Twitter April 2024

Like BlueSky, the discourse for April was dominated by protest and demonstration related to Israel's war in Palestine, but the tweets (in reverse order) give a slightly better sense of how that unfolded. There's less angst here about our march into fascism, which is interesting. Very little mention of DJT. A bit more recognition of Earth Day and the historic eclipse.

Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account and is in reverse chronological order, except some of the images, which I move up or down for better visual balance.

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What's cool about looking back at the history of college protests is that 19-year-old students have been right about every single American war, and the esteemed Harvard educated opinion writers at the New York  Times have been wrong about every single American war.
Existential Comics

Map of land value in the US, high resolution. One interesting thing this shows is why LA, Vegas, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City will need to densify in order to build new housing — they're nearly completely hemmed in by federal land.


@StatisticUrban

It should not be lost how eager these institutions are to equate speech with actual, physical violence, and using that as a justification to respond with actual, physical violence. Really dangerous precedent being set.
MikeL @mplarrick

Feel like this is 50% of tech/entrepreneur/startup culture in a nutshell: "what you call narcissistic I call FEARLESS! what you call theft I call DARING TO HACK THE FUTURE!"
Jay Smooth @jsmooth995

"Farmland is at risk of being used for solar PV". I would add some extenuating circumstances: Agriculture uses orders of magnitude more land than solar. Biofuel is even ~200x less space efficient than PV. So let's make sure we do 0% biofuel first before complaining about PV.
AukeHoekstra

Just 6 companies dump 25% of global plastic pollution:
1 Coca-Cola 11%
2 PepsiCo 5%
3 Nestle 3%
4 Danone 3%
5 Altria 2%
6 Philip Morris 2%
And just 56 companies dump more than 50% of global plastic, polluting at will with no consequences
Assaad Razzouk

Just thinking about how university presidents grilled by Congress were forced to resign over hypothetical scenarios about student safety while we watch students get beaten up at the behest of other school presidents and their jobs seem perfectly intact
Malaika Jabali

Livable neighborhoods start with mixed use buildings and streets narrow enough that they force drivers to slow down, allowing streets to become comfortable shared use paths. Beacon Hill, Boston:


Jonathan Berk @berkie1

I cannot stop thinking about the choice to point guns at students who spent their entire childhoods training to survive too frequent school shootings and who are out protesting because students half way across the world are being murdered. America hates its kids so fucking much
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein @IBJIYONGI

Riot police with guns are more dangerous than students with signs. The kids are never right about everything, but they are always whisper-yelling what will become the accepted truth of the future. You cannot defeat fascist authoritarianism by mimicking it.
The.Ink, from Anand Giridharadas @AnandWrites

adults always say “the kids will save us” until the kids actually try to do that.
Annie Wu

For all the complaints and hand-wringing about a radical, left-wing cabal running universities and colleges, the response of administrators to student protests reveals the true nature of the neoliberal university. Irony.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Why do we have this comp plan ritual where—once every 10 years—we raise the zoning cap just enough to maintain our current housing crisis? How does that cap benefit society?
Qagggy!

Like the warning label on cigarettes?


Dr. William J. Ripple

So we've adopted strict zoning rules to separate factories burning things from homes and schools, only to create 100's of millions of tiny moving factories that burn things [cars]. Bang up job guys
Naveen Gattu

Youngest, currently into the “I Survived…” book series, comes to me, deeply confused by the title “I Survived the Attacks of September 11”. “How can a date attack you?” She asks. The previous book in series is called “I Survived the Grizzly Bear Attacks”. She’s a little behind on modern history, but I am so proud of her as an editor.
Maggie Koerth @maggiekb1

I feel like this is a major turning point for A LOT of public protests for months, even years to come …
-Against A.I./ corporate take over of industries and livable wages
-Climate catastrophe
-Election 2024
-Women’s health
-Corrupt SCOTUS
Jennifer G., MPP Masters in Public Policy @JGodi

Headline: "Protests turn violent"
Video: All the violence is being done by cops
@BostonJerry

Richmond, VA has speed cameras at 2 elementary schools. In the first month, they're cranking out 176 speeding tickets a day. Cameras are only active during the mornings and afternoons on school days, and they're only snagging people going 11+ over the speed limit.
Andy Boenau

A generation that is willing to protest is a generation who believes the world can be better and they can make it that way, and in our current hellscape, that is a wonderful thing.
Jessica Ellis @baddestmamajama

The core problem with the way most people talk about social media is that they think it is, in fact, social media,  instead of understanding that it is widely adopted defective and dangerous product design. Think cars without brakes instead of a newspaper juiced with tech. We don't allow interior designers to use lead paint even when it is really, really pretty, and we shouldn't allow social media designers to use Las Vegas techniques of targeting and inconsistent reward to addict children.
Zephyr Teachout

French architect Le Corbusier viewed the traditional city from above and thought of it as a chaotic “nightmare.” This was his vision for the ideal Paris. The plan was seriously considered. But ultimately, he wasn't allowed to tear down Paris:


Strong Towns

As leaders in the Texas GOP vow to stamp out antisemitism by jailing campus protesters, a reminder of this headline by Robert Downen: “Texas GOP executive committee rejects proposed ban on associating with Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers”
Mike Hixenbaugh

So Texas allows students to carry guns on campus but not to carry out non-violent protest?
Philip Gourevitch

In 20 years (not so long to us olds) do you think anyone will gather their neighbors around the communal fire to tell the tale of how certain transportation advocates fought to keep freeways in our cities, so long as they had a bus and some bike lanes? Asking for a friend.
Mary Morse Marti

Wow. This is...profound. Google has become so enshittified that limiting your searches to results before 2023 results in much higher quality results. Cory Doctorow was right.
Joe Morse @desmoq

Serious Person In 2016: Free-speech means allowing open Nazis and avowed white supremacists on campus, and any attempt to stop them is illiberal.
Serious Person In 2024: For the love of god when is the National Guard going to open fire and reduce these protesters to a red haze?
Jared Yates Sexton

Reducing car traffic requires providing a MIXTURE of multiple, viable ways to get from point A to B. That means walking, cycling, multiple forms of  public transport, roads, and denser, infill development in walkable neighbourhoods.
Kevin Leyden

"Since their invention, cars and automobility have killed 60–80 million people and injured at least 2 billion." No comment
Dr Charlie Gardner

“If we buy the right-wing story, the superrich got their money from their great contribution to society. If we look at it with clearer eyes, the superrich got their money because we structured the economy in a way that allowed them to get super rich.” –Dean Baker
Keshav Bedi

A female Northern Cardinal crossing the nature trail:


Jocelyn Anderson Photography

The FTC's ban on non-compete clauses is a big victory for workers, and also a big victory for "rules should not have a bunch of weird exceptions so you can't explain them to people."
Matt Darling @besttrousers

Basel, a city with less than a third the population of Washington, DC, has 4 times as many trains per day, several trams that are served in front of the station, and an underground bike garage you can ride straight into.
christopher @its_Xopher

The liberal university is a place where students should be exposed to ideas that might make them uncomfortable and that they might even find dangerous, provided those ideas are of the 'black people are stupid' variety.
Osita Nwanevu

US share of the world's population: 4%
US share of the world's military spending: 37% (more than183 of the other 193 countries combined)(https://is.gd/BXlkAw)
US share of weapons sales: 42% (https://is.gd/n4aGAi)
US share of foreign military bases: 75-85% (https://is.gd/jwyBu4)
Alfie Kohn

It's interesting how happily armed government "law enforcement" agents carry out the request of university administrators to enforce trespassing laws compared to how they might carry out a request by workers to enforce wage theft laws.
Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec

Even if you've never heard the term VSP [very serious person], you know who they are: "the politicians and business leaders who say that yes, global warming is real and yes, it must be addressed, but no, it is unrealistic to cut carbon emissions at the pace climate experts say is needed."
David Roberts @drvolts

“By 2040, 70% of US will live in 15 states with 30 senators. That means 30% of country, which is whiter, more rural, more conservative, will elect 70% of senators” [quoting himself/his recently published book on NPR's Fresh Air].
Ari Berman

If I see Arab, Jewish, and Black students compared to the KKK one. more. time on this app...! As the great-granddaughter of a man who was lynched, I'm offended beyond measure by these constant comparisons by those who have invented a bubble universe where Black privilege exists.
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas @Ebonyteach

Happy Earth Day!


Eugene V. Debs Museum

A corporation is an immortal, transhuman colony organism that uses us as inconvenient gut-flora: no matter how much you love it, it will *never* love you back. It *can't* experience love - only fear.
Cory Doctorow

My town has a gas station, a bar, and three smoke shops. We don’t have anywhere to buy a gallon of milk, yet school choice grifters want y’all to think someone will open up a private school in my area? Lol. They could just tell the truth — they have defunded our public school.
Jess Piper @piper4missouri

“The plastics industry releases about four times as many planet-warming chemicals as the airline industry.”
David Wallace-Wells

Dems: Climate change is a serious threat. Immigrants and trans kids are human beings. Stop cops from shooting unarmed Blacks.
GOP: Distribute assault weapons to all white Christians. Install Trump as Pharaoh. Let embryos vote.
Media: We're so polarized! Extremists on both sides!
Alfie Kohn

More evidence of spanking's harmful effects: A new longitudinal study of poorer countries confirms that corporal punishment leads to "lower levels of social-emotional competencies," including empathy, self-regulation, and healthy social interactions"
Alfie Kohn

AOC said it best: Biden doesn’t stand for all the values I do. But I would rather fight for those things in a landscape where democracy still works, than in  a landscape of racist, sexist authoritarianism.
Pam Keith, Esq.

"Motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all, and shrink them for only a few." –Ivan Illich (photo: Brasilia):


Taras Greece

The authoritarian turn in elite universities  — via administrative imperium, loss of faculty governance, and expansion of contingent labor has been long in the making, obscured by false, reactionary promotion/panic around DEI, which never touched these aforementioned tendencies.
Nikhil Pal Singh

What happened at Columbia and USC is precisely what the Congressional hearings and interest group pressure campaigns sought to achieve: free speech, especially that critical of Israel, has been chilled. This is the cancel culture of the right at work.
David Rothkopf

It is amazing how the protesters are always right 50 years ago and always wrong today
Will Bunch

Framing climate action as a cost is misleading. A cost is when extreme weather causes damage and you have to repair it. Spending money to avoid the damage in the first place, however, is an investment. Climate action is an investment in a safer future, and cheap at any price
Dr Charlie Gardner



John Pavlovitz

Combine Angelou's "When someone shows you who they are, believe them" with the truism that in politics, "every accusation is a confession" and you get: "Every time someone accuses you of a vice, they're showing you who they are and you should believe them."
Cory Doctorow

If I were an Ivy League president I would simply not sic riot police on scores of nonviolent student protesters in a bid to impress Elise Stefanik. Elise Stefanik will never be impressed. Have some dignity.
David Klion

Americans have learned to aggressively wave the flag, complain about taxes, and hate unions. Taxes and unions are what make Denmark socially and economically strong. When people feel safe, they start voting with their heads and not the fear in their hearts.
Ole Rasmussen

On this day in 1846, New Jersey enacted legislation that, rather than abolishing enslavement, bound Black people to indefinite servitude as “apprentices for life” at the will of white enslavers.
Equal Justice Initiative @eji_org

On this day in 1945, three Black baseball players including Jackie Robinson were attacked during tryouts for the Boston Red Sox. The team refused to sign them and remained segregated until 1959.


Equal Justice Initiative @eji_org

What people don’t get is that being an “exception” to an abortion ban—because you got terrible news about your fetus, or you were raped, or you got cancer, etc—doesn’t mean you get an abortion. It means you’ve been invited to beg.
RHAvote

Did any of you know that Judge Jeanine Pirro’s husband, Al Pirro, a businessman & lawyer was federally convicted in 2000 of conspiracy and tax evasion in connection w/ illegally deducting $1.2 million of personal expenses as write-offs for his business in NY and Trump pardoned him?
Feminist Wild

You know who benefits from school vouchers? Donors and folks who can already afford to send their kid to a private school. You know who doesn’t benefit? Rural kids. Poor kids. Gay kids. Kids with disabilities. School vouchers are a scam.
Jess Piper @piper4missouri

Reminder: Weeks before the 5-4 Citizens United ruling, Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow helped Clarence Thomas' wife launch an advocacy group. Crow donated $500K. Then Thomas delivered the ruling they wanted, letting them spend millions in dark $ ever since.
Robert Reich

I mapped all the surface parking lots in Downtown Spokane Wa:


CoolDiamondsFTW @ftw_cool

Wonder why there’s a housing shortage in America?
Jonathan Hopkins @JHopLovesTrains

All the short-term noise and culture-war stuff around energy is obscuring the fact that humanity is transitioning into a new era of clean energy abundance. It's amazing and thrilling! We just need to get there before we fuck the planet up too badly.
David Roberts @drvolts

I was walking back from the park with my dog and 4 year old and a driver was creeping towards the crosswalk, I muttered under my breath, "We're still in the crosswalk," annoyed, because he was getting too close for comfort. He rolled down his window and said, "what did you say?" So I repeated, "We're still in the crosswalk, you could slow down" and he yelled "walk faster, fucking bitch" in front of my little kid. Happy Sunday. Yield to pedestrians, even if you're in a hurry
@BeckMac4

So much of 1970s “environmentalism” has nothing to do with *the* environment and is deployed, very specifically, to preserve MY environment. MY views. MY parking. MY property values. MY waves. It’s misanthropy, malthusianism and metathesiophobia in an environmental trench coat.
Bella Chu

There are no environmentalists in cars
Phil Walkability

United States of Attica by Faith Ringgold (1972), a map detailing many Indigenous, slave, and immigrant uprisings in each state since the 1700s and dedicated to the men who died during the 1971 Attica prison riots in upstate NY:


AMERIKA IN BLACK

Every newspaper has a business section and none have a labor section despite the fact that most readers will not be corporate CEOs but almost all readers are workers.
Hamilton Nolan

There is no middle ground on the basic right to abortion care. Either you believe women should control their own bodies, or you believe the government should control women's bodies. That's it. Anti-choice hypocrites want us to believe it's murky, but it's not. It's that simple.
Charlotte Clymer

School vouchers, as an idea, are older than I am, and I retired 4 years ago. Just saying.
Dr. Catherine Lugg

Speed is everything. Slower paces of action — gentler slopes of emissions cuts — may be less disruptive to the industries involved, but they set in motion vastly greater discontinuities for human civilization. Of course, it's later than we think: we have not yet even really turned the curve yet, and discontinuity is already unfolding all around us.


Alex Steffen

Tuned into live feed of the Minnesota Legislature just in time to see Minnesota State Senator Nathan Wesenberg, Duck Dynasty Party, ask if eagles are eating baby loons. Good to see we are focusing on the important questions.
Robert Moffitt @justplainbob

We can't eliminate fossil fuels overnight ... therefore ... we must expand fossil fuel extraction and continue using fossil fuels indefinitely. You rarely see this (il)logic stated baldly, but it underlies a great deal of public discourse.
David Roberts @drvolts

Bunch of dudes threatened by even the idea of women in religious leadership now threatened by women existing
Desiree @Desarrayed

It cracks me up that white people question Black history and Black culture when conservatives are systematically refusing to teach white kids Black history and Black culture in public schools. It's no wonder you've never heard of the Black national anthem, you numpties
Imani Gandy @AngryBlackLady

Hey I don't want to distract you from the trans kids or cancel culture or whatever, but ... "the levels of the three most important heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere reached new record highs again last year, US scientists have confirmed."
David Roberts @drvolts

just remember kids, a heavily polluting industry or cement plant on a WA shoreline is fine, but a mixed income, car-light development like this — is not.


Mike Eliason @holz_bau

As an ex-evangelical, I feel so much sadness thinking about how many joys are stolen from those people. Awe-inspiring phenomena like eclipses become evil harbingers, solutions for a better world are painted as signs of devilish plots. Just a prison of abusive lies.
Jared Yates Sexton

Thames Water company serves London and 1/4 of all England. Once a public utility until former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher government sold it to private capitalists in 1989. They paid themselves huge dividends, borrowed many $ billions,  and cannot now repay its debts…
Richard D. Wolff @profwolff

“No, [migrants are] not humans, they’re not humans, they’re animals.” —Donald Trump
Pod Save America

Trump's parents were the children of immigrants.
Trump married two different immigrants.
This isn't about "immigrants."
It's about brown people.
Mikel Jollett

the first US mayor who decides to prioritize safe streets, affordable housing, nature-inclusive cities, car-free streets, and ecodistricts will never have to find another job.
Mike Eliason @holz_bau

Bike lanes look empty because they are highly efficient in terms of vehicular throughput. Lanes with cars and trucks look like they are doing the heavy lifting in terms of transportation capacity because these vehicles take up remarkable amounts of road space and because they spend so much time sitting, in cities.
Jennifer Keesmaat

I don’t think people appreciate how ideologically driven Departments of Transportation are. They’ve set the car as the base unit of transportation and the lives of people outside of cars at zero. To get a signalized crossing, 5 pedestrians have to be hit, badly hurt or die at that location within a year.
Bella Chu

This is fine for a country like Finland, but how would it work here, in a country where we don't want to do that


@InternetHippo

New Seattle police contract just posted. This contract is retroactive through 2023 and includes a 23 percent pay increase without notably increasing accountability.
PubliColaNews

Can you imagine librarians or teachers ever getting a retroactive 23% pay increase? All the money showering every cop department comes from somewhere, and it's usually school + public services programs that get dismantled to pay for these extravagant raises.
@ahouse4all

4 in 5 K12 parents are satisfied w public schools, maintaining the same level of satisfaction as 20 years ago. This is true for both Democrats & Republicans. (In fact, Democratic K12 parents now more satisfied). The satisfaction dip is coming from Republicans *without K12 kids*
Jen Jennings, PhD @eduwonkette_jen

Such a key point: stirring up dissatisfaction with public schools is a political strategy. But as polls show it hasn't worked. And now GOP is saddled with extreme candidates who are repelling moderate voters and parents whose kids actually attend public schools.
Jennifer Berkshire @BisforBerkshire

This was penned in 2014, yet it still holds true to this day:


@NourNaim88
 
In Paris, the number of people biking *doubled* in a single year (Oct 2022–Oct 2023). It's not magic -- it's what happens when a city makes biking easy and safe.
David Zipper

People greatly misunderstand the original intent of the United States Post Office. It was established in 1792, even before the US Navy. But its mandate wasn't to subsidize letter delivery. Rather, it upcharged letter delivery to subsidize the mass delivery of newspapers.
Andrew Damitio

Increasing transit frequency is really the key to increasing ridership.
@SerafinaScheel

If Dems want to stop Christian Fundamentalist judges from issuing nationwide bans against whatever pill scares them this week, the answer is legislation. Legislation or GTFO. “Norms” have no more use here.
Elie Mystal

The odds of your child getting kidnapped are about 1 in a million. The odds of a person born in 2021 dying in a traffic crash are about 1 in a hundred. American parents act like these stats are reversed. Paranoid about the rare kidnapping when the common drive is deadly.
Andy Boenau

It will always be very depressing to think about how less than 20 years ago the entire US auto industry was on the verge of collapse and they were bailed out and then went insane with giant vehicles that cost over 50k, get like 15mpg, kill people, and destroy our aging roads.
@StPaulNate

The pedestrian plaza surrounded by shops and cafes: a basic, atomic unit of pretty much every European city; available virtually *nowhere* in the US:


David Roberts @drvolts

What is wrong with people" $3,000 a month in car payments. These people pay a mortgage for 2 cars. I just don’t understand.
Jimbo P. Esquire @JimboPastoral

If I had my way, every article in the popular press about research findings and recommended practices related to schooling would have to be accompanied by this caveat: "Phrases such as 'higher achievement,' 'positive outcomes,' and 'better results' refer only to standardized test scores. These are poor indicators of intellectual proficiency and primarily measure socioeconomic status or the extent of students' training in test-taking skills."
Alfie Kohn