Friday, July 1, 2016

Twitter, June, Now with Guns and Brexit

Last month, I put my monthly Twitter post together while sitting in a Bologna hotel room. Today I'm in Minnesota, as usual. What a change. Yet, oddly, somehow still the same.

First the never-ending election:

My backlash theory: Civil rights + globalization broke social contract between *white* workers and *white* elites. That's why it takes the form it does: These workers are now subject to the same market forces as nonwhites AND no longer get the status of whiteness.
Jamelle Bouie

BREAKING: Obama calls Trump's proposals, "nativism or xenophobia or worse." Trump responds, "He's just making up words."
Abe Yospe ‏@Cheeseboy22

I don't think Hillary will put Warren on the ticket, but I would be unsurprised to see her as Treasury Secretary. (Which would probably bother Wall Street more than her being VP)
Josh Barro

I like how people who say Obama's a Muslim are the same people who say Trump's a Christian.
John Fugelsang

Good lesson for the U.S.: "Protest" votes don't know they're not supposed to count.
Nicole David ‏@obbiecole

Donald Trump: an ectopic presidency.
Pat Thompson ‏@pattho

Just a thought: Trump is the neofascist version of Ross Perot. What his followers think he represents is contradicted by who he is.
Paul Thomas ‏@plthomasEdD

Trump talks like he's speaking to someone who barely understands English.
David Corn

Trump's strength is appearing as if he's having a conversation with 1,400 people. He makes it sound like an after-dinner conversation. Mind you, it's an after-Thanksgiving dinner conversation with your racist grandpa and you can't leave and you want to die.
Erin Burr, sir ‏@erinscafe

"Our dreams don't fit on your ballots." —Naomi Klein
Linda Sarsour

Trump says he's for LBGT but today he's with the pastor who said gay rights was paving the way for the antichrist.
Sean Kent

Media outlets: if Trump is not revoking your press credentials, what are you doing wrong?
Jeet Heer

So Trump wants Americans to report on their neighbors to police, but he won’t let newspapers report on his campaign.
Christina Wilkie

The screening process for Syrian refugees is a more effective vetting process than the Republican presidential primaries is.
Jason Stanford

Trump isn't a complete fraud - his racism is sincere and from the heart.
Frank Conniff

Voting for Trump because Bernie isn't the nominee is like hearing they're out of your favorite menu item and eating glass shards instead.
OhNoSheTwitnt

The idea that Hillary Clinton must be 100% perfect in order for her achievement to count as historic or laudable is a great metaphor for being a woman.
Chloe Angyal

Republicans don't get Trump because they see racism as a strategy to deploy when it's useful -- not a genuine attitude.
Josh Barro

Shorter Paul Ryan: Racism is bad, but being a Democrat is worse.
Meredith Blake

Violent anti-Trump protests are very popular with leftist grad students who think it would've been fun to be around for the French Revolution. But I don't think they have a broad electoral constituency.
Josh Barro

The strength of the he's-dangerous attack on Trump is that it's obviously true, it's important, and there is no good response to it.
Josh Barro

If Obama said Romney might nuke Europe, Republicans would have been all "that's ridiculous fearmongering!" With Trump, they just look at their shoes. Trump breaking the country will be good because the warlords ruling over the remaining nuclear wasteland won't be such phonies.
Jonas Mann ‏@jpmann

I'm going to say something about last night's violence in San Jose that folks will not like, but here goes. The reason folks are freaked out by Trump rally violence? It's the 400-year American nightmare. Brown and Black people beating up white people. I do not support violent protests and beating folks etc but understand, you can't keep reviling people and expect them to keep taking it.
ProfB ‏@AntheaButler

Violence directed at Trump supporters is the worst possible approach to his problematic candidacy. The. Worst. It will boomerang and further the already-inflamed sense of victimhood among Trump's supporters. If you want to give that passive Trump supporter motivation to actually vote, video of people of color attacking his rally is perfect.
jelani cobb

GOP response to 8 years of America's first black president was to nominate man who openly practices racial politics
Jonathan Martin ‏@jmartNYT

Maybe Trump thinks a dog whistle is just like a really loud whistle?
Matthew Yglesias

It's surprising Republicans don't realize it's not in their long-term interest to support this man until you remember they were too dumb to beat him.
Josh Barro

This quote could contain the most perfect unintentional wording I've ever seen:


neontaster

How many times a week do you suppose Hillary thinks “at least they know I know where France it’s?”
Sarah Mackey ‏@sarahjanet

Fear of demographic change generates unconscious thoughts of death, which in turn drives Trump support.
Ned Resnikoff

What genuinely frustrates me about analysis of Trump right now is it pretends like the past 30 years never happened.
Jamelle Bouie
Then a few stray Brexit tweets that appeared after my earlier post:
The entire Brexit catastrophe summarised in a single screen capture:


Andrew Przybylski ‏@ShuhBillSkee

If you close your eyes and picture British politicians as capitalists out of Dickens, things start making a lot more sense.
David Sessions ‏@davidsess

What the global right has learned from Trump: Lie. You can just lie. Lie about things and move on to the next lie.
Tim Maughan

Brexit Question—As globalization and technology marginalize millions of workers, what will government and society do to de-marginalize and help them?
Steven Greenhouse ‏@greenhousenyt

Brilliant assessment:


Joseph Khoury ‏@Jkhourystfx

Your WTF of the day: only 30% of Leave voters thought the UK would actually Leave. The others thought they could get away with a protest.
Mark Chadbourn

I hate this referendum, for turning a question of unfathomable complexity into Lord of the Flies.
Hugh Laurie

Marine Le Pen justifies the Jo Cox shooting: "People resort to violence because they are sneered at by Brussels elites.”
Evan O'Connell

PLEASE, people, let's not POLITICISE the political assassination of a politician over a political issue by a gunman who opposed her politics.
Amelia Mangan
Guns of all types, after the wake of the Orlando shooting, including the Senate filibuster and the House sit-in:
More than 125,000 shot dead in US since Benghazi. How many gun violence committees, hearings and reports?
Col. Morris Davis

Honestly, what the GOP Senate is doing with Merrick Garland makes the House gun sit-in look adorably minimalist. I think the current precedent set is that no party that controls the senate will ever confirm the other party's SCOTUS nominees. You'll have long stretches of 8 or 7 seat courts and a ghastly, morbid kind of "die-off," to reach majorities.
Christopher Hayes

Visitors are not allowed to carry guns inside NRA headquarters #irony
Meredith Blake

I don't have the solution. I just know when I had a gun pulled on me, I didn't think, "I wish I had a gun." I thought, "I wish he didn't."
Mike Drucker

It is troubling that nobody is talking about redistributing wealth and creating a WPA-style jobs program as solutions to reducing gun violence. Gun control ain’t anywhere near enough. We need a complete transformation of our economic and social systems.
Nikhil Goyal

Be hopeful. Be optimistic. Hate is too heavy a burden to bear. But when you see something that's not fair or just, you have to speak out.
John Lewis ‏@repjohnlewis

Besides universal background checks and assault weapon ban, ending the war on drugs would do a great deal in reducing gun violence.
Nikhil Goyal

Important to remember that the *vast* majority of U.S. gun violence does not look like what happened in Orlando:


The Trace ‏@teamtrace

One party filibusters because too many guns have killed too many people. The other party filibusters because more people got health care.
Kevin Gannon ‏@TheTattooedProf

31 cases of voter impersonation since 2000.
83 Americans are killed by a firearm EACH DAY.
Guess which problem the GOP is willing to fix.
LOLGOP

Between abortion and gun control in this country, it feels like our actual legal system operates via "innocent until born guilty."
Aparna Nancherla

Disarm:


Paul Thomas ‏@plthomasEdD

need a macro that replaces 'thoughts and prayers' with 'hypocritical platitudes'
Saladin Ahmed

The number of Americans killed every year with firearms is catastrophic:



Vox ‏@voxdotcom

The Constitution was wrong about black people and women... Maybe we should reevaluate it's relevance on guns in our society today.
Isis Anchalee

Can you guess which of these is illegal to sell anywhere in the U.S. because of the risk to human lives?


Chris Sacca

homophobia, the fragility of masculinity, gun obsession, violence as means of imposing inequality... all factors, all have to be addressed
Mychal Denzel Smith

There is zero chance the founders envisioned this.
Ronda Sly-Jones ‏@MsSlyJones

tell me again how one person needs the capacity to shoot over 60 people because second amendment
Jane Doe, MD ‏@DrJaneChi

Living in a society in which literally anyone could be carrying a gun is the kind of thing that only seems sane b/c of familiarity.
David Roberts ‏@drvox
Racism, white supremacy, and policing:
While locked up for "lynching," Jasmine Abdullah organized a Black Lives Matter chapter in Lynwood jail as well as the prison.
BLMChicago

In place of reasonable suspicion, the police have adopted a standard in which all suspicion is reasonable. —Jelani Cobb
Don't try me. ‏@Pacinthe

If a black president yielded an uptick in antiblackness, a woman president would yield more misogyny, carry the 1 = more antiblack misogyny.
Zeezus the Scrivener ‏@zfelice


the ability to have an apolitical life means you exist at the intersection of many privileges
Crystal Eidson ‏@cveidson

One thing that should be mentioned is that "stop and frisk" is a gross euphemism for something much more invasive.
jelani cobb

We live in a country that would rather drain the pool than let black people swim. —Heather McGhee of Demos
Lynette Taylor ‏@taylolya

One thing is very clear, The ideology of exclusion, whiteness, misogyny, racism, and hatred is flourishing. It needs to die. Soon.
ProfB ‏@AntheaButler

Report says that a crisis in police legitimacy is a MORE PLAUSIBLE explanation than depolicing for the U.S. homicide spike.
Phillip Atiba Goff

There is nothing wrong with black people that ending racism can't solve.
Andre Perry ‏@andreperryedu

Since zero women and zero people of color weighed in on U.S. constitution when it was written, I assume it may occasionally need a few updates.
Cameron Esposito

This is a 100% holy shit study about the long-term effects of the Tuskegee experiment.


Jamelle Bouie

Indifference to social injustice/police brutality/wrongful imprisonment: people don't think it could ever happen to them or anyone they love.
Joyce Carol Oates

The Golden Rule of Criminal Justice Reform:
Thou shalt close disparities by leveling UP to greater humanity, never DOWN to greater harshness.
2nd Commandment of Criminal Justice Reform:
Thou shalt abolish privilege by EXPANDING it to ALL, not by CONFISCATING it from the FEW.
Chase Madar

I wish progress for marginalized peoples meant something other than acceptance/integration into oppressive systems and paradigms. "Are you willing to kill other marginalized folks for us?" It's no coincidence that military participation is the road to rights in the U.S.
Son of Baldwin

Black Americans are killed at 12 times the rate of people in other developed countries.
FiveThirtyEight

One of the most radical things white folks could do to end systemic racism is believe us when we tell them what it's like to be us.
Ashley C. Ford ‏@iSmashFizzle

New research findings: people who say society is too politically correct tend not to have experienced discrimination.
Demos

Airbnb is a fine example of technology being unable to transcend the baseness of humanity. The platform is basically "whites only"
roxane gay
Cars, pedestrians, safe streets, sustainable cities:
Worldwide, sharks have killed 550 people since 1958. Cars have killed 550 pedestrians/bikers in the last 2 hours:


Mitchell Reardon

Approx. 30% of downtown congestion is people circulating, looking for parking. With driverless vehicles, we no longer need to park.
jennifer keesmaat

Abolishment of the private auto is the low-hanging fruit for degrowth. The auto is heavily subsidized. Many costs are externalized at the time profit is taken.
Free Public Transit

Engineers show a conscious indifference to pedestrians and cyclists. This is the very definition of gross negligence.
Strong Towns

The all-powerful bicycle lobby is a joke that should be a reality. The all-powerful gun lobby is a reality that should be a joke.
Bicycle Lobby

Why build bike lanes for just the 3% who currently bike? Do you build bridges based on the number of people swimming across a river?
Kyle Mianulli

People will make mistakes; the transportation system should be designed so those mistakes aren’t fatal.
jennifer keesmaat

Cars and tje tragedy of the commons: Apparent gain in individual mobility leads to a diminishing of public space for all.
Taras Grescoe

Americans don't fear going to hell for what their government is doing to get oil for their cars. Most don't even know.
Free Public Transit

Parking, what they say we must have but we place so poorly that we kill the things we are trying to get to..

David Holdsworth ‏@holdsurf

Traffic is not a force of nature. Traffic is the collective outcome of individual decisions.
William Lindeke

The problem created by fossil fuels is 7 billion people expecting to live like suburban Americans. Technology can not solve this.
Free Public Transit

The U.S. spends $11M a day bombing Muslims for oil while public transit falls apart.
Free Public Transit

the basic problem is that people drive their cars too fast
William Lindeke

At the very least, stop stopping climate change solutions:


Ken Avidor
Rape culture and the Stanford rape sentencing:
It's increasingly clear that for men, being drunk excuses anything they do. For women, being drunk excuses anything done to us.
Louisa ‏@LouisatheLast

"If you don't give young men a good and useful group to belong to, they will create a bad group to belong to." —Sebastian Junger
Kevin English

Rape for beginners: it's all her fault, because she was drunk, and it's not his fault, because he was drunk.
Gemma Burgess ‏@GKateB

Men, if your only option with women is force, you are WRONG. Adults, if your only option with a child is force, you are WRONG.
Paul Thomas ‏@plthomasEdD

I bet a lot of guys who don't think that rape is a big deal were super upset when that U2 album was put on their phone without consent.
Emily Faye ‏@mlefaye

There are thousands serving life sentences for nonviolent crimes — nobody asked what impact prison would have on them.
Alice Speri
And the best of the rest:
Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence
Neil deGrasse Tyson

I'm a strong Universal Basic Income supporter but I wouldn't trade Medicare and Medicaid for $13,000 a year.
Noah McCormack

They say "Money doesn't grow on trees." So what. The *real* worry is that trees -- which are far more valuable -- don't grow on money.
Jon Foley ‏@GlobalEcoGuy

Somehow, this is acceptable for Christians to say. But when "Jesus" is replaced with "Allah," it's a threat.
Hemant Mehta, replying to Franklin Graham’s tweet, which read: Everyone—complainers and skeptics included—will one day declare Jesus is Lord.

Dear Jesus: U.S. TV needs fewer bloated old white men bloviating. Especially the faux tan ones
Paul Thomas ‏@plthomasEdD

"True size" of Minnesota (pop 5.4M) vs the UK (pop 64.1M):


Meanwhile, Minnesota fits easily into Somalia:


William Lindeke

Through privatization of play, inequality is reproduced in our children.
Marisa ‏@mapooka

Here's what's so crazy about the Texas abortion case: the entire case is predicated on an OBVIOUS lie, clear to everyone involved. The lie is that the law was NOT passed with the explicit goal of restricting women's access to abortions. Because if Texas had been honest about that, then the law's clearly unconstitutional under Casey. So the state of Texas and everyone on that side had to lie again and again in open court and say "No, no. This wasn't about abortion." Even though literally every single observer on all sides understood that obviously it was. The depths of bad faith here are astounding. Today the court basically said: stop lying. We see you.
Christopher Hayes

Some people want to act like they were always *woke.* Nah, fam it's a journey all of us are still on, and everyone is at different points.
Clint Smith ‏@ClintSmithIII

Why have car designers decided that we don't need to see out the back windows?
Rainbow Rowell

Striking scenes of apartheid's urban legacy:


CityLab

Why do so many party-line Republicans self-describe as libertarian, even when they clearly favor patently illiberal policies?
Joseph Nathan Cohen

I've spent the last three weeks reading about ghettos and history of housing policy in the 20th century. Nothing but sadness and outrage. I've spent nearly my entire life on Long Island and not once in school was I ever taught about the racist public policies that created it.
Nikhil Goyal

Americans are 7x more likely to be killed by a right-wing terrorist than by a Muslim.
Saladin Ahmed

"If it holds water, it's craft. If it leaks, it's art." - Stewart Brand, quoting potters in How Buildings Learn.
Denis Kozlov ‏@kozzzlove

"It is fundamentally immoral to try to win elections by stopping people from voting." —Ari Berman in Give Us the Ballot
Sondra Cosgrove

The factory-based middle class was constructed and short lived. Most of time factory workers were immiserated.
Richard Florida

Pick any point in U.S. history you deem "great" and do research. At that point conservatives were screaming that the U.S. was in decline, must regain greatness.
Paul Thomas ‏@plthomasEdD

The fact that plutocrats are not uniformly heartless monsters blinded by unlimited hubris is not especially relevant to structural analysis.
Emmett Rensin

Between 2009 and 2013, the top 1% captured 85% of total income growth in the United States.
Tamara Draut

School is like spending 12 years studying a map to a country you can't visit until you're 18.
Carol Black

Those who don't know history are very unlikely to realize they're repeating it.
LOLGOP

If your style guide prohibits the use of singular they/them/their, and makes you use his/her binary, your style guide needs to change.
Anjanette S. ‏@flanjanette

A man who objectifies/assaults women may fear that men who take interest in him may treat him the way he treats women.
Josh Rosenau

Mustn't we confront that all mainstream religions fuel homophobia and that fundamentalism is a cancer regardless of religion?
Paul Thomas ‏@plthomasEdD

Ways to rationalize one’s failure to oppose harmful policies: Just repeat “That train has left the station” or “We need a seat at the table.”
Alfie Kohn

You don't get to be "neutral" on the humanity of marginalized people.
Nessa. ‏@curlyheadRED

Keynes: "Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will work for the benefit of all."
Nikhil Goyal

The opposite of grit, often enough, is thinking, wondering, asking questions.
peter4logo

If you don't recognize that women make ourselves smaller in public and men don't worry about taking up space, then you're just not looking.
@itsginnydi

"What's the deadliest animal in the world?" eye opening:


World Bank Data

Default good in the U.S. is compliance, doing what you are told. Ironic since we are paralyzed with fear about communism (totalitarianism). "Good soldier," "team player." Our real heroes in the U.S. rebelled, refused, took moral stands.
Paul Thomas ‏@plthomasEdD

Continental Breakfast. 2 great words that become very sad when you put them together.
Kristen Schaal

U.S. is doing to itself what no terrorist could pull off: dissolving social bonds through a culture of excommunication.
Anand Giridharadas

It costs $616 a day for a child to stay in Juvenile Detention Cntr That's $225k/year. CPS schools get 12k per student.
Mike Klonsky

Obama did not prove to be the end to racism. Hillary cannot prove an end to the glass ceiling. Outliers are not evidence of norms. The U.S. is captive to market ethics: if it sells it is "right" and if you can win an election (through deceit) you are a "winner.”
Paul Thomas ‏@plthomasEdD

[At a funeral]
Me: Hey what's the wifi password?
Widow: Have some respect!
Me: All one word?
rhyse ‏@deathcab4booty

Today I made my 15-year-old daughter sit in the car in the driveway for 30 minutes. She needs to learn patience for future traffic jams.
Sisyphus ‏@Sisyphus38

Is there a more reliable sign of weakness than "fearing to appear weak"?
David Roberts ‏@drvox

Public education is the infrastructure of democracy.
Zephyr Teachout

"there is a chasm separating students with parents who have predictable work schedules and those whose parents don't"
eatwords drinkstars ‏@akamami

ME: The love of money is the root of all evil.
HUMANS: We put your name on our money! Aren't you proud of us?
almightygod

"We accept / credit cards / and food stamps": six words on a bodega window, quietly encompassing the whole damn fullness of America.
Anand Giridharadas

In an essay one of my students just confused "emulate" and "immolate." "Find the writers you admire and immolate them."
Colin Dickey

Grid operator says we can easily ramp up renewables to 80% with current grid flexibility. No major storage needed.
ArneJJ ‏@ArneJungjohann

2012 study: An excellent way to destroy kids' interest in reading for fun is to make them keep reading logs.
Alfie Kohn

I like when white males who supported George W. Bush, Gingrich, Limbaugh, Romney and Trump say Muhammad Ali was a draft dodger.
John Fugelsang

Everyone, let's stop using the phrase "transcend race." Race is not an obstacle to be overcome. White supremacy is the obstacle.
Vann R. Newkirk II ‏@fivefifths

Don't judge those running for office by the eloquence of their tributes to Ali, but how they would treat a 20-year-old version of him now.
Tom Fletcher

EDUCATED GUESS: whoever said nice people don't get ahead probably wasn't that nice
Aparna Nancherla

Gloria Ladson-Billings: We should not use "achievement gap" but "education debt." Framing of problem important.
Dale Mezzacappa ‏@dalemezz

when you read media companies talking about their mission in high-minded prose, always append 'but most importantly make rich people richer'
Saladin Ahmed

If "Roots" aired on a cable news channel, there'd be a rebuttal from pro-slavery pundits to show both sides of the issue.
Frank Conniff

I like my women like I like my mushrooms: dirty, hiding behind trees, pigs want her, gills in secret places, she has her own umbrella.
Patricia Lockwood

Conservative economics has taken the rungs out of the ladders of opportunity for the most diverse American generation. —Heather McGhee, Demos
Demos

America would be much better off now if Republicans had not blocked, degraded, or delayed everything Obama wanted/tried to do. And while I'm stating the obvious: it's odd so say Obama or Dems "wanted" outcomes that resulted from kludging around GOP intransigence. I worry GOP nihilism has become so familiar, political discussions treat it like a feature of the landscape, a mt. range or something.
David Roberts ‏@drvox

There are only two responses to your claims of extraordinary educational outcomes:
1. It will be disproven.
2. If true, outliers mean nothing for policy.
Stop it
Paul Thomas ‏@plthomasEdD

There are bad visualizations, and then there's the 'bicycle of education':


Tim van der Zee ‏@Research_Tim

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