I forgot it was the end of the month and therefore time for a Twitter round-up until after I had posted yesterday, so here is September 2021 a day or two late.
Let's see, what were the month's major stories? The failed California governor's recall election, movement toward funding climate justice in Congress, covid stuff, stopping Line 3, Texas (with its abortion law, voter suppression and gerrymandering and other revanchisms), plus a lot on my usual topics of the climate crisis, livable cities and white supremacy. Oh yeah, and the 20th anniversary of 9/11.
Reading back through these, I felt more gut-punches than in an average month. Or maybe I was in a sensitive mood.
Everything below the line is a quote, attributed immediately afterward, and listed generally in reverse chronological order.
__
Safety professionals who object to context-appropriate treatments that reduce speed/speeding and the severity of injuries from speed related crashes... should reassess their role in the profession and value they bring to people they serve.
Dongho Chang
without impugning the amazing efforts of the citizens willing to engage in such efforts, at this point politicians and senior officials who say they need a walking tour to grasp the extent of the problem of traffic violence are trolling us. they do these exercises (walking tours, hearings, community engagement, etc.) to release political pressure. people are mad and they think they need to make an ostentatious show of "doing something" long enough for the heat to dissipate. then they do nothing. it's bullshit. i have nothing but respect for the citizens who engage in these activities in good faith, and who knows, maybe this time it will work, but i am **so angry** that our politicians and their DOT lackeys waste activists' precious time with these charades of pretending to care.
Peter Krupa
2021 and we’re still being ruled by coal barons but sure the people who want to live are radicals
Amy Westervelt
"Fiscal conservative, social liberal" is a cop out. It means you are treating employees with the minimum amount of respect and don't care if the world kicks the crap out of them on the way home... or they can't marry... or adopt... or.. anything.
Steve Marmel
"Socially liberal, fiscally conservative" translates to, "I'm in favor of all freedom that doesn't hurt my stock portfolio."
Steven Brust
I
have had MULTIPLE libertarians say directly to my face that they would
prefer a dictator who respected private property over a democracy that
taxes people for socialist goals.
Jonathan Roth @RothAnim
They
are so hostile to the idea of public goods and forward social value
they are now reflexively opposed to science, factual data, and pursuit
of knowledge itself. The low tax small government freedom agenda is, will always remain anti social innumerate horseshit.
@nongnonghead
With a potential big strike across film and television on the horizon, now is a great time to remember the 1941 Disney animators’ strike — and the absolute best-looking picket signs in US labor history. Enjoy.
@zackpattin_ (more photos in the original tweet)
It's nuts that our entire transportation system is built around what white men in the 50s wanted. Like commuting from/between the suburbs by car at 8am and 5pm DOMINATES our every decision as planners and designers.
@BicycleHannah
This. But also...our entire land use system is built around what white women in the 50s wanted (or what white men wanted for them): a big house in the suburbs, safe from the perils and distractions of urban life.
The transportation system followed suit.
@DrTCombs
how are Prince and David Bowie gone but Henry Kissinger is still with us
Tom Tomorrow
My new tag line is, "We are killing millions of people in the global south by perpetuating driving as a form of transportation." I don't think people like it much.
@BicycleHannah
A catastrophic failure of US journalism and politics is that something like Biden's 10-year, $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill is not called a $350 billion annual bill...but the Pentagon's budget, which will exceed $7.5 trillion over a decade, is called a $750 billion annual bill
Dr. Steven W. Thrasher @thrasherxy
The House by an overwhelming bipartisan margin approved a $778 billion
military budget. That roughly translates to ~$8 trillion over 10 years;
or, put another way... More than double the cost of the Biden safety net
+ climate package of $3.5T over a decade.
Jeff Stein
Questionable advice:
@reubencollins
I’m going to write a whole book where I bravely stand up for puppies and sunsets! The people aren’t ready for my brave truth, but damn it it needs to be said! Steven Pinker is just like when politicians say their favourite book is the bible and he does. not. see it.
Sarah Grynpas
Driver's training should include a mandatory two-hour module of biking on city streets. It would not fail to give soon-to-be drivers a visceral sense of how easy it is to kill someone with a car. When that two tons of metal is two feet away from you at 45 mph, it gets real.
Jason Segedy
We have this derogatory term "jaywalking" for pedestrians who won't conform to our impossible to follow rules. But we don't even have a term for a much more dangerous driver behavior. Passing a car that yielded to a pedestrian in a crosswalk
Angie Schmitt
NEW: A leaked membership list from the Oath Keepers militia includes those who used official government and military emails. Users stem from the Army, Navy, and Coast Guard as well as the FAA, DHS, NASA and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Mikael Thalen
The auto industry is free to design, market, and sell these products to the general public for enormous profit. The citizens are then left paying the bill to try and regulate the carnage that takes place on our public streets.
Brandon Lust @AmericanFietser
“In counties where Trump received at least 70% of the vote, COVID has killed 47 out of every 100,000 people since the end of June. In counties where Trump won less than 32% of the vote, the number is 10 out of 100,000.”
Bill Grueskin
95% of Texas population growth in the last decade came from communities of color and the state gained gained 11 Hispanic residents for every new white resident, but the new GOP congressional map doesn't create any new majority Hispanic districts. This is what gerrymandering looks like.
Ari Berman
The GOP for decades laser focused on the Supreme Court and state legislatures. They now control 6/9 SCOTUS seats and majority of state gov't. Now they are shifting focus to taking control of school boards, which are super powerful locally. We have to get ahead of this Democrats!
Amy Siskind
“Green growth” is the fairy tale they hope will lull us to sleep as the world burns.
Jason Hickel
I used to think that I needed a car because I had small kids. What I really needed was a safe bike lane and a rain coat.
Dr. Natalia Barbour
56% of surveyed young people said "humanity was doomed" due to climate change:
Hannah Ritchie
Holy moly. These are revolutionary conditions.
Margaret Klein Salamon, PhD @ClimatePsych
Environmental campaigners taking direct action are dismissed as mad and bad by people who have not seen what they have seen: the gathering collapse of our life support systems. Once you understand the enormity of what we face, you'll see them as the heroes they are.
George Monbiot
The white vaccine misinformation narrative, largely reported for white audiences by white reporters writing about white people, is rendering people of color who haven't vaxxed for reasons unrelated to misinformation invisible.
Aura Bogado
Boys don’t cry. They commit mass shootings.
Hari Kondabolu
90% of machine learning is burning down a forest so that you can train a computer to do phrenology
jacqueline @cooljqln
We spent decades closing neighborhood schools and consolidating classes into buildings people can't just walk to. And now, in the wake of bus driver shortages, many cities struggle to get their kids to school.
Strong Towns
It’s 2021 and the federal minimum wage is $7.25. Just, like, if you were wondering what’s wrong with America
Adam Miller @ajm6792
The argument that police can't do their jobs unless they are allowed to abuse, brutalize and murder without protest is an authoritarian argument. We can either have unaccountable police power or a free society. We cannot have both.
Phillipe Copeland @GandalfDaBlac
Dutch men in traditional trousers, 1900:
History In Pictures
Does anyone else miss the days when people got arrested for brandishing weapons in public?
@ResistAmerica
Sociologist Jessica Calarco has observed that, while other nations have social safety nets, the U.S. chooses to rely on women. "It was the kind of statement that knocks you back a step for how obvious, complex and direct it is," writes Tressie McMillan Cottom
New York Times Opinion
Media should stop referring to voting laws in places like Texas as “strict.” They are not strict, they are racist and suppressive.
Kaivan Shroff
I cannot handle the phrase “the reality is” while the speaker goes on to name something that is really NOT a predictive nor a physical reality. The actual reality is we’re going to experience radical change beyond our previous experiences, regardless of whether we accept that. It’s very confusing, this planning allegiance to past observed numbers (the most generous take) instead of actual observable conditions. How are cities regularly subcontracting out design/planning projects for hundreds of thousands of dollars that are TOTALLY MAKE BELIEVE?!
@happifydesign
Overall, the reduction in cars traveling in Paris has been dramatic, dropping by 44%. “Out of 100 cars circulating in Paris in 2002, 56 remain.”
Queen Anne Greenways
Just realized that people don't understand that desperation is the cause of crime spikes in a pandemic because they don't get that desperation is the cause of most crime, in general. They really just think wealthy people are more moral. Obviously a society that teaches people that wealthy people got what they have by being good, hard workers, also teaches that "criminals" are bad people who make bad choices, not people suffering because of system that was designed to keep them at the bottom.
ashley fairbanks @ziibiing
Nitrous oxide (N₂O) is the third most important GHG. It is 298 times more
effective at trapping heat than CO₂ (over 100 years), it has a lifetime
of ~116 years, has had a 30% increase in the last 30 years, and 70% is
from agriculture:
Glen Peters
Putting out there: maybe we should tax speed, given its direct relationship to public health / fatal collisions.
Warren Logan
The European Central Bank calculated the potential impact of climate change over the next 30 years on 4 million companies and 1,600 banks in Europe. It concludes that mitigating climate change in advance will cost FAR less than dealing with its effects. Which, I know, duh, but still. It's the ECB.
David Roberts @drvolts
If we save people time on their commutes — and we spend billions to do this — their commutes don't get any shorter because they just move farther away and purchase more yard. This is the logical endpoint of every street in the US once we apply standard traffic engineering dogma. The formulas are designed to produce this complete hellscape every time. In traffic engineering, 49 seconds of delay to make a left turn or something will be "level of service" E — in other words, unacceptable. But 1.5 minutes to cross the street: 100% acceptable. Longer even:
Angie Schmitt
A preoccupation with “wokeness” represents cishet white men ragecrying that they have to compete on a nearly even playing field with the rest of us despite having no skills other than ragecrying that they have to compete on a nearly even playing field with the rest of us.
@MadelineTraino1
Can we ban referring to basic human needs or civic rights—public health, reproductive freedom, bodily autonomy, climate policy, voting access—as “social issues”?!
Dan Berger
People who are indifferent as to whether huge swaths of the planet become uninhabitable probably shouldn't be called moderates
Kate Aronoff
We have a climate crisis and a plastic pollution problem. Why is it still legal to sell coffee not only in single-use cups but at a drive through? What is seriously wrong with us?
Terri Chu
I sure hope there's still a softer side of Sears.
@4SLars
“In just two years, [Seville, Spain] transformed a city with almost no cyclists, to a city where bikes have a central role... The secret was treating cycling like transportation — building an entire network of connected lanes, instead of a few disconnected lanes...”
Brent Toderian
Sometimes I feel silly riding around my four seater e-trike without my kids like wow this is too much bike for just one adult... and then I remember that cars exist
Elise Cote @EliseVelaz9
If you’re prioritizing the existing character and context of low-density, single-use zoning in your planning, then you’re likely prioritizing continued car dependency, social and economic segregation, poor public health, high public costs, and continued fueling of the climate crisis.
Brent Toderian
Me: biking in the rain so my kids can grow up on a habitable planet
Them: idling their truck on the sidewalk Upside-down face
Everything is fine!
Madeleine Bonsma-Fisher
The Brooklyn Bridge ... hit peak capacity of 426,000 crossings a day in 1907. The bridge’s capacity has declined by an enormous amount since transit was replaced by car lanes.
James Szypula @YokohamaRides
The advantage transit has over cars for moving people isn’t just theoretical. When NYC bridges were built for transit, they generally carried *twice as many people* per day as they do now with cars.
Lou Miranda @TheNewLou
Watching the same people who are supposedly so concerned about censorship on college campuses (and get taken seriously!) lead the charge to literally ban books from secondary school is so wild.
Angie Schmitt
In 1893, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner calculated that the US owed Black people ~ $40B for the free labor of enslavement. That would be $1,215,853,333,333.33 ($1.2 Trillion) today with inflation. #reparations
Tami Sawyer
Did you know mobile home "mortgages" are treated like car loans? Even in the best market, rates are like 5 full percentage points more than a traditional home. Along with land rental and other fees, the payments end up nearly the same as a mortgage for a home worth 4 or 5X!
Aaron Bauman
There are only two states in the United States with separate supreme courts, one for civil cases and one for criminal cases. Guess which two states have the most death penalty executions since 1976? Same two. Texas with 538 people executed and Oklahoma with 113 (tied with Virginia).
Elsa Alcala @TexasElsa
Seems increasingly likely to me that the international protections for asylum created after the Holocaust will be entirely rolled back and/or abandoned over the next few decades. With the US playing a big role in it.
Chris Hayes
Japan is about as big as the eastern seaboard, Britain is about the size of California:
@notkavi
Motion to replace the “pollution” with “poisoning.”
Mary Annaïse Heglar
I wonder if anything would be different if the American media had given even like 10% as much coverage to the first few dozen botched drone strikes that killed civilians in Afghanistan as it has to the last one.
Joshua Holland
I meet a woman in an art studio. She asks what I do.
Writer, I say.
What are you writing?
A book on super-rich people who claim to "change the world."
Well, are they? she asks.
No, I say. That's the point of the book.
Oh, she said.
Later I learned she was Elon Musk's mom.
Anand Giridharadas
4) Let this sink in—Under DeSantis, Covid Deaths in Florida will surpass American deaths during *ENTIRE* Vietnam war.
Eric Feigl-Ding @DrEricDing
Water fountains. Has there ever been any real been any evidence that water fountains were a transmission risk?
Angie Schmitt
Men are not under attack... We are under review.
@solomonmissouri
For those still saying automated vehicles mean we won’t need parking, that assumption is based on vehicle trips by shared vehicles, not privately owned vehicles (unlikely unless the latter are banned). Private AVs could either be sent home or would “circle,” ADDING CONGESTION.
Brent Toderian
You have to ask yourself: if our economic system actively destroys the biosphere *and* fails to meet most people's basic needs, then what is actually the point?
Jason Hickel
One core rule of American conservatism is that no event is horrific enough to challenge core beliefs.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish
Really caring about kids means considering the range of risks they face. The whole child. Their social and emotional needs. Their caregivers’ well being etc. It’s like beyond us Instead we just trot them out when it’s convenient for dramatic effect to win arguments
Angie Schmitt
I spotted a car with a license plate that started "GHG" and if that isn't right on the nose...
@ianrbuck
The Katy Freeway in central Houston was expanded in 2011 to more than 20 lanes in some segments at a cost of $2.8 billion, making it one of the widest in the world. When finished, travel times out of downtown increased, by some estimates as much as 30%.
Brent Toderian
Not to be "that guy" but for a zombie about to take a huge step he sure has left a lot of closely spaced, mincing footprints
Chris Steller
You can have a grid that runs at very low reserve margins if you are interconnected with the rest of the country. Or you can have an isolated grid that builds in tons of storage and demand response as a reliability buffer. But an isolated, low-reserve grid? A recipe for disaster.
David Roberts @drvolts (describing Texas)
Space travel: One small step for Elon Musk’s midlife crisis, one giant leap for the privatization of the public good.
Anand Giridharadas
Seriously, since when is empty land ("vast, rural Northern California")
more important in a democracy than the actual people who vote in it? Why
should the votes of people who live further apart count for more than
the votes of people who live close together?
@ZhiZhuWeb
It’s wild that a story about how living in an echo chamber can lead to unpleasant surprises is framed as a reason to have empathy for the people in the echo chamber
Michael Tichy
Land doesn't vote. And if it could, it wouldn't vote *that* way.
Anne Boyd @theparsley
“Once again we have been outvoted by the rest of the electorate which contains several times more voters than our segment contains, and their voters voted for the thing they wanted and not the thing we wanted, which continues to be outrageous”
@only_living_grl
I always keep this poll in mind, always:
D.A. Bullock
the U.S. military sent tens of thousands of soldiers with learning difficulties to Vietnam in order to try and make up troop numbers; their fatality rate was three times that of other soldiers, and they make up roughly 10 percent of the U.S. war dead.
James Palmer @BeijingPalmer
Do people know Rikers was named after a slave catcher? Yes? Just making sure. Seems relevant.
@Michelle_Mc_G
A Republican Senate will never again confirm a Democratic president's pick for the Supreme Court again — the most extreme form of court packing there is. Any Democrat who refuses to expand the Court is dooming us to minority GOP control of our rights for the rest of our lives.
LOLGOP
New study of poli sci PhD students finds male self-confidence requires outsize self-representation on syllabi. A mere boost from 10% to 30% ladies undoes them, apparently. Le sigh.
Rebecca Colesworthy
Men — and more generally, dominant social in-groups — feeling like they're being stolen from or discriminated against or overwhelmed by numbers when faced with about 30% representation for the outgroup is such a consistently found phenomenon.
Alexandra Erin
Pumpkins are Indigenous to the Americas. They are literally the food of my people. I don’t wanna hear any more dissing of pumpkin season: pumpkin pies, pumpkin blizzards or pumpkin spice lattes. Pumpkin is sacrit, it’s tradish. Pumpkin haters are basic, not the other way around.
Gabriella Cázares-Kelly
Cheri Jacobus
Antivaxxers' affection for Regeneron is fascinating. It's under an EUA, and is not FDA-approved. It's a new technology. Its clinical trials started just before the trials for the vaxxes, so we have no idea what the long-term effects of taking it are. And yet antivaxxers love it.
James Surowiecki
You can't un-know something this profound. It will shape every part of your life, or it will slowly eat away at the back of your brain while you pretend everything is OK. That's life in 2021. Everything is not OK. We have to change the whole system. It's all connected.
Eric Holthaus
Riding a bike to work will radicalize you. You experience this easy, better for your city AND environment, faster means of travel that brings you health and childlike joy. At the same time you realize your entire city is designed to make using it as hard as possible.
@futurebird
I moved within Boston recently and I needed to reserve curb space for the moving truck on both ends. I paid about $150 to reserve spaces for 9 hours. I do not use on-street parking ever during the year, yet I had to pay $150 for a single day while resident permit users pay $0.
Charles Denison IV @cden4
The fact that Boston charges you for moving permits to use on 1 day but doesn't charge you to park your car on-street for the remaining 364 days of the year tells you everything you need to know about this city's transport and climate priorities.
anti-car crusader @cinemachagrin
"self-driving cars will have to answer split-second ethical decisions, instantly calculating the worth of the lives of the people around them. can AI solve the trolley problem?"
self-driving cars in reality: i swerved onto the sidewalk because i thought the moon was a stop sign
@shaun_vids
The minute someone’s named a suspect everybody starts saying they’re guilty and they deserve all manner of bad things happening to them, then those same people go and protest mass incarceration and pretend to be confused as to how we got here as a society
Olayemi Olurin @msolurin
public libraries really are the best damn thing in this broken world
Ben Purkert
For most of human existence, streets have been predominantly people-places. Beautiful, successful ecosystems where people could flourish. Then we introduced an invasive species — cars. They took most of the space and then kept getting bigger. But we can take streets back. #Tokyo:
Brent Toderian
Back in 2009, Dick Durbin said big banks "frankly own" Congress. This was false, banks co-own it with big pharma and weapons manufacturers.
Jon Schwarz
Dems join with Republicans to tank prescription drug price reform in committee. Just staggering levels of self-sabotage going on right now. https://twitter.com/sarahnferris/s
Zachary D. Carter
Most of us were raised to treat change as a risk. But we live now in a world where the opposite is true: where prudence demands wild change.
Alex Steffen
The map on the left is the recall results. The one on the right is the current COVID situation:
Eric Ball
It's wild to me that people wanna bring back ancient animals when we can't even keep the current species safe.
@ghostmodePDX
These idiots wasted 300 million dollars on this ridiculous thing --- and Newsom is up for reelection *next year.* Let's hear no more about GOP "fiscal responsibility."
@digby56
Transit for clunkers: In 4 years, Barcelona residents have traded in over 10k cars and 1.7k motorcycles in exchange for a 3-year, unlimited transit pass.
David Zipper
Back in the early days of automobiles it was routine for drivers who killed pedestrians or bicyclists to be held in jail pending an investigation. Now only the most egregious behavior imaginable will result in criminal charges, let alone prison time. Reading old newspaper clippings or books like Peter Norton's "Fighting Traffic" about newspaper coverage and public perception of auto fatalities and killings in the early 1900s is fascinating. People cared deeply; it was a moral issue.
anti-car crusader Avocado @cinemachagrin
Tenants also deserve insulation from drastic demand/supply shocks through the power of tenants unions and collective rent bargaining/broad rent growth caps, but this all hinges on consistently growing housing supply to meet demand in the first place
The OmniZaddy Monkey face
Bowling Alone really didn’t give enough consideration to cars and the switch to driving over the 20th century as a reason (driver, if you will) of plummeting social connectedness.
@KJegalian
Similar to online behavior, cars grant anonymity and then combine it
with power and time pressure which appears to produce aggression and
impatience.
Bella Chu
Reasons to hire an athlete:
• They are used to working under pressure
• They understand that doing work outside of working hours is where they’ll find their advantage
• They’ve endured success and defeat; they manage adversity
• They sacrifice personal accolades for team success
Craig Doty @CoachDoty
Don’t take it from me that sport is training for capitalism. Ask a coach.
@nkalamb
Aging is the process of knowing who fewer and fewer of the Famous People are.
Chris Hayes
I wish candidates would stop using seniors and people with disabilities as an argument against bike paths. Seniors and people with disabilities ride bikes too.
Amity Foster
When tens of thousands have the absolute conviction that an antiparasitic is the preferred way to treat a virus would a psychiatrist need any further evidence for a diagnosis of mass psychosis?
The Swede @AverageSavant
Pretty wild how a bunch of 18th century political compromises with slaveholders will determine whether my children have a habitable planet to live on.
Max Berger
A white man who owns a business threatens to kill the 3rd person in succession to the president of our country and all he faces 6 months in prison. My cousin got 15 years for robbing $300 from a 7-11 with a fake gun.
Daryl Sturgis
made a little guy........a little autumn boy...........
Jay Castello Sunflower
You will literally never see a military recruiter in a rich neighborhood.
Zeb Habash
“Judeo-Christian” isn’t a thing. It a) positions Jews and Christians against Muslims, is Islamophobic b) elides Christian oppression and murder of Jews over more than 1000 years and c) ignores Jewish civilization worldwide and facts of key Jewish developments in Middle East and N Africa.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg
I regret to inform you that even your educated cool hippie vibe progressive aunt drives like an asshole and hates bicyclists
Matthew @riotpedestrian
Now is a good day to remind everyone:
TSA was founded in 2001
Homeland Security - 2002
ICE - 2003
The Patriot Act - 2001
The detention camp at Guantanamo Bay - 2002
@CaseyExplosion
Maybe young knowledge workers are not going to flock to a theocracy?
David Roberts @drvolts
Roads and cars are all about profits and jobs and ownership and extraction and sanctioned violence and pollution and harm. Good thing it's really fun to travel in a climate-controlled speed machine, seated in a padded living room chair.
Mary Morse Marti
Why does this 9/11 20th anniversary feel weird and muted? Because the real historical significance of 9/11 is that it marked the beginning of a downward spiral for the US, as a democracy and as the dominant global superpower. We're too close to that, to *in it*, to reckon with it.
David Roberts @drvolts
Talking to fully functional, accomplished adults with real challenging jobs who have smart takes on things, good grasp of history, good perspectives, and then they say they don't remember 9/11 because they were 2, 3, 4 years old. Just wow, I'm old.
karkar @kar_nels
White folks out here doing whole ass insurrection with tri-cornered hats, subverting entire local public ed structures over face masks, then will turn around and say they are cautious about changing a city charter to make the police like every other city employee. shit is wild
D.A. Bullock
I'm probably extreme but I don't think we should even do clever graphic design about it. are we branding for al-qaeda?
Chris Steller
People who walk are not “a vulnerable group.” They are humans doing the most basic human thing: walking. We are vulnerable *when* exposed to people driving vehicles weighing several tons, and in comparison with them. Walking should be the reference point.
Tamara Bozovic
My latest: There are two fatal flaws with “net zero by 2050.” One is “net zero.” The other is “by 2050.”
Peter Kalmus @ClimateHuman
If “diversity” just means recruiting more non-white people for the white people who remain in charge to boss around, keep it.
Ryan Ken
This is remarkable:
A 15-year study of 2 million Danish adults concluded that traffic noise is likely responsible for ~11% of **all** annual dementia diagnoses in Denmark. Urban autos are a serious health hazard.
David Zipper
BIDEN: [announces wildly popular policy to save thousands of lives]
GOP: [demands unpopular reaction that will lead to mass deaths]
MEDIA: has biden blown it
Jake Maccoby
Broken English is a sign of courage and intelligence and it would be nice if more people remembered that when interacting with immigrants and refugees.
@AngeeGabs
This is the tar sands oil industry at work. Where ancient forests once stood, there is now a gaping wound in the earth, filled with toxic chemicals unsuitable for life. @POTUS could stop contributing to this industry with the stroke of a pen. Biden, will you #StopLine3?
Resist Line 3
There are left-leaning foundations sitting on endowments of tens of billions of dollars. What the fuck are they doing? US democracy is falling apart right in front of us. If they're not spending big and making noise and trying to supercharge a democracy movement now ... when?
David Roberts @drvolts
Wondering how much the angry Black woman stereotype in the office is due to the fact that Black women are often the only ones willing to speak up and state the plain truth
@quidditch424
Trying to understand: if driving someone to a women's health clinic now conveys culpability, then how does making, advertising, or selling a gun used in a shooting also not suggest culpability?
Jonathan M. Metzl
“Effective altruism” is just prosperity gospel plus eugenics.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish
Hear me out: Nation-building, but at home and via democracy, not imperialism.
Anand Giridharadas
Saying voting rights should not be partisan is a statement of aspiration. Saying voting rights is not partisan is a statement of delusion.
Marc E. Elias
Nimbys complain that shops need parking outside their doors, then will proceed to walk 200 metres to a shop in the centre of a mall
@PubRockVersion
In the 1960s in NYC the average wait in jail was about 2 weeks. This was seen as an outrage at the time. Now people sit there for more than a year.
Nick Encalada-Malinowski
A Democratic senator from one of the poorest states in the entire country is sitting on the deck of his yacht helping corporate lobbyists try to pare back the anti-poverty bill, and this is portrayed by corporate media as absolutely normal and not at all sociopathic
David Sirota
A world with enough political juice to deliver free transit could also deliver better overall funding to improve service. People keep acting like this is a bizarre situation but we have free at point of use K-12, roads, parks and other amenities. Tax (the rich) and do it
Andrea Kiepe
Forced birthers believe if a woman has ambition she should remain celibate. Only women with little to no ambition should have sex.
@ebonyabsolutely
How it started. How it's going. Mount Shasta without snow for the first time in history. This is what climate/ecological discontinuity looks like on the ground:
Alex Steffen
What’s a privilege that America treats like a right? I’ll go first: driving.
Queen Anne Greenways
Exploiting other people's labor for cheap clothes + home goods + electronics + food + service + + +
@happifydesign
It's an indictment of our system that we even have to discuss whether we should preserve a livable planet for the 99%, or the extreme wealth of the 1%. We need to tax the ultra-rich to build green infrastructure. And we need to do it now.
Jamaal Bowman
Police want us to call them "law enforcement" because it suggest neutrality. But police only enforce *some* laws against *some* people in *some* places. A better term would be "wealth protection agents" or "selective enforcement bureaucrats."
Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec
According to the toplines, the "victims" are mostly white, male, and tenured and speaking on topics of race, culture, or partisanship. Without delving too far into the incidents I'd bet this trend has improved the academic experience especially for students that are not cis/white/male.
Brian Guggenheimer
Nobody even asks Boris Johnson where the Brexit £350m is for the NHS; it’s just accepted that Britain left the EU based on huge lies, and all a bit embarrassing to bring it up.
David Conn
My favorite street in my neighborhood has a tree right in the middle of it. A good litmus test for hiring public works engineers would be, "Do you love this or hate it?" If they say they hate it, or express concerns that it doesn't meet standards, don't hire them:
Daniel Herriges
Because the climate fight is not a fight against citizen apathy, it's a fight against the Carbon Lobby's organized predatory delay. Predatory delay strategies are not just a *part* of climate politics these days—they're the fundamental conflict of climate politics.
Alex Steffen
I've seen landscapers work and I've seen bankers work. There is no comparison as to who works harder.
@DrJohnAndrew
Noticing this morning that when white people put in-search-ofs out for traditionally non-white help or services, we qualify the request with adjectives like "reliable" and "trustworthy," ie "Looking for a trustworthy housekeeper".... "reliable landscaper." Language is so telling.
WhiteNonsenseRoundup
Some of the inexplicable things going on in car (truck really) design are connected to rising vigilantism on the right.
Angie Schmitt
So when are Abbott and the Texas GOP going to pass a law paying women $10,000 for reporting a rapist, or someone who drives a rapist anywhere, or someone who gives advice to a rapist?
@1people1future
Towns ban starter homes more than they ban guns.
Phil Ritz
Just saw a chick walking around Target in a t-shirt which read: “Unvaccinated and Unmasked. Because that’s how God made me.” She was wearing makeup. Her nails were painted. And I’d be willing to wager all my money that she isn’t exactly a natural blonde. I guess God does hair.
@JoJoFromJerz
White supremacy explained:
Jeffrey Levin
First we were told not to shame Trump voters. Now we’re told not to shame the unvaccinated. As a Muslim whose entire community was blamed, demonized and condemned for the actions of 19 guys 20 years ago, and asked to disown them, forgive me for laughing out loud at the new rules.
Mehdi Hasan.
Per NPR: in a typical year, there are 2-3 natural disasters that cause over a billion dollars of damage in the U.S.; in the last year, there have been 22.
@ameseh
We’re trying to be more positive here at the Gazette. So instead of referring to people as “anti-vaccine” we’re now going to use the term “pro-pandemic.”
@OakBayGazette
Why is charging $50 for a $6 case of water during a hurricane considered price gouging, but charging $700 for a $5 vial of insulin is considered health care?
Deacon Blues
Climate breakdown isn’t really a dry intellectual topic in my opinion? I really don’t have any patience for theoretical discussions that boil down to “but the people who die first are far away, poor, and not white, so maybe cars are good” when we’re at 1.5°C best case scenario
@happifydesign
When the end of federal unemployment benefits fails to end the nationwide worker shortage, who will the bosses blame next?
Robert Moffitt @justplainbob
Kind of awkward leading up to the 9/11 anniversary with covid killing the same number of people every two days and little action to stop it
wsbgnl
Why do doomers need to be so vocal? If you lack courage and want to give up, why not keep it to yourself? Is it insecurity and a misplaced desire to appear smart? The fact is that NO ONE KNOWS how this will all turn out. The future is not written. Don't work to make it worse.
Peter Kalmus @ClimateHuman
It is striking that I've literally never seen any discussion of intellectual property as a type of protectionism that redistributes income upward — my guess is that it hits too close to home. Elite types, including progressives, simply don't want to think about it
Dean Baker
This is the stock market (SandP 500) over the past 40 years. We seem to be in the midst of an almost unprecedentedly exuberant market. Can somebody explain to me how this is rational, given the pandemic and many other causes for uncertainty about future stability and prosperity?
Robert Wright
Yes, I can explain it. During the latter years of the curve, the US was
taken over by oligarchs, who inflamed nativism and racism to effect a
massive redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich. Corporations
are barely taxed; this chart shows concentration of wealth.
James Gleick
I wish more centrists knew about the history of Northern Ireland
Adam Miller @ajm6792
I just feel there’s a good deal of denialism around how much anti-Black racism sits at the center of the organization of the modern world. It is pervasive. It’s like the scaffolding that structural oppression, economics, politics and western religion is all built on.
@BreeNewsome
do you ever think back to when the nyt did that 100k dead headline and that since then it’s happened nearly 6 more times but nobody bothered to write about it or commemorate it
@karengeier
Doing some research on donors to Texas legislators who sponsored the state's new abortion ban — a law that allows ANYONE TO SUE ANYONE who helps a woman get an abortion in Texas and receive 10K. The top donor to the sponsors of this law? TEXANS FOR LAWSUIT REFORM. Not a joke.
Judd Legum
How many more flood videos will go viral before we stop spending 80% of federal transportation funding on highways?
Jenna Fortunati
In the era of Instagrammable urbanism, sometimes the simple, low-cost
and functional gets underrated. I’m a fan of this very simple seating
that’s being rolled out by our local transit service at
space-constrained local bus stops:
Jason Thorne
The economy is an abstraction. The physical world is very real. The current system pretends it is the other way around.
XR Cambridge
Conservatives: *pass law allowing motorists to literally mow down protestors they don't agree with*
The Economist: the woke left is maybe spending too much time discussing building names, threatening the very foundation of our democracy
Sean Hayford Oleary
I am waiting for a Texas law that pays $10,000 bounties on men and women who are delinquent on child support.
@BlueTexas6
In recent court filings, US Capitol breach defendants have expressed concerns about:
Having to wearing ankle monitor with shorts
Not being able to watch Netflix
Not being able to go to classic car show
Not being able to shop Amazon
Scott MacFarlane
Cars are climate roasting murder weapons on wheels. Reconfiguring our streets isn’t about bending to the whims of some supposedly tiny minority of people who don’t drive, it’s about literally saving lives, and it keeps getting more urgent.
Molly Kleinman, Ph.D.
"It is a shockingly common experience across North America to have a street designed to accommodate speeds of 60 miles per hour, traffic flow at 45 miles per hour, and have the legal speed limit designated at 30 miles per hour."
Charles Marohn
We need a Supreme Court of minimum 33 justices, hearing cases on panels of seven or nine drawn by lots, with staggered term limits so that fully a third of them rotate out every four years. There's no reason why filling every opening has to be a knock-down drag-out culture war.
DavidLieberman
Pretty much every single person in the last 20 years who said, “relax, that could never happen” or “don’t overreact, it’s not that bad” have been 100% wrong and I guess they’ll never feel shame and stop talking but we sure should stop listening. It’s not that they’re reasonable or open-minded or cooly rational: it’s that they’re morally lazy, and they’d like extra credit for yawning while the world burns.
A.R. Moxon @JuliusGoat
It is bad that the government has practically unlimited authority to seize your house or business to build or expand a road but every individual homeowner has veto power over proposals to add sidewalks.
Angie Schmitt
I hate to get cryptic, but I also really don’t
@buckfruitt
Wouldn't it be nice if governments took climate action with the same vigour they apply to making laws and training police to suppress climate protest. Then, who knows, maybe protest wouldn't be needed.
Andrew Simms (referring to a story about riot training for thousands of climate summit police)
To think, they could be training armies of retrofitters, urban gardeners, tree planters, rewilders, cycling trainers, renewables installers, nutrition trainers, replanters of kelp forests, ethical investment managers... but no. 10,000 riot police.
robintransition
The same people who told you asking whether someone is vaccinated is a violation of HIPAA law now want you to report your neighbors, their doctors and their Uber drivers if you think they possibly did a procedure based on a guesstimate you made about when they might have had sex.
The Daily Edge
Robert Mercer and his colleagues agreed to pay $7 billion in back taxes. Imagine how much they really owe.
@nycsouthpaw
[The Texas abortion bounty snitch law] reminds me of the “she’s a witch” accusations of decades past. How can someone prove they did not have an abortion? How can a litigant prove someone did with HIPAA laws as they are? Right to privacy.
ladydi80
It's not the Texas Taliban, it's the Texas Ku Klux Klan. It's not American Sharia, it's Christian Theocracy. Stop trying to pin Christian U.S. patriarchy, misogyny, and white supremacy onto Empire's bogeymen.
Shailja Patel
People died in basement apartments in New York ... assumably trapped by rapidly rising waters...just sit with that a moment...our dystopian future is now. We are living in a novel,and everyone ignoring climate change is an antagonist.
MockMaturity
40% of the 5 people who just gutted Roe v Wade have been credibly accused of sexual assault or harassment.
Leah Greenberg
The authoritarian and climate emergencies are connected. The only solution is for opponents of both to come together globally.
Ben Rhodes
My astonished rage cleared for a second and I realized that, according to this decision, states can pass all kinds of unconstitutional laws as long as they leave the enforcement to bounty hunters. Jesus, we're back at the Kansas-Nebraska Act again.
Charles P. Pierce
A reminder that congestion pricing still has to go through a 16-month environmental assessment.
Doug Gordon @BrooklynSpoke
It's almost comical to say it at this point, but doing nothing is so obviously not an option. Inaction will cost so much more than passing a Green New Deal, creating a climate-resilient and 21st century infrastructure, and ending our dependence on fossil fuels.
Ryan Hickey
We’re not actually a rich country anymore. We’re a moderately rich country — and stagnating — with a bunch of untaxable rich people and corporations in it.
@wait_about
But see it was so cool at the time to claim the house wasn’t on fire as people were actively being burnt to fucking crisps on the bottom level
@JulesMoffit
The fact that no one was arrested [on January 6] and only one person was shot after receiving multiple warnings shows how the rampant killing of Black people by police is just selective state violence
@BreeNewsome
#Texas values explained:
Pro-individual liberty...unless you're a pregnant woman
Pro-life...except we want everyone to own a device whose sole purpose is to kill or injure
Pro-local control and free enterprise...but we'll prohibit towns and businesses from keeping people safe...
Pro-academic freedom...but not for educators who want to teach about racism. And if you don't agree with these positions, we do have one commitment that's unequivocal: making it as hard as possible for you to vote.
Alfie Kohn
"Court packing is a radical change" yeah well so is nullifying Roe via a late-night shadow-docket move without even writing an opinion
Tom Scocca
Anti-choicers like to pose hypotheticals about the remarkable baby a woman could have if she didn’t get an abortion: What if they cured cancer? None ask if that woman herself might change the world. They never consider we could be the remarkable ones, if only given the chance.
Jessica Valenti
The only self-driving vehicles that can actually help cities. #publictransit:
Brent Toderian
Surely now, having seen the evolution of the right over the last 20 years, we can dispense with the notion that their opposition to abortion has anything to do with "life," yes? I can't believe that gaslighty bullshit argument went on for decades. People who gave a shit about life would focus on air pollution — it kills more people than almost anything else and it's easy to eliminate. (You may recall that the "pro-life" party works relentlessly to enable more air pollution.)
David Roberts @drvolts
SCOTUS is stolen, our democracy is being dismantled, pandemic and climate disaster are being utilized to punish the poor and install fascist rule. Real leaders will stop treating Republicans like valid actors within a government they're actively destroying.
A.R. Moxon @JuliusGoat
If Massachusetts passed a law empowering private parties to sue anybody who carried a firearm, not much doubt SCOTUS would rush to block it as a violation of a fundamental right—jurisdictional troubles be damned
Steven Mazie
A handful of billionaires schemed decades ago to commandeer the political right, and now behold these burning forests, these smoky skies, these flooded streets, these shuttered clinics, these unvaccinated corpses, these vanishing ballots, these doomed wars, all these dead dreams.
Anand Giridharadas
Please recall that SCOTUS overruled voters in 2000 to install Bush as president and that was when we still had an intact Voting Rights Act. I think the mistake is believing we have an actual republic and not a ruling oligarchy that keeps changing the rules at whim. I’m not saying elections don’t matter or have consequences—you haven’t followed me long if you think that—but this idea that we can resolve a raw power struggle thru elections alone is sorely misguided, not supported by history or evidence.
@BreeNewsome
Why do folks assume Republicans would’ve allowed Clinton to seat justices? I don’t know what it will take for folks to understand that we don’t have a functioning constitutional democracy. This is a raw power struggle with a violent fascist movement and its political leaders.
@BreeNewsome
·
According to mainstream media in 2016, any concern you might have about an issue like abortion pales when compared to the danger a major political figure using a private email server. I wish I was making this up but I'm not.
Frank Conniff
I think most of the time when people talk about a street being dangerous to drive on, what they really mean is they’re uncomfortable driving it inattentively at 5–10+ over the speed limit.
Ken Paulman
I don’t know whether this is a popular or unpopular opinion, but there’s no reason to use gasoline-powered lawnmowers on standard-sized urban lots and they ought to be phased-out as soon as practical. In particular, many of my neighbors hire lawn services, and those services often use equipment that seems so oversized for the task. You’re cutting grass on a 6,000 square foot lot, not an athletic field! Too loud/stinky/polluting.
Jason Wittenberg
File under: “Image to use for replies when a road safety tweet aimed at pedestrians and bicyclists claims ‘safety is a shared responsibility.’”
Don Kostelec
Getting every household to 1 car (maximum) should be a goal of every city council in America.
Warren J. Wells
Folks gotta stop erasing Black, Indigenous and Latino people from southern, rural American identity. Like, I can’t emphasize how enormous the erasure is when folks do that. You actually don’t have an analysis of America if you think southern rural = white. We have significant South Asian populations in the south too
@BreeNewsome
And on the death of local news... "Today’s 28-year-old living in an exurb doesn’t understand how much coverage of a town meeting, a county executive’s office, or a public school they would’ve read 20 or 30 years ago. They merely see nothing and learn to live with it."
laura mckenna
No comments:
Post a Comment