucking kidding me
Tisya Mavuram

Even the statement, “Let’s invite more Black people to the table,” implies ownership of the table and control of who is invited. Racism is about power.
@BerniceKing

Between 1910 and 1997, African-Americans lost about ninety per cent of their farmland.
The New Yorker

As a white person, you can’t “non-confrontationally” learn about racism. The entire process is a confrontation of your life, your family, your culture, your belief system, your status, and your narratives about yourself. Etc etc etc.
@flotisserie

Whenever white people tell BIPOC not to make EVERYTHING about race, it’s like, ok, well, you guys started it
Aparna Nancherla

I need every single person on earth to stop complaining about looting. How the hell you think Black folks got here in the first place?
Marcus Ferrell

anyone who doesn't "believe" that systemic racism is real or that white supremacy has no effect on our laws is not fit to govern – anything. it's dangerous to let people wield power when they live in an alternate reality.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright

Any scholarship kid who went to a private high school can tell of the criminal behavior of wealthier kids. Drugs, violence, theft, property destruction. Behaviors many white Americans say justify police violence are Friday night fun for their children.
Victor LaValle

This is a Third Reconstruction moment, just like after slavery and after the Brown decision. It’s a time to restructure and reorder all of society. When Emmett Till was killed, Rosa didn’t just go after the murderers. She went after the entire Jim Crow system.
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II

A reminder that NO ONE *wants* to be talking about this stuff endlessly. Folks simply want things to be equitable.
Lisa Lucas

Black Lives Matter protests are essentially a national exorcism. If seeing them makes you rage and shake and froth at the mouth, maybe you’ve got a demon in you.
Victor LaValle

400+ years of oppression. Couple days of some folks getting it. The end isn’t close. Let’s go.
Phillip Atiba Goff

If you are a British taxpayer, you were paying reparations from the abolition of slavery in 1833 all the way to 2015... but to the *owners* of slaves rather than to former slaves themselves (and no one made a peep). Keep that in mind next time you say reparations are unthinkable.
Jason Hickel

Nearly every book on the New York Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list is about race, racism, or antiracism. America is suddenly cramming for an exam it's been failing for 400 years.
Renee Graham

America is trapped in a permanent past of violence and hatred as a society because its constitution, and the institutions built atop it, were meant for a slave state. That fundamental problem is why little changes.
@umairh

Imagine being shown this photo in 2019 with no explanation:


actioncookbook

The Gone With the Wind and NASCAR stuff are related: GWTW is obviously Lost Cause porn, and it was also responsible for "democratizing" the Confederate flag, making it popular among white people besides Klan members and White Citizens Council members.
@GeeDee215

White supremacy won’t die until White people see it as a White issue they need to solve rather than a Black issue they need to empathize with.
Dwayne Reed @TeachMrReed

"I'm not racist! I'm just fighting to preserve the character of my neighborhood that is 99% white and where every house costs at least $500,000"
@GettingGophery

Someone tell Langston we found the answer: It definitely explodes.
michaelharriot

It occurs to me how much I hate all of this. Like really, really hate it. Even the beautiful parts remind me that we are so good at memorializing our dead because we’ve had so much practice.
jelani cobb

"Elvis Presley waiting for his food while a woman, who is not permitted to sit, waits for a sandwich, 1956":


Nathaniel Parkinson @np1959

My beloved south asian community, we can either stand in support of the Black Lives Matter movement or we can be the foot soldiers of white supremacy. I know where I stand.
Nish Kumar

Colin Kaepernick's peaceful protest won't be fully appreciated until there's a protest that isn't so peaceful
Vincent Goodwill

There is a 100% chance that conservatives 30 years from now will be scolding black activists for not being more like Colin Kaepernick, whose ideals and methods they always revered.
A.R. Moxon @JuliusGoat

Tiny BLM diorama:


Chris Steller

If you don’t even *realize* that Black and Brown people are the ONLY ones positioned to tell us anything of value about how much “progress” white people and white institutions have made, then have you really made much progress at all?
@alwaystheself

Honestly I think that whiteness has a social contract that racial violence is acceptable as long as white people have jobs or the promise of jobs, and too few white people feel confident that they will have jobs
Cass Adair

uptown theatre: @AdamTurman (i think):


will martin

People bring up the importance of “free speech” and “free press” when defending racism in mainstream publishing as if these things haven’t always been reserved for white society with Black people systemically denied access to either. We’ve gotta hear both sides even when we’ve only been allowed to hear from the racist side for the past 400 years
Bree Newsome Bass

liberals have learned to call racism "systemic" but then suggest exclusively non-systemic fixes like police trainings as solutions
micah herskind

Reminder of what they said about MLK when he was alive:


@WhackNicholson

"diversity and inclusion" needs to be upgraded to "anti-racism and dismantling white supremacy"
Tatiana Mac

Comments on policing and defunding police specifically, since there were so many this month:

My favorite thing to say when law enforcement complains about me suing them for breaking public records laws: “I'm enforcing the law. What do you have against people who work in law enforcement?” Their heads turn like 720°.
Tony Webster

i really hope the lesson people take from elijah mcclain is not "it's extra sad because he was so sweet" but rather, "no amount of gentleness and respectability can protect a black person from the arbitrary wrath of police"
@itsSupercar

all cops are going to need rehabilitation and therapy once we abolish them before they can be allowed to safely move into different careers without carrying their cop mentality with them.
@OhDionne

Our local media will breathlessly report any opinion from any dullard who owns something in Minneapolis about "their safety" but won't make the analytic connection to the current failure where we currently invest huge money into "failed" public safety.
D.A. Bullock

Key facts:
1. Police killings fell from 1970-2000, then SKYROCKETED
2. Police killings are now ~9% of all violent deaths in the U.S., up from 4%
3. The # of police officers killed fell in the 90s and hasn't risen since
4. Police killings are biased against Black people
In the last few years, the number of Americans killed by police each year has been over 30 times the number of police killed by Americans.
@Noahpinion

When crime stats go up, police use that to justify their increase (you need more of us to save you), when crime stats go down, police use that to justify their increase (See we are saving you so well, don't you want to stay safe?) It's absurd. please stop.
D.A. Bullock

cops are supposed to investigate crimes for a living but every one of their attempts to fake a crime has resulted in them being thwarted by McDonald's workers within two hours
@The_Law_Boy

Police don't really need a union, they have Republican state legislators who represent them for every violent criminal act and wrong-doing.
D.A. Bullock

In order to truly do abolition work we must grapple with our obsession with punishment.
@itsrabiyatu

Police “unions“ are violent, white supremacist fraternities. Kick them out of the labor movement.
Haymarket Books

Rayshawn Brooks ran from cops because a DUI would've revoked his parole. Public transit in Atlanta has been deliberately under-funded by the racist legislature, so he had no choice but to drive. Car-dependency in this country just skyrockets your chances of encountering cops.
@IDoTheThinking

you ever see a church sign writer go supernova:


@cubosh

The only headline every day for the last two weeks should’ve been “At Protests Against Police Violence, Police Use Unthinkable Amounts of Violence”
@nicetryofficer

You want police to exist because u know with 100% certainty they are your strong arm muscle in any mundane social disagreement. You don't want to give that up despite knowing the harm they inflict on other people not like you. That has absolutely nothing to do with public safety.
D.A. Bullock

This is obvious but worth noting: it is because of cars & freeways that cops can live in Oakdale or Anoka and work in Minneapolis.
Dan Marshall

George W. Bush has a DUI
Dick Cheney has a DUI
Matt Gaetz has a DUI
Mike Crapo has a DUI
Beto O’Rourke has a DUI
But Rayshard Brooks had a DUI, couldn’t get a job and was killed. This country’s criminal justice system was built to incarcerate and kill black and brown Americans.
@DeNarde4MDDel

What elites have given poor communities: Cops to keep everyone in line and teachers to extract the talented
Chris Arnade

I don't get these "cities need a policing structure like suburbs" takes. The existence of the suburb itself is policing. It's predicated on tax hoarding revenue generated in the city. Suburban cops aren't patrolling streets, they're patrolling city limits for dark skinned motorists.
@IDoTheThinking

One of my favorite things Fox News does is talk about how police are tirelessly and endlessly brave but that they might all quit or stop doing their jobs if everyone doesn’t worship them or stop saying mean things.
Jared Yates Sexton

Something I learned researching this story is meter maids and other non-police traffic enforcement started to dress like cops because angry people getting tickets would assault them. Dressing like cops gave them a veneer of authority.
Aaron W. Gordon

This is the best graphic I’ve seen in a while:


@CoolWindBreeze

I wonder if a lot of the resistance to defunding cops comes from this very strong idea, in my opinion, that white men, regardless of education etc. should be entitled to good paying jobs. Also why politicos like Trump use coal miners as props.
Angie Schmitt

If you're a police officer and you're shocked the public is upset with your profession after literally hundreds of videos of your fellows brutalizing citizens over two weeks instead of shocked at your colleagues you are telling on yourself in a profound way.
@tznkai

imagining a world where everyone had a union that acted like a police union. where, like, a librarian could choke you to death for being too loud and then get a million dollars. and then their union rep went on TV and was like "and if you don't like it we'll fucking kill you too"
@Chinchillazllla

On hour 10 of analyzing NYPD brutality against protestors from over the last couple of weeks. One thing that has stood out to me is both the viciousness & number of instances of male (cop) against female (protestor) violence. Punches. Body slams. Pushes. Neck grabs. Baton swings.
Scott Hechinger

I’m sorry, the city of Philadelphia can’t drop teargas from helicopters on peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters and at the same time protect groups of bat-wielding white men who are assaulting people and not expect us to demand a complete reform of policing in this city.
Conrad Benner @StreetsDept

It's kind of insane that Angela Davis is alive and well but every major news source is like "what's prison abolition? matt here, who half read a wikipedia article about it while also replying to a nate silver tweet, has the answer!"
@surlybassey

Something I've been curious about and would like to read more on: seems to me one of the major factors in the militarization of police is America's insane lack of gun restrictions. Police go into every single encounter thinking that they could be shot because *it's true*. I mean, literally anybody could have a gun and be upset enough to use it -- a traffic stop, a domestic abuse call, even just a routine patrol. How could you police an insane society like that without becoming paranoid and violent? So I'm wondering how (or whether) the defund-the-police movement is connecting up with gun-law reformers. Seems like they're properly part of a package. Is this a thing?
David Roberts @drvox

That feeling when a country that struggled to (barely) come up with $1200 for (some) people in the midst of a plague not only has apparently endless resources for its violence workers, but demands you *worship* them
@PatBlanchfield

It's hard to overstate just how badly police across the nation have screwed up this moment. Had they shown even the slightest modicum of restraint and empathy, centrist white folks would have gone on believing that Black folks were exaggerating police violence. Instead, they exhibited a national showcase of televised brutality, commiting the mortal sin of US public relations: assaulting white people. Not to mention, reporters, legal observers, medics, and of course the BIPOC that have always been at the receiving end. In their hubris, these cops gave white America a window into the contemporary militaristic police brutality that Black Americans have long been accustomed to; and in doing so—hopefully—precipitating its demise.
@wjfarr

what if we use our taxes for universal healthcare and free college and then we can do a gofundme for the police if an emergency comes up
Adam J. Kurtz

I saw this yesterday. It's too good not to share. Brutal, but completely on the mark:


@caerbannog666

If the police did their jobs, everyone would trust them. Ain’t no song called Fuck The Fire Department.
@itskingapollo

Police departments get hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but children have “school lunch debt.” Make it make sense.
Cora Harrington @lingerie_addict

If you have to train people not to kill me because I’m Black, I’d really prefer you just not give them the power to kill me at all maybe?
Bree Newsome Bass

Black people and white people pay taxes but are subjected to an entirely different experience of policing. Wealthy white communities have enormous control over their police forces while Black communities don’t. White people regularly weaponize police against Black people while Black people are afraid to call the police in real emergencies. There is no colorblind, race-neutral lens for evaluating the function of policing in America unless the goal is to be intellectually dishonest. So how can it be said that those most subjected to police violence have no right to propose defunding their local forces? That talking point is also racist because it’s about denying Black people political autonomy or self-governance. Wealthy people aren’t policed this way at all.
Bree Newsome Bass

Medicare for all is a pipe dream but giving police a bunch of money might make them less racist
@MurderBryan

THIS man wrestles THE FIRE OF THE GODS to KEEP YOUR HOUSE WARM AND LIT. he's the THIN YELLOW LINE between you and PREINDUSTRIAL BARBARISM. he's an ELECTRICIAN, and his job is more dangerous than ANY COP'S:


@Theophite

The Minneapolis Police budget is 193.3 million for 2020. That does not include the budget for Metro transit police, Parks police, Sheriffs Dept police and University police.
D.A. Bullock

As we see multiracial crowds fighting for police reform, I keep thinking of how so many white liberals react when policymakers attempt to integrate their children's schools and gifted classrooms, or construct affordable housing in affluent neighborhoods. My colleagues and I have written story after story about opportunity hoarding in the institutions of our daily life, which create the highly segregated living conditions that contribute to racism, dehumanization and over-policing.
Dana Goldstein

Man, remember earlier this year when a cop said a barista wrote pig on his cup then it turned out she didn't but got fired anyways then it turned out cops were doing it all over the country like some weird munchausen by proxy thing to get sympathy for themselves?
@JenYetAgain

The people who are telling you that you will never get anywhere with a slogan like "defund the police" never would've imagined such a phrase gaining mainstream momentum in the first place, so they aren't exactly political fortune tellers.
Puff the Magic Hater @MsKellyMHayes

The problem with America isn't the "depraved individuals" that murdered George Floyd: it's the system that gave those murderers badges and guns and qualified immunity.
Cory Doctorow

Reflecting on all those years of SimCity brainwashing, where you can demolish homes for a highway and no one's life is ruined. Where crime happens for no real reason — just a function of population—and paying for police stations makes it magically disappear and everyone is happier.
Daniel P. Huffman @pinakographos

If we banned domestic abusers from possessing firearms, about 40% of cops would no longer be allowed to carry a gun.
Joshua 4 Congress

Every word police utter and report they write should be considered to be under oath. Any misstatement of fact by an officer of the law is perjury and should be immediate grounds for dismissal. How did we get to this point where lying by cops is tolerated?
Kendal Killian

ok fine I have been convinced "defund" is both too strident and abstract, so I'm gonna move to a compromise platform of police demobilization, disarmament and truth and reconciliation commissions combined with reparations and universal employment under a 75% wealth tax. hows that
@PatBlanchfield

Every bartender I've ever met is better at de-escalating conflict than the police.
Lucie Steiner

You realize police forces around the country have just been holding up cities for protection money for decades, right? And you realize their monopoly over funds has destroyed social services that would've helped curb crime without them and saved lives and property anyway, right? Cut police funding and invest in communities. Stop throwing our money away for fear and white supremacist paranoia and fund education, infrastructure, social services, and human projects.
Jared Yates Sexton

I really want to see cost of average arrest, prosecution, jail for things we most often don't need to arrest for, and that go virtually unenforced among richer, white people. Like costs for arrest for drug use, drunken tussle, mental health crisis, weapons possess, prostitution
kar nels

defunding the chicago police department definitely doesn't seem that radical when you remember that they closed down 60 public schools and half the city's mental health clinics to spare corporations from paying taxes.
@loveformypeople

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. We have trained a ton of radicalized men that will soon be unemployed and they all likely have massive weapon caches at home.
@mikesonn

People twisting themselves in knots over the "Defund Police" slogan when the GOP slogan, to great success for many decades, has been "Defund Healthcare, Education, Social Security, Unemployment, Public Transit!" Maybe if we just tell people they'd get a tax cut that would do it?
@DougScha

"Defund the police? Impossible!" they cried as they defunded education, healthcare, social security, welfare, planned parenthood, public transit...
@batwingdings

Black people been talking about the problem with police brutality since the police were first formed. White people are the recipients of that shit for less than two weeks and now we got a major city disbanding their police force. Wow.
@crissles

Cities are just police departments with some underfunded services on the side:


Kailash Srinivasan

Defunding the police sounds radical until you realize realize we’ve been defunding education for years.
T.J. McKay

The difference between a police union and a real union is that when a steelworker shoves a 75-year-old man to the concrete and cracks his skull, the steelworker goes to jail.
Zach Carter

Does anyone know who took this photo because it deserves an award:


Diego Lopez

i am by no means an expert in policing or criminal justice. but even from the brief fieldwork i did in police departments, i am not kidding when i say that i have never studied a system designed to be *more* resistant to reform than police departments.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright

The cops are rioting in NYC. de Blasio and Cuomo aren't doing anything to stop them. This isn't just a Republican problem.
Max Berger

The police kneeling with and hugging protesters is like when your abusive boyfriend brings you flowers after hurting you. when he makes a grand gesture of love in front of your friends. It’s to pressure you into forgiveness, it’s manipulation, it’s abuse. Don’t fall for it.
@TheBlackLayers

I hate to be so on-brand, but one easy, concrete step we could take towards de-policing society would be installing speed and red-light cameras and ending random traffic stops
Henry Grabar

Imagine living in a country that it took months to respond to a pandemic and seconds to militarize the police against its citizens
Solomon Georgio

everyone saying that responding to a murder of one of your own with some aimless property damage and petty theft is completely indefensible: i have a few questions for you about our ongoing 20-year war in the middle east
eevee

Each time I've been called for jury duty here in Manhattan, defense inevitably gets to "Do you think that the police always tell the truth?" and each time I've honestly answered "No," and so the last time I was on a jury was 1985.
Jack Womack

ComicsGate: Modern comics are too political
MAD Magazine, 1970: Hold my sign:


Andrew Farago

When we say police abolition we do not mean abandoning all tasks currently performed by the police. We mean turning those tasks over to appropriate professionals (and who do not rely on violence).
@ExileTheology

Rubber bullets are not a safe alternative to lethal force. Often they ARE lethal or debilitating. 3% of people hit by them die from the injury, and 15% are permanently injured. They should not be used on people exercising their 1st Amendment rights.
Julián Castro

Wild seeing the same people who screamed that shutting down hair salons was some Nazi shit now saying that protesters deserve to be brutalized by the state for staying out past curfew.
Joshua Holland

Liberals have talked for years about federal military complex as bloated and sucking $$ from the community investments needed most, but haven't been willing to talk about our own backyards an municipal/state policing. Young BIPOC activists changed this narrative @reclaimtheblock
Elizabeth Glidden

17 kids get shot to death at school: (*nothing*)
3,000 Americans die in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria: (*nothing*)
100,000 die in a pandemic: (*nothing*)
People protest police for strangling a Black man: whoa whoa WHOA, let's get the Army out there for this
Greg Greene

conservatives a month ago: “why should we listen to the government and stay home? you are all sheep, this is a free country!”
conservatives today: “if you just follow the government mandated curfew, the paramilitary police stormtroopers won’t shoot you in the face, it’s simple”
@heycrisp

Some of the dudes who seemed super into liberty and free speech when they were talking about a dean’s email about Halloween costumes are weirdly silent about cops tear gassing peaceful protestors. What gives?
Mehrsa Baradaran

This is going to be a superficial analogy because I don’t really know the details, but: as part of bringing an end to the Troubles, Northern Ireland disbanded the police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and started over. We need something like that
Adam Miller @ajm6792

There were not as many comments on statues and monuments:

America is a Confederate monument
michaelharriot

The president, who promised lengthy prison sentences for anyone who damages a monument, has been dismantling and desecrating protected monuments since he took office.
Chris D'Angelo

Philadelphia is removing a Columbus statue after multiple violent attacks instigated by guys protecting the statue. A truly incredible self-own.
Bradford Pearson

Fun fact: Gay marriage has now been around longer than the Confederacy.
Keith Edwards

I guarantee people are learning more about history reading about why statues are being torn down than they ever learned by looking at those statues.
Amanda Marcotte

"But you're erasing history!" -- usually said by a white person upset that actual history is being shared and a previously venerated icon turns out to be an asshole
Newfangled Dad

Quick reminder that the government closed almost 800 public libraries from 2010. These complaints that removing statues erases our history would have been useful when they literally were getting rid of our access to history books.
@JamesManuell

If the US really wants to get real about abolishing monuments to slavers how about the electoral college?
Hanna Jameson

Germany doesn’t have Nazi monuments to “remind” citizens of their history. Instead, they have memorials for the 6 million Jews and others who were murdered. The U.S. doesn’t need statues of confederate generals to “remind” us. We need monuments for Nat Turner and Harriet Tubman.
Padma Lakshmi

Removing statues and renaming buildings is *not* erasing history.
Removing statues and renaming buildings is *refusing to celebrate* the hatred and violences of our past.
Paul Thomas

This was vandalism:


Aaron the Anthropologist @Anarchopology

I still can't believe that Cuomo said that Columbus is a source of Italian-American pride when there are so many other people who can be just that: Caravaggio? Da Vinci? Alighieri? Versace? Sophia Loren? Like come on. Don't give us that crap.
Morgan Jerkins

For the umpteenth time: There’s a huge difference between honoring historical figures in spite of their sins (Washington, Jefferson, etc.), and honoring historical figures because of their sins (Lee, Davis, Forrest, etc.).
Radley Balko

You're not allowed to complain about participation trophies if you fly the original American participation trophy: the Confederate flag.
Sunrise Movement

Nobody wants Columbus to be forgotten from History they want to treat him like the monster he was
@PandaWhoIsPink1

Doesn’t the fact that so many people are just discovering their statues are of horrific racists kind of prove they weren’t actually teaching anyone history?
@TheAndrewNadeau

If you think tearing down a statue of Christopher Columbus is bad, wait until I tell you what Christopher Columbus did.
Charlotte Clymer

Let’s learn some MN history. The Columbus Statue on the MN Capitol Grounds was installed in 1931. Also in 1931? The height of Klan activity in MN. Also the year MN State Auditor King, who was a card-carrying KKK member, was elected.
Erin Maye Quade

It’s weird how the same people who want to cancel immigration are really angry that indigenous people knocked down a statue of a guy from a foreign country.
@mrotzie

If you're upset about Jefferson Davis remember that statues of the bad guy who lost the war are literally the visual device that they use in movies to reveal that you fucked up your time travel
Daniel Kibblesmith

“You’re erasing history” is consistently the most Orwellian argument of racists and bigots who erected the statues in the first place specifically to erase the stains those people left on history. No one is a erasing history; they’re erasing your lies.
August J. Pollak

"Things should change but it is wrong to change them." Liberalism in a nutshell:


@MediocreDave

One reason people insist that you use the proper channels to change things is because they have control of the proper channels and they’re confident it won’t work
Jon Stone

Confederate statues are literally monuments to losers, but please tell me more about how it’s liberals who want participation trophies.
The Volatile Mermaid @OhNoSheTwitnt

Every confederate statue is a place we could put a fiberglass dinosaur.
1. Also important historical figures
2. Also all got killed
3. Didn’t declare war on the U.S. (yet)
Daniel Kibblesmith

If you’re one of the people who thinks throwing a statue of Edward Colston into the sea is bad, wait until you find out about the 19,000 slaves who died whilst his company transported them to the Caribbean.
James Felton

This nation made monuments of slave traders and then told black people to get over slavery.
Bev Gooden

For once, there were just a few on sexism, misogyny, and toxic masculinity:

Sometimes I see someone change "man-made disaster" to "human-made disaster" and I always think... no, no man-made is correct.
Dr. Samantha Montano

The word "muse" was invented to not pay women for ideas, right?
Hana Michels

*whispers* Biden is running the Hillary campaign and it will probably win in a landslide because the only thing that really mattered in 2016 was misogyny
@coldlawgic

And hey, remember we're still in a pandemic? And it's getting worse again as the month is ending?

Here's a quick visual summary of what got us here:


Rishi Desai

The rush to open bars (can’t wear masks, minimal social value) while being super-cautious about schools (masking possible, large benefits) is absurd but it’s a straightforward consequence of GOP fiscal policy hanging state/local governments out to dry.
Matthew Yglesias

Any zombie movie that doesn't have hordes of people running towards the zombies to deliberately get bitten because they're convinced it's a liberal hoax is going to look pretty unrealistic now.
@CaseyExplosion

85 cases, from a single restaurant, that followed spacing guidelines, in a state with relatively low transmission. I’m very pessimistic that there’s any safe way to reopen indoor dining. Capping occupancy won’t cut it. Outdoor and carry out only for now.
@JeremyKonyndyk

“we opened the businesses so we could kick their workers off unemployment, not so you would GO to them!!!!”
@aherman2006

If the USA has 3% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s COVID cases and is traveling south at 65 MPH, and Trump has 50 sexual assault allegations and 5 kids by 3 wives and is traveling east at 45 MPH, what’s it going to take for you to vote for him out of office?
The Volatile Mermaid @OhNoSheTwitnt

Science is not our missing ingredient in beating this virus. Empathy is.
Andy Slavitt

Nigel Farage was given special permission to enter the US for Trump's Tulsa rally, despite a ban on travel from the UK, after DHS officials determined it "would be in the national interest"
Jon Swaine

Our acceptance of mass death in America (guns, cars, COVID etc) like nothing can be done because of freedom is insane. Plenty of places who even outpace us on freedom indices have fixed this shit.
@DougScha

Alex Zalben:


@azalben
·
The rush to justify Covid deaths as only people with pre-existing conditions is crass and places a stigma on health and implies that their deaths are somehow less than an otherwise"healthy" person
Lyz Lenz

So we are definitely going with 'recovery' as the word to describe a return to the state of permanent crisis that defined the pre-lockdown era?
Chris Shaw @kalahar1

Prisons in 21 states have gotten *more crowded* even as the number of those imprisoned has *declined.* It’s because states have been closing prisons — to save $$ — faster than they’re letting people out. One result: Massive COVID outbreaks.
Eric Umansky

PSA: The subtext of herd immunity is culling.
@lizbon

My patient works at a homeless shelter in Brooklyn. Tearfully she told me every resident there got COVID in April. Every single one. More than 20 died. No one had a funeral. No one called. No media reported about it. Think about that. They just disappeared.
Haitham Ahmed, MD, MPH

Seriously: Every place opening up or loosening restrictions is forcing low-wage workers back into unsafe conditions so that folks with money can get back to “normal” life.
Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones

The Covid numbers are rising because the political apparatus of the US as a whole was simply unwilling to meet a pandemic with the baseline action of "pay people to stay mostly indoors for 4 months," or the follow-on of establishing comprehensive testing and tracing.
Kelsey D. Atherton

Nothing has changed in terms of the pandemic. If we shouldn't have been open in mid-March then we shouldn't be opening anything now, literally nothing has changed except that the government doesn't want to send you any more checks and so is just giving up
@PlanetofFinks

The Republican Party has dedicated 2020 to arguing that senior citizens have to be sacrificed to the cannibalistic economy during a pandemic and if they get in the way of marauding police they should expect to end up bleeding on the pavement and left for dead.
Jared Yates Sexton

Trump's labor secretary confirms OSHA has only brought one citation against employers nationwide during the pandemic
Jeff Stein

There are more maskless people in grocery stores and restaurants right now than at protests. Just pointing that out for when the "Reopen!" people blame any COVID spikes on Black Lives Matter.
Zach Heltzel

How are you gonna say All Lives Matter when just two months ago you wanted to sacrifice your grandma for the economy?
@sdellag

Within the COVID topic, there was the subtopic of masks:

Extremely mysterious how masks were an affront to liberty when the virus was tearing through communities of color in the Northeast, and are now a pragmatic protective measure as the virus explodes in key Sunbelt battleground states, gee, must be a coincidence.
Alex Schieferdecker

The unacceptable sacrifice isn't wearing a mask, it's acknowledging that science and progressives are right. THAT is the bridge too far, being compelled to signal, through one's behavior, over and over again, that Trump and his cabal were catastrophically wrong.
Lori K. Brown @LKB64

O2 kinetic size is about 350pm, N95 mask filters down to .3 microns. So, we are looking at a molecule that’s 1000–10,000 times smaller than the filter size. That’s like saying that a soccer goal net is stopping grains of sand blowing through.
Seamus Blackley

this mask pushback confirms my suspicion it truly is just an all-in mentality with some folks. whatever we want, they’re always gonna want the other thing. can’t even agree on a fucking plague
@robwhisman

I know masks aren’t exactly comfortable, but neither are bras, and a good portion of the population wears those regularly for far less important reasons.
Ashley Bissette Sumerel

I keep seeing couples where just one of the two is wearing a mask... and why. And yes, it’s always the man who isn’t wearing a mask.
Alex @mplsalex

Only in America is wearing a mask deemed too burdensome but people are forced to wait in line for 5 hours to vote
Ari Berman

Meanwhile, climate change continues (and renewable energy solutions still exist):

South Pole warming 3x faster than the rest of the globe, new study finds
Bill McKibben

Fracking, overall, has been an incredible money loser for the companies doing it. Meanwhile, the companies deploying solar and wind have made steady, predictable returns.
Ramez Naam

To end the climate emergency, we need to fix the systems that make us think that some lives are worth less than others, and that the exploitation – of people, or resources – is ever ok. Climate change is not about emissions. It's about justice:


Eric Holthaus

I hope seeing how the US has responded to coronavirus has quashed any remaining notion that climate action depends on facts, reason, persuasion, or even appeal to personal interests. You want change, take power. Everything else is vapor.
David Roberts @drvox

PSA: if you’re worried about CO2 accumulation from masks, our climate crisis is going to blow your mind
Arjun Arya, MD, MSc.

U.S. shale has lost $300 billion in 15 years, and "peaked without ever making money"
Nick Cunningham

Yes but a handful of CEOs got rich, and a bunch of industry shills got to yell about "energy independence" for a decade or so, so it wasn't all bad.
Chris Nelder

The Green New Deal isn’t a radical idea. Continuing to let the Arctic cook to boost fossil fuel industry profits is a radical idea.
Mondaire Jones

Siberian town tops 100 degrees F, the hottest temperature ever recorded north of the Arctic Circle. This scares me, I have to say.
Bill McKibben

The theory we can rely on billions of people doing everything they can in their own lives to stem the climate crisis feels like it's been pretty decisively refuted by the fact that hundreds of millions of people won't even put a cheap cloth mask on to save their neighbor's life. We're not going to save civilization on a volunteer basis, in our free time, when we feel like it and it doesn't cost too much.
Alex Steffen

Of course we can address climate change and inequity at the same time. You think we got here by distinct tracks, the department of damaging the climate and the department of structural inequity? One internally consistent worldview adhered to by those in power got us here.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

Future people don't get to choose what future they'll live in. We're deciding for them, now. Our choices will be effectively irreversible:


Alex Steffen

Who in the USA is concerned about climate change?
49% of Whites
57% of Blacks
70% of Latinx
Imagine what would be possible if POC didn’t have to deal with racism and could devote that energy to
Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

Climate change is dire and we can't get any sort of hold on planetary systems unless we have the beginnings of a more equitable and just society. That means we have to find solutions that both sequester carbon, replace agriculture, & repair & address racial and economic justice.
BuildSoil via One Million Mixed-Species Chestnuts.

Setting emissions targets in the distant future (2030, or 2050) is suicidal. Governments have no reason to care about such targets. The *only* target that matters is an immediate cap on fossil fuel use and legally binding objectives for annual decline.
Jason Hickel

And livable cities and sustainable transportation are still being talked about:

Public transportation should be free. That’s why Ayanna Pressley and I introduced the Freedom to Move Act to support fare-free public transit and guarantee the freedom of mobility for all—a freedom that is critical to achieving social and economic justice.
Ed Markey

Aspirations: Rotterdam is transforming seven iconic spaces, removing cars, adding nature and creating places ‘to be’ recognizing that the city landscape needs more places for people. This is the city of the future:


Jennifer Keesmaat

“Car owners have mistaken their century-long domination over pedestrians for a right rather than a privilege. The truth is cities are not doing nearly enough to restore streets for pedestrian use, and it’s the pedestrians who should be furious.” Quoting a story about Madrid in the New York Times
Brent Toderian

Apropos of nothing, it should be illegal/frowned upon/discouraged for anyone to build 6/7+ lane pedestrian crossings that don't have median islands at least. We know that's not safe, esp. for slower moving groups. You shouldn't have to be an olympian to cross the street.
Angie Schmitt

Eliminating parking minimums is the single easiest and cheapest thing your city probably hasn't done to fight climate change.
@reubencollins

When suburbanites fight against any public space near their houses, they are using car access as an invisible way to create a gated community.
Angie Schmitt

No renewable energy investment can change the fact that these needlessly wide neighborhood streets get really, really hot in the sun. Parking lanes are climate injustice:


@ban_SUVs

Funny how building affordable housing or striping a bike lane requires a decade of hearings and approvals and lawsuits and temporary restraining orders, but if cops want to commandeer an entire street for parking or build a barbed-wire-covered wall across the fucking sidewalk, it's up in a couple days.
Neptune

'The motor vehicle is like a cuckoo in the nest of the urban environment; it cannot share the space without murdering its companions.' Powerful words from @crisortunity
@CirclingBear

Bike lanes are not tools of oppression. That would be forcing people to own cars in order to work, eat, go to school and access health care, while poisoning their own air.
Mary Morse Marti

Wish we had something like this in the US. "A trip with the kids or shopping without a car? Apply now to test the Cargoroo bicycles for free for two weeks":


Brandon Lust

As we lurch toward progress, do not forget that cars, trucks and the infrastructure that supports them bankrupts households and poisons the most vulnerable and that redesigning our transportation system for bicycles, trains, and feet is imperative to wealth building.
Mary Morse Marti

Car tires —28%:


Brandon Lust (graphic from World Economic Forum)

There were several about media criticism (including criticism of social media platforms):

“Would Facebook have provided a platform for Hitler?” Bickert once asked in memo when weighing whether or not take down Trump’s anti-Muslim call to violence years ago. They decided the answer to that question was an enthusiastic yes.
@BrandingBrandi

tl;dr: Facebook's VP for Global Public Policy clerked for Scalia, was a part of "Brooks Brothers Riot" that stole 2000 election, worked 8 years in the Bush administration, and was a lobbyist for the coal industry. In other words, a normal Republican.
@mateosfo

NPR is news for people who are okay with war and genocide as long as the paperwork is filled out correctly.
Aren R. LeBrun @proustmalone

A note to media folks: If your newspaper or outlet is no longer covering the *enormous* BLM protests because they're peaceful now, question why the news business fetishizes blood and violence and ignores racial justice movements otherwise.
Heidi N. Moore @moorehn

I hate that "diversity" in newsrooms is framed as a social justice issue and not a journalistic failure. It should be clear: Out-of-touch white publicationss spent decades ignoring police brutality bc their limited experience with police blinded them to what policing looks like for black people
Jack Herrera

Extremely noticeable that cable news spent the early days of protests covering them nonstop while condemning the burning and looting and then stopped covering the ongoing protests once there was no burning and looting
Hamilton Nolan

When we were kids, our parents told us watching too much TV would rot our brains, and the internet was full of creeps. Now they get all their news from FOX or MSNBC and a FB group called “WAKE UP SHEEPLE.” I guess they were right.
Sunrise Movement

Wealth inequality, wage theft, and a better way to run an economy:

Shame on every centrist who just wants to return to normal.
Normal means 87 million are underinsured or uninsured.
Normal means the Black-white wealth gap hasn’t changed since 1968.
Normal means more war, more inequality and more injustice.
Fuck normal. WE NEED A BETTER WORLD!
@ProudSocialist

It's almost as if we know exactly what to do to address every single problem facing our country and our world, but we actively refuse to do it because it might require the richest and most powerful people to not have a fifth vacation mansion.
David Sirota

Apparently, it's only looting if you steal less than $500 worth of goods and actually put in some physical labor. Rich people are just doing "capitalism."
Hari Kondabolu

Capitalism sells itself as the height of Reason. But there is nothing rational about an economic model that systematically undermines the web of life on which humanity itself depends.
Jason Hickel

Hedge fund investors are suckers. Fascinating paper shows that when a hedge fund makes $1, the client only gets 36 cents.
Jesse Eisinger

Weird that I haven’t bought an avocado toast in more than three months and I still don’t have the down payment for a house.
Sophie Vershbow

The quote ringing over and over in my mind in 2020 is that good will is not public policy. Good landlords aren’t the same as rights under the law. Good cops aren’t the same as actual experienced safety everywhere. Good businesses aren’t universal guarantees against wage theft/virus spread. I don’t want your one-off stories about good actors. I want a world where everyone’s health, safety and dignity is fully enforceable under the law, and not enforced thru the machine of policing/mass incarceration. We live in a world built to guarantee wealth/health of a select few.
Mitra Jalali

And finally, as always, the best of the rest:

Me: every one of my 40 browser tabs is precious I couldn't possibly narrow these down
Also me when my computer crashes and the tabs don't recover: I can't remember a single tab I had open
Nneoma Adaku @theemdphd

Again, the two Supreme Court justices accused of sexual assault and harassment have voted to uphold a law that tells women, sorry, you're not in charge of the most intimate parts of your own body.
Jill Filipovic

5% of Americans say they feel things in America today, generally speaking, are going "very well" via new CBS poll.
Ryan Struyk

This is the corner of a block of balsa wood as seen under a scanning electron microscope: balsa wood’s cells are big and thin-walled, so that the ratio of solid matter to open space is very small. Only about 40% of the volume of the wood is solid substance:


@Rainmaker1973

“you’ll get more conservative when you’re older” were words spoken by the more privileged of a generation who were actually saying “i expect that you, like me, will acquire wealth and property as you age, and therefore stop desiring to challenge that status quo”
@jessfromonline

boomers got more conservative as they got older and attributed that to age instead of accumulated wealth and a total lack of immunity to corporate news propaganda. then they voted in politicians who froze wages & deregulated the economy until it exploded
@shaun_vids

Jesus never mentioned gay people or abortions, but he made it 100% clear that he does not allow divorce and remarriage. Of course, nearly all churches ignore that.
almightygod

My advice: Share the work you find beautiful and meaningful more often than you announce your rejection of the work you dislike.
Imani Perry

People get mad about new acronyms like BIPOC but expect you to understand what a Presbyterian is
@lodgepolepines

This figure is pretty scary. The share of residential investment going into renovation jumped dramatically after the Great Recession and stayed there. Basically, we replaced the construction of new housing with home-flipping and owner occupancy of rental units:


@ShaneDPhillips

Allyship is prone to fatigue, but solidarity has some staying power.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

What if politics was about making the world a better place and not about insisting it can’t be any better?
Zach Carter

Every marriage has one person who doom scrolls and reads headlines out loud pre-coffee, and another person who is begging them to stop
@Almost_Anna

The Klamath River was the third largest salmon run in the world until shortly after WW2. The US dammed it up to irrigate farmland that can never, ever possibly make as much food as that salmon run did. Before industrial meat, US cities used to get most of their protein from fisheries. This whole "food comes from farms" thing? The "cities depend on the countryside for food"? That's actually kind of a recent development.
Dr Sarah Taber

Most people don’t know how to self educate because they spend their formative years being conditioned by school which forces passivity in learning. For the most part, we socialize education as something done to you, not something you control.
Mother Bae I @tiersaj

The US is obsessed with personal responsibility for systemic problems that require systemic solutions. You’re supposed to bear the brunt of the problem, take the blame for causing it, and also solve it all on your own.
Amy Westervelt

“Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy” -Wendell Berry
Alfie Kohn

anti-discrimination laws are literally meaningless if we don't also abolish at-will employment. "i'm not firing you because you're trans, i'm firing you because uhhhhhh you missed a spot while mopping last night"
JordantheKitty

Alito says that "sex" must be defined exactly the way that lawmakers understood that term in 1964. I'm skeptical he'll apply that same rule to defining what counts as "arms" when reading the Second Amendment.
Adam Winkler

The Bundy crew still grazes on federal land without paying fees -- ain't no "law and order" for them.
Dean Baker

History is actually very radicalizing, which helps explain why so much effort is expended in suppressing real knowledge of it
Ben Tarnoff

people get so weird and cagey whenever you talk about letting incarcerated people vote like what do you think they’re gonna do........ write in “murder should be legal” on their ballot and then suddenly lawmakers will be like “well my hands are tied. murder is legal now”
@hanabryanne

"Your binky, my liege?" #medievaltwitter:


Emily Steiner @PiersatPenn

Basically my brain is a third generalized anxiety, a third Ursula LeGuin and a third Ecology.
BuildSoil via One Million Mixed-Species Chestnuts.

My children are going to make a little high school coven of theater goths so very happy someday.
Maggie Koerth

My plan:
1) Set the rules so no one can follow them.
2) Threaten to eternally torture everyone who breaks even one rule,
3) Watch humans kill My Son/Self.
4) Now I’ll only torture ALMOST all people.
You’re welcome!
almightygod

Absurdity is the state assigning you The Grapes of Wrath at 16 and tear gassing you at 26 for understanding it.
Aren R. LeBrun @proustmalone

Was just reminded of this Census study from 2011 showing that people who claim to work 75 hours a week or more typically actually work 50 hours a week.
Josh Barro

I kinda think institutions work the opposite of the famous Tolstoy line: all bad institutions are the same; every good institution is good in its own way.
@csilverandgold

Sunlight is a bad disinfectant. Not getting infected in the first place is an excellent plan
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

If you think antifa’s bad, wait until you find out about fascists.
@kashanacauley

Future historians will be asked which quarter of 2020 they specialize in.
David Burr Gerrard