Twitter at the Bitter End of 2016

After November 2016’s crushingly long Twitter round-up of dire sadness, I vowed to mark fewer tweets in December. (Retweet more, favorite less, I thought.) I was somewhat successful, but there are still a lot.

On Trump generally:

It is deeply troubling when you realize that the president-elect generally does not know what he is talking about and when he does he lies.
John Dean

We are in for four years of the most neglectful dad in the world as our president.
Anand Giridharadas @anandwrites

Trump with executive power is different from Trump as a civilian. Power will make him more paranoid, insular and cruel. Like all authoritarians.
Sarah Kendzior

Autocorrect wanted to use "president eject" when I was writing "president elect" and honestly, "President Eject Trump" sounds so much better.
John Scalzi

They said Obama should be evaluated based on how he helps all Americans. But Trump is only responsible for helping working class white folk?
Samuel Sinyangwe ‏@samswey

Why every tweet in a tweet storm should be a self-contained sentence or thought:


Angus Johnston ‏@studentactivism

Trump has trouble hiring fiddlers for the official burning of the USA; offers bookers diplomatic posts because we're way beyond banana republic.
Sarah Kendzior

Hard to process that the next president is both a conscienceless threat to the republic and also a heartbreakingly weak and sad broken soul.
David Frum

Every tweet from Donald says the same thing. "My father hated me and nothing I do will ever be good enough.”
Graham Linehan

I have to give America this much credit: They went through four election cycles with "reality TV stars" before they elected one President.
almightygod

Nixon was evil but he wasn't ignorant.
W was ignorant but he wasn't evil.
The incoming combo is unpresidented.
John Fugelsang

Everyone makes spelling errors. The problem is that certain jobs (i.e, the Presidency) require impulse control and thought before action.
Chase Strangio

It is weird to have a President-elect you would trust with absolutely nothing. Man would steal a pie from a windowsill.
Robert O. Simonson

An under-appreciated virtue of previous presidents was that you could forget about them for days at a time.
Bill McKibben

Once you see Trump's hair in the New York Times' typeface you can't ever unsee it (I'm so sorry):


Jennings Brown

It's good that Donald Trump keeps telling us he's a smart person. Otherwise we would probably forget.
Dean Baker

In my experience with genuinely smart people, they very rarely tell you how smart they are. In fact, it's the opposite. And unlike our POETUS, who actually appears to be genuinely dumb, the smartest people I've met are the most curious and read insatiably.
John Warner ‏@biblioracle

On Trump and Vladimir Putin, and Russian interference in the U.S. election:

It's notable that people who went into cardiac arrest over Obama bowing to Emperor Akihito have made peace with Trump’s slavish devotion to Putin.
jelani cobb

Congratulations to everyone who had "one" for "How many black presidents would it take to get the GOP to side with Russia?"
LOLGOP

No republican/conservative that is sanguine about the Russian intervention in our election process can consider themselves a patriot. Recent events have proven that the Republican party would sell their own mother to have power, and evangelicals as well. Trump's presidency will always be suspect, tainted, and illegitimate. Full stop. There is no claiming of a victory here. I'll say it again for the cheap seats: White people who voted for Trump to protect their so-called interests will be hurt deeply... Authoritarianism is an equal opportunity offender, so if you think whiteness will save you under a Trump admin, you are mistaken. The biggest danger is how religion is going to be used in Trump's administration as a cudgel and a way to promote authoritarianism. I won't expand that all here on Twitter, but suffice to say that it isn't just about abortion, same-sex marriage or the court. Evangelical Christianity in the Trump administration will be used to promote a nationalist fervor against "threatening groups” and you can fill in the blanks about who constitutes "threatening groups.” Same way Putin uses Russian Orthodox church. Trump doesn't give two figs about religion, but it will get him where he needs to go, if we choose to ignore the signs.
ProfB ‏@AntheaButler

It is possible to condemn both Russian electoral interference AND the U.S.’s own interventionist legacy. I refuse to choose one or the other. Not here for the performative left-ness, thanks.
Kevin Gannon ‏@TheTattooedProf

A good lesson for Americans to take away from this is that it feels like shit to wonder if another country's influencing who governs you.
Jon Schwarz ‏@tinyrevolution

Dear GOP,
Don't lecture others on patriotism when you knew a foreign leader was manipulating your own country's election — and did nothing.
Greg Hogben ‏@MyDaughtersArmy

We are all discovering that what we thought of as democracy was actually just a fragile, eroding code of conduct among elites.
David Klion

On Trump’s cabinet appointees (it amazes me that I don't have any about his nominees for EPA, HUD, HHS, and Education, let alone Bannon or Flynn, but it's all so overwhelming and they are generally covered in a couple of these that address the whole slate):

Trump’s secretary of labor pick believes workers are ‘overprotected’ and shouldn’t get breaks.
Raw Story

Jeff Sessions omits decades of records for his AG confirmation hearing - he once argued that doing this was a felony.
Katrina vandenHeuvel

As Attorney General, Sessions would oversee office responsible for ensuring that judicial nominees' records are complete for Senate confirmation hearing.
Leslie Proll

Trump is cutting out the middleman by putting wealthy donors directly in charge of agencies they want eradicated.
Demos

With Donald Trump's gang we'll have billionaires stealing billions, but at least we'll have fewer people improperly getting food stamps.
Dean Baker

If someone wrote a script about a high council whose job it was to make a planet desolate and lifeless like Dune? You'd have Trump's cabinet.
BigIndianGyasi

you won't find a better summation of the Obama-Trump transition than a nuclear physicist being replaced by a "Dancing With the Stars" washout.
Simon Maloy

There were just a couple on the Electoral College, since I pulled a few out to write about earlier:

we don't have slavery any more but we still have a system that was designed to make individual votes unequal because of it.
Matt Pearce

The archaic, undemocratic Electoral College has about as much reason to exist as Trump University.
Steven Greenhouse

The president who won 5 million more votes in 2012 won't get to fill the Supreme Court vacancy but the guy who got 2.5 million fewer votes will.
Ari Berman

If you're deferring to the Electoral College in the face of such a resounding popular vote loss, you're deferring to systemic racism.
Propane Jane™ ‏@docrocktex26

There were lots of thoughts on living under Trump for the next four years, and how to resist:

It continues to be the case that most people, across the political spectrum, haven't realized just how bad it will get.
Christopher Hayes

JESUS: "love thy neighbor"
SOME: "ok but what do you mean by 'neighbor'"
JESUS: "everyone"
SOME: "that doesn't sound right"
Myq Kaplan

Republicans' answer to all damning questions about election: "let's move on."
Robert O. Simonson

I feel the "drain the swamp" rhetoric is going to morph from anti-lobbyist rhetoric into a purge of civil servants and public sector unions.
Lee Fang

I hadn't thought of it this way but the difference between a Trump presidency and a Pence presidency is kleptocracy and Nazism vs. a theocracy.
ProfB ‏@AntheaButler
Break government.
Complain about government being broken.
Repeat ad in finitum.
Nebraska Appleseed (responding to a tweet about Kansas Governor Sam Brownback’s tax plan and its effect on the state’s budget and economy, now being considered as a model by Trump and the Republican Congress)

America is to be governed by something akin to a Mafia crime family, interbred with a genocidal Nazi televangelism cult.
Xeni Jardin

Under Trump, red states are finally going to be able to turn themselves into poor, unhealthy paradises.
Dr. Marc A. Weiss ‏@marcaweiss

MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN is an anagram of KARMA ATE AGEING AMERICA.
Saladin Ahmed

So many fucks will need to be given, in 2017. Start growing yours now.
William Gibson ‏@GreatDismal

I feel like a lot of people wrongly thought that norms are self-enforcing.
David Kaib

I have moments of despair, but I remind myself that despair is unproductive. It will do me no good. Nor anyone else. And I want to do good.
Ashley C. Ford ‏@iSmashFizzle

"Why are you afraid of Trump?" "Because I read Octavia Butler.”
"Why are you afraid of Pence?" "Because I read Margaret Atwood.”
Emily Finke ‏@seelix

Request as we enter 2017: Please stop eroding the norms that recently made it safer to be yourself in this country. Doing so can be deadly.
Phillip Atiba Goff

Defeatism and complacency are two sides of the same coin. They both shut us down when there's work to be done. Don't assume wins or losses.
flippable

Hmmm... Orwell: totalitarianism requires "the continuous alteration of the past, and...a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth."
Wayne Curtis

The fact that the stock market is doing great after the election of a fascist should remind you that capitalism doesn't need democracy.
Matthew Frost

I mean, do you know how bad this can get, America? Do you understand what a real war looks like? A real crash? The real end? This bullshit idea that True Reality is Rust Belt Decline and that denial was everyone who didn't see the appeal of Trump's snake oil there. Telling that story masks what is really at stake: what could really happen when the empire teeters, the seas rise and crops don't grow. What can happen when the most powerful, lethal, far-reaching imperial system in history is run by traitors, dilettantes and criminals. (And some, I assume, are good people.)
Jonathan M. Katz ‏@KatzOnEarth

To understand what is happening I find it easier to think of the GOP as a criminal enterprise conspiring to enrich its leaders.
Bruce Bartlett

take the energy you are dedicating to dialogue with fascists and use it to help bolster the communities fascists seek to destroy. unlikely allies will be thrown together as the fascists try to crush us. gonna be hard enough working with each other. FUCK working with nazis.
Saladin Ahmed

I don’t think Trump is Hitler or that history’s a cheat sheet. I do think we’re morons if we approach each moment as though the world is new.
Erin Kissane

Anyone who treats the left and the right as the same isn't interested in fighting the right.
David Kaib

That awkward moment when you voted Trump for White supremacy's sake, but all he does is fail harder and debunk your mythology every day. Spend more money on education or psychotherapy. You don't need another gun or more ammo, you need a self-identity not predicated on hatred.
Propane Jane™ ‏@docrocktex26

If you don't feel fear these days, [good for you]. But please avoid the classic error of the fortunate: assuming you're the rule, not the exception. The good news: not being afraid frees up a lot of energy. Please spend this energy on learning why others are afraid and on protecting them.
Anand Giridharadas ‏@AnandWrites

The experience of being alive right now feels like the disorientation phase of brainwashing. Not actually joking.
Erin Kissane

Think Global, Act Loki.
Pat Thompson ‏@pattho

Then there was the nuclear threat, newly revived by Trump:

Beginning to miss the last couple of decades, when active fear of nuclear war seemed lower on the priority list.
Bill McKibben

Obamacare is too expensive but building up the power to destroy the earth a kazillion times over is a better use of taxpayer money.
@courtneymilan

The thing I'm terrified of is him getting to a point where he feels like he has to fire a nuke or seem "weak."
Josh Barro

It's almost like there are consequences to electing a viciously ignorant man-child.
Jamelle Bouie

please god let us be only a laughingstock for the next four years and not worse.
Erin Kissane

There was a fair bit of Democratic post-mortem and why-why-why did Clinton lose:

Seems like thought pieces on Democratic losses in the Obama era could at least note that this coincided with Citizens United + radical gerrymandering.
Tom Perriello

Hate ran for public office and won. And now, those who ignored it because of "economic anxiety" want to pretend they didn't hear it. You heard it. You didn't care. Now his campaign lies are obvious to pretty much everyone, but the racism wasn't subtle. It isn't new. Please stop pretending ignoring blatant racism isn't a sign of racism. "It's fine he threatened all those groups, he didn't mean it.” Nope. Trump didn't con you. His supporters heard and repeated every word. They reveled in the idea of being free to oppress. Well, here we are.
Mikki Kendall ‏@Karnythia

It's fundamentally undemocratic for extreme social change to hinge on 500 Floridians or 80,000 MI, WI, PA voters in a nation of 325,000,000.
section_sign

Wahhhhhhh I'm a white voter whose fee fees have been hurt by a black president not catering to meeeeee so I voted for a Russian puppet.
DC Women Kicking Ass

I don't know how you empathize with, reach across the aisle to, or "compromise" with people who BASE THEIR VOTE on not wanting you here. I grew up in the white working class, adopted and assimilated in every way but appearance, and I don't know how to do this.
Nicole Chung ‏@nicole_soojung

Seems doubtful:


Pat Thompson ‏@pattho

Republicans who won't cross the ethical line of choice/abortion but do not flinch at a candidate's racism, sexism, xenophobia, speaks volumes.
Paul Thomas ‏@plthomasEdD

I truly think Trump unlocked the code to beating the media: Have so many terrible things at once they can't focus. Basically a DoS [denial of service] attack. Imagine if even Romney had a Trump U. That would have been a 12-month story. It was discussed less than Rev Wright! 12 women accused Trump of groping/assaulting them. They disappeared from media sight in a day. 12! Russia attacked us to get him elected! He has countless ties [to Russia]. It's only now getting decent coverage. He ran a fake charity and used funds to pay his legal bills and buy self-portraits. This is illegal. God bless David Fahrenthold [of the Washington Post] but that's insane! How much have you read about Linda McMahon? He appointed his largest donor to his fake charity to a post! That got 15 seconds of attention. Every person reading this pays more federal income tax than the next President. When is the last time the media hounded him for details? People have already stopped talking about him appointing a white nationalist to be his Chief Strategist. No hearings for that. By contrast, with few Clinton stories available, EMAILZ got what, 18 months of stories including a deluge in the last week? It's not that Trump gets positive coverage. He gets scattered, unfocused, normative coverage which turns it all into white noise. The closest we had to a story that stuck was his gross attack on the Khans. It killed his polling and lasted over a week. Compare tax return coverage of Romney vs tax return coverage of Trump. I swear the media asked more about dressage than about Trump's taxes.
Grudge ‏@grudging1

My hot take is, one can understand people's material concerns without hand-waving away their investment in color caste. And that, in fact, taking the latter seriously is necessary if you want to address the former.
Jamelle Bouie

When I looked at the list of Obama states Trump flipped, I noticed they all had GOP governors, voter suppression laws passed. Hmmm.
Karoli

Once they decided that Jesus Christ was a hard-core angry conservative, it was pretty obvious that facts weren't going to matter anymore.
William K. Wolfrum

One can't overstate how much voters conflated the Wikileaks emails with the private email server. It's why those leaks were so costly to Hillary Clinton.
Alec MacGillis

The election post-mortem sometimes related to sexism, and a few others had thoughts on that generally:

Every time I hear a pundit say 'Hillary wasn't the right messenger" my mind translates it to "Hillary is a woman."
Peter Daou

one of the things I think people don't fully understand about patriarchy is how much men hate other men. there's definitely male solidarity around things like rape culture. but proving you're a man under patriarchy means hurting other men. that's what war is about. and of course there's a fairly obvious connection with Trump. voting for Trump was voting for traditional gender roles in a lot of ways. strong men (in theory), shows strength in part through gratuitous exploitation of women. men find appeal to male solidarity and exploitation of women appealing. but of course Trump is committed to exploiting men too.
Noah Berlatsky ‏@nberlat

I love the need to say "Hillary was a flawed candidate." Yeah, unlike the guy who was caught on tape bragging about sexual assault.
LOLGOP

What if men had to correctly label a full diagram of a woman's reproductive system in order to introduce a law regulating it?
Laura Bassett ‏@LEBassett

Tell me again how sexual assault allegations destroy men's reputations [accompanied by Time’s Person of the Year cover, featuring Donald Trump].
Dom ‏@DomPerinyon

trying to explain the patriarchy to men feels like telling someone who has never heard of bones that there's a skeleton inside their body.
Emily Heller ‏@MrEmilyHeller

When Sean Connery passes, I hope every outlet that used the shot of Leia in Jabba's chosen attire for Carrie Fisher’s obit uses this:


Alexandra Erin

There were just a few on education:

High school biology student: “Apparently the way science works is if the results of your experiment aren't what you expected it means you did the experiment wrong and have to get the data from the teacher.”
Alfie Kohn

Student evaluations of teaching are not only unreliable, they are significantly biased against female instructors.
Pamela Scully

Proportion of all U.S. public school students whose families are low-income: In 1989, less than 1/3. In 2013, more than 1/2.
Alfie Kohn

Imagine if reducing class sizes and eradicating testing were given as much attention as "teacher evaluation."
Drew Timmons

I paid off my student loans. But I don't feel slighted by anyone who gets theirs forgiven. My sense of fairness doesn't require your misery.
Sweet Cottonmouf ‏@dtafakari

And more on climate and sustainable cities:

Living wall, France. Manage storm water, improve air quality and beautify, all in one go:


jennifer keesmaat

Free transit would cost $100/year per person in the U.S. The savings would be immediate. Congestion costs three times as much.
Free Public Transit

Is real estate speculation a right, or is affordable housing a right? A serious 2017 question in cities the world over.
jennifer keesmaat

"The average car owner in the U.S. pays $12,544 a year for a car that puts in a mere 14-hour workweek.”
Oliver Moore ‏@moore_oliver

Your rights are also your neighbours' rights:


21st Century City ‏@urbanthoughts11

Israel is criticized for doing on a small scale [settlements] what all developed countries are doing on a large scale.
Free Public Transit

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.
Kurt Vonnegut

We, ourselves, have to choose between cars and biosphere. You don't think world leaders are going to save us do you?
Free Public Transit

Air pollution kills one in three Chinese. Let's be sure to rid ourselves of the EPA and its bothersome rules.
Bill McKibben

The more drivers there are, the less freedom drivers have. The more cyclists there are, the more freedom cyclists have.
Brooklyn Spoke

People Who Want to Drive Everywhere Upset That Others Might Too And That Includes Driving On Their Street
la flaneuse

One of mine, all the global temperature observations for 1850-2016 mapped in a single figure. Can you see a trend?


Ed Hawkins

Smog in Paris so bad this week that all public transit is free. Which would make sense everyday, everywhere.
Bill McKibben

To stop pipelines, stop driving cars, stop living sprawled.
Free Public Transit

Driving in winter isn't a great idea, but yet here we are, with a whole metro built around the automobile.
mike ‏@mikesonn

Roads are engineered to be comfy driving 10 MPH above the speed limit. And you wonder why everyone drives 10 MPH above the speed limit.
Andy Boenau

the most common form of "manspreading”:


William Lindeke ‏@BillLindeke

The bottom 3 billion account for only 5 percent of carbon emissions. The answer is to makethe rich responsible, not fewer of the poor.
Tony Annett

pet peeve is people who brag about their grandkids one minute and then talking about need to reduce pop growth the next
Atrios

Time out for a classic cartoon by John Cook at Skeptical Science:


J. Drake Hamilton

Everyone has been talking about the return of the robber baron era combined with the worst of the 1930s. But why are we here? I would argue that part of why we’ve gotten into this mess of civilization is because we’ve forgotten to build civic structures. There are few public squares, plazas, parks, piazzas being built. Combine that with the fact that we ghettoize the poor into industrial areas rather than build mixed-income neighborhoods. Add in the physical separation that car culture creates. And you get a culture where it is difficult to agree because you don’t see your neighbors unless they’re in your social circle. Only the most wealthy have a voice, both because of the physical proximity to power and because money buys a voice. If you really want to tackle representation, also attack zoning laws, fight for inclusive housing, build walkable cities. I would argue that, in part, the structure of American small towns and cities helped prevent a fascist takeover in the ’30s. One of the issues in much of America is that people are too spread (suburban living in rural areas) out to have access to services.
papabybike

There was a figurative boatload of tweets about racism, whether in the election, post-election analysis, or on the streets:

If you are more worried about someone sticking their penis in an orifice, and not about black folks dying, you have no Christian Witness. Period. Caring more about who is fucking whom than black folks being murdered and abused is a sin. Stop preaching about fucking and start preaching about freedom. Work for justice. Stop holding up the construction of patriarchy.
ProfB ‏@AntheaButler

The way to neo-Jim Crow is being paved with the intellectualization of racism.
Vanta Black

No point in American history has been lacking a white man prepared to explain to you why what just happened is ~definitely~ not about racism.
Wesley Lowery

I think American history education spends *a lot* more time on the Civil War and Civil Rights Movements than Reconstruction. It's understandable because Reconstruction is basically the story of a successful terrorist campaign and it's hard to know what to do with that.
Christopher Hayes

The country was born as a project of identity politics. How else to rationalize a "democracy" that allowed owning other people?
jelani cobb

Every holiday is made up. If you are not Black, ask yourself why you have a problem with one made up to celebrate Black people. For what it’s worth, Kwanzaa and 'One nation under God' are roughly the same age but a lot of white people think the latter dates back to the constitution.
Saladin Ahmed

The election has seduced people into believing that free speech means that all speech has the same merits, that ideas are suddenly equal. The KKK and its kin organizations are responsible for the murders of generations of black folks. We can never stop reminding people of this.
deray mckesson

How to tell a real monster: It tells you another human is not worthy of your love or compassion and it uses the word "Them" to get your rage.
Guillermo del Toro ‏@RealGDT

If climate change or nuclear warfare ends Homo sapiens, then not only is White supremacy wrong, it'll actually prove to be maladaptive.
Ebony Elizabeth ‏@Ebonyteach

The order of the day is not democracy; the order is to maintain the Traditional Order of wealthy white male dominance.
Bree Newsome

Since I began writing about injustice in academia in 2008, the critiques of whining and playing the victim card have been consistent. Colleagues in sociology -- a discipline that studies systemic inequality and oppression -- dismiss critiques of oppression as whining. Somehow, even Ph.D.-educated people are no better at discerning anti-oppression critique from whining about one's problems. But, it's not merely faulty logic -- it's an intentional effort to gaslight marginalized scholars who call out oppression. If you keep dismissing someone's narrative of oppression enough, you may successfully lead them to doubt whether they are truly oppressed. You may convince them that all of the evidence of pervasive oppression is not reflected in their supposedly trivial concerns. Naming one's harassment or discrimination is hard and can be painful.
EricAnthonyGrollman ‏@grollman

America was built on the assumption of white male hegemony and pre-eminence. A racist proto-utopia constructed to serve their elites' needs. This is why race and power in the U.S. are often the same thing. Now challenged, what we are seeing is defensive white supremacism. Diversity, anti-racism, multiculturalism, etc. did not create more racism or the far-right. It merely revealed or provoked what was latent. It's thus likely that the "alt-right" will attempt to push racist pseudoscience into the mainstream next year. They need their beliefs about the "superiority of western civilisation" to be based on observable biological preordination. This has the effect of rationalising (a) atrocities or discrimination in the past, (b) racism in the present, (c) future behaviour/policies.
Liam Hogan ‏@Limerick1914

white people on race are like that joke: "Enough about ME. What do YOU think about me?"
JessieNYC

Authors who complain about diversity in books are basically viewing diversity as a trend they're too racist to cash in on.
Jenny Trout

The most offensive thing about the wannabe neo Nazi fuckwits who hop in my mentions is their complete devotion to not knowing anything. They aren't poor. They don't lack access to education. They choose to be ignorant of anything useful. Or even interesting. It's pitiful. They are consistently cowards. Too craven to even read a real history book, much less think critically about the bigotry they are being fed. They are convinced that the problem is multiculturalism and not the fact that they are not prepared. White privilege can't insulate them. At least not in an actual merit-based society, so now they must fight to topple merit. And facts. It's not economic anxiety. It's fear. All those news stories about more Black women going to college. About successful immigrants. They can't keep up, so they wallow in hate. I'm sure it is hard to accept being such a sad sack that you can't succeed even when you have all the advantages. They should grow up. Because even if they got their mythical all-white homeland they couldn't run it. Couldn't build it or feed themselves. The fighting between the ones with life skills and those completely without them would make great TV. I mean, okay most would die of dysentery or cholera. Bunch more would starve. Grim TV, but the profits could go to education. And health care. These are people who don't want to have life skills. Or a basic grasp of the world around them. What else are they going to contribute?
Mikki Kendall ‏@Karnythia

Largest police union wants Trump to lift the federal ban on racial profiling, which police unions say police never do.
Radley Balko

I find all of this talk about how "our institutions will protect us" to be bizarre. As if these institutions haven't facilitated oppression. This has been said before, but these institutions that we say will protect us allowed slavery, internment, lynching, and mass imprisonment. In case you forgot, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court doesn't even think race matters in policy anymore. As if history didn't happen.
Clint Smith ‏@ClintSmithIII

So when people argue that "diversity" is an add-on or fad or "forced down my throat" there's a reveal there about their view of the world.
Kate Elliott ‏@KateElliottSFF

yeah it turns out I'm really OK being in an echo chamber if the echo is “Hi Danielle you're human and you don't have to prove it.”
Danielle Evans ‏@daniellevalore

the idea that people go to safe spaces because they don’t know reality is so dumb. they need safe spaces because reality is cruel.
trollhunters loser ‏@angrysigh

I will always trust a fellow person of color's sense that a joke shits on them over a white joke-teller's insistence that we don't get irony.
Saladin Ahmed

Whites laugh at [the idea of safe space] because they think the notion of "protecting" People of Color is silly. Why shouldn't People of Color students stomach abuse 24/7? That's the stance. Never mind that Whites can't even handle being critiqued on racism. They can't handle that but People of Color should handle the racism itself. Ok.
Trudy ‏@thetrudz

Amazing to see conservatives who hate the government and corrupt officials but take every word of police testimony as incorruptible iron law.
Vann R. Newkirk II ‏@fivefifths

I guess the one-drop rule still applies. One drop at the top was enough to make these people rip apart the body politic to rid themselves of it.
Brittney Cooper ‏@ProfessorCrunk

White supremacy hides behind masks, smoke, and mirrors. It cheats, steals, and lies. It doesn't fight fair. It goes nuclear in a knife fight. Now, Black Americans vote as a bloc not because we love Democrats (please), but because modern GOP politics crystallized around hatred of *us.* Most hypervisible Black writers, thinkers and activists who are using social media are living degrees of precarity. I've watched them work. Many of us on here are writing/talking/sharing for our *lives.* For if we had comfort, privilege and safety, why would we be tweeting?
Ebony Elizabeth ‏@Ebonyteach

America isn't going to outgrow bigotry until we start talking about the way it is taught passively and overtly to every generation. We have to stop assuming humans are fundamentally altruistic. We're apex predators who occasionally act right. But to many? Hate feels good.
Mikki Kendall ‏@Karnythia

I'm a psychologist of racism. [The idea] that calling someone racist is not persuasive is mostly irrelevant to why you do it. The argument: "the science says calling the racist doesn't change their minds, so don't do it" is an absurd overreach...from the science! The science says that it's not fun when people think bad things about you. That doesn't mean we shouldn't think bad things about people. What it DOES mean is that, if you thought educating hearts and minds was the strategy for change, you are likely frustrated by the Left. It ALSO means you need to update your strategy. Because the SCIENCE says that attitudes are a relatively WEAK predictor of behavior. Norms and situations are far more powerful. And labeling racist behavior as racist...sets the norm that it's unacceptable. That means there's good science to say that, sometimes, calling it racism helps reduce racism. Last point for now: science is NOT political strategy. People substituting one for the other, are being lazy, ignorant, or insincere.
Phillip Atiba Goff

Any ideological debate with someone denying the reality of systemic racism will inevitably become a debate over whether slavery was really so bad.
Bree Newsome

A HUGE part of institutional racism is the near-invisible act of siphoning off People of Color time as we repeat arguments over and over and over again.
Shaun | No, Totally! ‏@NoTotally

If there’s one lesson of this election it’s that black people (hell any people of color) can’t save white people from their own stupidity and racism.
Darth Kriss ‏@insanityreport

The liberal media bias claim originates with a belief on the right that treating Black and immigrant concerns as news violates whiteness. Breitbart?
Jonathan W. Gray ‏@elmcitytree

We all have [this type of] classmates and coworkers. They say racist things and insist there isn't a racist bone in their body. They are "colorblind.” They never stop to think that needing to ignore someone's race to treat them like a human being is a problem. I like to point that out.
Mikki Kendall ‏@Karnythia

Until we decide that all 7.4 billion members of our species are human with inherent worth, we can't have nice things. We can't even have single-payer health care in the USA because millions of folks think "those people" will have gotten away with something. Giving every member of the species enough to eat? Clean water to drink? A roof over their heads? Let's not get ahead of ourselves here...
"What's to guarantee they'll work?"
"Most work will be automated within the next 25-30 years."
"But they're getting something for nothing."
Ebony Elizabeth ‏@Ebonyteach

(If someone is actively in favor of reducing millions of people's access to the ballot, can they reasonably be called a populist?) (The answer is only "yes" if you think the "white" in "white populism" is implicit and understood.)
Gene Demby ‏@GeeDee215

Racists in my mentions LOLing it up about black people dying and I gotta raise a black kid among these dickheads and always take the high road.
Vann R. Newkirk II ‏@fivefifths

If an unarmed man -- 15 feet from you and running away -- deserves death in the mind of a courtroom, then when could that man be safe? Without an answer to this, most reflections on policing sound like BS to the communities in which I work.
Phillip Atiba Goff (talking about the mistrial in the cop-killing of Walter Scott)

Confession: sometimes when I see the word "antiracist" I think it says "antichrist" at first.
Pat Thompson ‏@pattho

When we see mental illness as a threat, we militarize psychiatric hospitals… Less than 3-5% of American crimes involve people with mental illness - a lower average than "sane" people.
Jess GS ‏@JessGantt

There was a subset of tweets in reaction to a controversial tweet by a Drexel University professor that was meant to mock the phrase “white genocide.” The professor faces sanction from his university:

White genocide is a fictional concept contrived by white supremacists and Neo-Nazis. It does not actually exist.
Shaun King

Folks, I've been trying to tell you what's coming, and if you haven't been listening, now would be a good time. I'm about to drop out of here on a regular basis after New Year’s, and start the serious work that needs to be done. Now, the new regime is going to use Breitbart to come after folks for tweets, articles, whatever is said that disagrees with them. These folks do not believe in First Amendment rights. If they did, they would simply disagree. They want to destroy dissent. My calculus in this new time is, if I am going to be vilified for my thoughts, then damn it, read my whole article, not a tweet. Which is why I am going to move away from Twitter as a daily means of communication. It's not worth the trouble going down over a tweet.
ProfB ‏@AntheaButler

White genocide is a Nazi concept, comparable to eugenicist "race suicide," the only people who use it unironically are Nazis or ignorant.
Mazel Tov Cocktail ‏@AdamSerwer

There were a few tweets about health care, as the Republicans geared up to end Obamacare and maybe Medicare and Medicaid:

You have to tell a lot of lies to convince yourself that denial of healthcare is something a person deserves for not being rich.
Salena ‏@Salencita

There's been a spike in heroin-related deaths (now nearly 13,000). For comparison: annually there are 88,000 alcohol-related deaths.
Mary E. Harris ‏@marysdesk

To hell with co-pays. Single-payer now!!!!
Nikhil Goyal

When your skin is in the game, it's not covering your body as it's supposed to.
Pat Thompson ‏@pattho

So frustrated about the Affordable Care Act that literally every concession we made to fiscal conservatives and GOP to get the 60th vote eroded the ACA's quality and popularity. Less generous subsidies, no public option, no bargaining for drug prices. These weren't strategic errors. They had to be done.
Harold Pollack

The press and media, generally, and specifically in our current predicament, were a popular topic, including fake news:

A couple months ago I unplugged cable TV. Don't miss it, especially lap dog "journalist" rituals of Trump normalization.
Langdon Winner ‏@langdonw

DONALD TRUMP ISN'T A MEDIA DARLING he is literally a monster put together by a fascist media junta tied to too many dying USA industries
Liza Sabater

they’re covering trump like the hollywood press does tom cruise. "just ask about the new movie, no scientology questions"
Oliver Willis

My worry is that the human brain did not evolve under the conditions that we are now facing: images that simulate and twist reality.
Ebony Elizabeth ‏@Ebonyteach

What if...the news wasn't on...24/7?
Ashley C. Ford ‏@iSmashFizzle

Question: if, in lieu of any real press availability, Trump just keeps holding these de facto campaign rallies. In which the only press role is being cast as the villain, as Trump points at them and exhorts the crowd to jeer them. Should the press really continue showing up to televise these events?
jay smooth ‏@jsmooth995

(How cool would it be to normalise Muslims instead of fucking Nazis?)
Tauriq Moosa

the more I read the more concerning it is to me that the main beneficiaries of free speech absolutism have been corporations and Nazis
David Golumbia

The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.
Garry Kasparov

How TV has fragmented: The audience for the #1 rated show for the ’16 season (NCIS) would have been good for 106th place in 1987.
Steve Kornacki

America has proven what I learned in Russia: the people most skeptical and conspiracy-minded are the most easily duped.
Julia Ioffe

Man, how the right loves to cry "false flag." Two little words, and all reason and evidence is instantly banished from their minds.
Robert O. Simonson

People constantly calling events "false-flag operations" are telling you they are entirely capable of running false-flag operations. This is an individual instance of a general principle: people who habitually make shit up will always do what they accuse you of doing.
Erin Kissane

[The pizzagate conspiracy belief] is what a “bubble” looks like. If I said Romney was behind a child sex ring, my friends would push back. But conservatives clearly are more likely to live in environments where even batshit, off-the-wall beliefs get no challenge. I see this in my discussions with conservatives I know. They feel no compunction about disagreeing with my views. But if I push back, even gently, I get a brick wall. They are clearly unused to getting any kind of pushback and don't know how to take it.
Amanda Marcotte

Speed and exclusivity are out-dated priorities for news media. We need news sources competing not to report first, but to report best.
RedIsDead

*sigh*
I wish more of this year's news had been fake.
Les Lim ‏@lesmana

[This includes one incredibly long tweet storm that I have grouped into seven paragraphs]:

Fake news was a core concern of New Deal media reformers [in the 1930s]. Newspapers owned by reactionary publishers constantly made things up about New Dealers. Like that Congressman didn't pay taxes. [One] particular newspaper was called the Paris News. It was…absentee owned. This is a core concept.

Absentee ownership meant that the owners didn't pay attention to how their institutions affected people where those owners didn't live. It didn't matter to a New York news magnate whether info put out by his chain about Paris, Texas, was true. He didn't live there. The basic idea behind media and telecom reforms was to keep institutions local, and keep them decentralized. Multiple structural barriers were organized to preserve truth. Newspaper unions, for one, fought publishers over editorial independence. A diversity of news sources, like union newspapers and newspapers in lots of languages, was another. The Communications Act of 1934 was a key law to block control of our telephone system by AT&T. All of these fights created a structure of New Deal news that people think of as objective. Nostalgia, like 'remember when Walter Cronkite told the truth?' When America was unified. But this was because of earlier political fights. The 1930s to 1970s news industry was structured to avoid fake news. It wasn't totally successful. But some of the protections held. There were other protections for media more broadly, like financial and syndication rules for TV and the antitrust suit against the studios. There were lots of newspapers for different communities, including ones that were key to the Civil Rights movement.

Fast-forward to the 1980s and 1990s. Media consolidation, deregulation, attacks on newspaper unions. Fox News and Rush Limbaugh emerge out of changes in regulatory policy by Reagan and Clinton. Financiers begin newspaper roll-ups. Newspapers begin falling apart, though the financials don't reflect it yet. The 1990s media landscape is insane with conspiracy theories. In the mid-2000s, Google and Facebook begin their march to monopolizing the ad networks. As corrupted as news has become, it still exists, somewhat. But the platform monopolists begin chewing up all their revenue. And the greatest absentee owned editor imaginable appears: The Algorithm.

The Algorithm is scalable, automated, and seems totally value-neutral. Right? It delivers everything everyone wants. Facebook and Google slowly become the editor for the planet through The Algorithm. New media outlets live and die by The Algorithm. But odd problems start cropping up. Facebook's The Algorithm censors a Pulitzer-Prize-winning Vietnam-era photo from Norwegian news. Turns out Facebook is misleading on traffic numbers for major news sites. Optimization, aka gaming The Algorithm, becomes an industry.

This opens the way for modern fake news. Completely made up, riding on The Algorithm, perhaps foreign propaganda, crops up like barnacles on the bottom of a boat. This is a function of the centralization of power in the hands of The Algorithm, aka Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page. No matter how competent, no one person can be the editor for all of humanity. The Algorithm is the mother of all absentee ownership.

The response to the 'fake news' panic has been authoritarian. It has been 'why won't Facebook censor things I don't like!?!' So Facebook announces it will censor. And it may engage in "policy enforcement actions" to cut off $$$ to media. Facebook acts as a sovereign power unto itself. It outsources censorship to sites like Politifact, a site with clear policy biases. Hoping that if it does this outsourcing, people won't notice Facebook’s total control over our free speech commons via The Algorithm. But fundamentally, such control is not consistent with a democracy, with a free press, or with freedom of association. There are many policy approaches to this problem. But it is not a problem of 'fake news,’ it is a problem of concentrated monopoly power. Fake news is simply the barnacles that aren't being cleaned out of the system

It's worse today, but this is a longstanding issue. Fourteen years ago, it was fake news around the war in Iraq. What we need to restore democracy is a wholesale anti-monopoly approach to our media ecosystem, starting but not ending with the platforms. Communities must have the ability to organize their own public commons for debate and speech, unmediated by private monopolies. Otherwise, we will not be dealing just with Fake News, but with a Fake Democracy as well.
Matt Stoller

And finally, there are the best of the rest of my favorite topics and jokes, even as we go to hell in a handbasket:

People are right when they say that a PhD is as much a measure of resources -- emotional, monetary, etc -- as it is intellect or talent.
jelani cobb

Some copy editor's going to have a not-so-nice day:


Shikha ‏@TheCommanist

Voting rights are just that - rights. There should be no difficulty in registering to vote. When everyone can vote, the working class wins.
Demos

Why can't we fight the good fight against the immediate crisis, live good personal lives, and face the future at the same time?
Ebony Elizabeth ‏@Ebonyteach

Food stamp fraud costs the U.S. less than the cost to taxpayers for just three months of Trump's family living in NYC. But yeah, starve the poor.
Tom Bonier

Can't imagine folks telling Nabokov or Brett Easton Ellis that their protagonists needed to be "likable."
Kameron Hurley

I say that wealthy interests have too much power, that CEOs and bankers are generally not who should hold office, etc.
David Kaib

Florida drivers with poor credit scores and clean records pay $1,552 more for auto insurance than those with excellent credit and drunk driving convictions.
George Joseph ‏@georgejoseph94

Humans hate what they fear and fear what they do not understand. And they understand almost nothing.
almightygod

I've been online since AOL was hot. So, I have seen pretty much every kind of scam. And I've seen the laws changing in response. I've said before I don't believe appealing to morals works on everyone. So I lead with self interest, follow with morality. That combo works.
Mikki Kendall

Study: inmates in private prisons get more conduct violations, increasing time served and prison profits.
sean. ‏@SeanMcElwee

We don't need better science outreach. We need to fight corrupt wealthy interests from pushing self-serving disinformation.
Alex Wild ‏@Myrmecos

Lord I love a competent person.
Tressie Mc ‏@tressiemcphd

I don't care if it rhymes with "right," lyricists should be prohibited from using the word "fright."
Pat Thompson @pattho

All the technology we've developed as a species standing upon each previous generation's shoulders should make us all better off. Seriously, how shameful is it that poverty still exists in a world where cars are about to start driving themselves and our phones talk to us?
Scott Santens

Waiting for people to wake up and realize that Santa is just another giveaway program for the takers.
jelani cobb

Lattes aren't the problem:


Andrei Cherny

Am I the only one who consistently thinks references to AI [artificial intelligence] are about a guy named Al? Damn you, sans serif typefaces!
Pat Thompson ‏@pattho

Report: 39 percent of American prisoners are “unnecessarily incarcerated” with “little public safety rationale.”
Jared Keller

If low-wage employers paid their workers a living wage, taxpayers would have saved $153 billion a year from 2009 to 2011.
Bernie Sanders

When we discuss immigrants as good or bad for the economy, we are judging other humans based on their economic value to us. THIS IS WRONG.
Hari Kondabolu

I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.
Kurt Vonnegut

Update: watching an entire episode of a TV show without looking at your phone now counts as reading a book.
Christian Hoard

Bernini makes this shit out of a rock and I can't fucken draw my eyeliner on straight:


Victoria the Undying ‏@sailorbee

In 20 years a movie called “Aleppo” will win seven Oscars and everyone will say “Something like that should never be allowed to happen again.”
AYESHA ‏@ayeshamirza_

“Poppycock” comes from the Dutch word “pappekak,” which means "soft dung."
Merriam-Webster

For me, "explanation" and "discussion" are not the same thing. The first I'm doing for you, the latter I'm doing with you. Different labor. If I'm the person showing up to the conversation with all the information and you're just there to ask me "Why?", that's not a discussion.
Ashley C. Ford ‏@iSmashFizzle

How do we not have a word for when your snow shovel hits a crack or line in the sidewalk?
Chris Steller

I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of reward or punishment after I'm dead.
Kurt Vonnegut

The flying duck orchid is native to Australia:


Nature Is Weird

“Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” is my favorite Christmas story about how Santa's reindeer are bigots until they need someone’s help.
Elizabeth ‏@Elizasoul80

Keep seeing these “Manchester by the Sea” commercials and I'm 99.9% certain I'm done giving my money to all-white movies. I just don't care about white dudes and their navels.
Mikki Kendall ‏@Karnythia

Humans have a bad track record when it comes to dealing with who we perceive as surplus labor/non-contributors.
Ebony Elizabeth ‏@Ebonyteach

"Tough" policies mean “repressive and discriminatory.” Tough is a euphemism.
David Kaib

"Form follows function" misled a century of architects into believing that they could really anticipate function.
Devon Zuegel

Do not crowd-source your opinions, values, and identity. Just read, y'all.
Ashley C. Ford ‏@iSmashFizzle

People decide "moderate" is a normative praise term, then define the ideological spectrum with "moderate" centered on their own views.
Josh Barro

This graphic is mind-blowing: perceived size of Muslim population in France, U.S. and elsewhere vs. reality:


Leandro Oliva ‏@lmoliva_

Teach microwriting (Twitter, email, etc.) instead of five-paragraph essay. I’ve never written an essay at work, but do microwriting all the time.
Shana Crosson

I would love if public radio got hyper-local and shed the "Prairie Home Companion"/MPR model of relying on national programming.
William Lindeke

whenever you feel inadequate, just remember you aren't ted cruz. wtf is wrong with that dude.
Nikhil Goyal

So when I hear someone say, “sorry to be un-PC, but…,” I hear a person, at best, apologizing for being linguistically inadequate. Generally, though, I hear a person admitting he doesn’t care whether he’s understood.
andrewkarre

someone in my town made a little mouse café! that's so nice:


Anna Syvertsson ‏@sparkleboob

We GenXers are very much like "shit happens, that's life, get over it." Millennials are interrogating systems in a way that never occurred to us.
Ebony Elizabeth ‏@Ebonyteach

"There's a fine line between a good hug that releases pheromones, and a court order." –BigIndianGyasi
Live Wire Radio

If scientists stayed out of politics we'd still be inhaling lead from fossil fuels and bathing in DDT.
John Maerz ‏@MaerzLab

"what if dinosaurs were just fat birds”:


@FioraAeterna

Today I learned that Cantonese is so fond of metaphor you have to put the word "color" after color names if you're actually talking about literal colors.
S.I. Rosenbaum

Whatcha thinkin' about? Oh, just box things:


Faces in Things ‏@FacesPics

The great irony is that the ethnonationalist, populist wave sweeping Europe and the U.S. is installing oligarchies, not populists.
Joy Reid ‏@JoyAnnReid

The problem with Kate McKinnon's impression of Kellyanne Conway is it gives her a brain and a soul. #SNL
Robert O. Simonson

What could go wrong?


SciencePorn

All superheroes are kind of whiny and embedded with a colonial mindset and I don't care for that.
lyz lenz ‏@lyzl

lol cheery seasonal promoted tweets amid uniform stream of doom
Chris Steller

Thankful for Stanislav Petrov

Our recent re-immersion into nuclear fear reminded me of a story I heard a while ago about a Soviet soldier who stopped a nuclear strike at some point. I didn't remember the details until Chris Hayes covered it a few nights ago.

Stanislav Petrov was a colonel in the Soviet Air Defence Forces. He was on duty September 26, 1983, at the command center for early warning when an alert came up saying a single warhead had been launched from the U.S. toward the USSR. Shortly after, several more alerts appeared.


Petrov reported it to his superiors as a false alarm, rather than an imminent nuclear strike. Quoting the Wikipedia:

Petrov later indicated that the influences on his decision included: that he was informed a U.S. strike would be all-out, so five missiles seemed an illogical start; that the launch detection system was new and, in his view, not yet wholly trustworthy; and that ground radar failed to pick up corroborative evidence, even after minutes of delay. However, in a 2013 interview, Petrov said at the time he was never sure that the alarm was erroneous. He felt that his civilian [education] helped him make the right decision. His colleagues were all professional soldiers with purely military training and, following instructions, would have reported a missile strike if they had been on his shift.

This event took place just two weeks after the Soviet military had shot down Korean Airlines flight 007, and tensions were high. Cruise missile installations were being deployed across Europe, and Reagan was talking about the Strategic Defense Initiative. If you didn't live through this period, it's hard to realize how tense things were.

I'm trying to remember what I was doing on that day. Ironically, right around that time I was working on a report for Critical Mass Energy Project on the costs of decommissioning nuclear power plants.

It was a Monday. I was living in Washington, D.C., recently turned 24 years old. I worked a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol, so if it had happened, at least I wouldn't have had a lingering death! But, like everyone else, I had no idea this had (almost) happened.

That's how close it can be. I hope our Dear Leader has a few people around who can fill him in about this.

Comic Contradiction

This one, from Dan Piraro's "Bizarro" daily comic, is for Michael Leddy:


(It ran on December 19, so I'm a bit late with this.)

And once again, here's to the people who think artisan is pronounced artesian! I salute you.

Signs for a Future Protest

As we get closer to the Dear Leader's inauguration on January 20, people are preparing to protest and resist. And to do that, you need some signs. Here are few I made at a poster-making session just before Christmas.

It was hard to decide whether to focus the message on Donald generally...




...or his business conflicts of interest...


...or on an issue he is wrong about ...


...or even something positive that we believe (and he does not):


Or maybe about the event itself, as a poster to use in the weeks before:


This one was made by another person at the session, who clearly has much better sign painting technique than I do:


What are you doing to prepare for the coming of our first orange president?

The Talking Cure: What Needs to Be Said?

Today, during a visit to the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, I saw an exhibition called The Talking Cure. Most of it was a collection ceramic figures, each with its own audio story written and performed (and delivered through your phone).

But at one end was an installation designed as a way for viewers to participate. It looked like this:


Respondents were asked to take up paper and pencil and answer the question, "What needs to be said"?

Many of the messages were affirming statements about having a positive outlook ("Look on the bright side!", as if that never gets said), but others were more interesting, in my opinion:








And at least one that was funny in an unexpected way:


There was a lot of other cool artwork in the galleries throughout the museum, too. I haven't been to WAM in something close to a decade, and now wonder what I've been missing.

Another Look at Lead

If you ask an average American their first thought about the metal lead, you would probably hear about lead poisoning. I was even taught that lead poisoning may have contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire. But lead had an important use in creating the cultural context for the Enlightenment and later the Industrial Revolution.


Click to enlarge and read the words more easily.


The machine at the bottom is a 19th-century type casting machine. (I love the little animal ornaments in the corners of the border.)

I'm a fan of printing generally, the history of printing, the technology, the effects of the innovation... and this broadside, created for the 2010 American Typecasting Fellowship Conference, says it really succinctly.

Pete Seeger's "Ode to Joy"

I went to a neighborhood sing on Monday night before Christmas. It was my first time attending the sing, which has been going on once a month for several years. Lots of fun, but I also learned something: Pete Seeger wrote a set of lyrics for Beethoven's "Ode to Joy."

Much of the song's content is moderately religious, but the first two stanzas are not, and I think express Seeger's idea of a better world, and mine as well:

Build the road of peace before us
Build it wide and deep and long
Speed the slow, remind the eager
Help the weak and guide the strong

None shall push aside another
None shall let another fall
Work beside me, sisters, brothers,
All for one and one for all.

 With a nod to Dumas there at the end.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa... and all of my wishes for a 2017 that begins to achieve Pete Seeger's dream.

How to Build Community

When four-color printing is left in the sun, the yellow ink fades first, then the red, then slowly the blue, and the black, last of all.

There's a copy of this poster, called How to Build Community, in Trotters Restaurant in St. Paul. It's been there for a while, because the yellow is at least half gone and the red is starting to go, too.

The poster art was created by Karen Kerney for the Syracuse Cultural Workers in 1998. It made me think of how easy it is to say what we don't want, and not so easy to say what we do want, what our vision of a just, sustainable, humane world looks like.

Here are the words:

How to Build Community
Turn off your TV
Leave your house
Know your neighbors
Look up when you are walking
Greet people
Sit on your stoop
Plant flowers
Use your library
Play together
Buy from local merchants
Share what you have
Help a lost dog
Take children to the park
Garden together
Support neighborhood schools
Fix it even if you didn't break it
Have potlucks
Honor elders
Pick up litter
Read stories aloud
Dance in the street
Talk to the mail carrier
Listen to the birds
Put up a swing
Help carry something heavy
Barter for your goods
Start a tradition
Ask a question
Hire young people for odd jobs
Organize a block party
Bake extra and share
Ask for help when you need it
Open your shades
Sing together
Share your skills
Take back the night
Turn up the music
Turn down the music
Listen before you react in anger
Mediate a conflict
Seek to understand
Learn from new and uncomfortable angles
Know that no one is silent though many are not heard
Work to change this

Thanks to the Trotters family and their small business for keeping this poster up long enough to fade a bit, and reminding me of this.

Christmas Eve of Destruction

Over at The Transportist, transportation engineer and all-around great thinker David Levinson has been sharing the transcripts of a long interview he did recently on the future of transportation. That's one of my pet issues and I've been reading them as they appear each day (today is day 5).

But meanwhile, Donald Trump is tweeting about starting the arms race again. He's ably demonstrating why anyone who voted for him has clearly forgotten (or never knew) the fear of nuclear war we lived under in many decades of the 20th century, but particularly during the early 1980s. Yesterday I read (reread) Tom Shales's Washington Post review of the 1983 TV movie The Day After, and it brought it all back.

Will any of us be here to see if Levinson's predictions about driverless cars come true? I'm not so sure at the moment.

Here's a bit of what Twitter has to say about Trump and nuclear weapons.

Walking in a nuclear winter wonderland.
lyz lenz

The thing I'm terrified of is him getting to a point where he feels like he has to fire a nuke or seem "weak."
Josh Barro

One reason the nuclear arms race ended: it almost sparked global annihilation in 1983, spooking the US and USSR. (with link to this Vox story)
Max Fisher

Hard to process that the next president is both a conscienceless threat to the republic and also a heartbreakingly weak and sad broken soul.
David Frum

The global warming we should be worried about is the global warming caused by NUCLEAR WEAPONS in the hands of crazy or incompetent leaders!
Donald J. Trump (tweeted on May 7, 2014)

Obamacare is too expensive but building up the power to destroy the earth a kazillion times over is a better use of taxpayer money.
Courtney Milan

Trump wants to expand our nuclear arsenal. I think of my aunt and baby cousin, found burnt in a ditch in Hiroshima. These weapons must go.
George Takei

Boomers just want us to relive their childhood of hiding under desks.
mikesonn

Oh, and also meanwhile, a nonpartisan group called the Electoral Integrity Project has declared North Carolina is no longer a democracy, based on objective criteria used to assess countries around the world:

North Carolina’s overall electoral integrity score of 58/100 for the 2016 election places us alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies like Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone. If it were a nation state, North Carolina would rank right in the middle of the global league table – a deeply flawed, partly free democracy that is only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world.

The screaming inside my head is pretty loud right now. Hard to concentrate enough to write this, but when I think about trying to not think about it, to distract myself with something happy and maybe seasonal, I remember this tweet by a guy named Josh Kalven who wrote about the term "internal emigre" in the age of President 46%. His father, Jamie Kalven wrote these words:

One of the dangers is that people will instead become demoralized and retreat into denial, that they will seek refuge amid the pleasures and fulfillments of private life. That would give carte blanche to power. There was a term used in central Europe to describe those who opted to retreat into private life under totalitarianism. They were called “internal emigres.”

That is certainly tempting at a time like this: to live one’s life in the wholly private realm, enjoying the company of friends, good food and drink, the pleasures of literature and music, and so on. Privileged sectors of our society are already heavily skewed that way. It’s a real danger at a time like this. If we withdraw from public engagement now, we aid and abet that which we deplore.

Thanks (both ironically and seriously) to Jay Smooth for calling my attention to Kalven's tweet.

A Sign of the Times, Then and Now

This article from yesterday’s Star Tribune about a girls-only engineering class in a Twin Cities suburban high school got me thinking back to the end of 7th grade.

It was 1972. My classmates and I were just finishing a year of home economics for girls and shop for boys; in 8th grade, both of these (as well as art) were half-year electives. I wanted to take art, but I also wanted to take shop instead of home ec. I’d already sewed a stuffed frog and made some food, and that seemed like enough, so what I wanted to do in the next year was construct a wooden sign that had my family’s last name on it.

That was the major project of 8th-grade shop. I can still remember the signs made by older boys I knew: the face of the sign was about 4” tall, maybe 24” wide, with zig-zag ends. The wood was stained a medium brown and the sign was attached to a pointed black upright, maybe a 1x1 or 2x2, that was stuck into the ground. Your last name was stenciled on in white lettering, all capital letters, and then the whole thing was varnished for weather-proofing.

I really wanted to make one because my family (as you may know if you read this blog regularly) has only daughters. We would never have one of these signs.

I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but I requested — or maybe had my mother request, thanks, Mom! — a spot in the shop class instead of home ec. But I was told no, girls weren’t allowed to do that. We questioned it, but didn’t fight it in any major way, as I recall. (It's weird how hazy and inexact these memories are.)

I think the school changed that policy a year or so after, maybe because of my request, maybe because they got the memo that they were discriminating on the basis of gender and inviting lawsuits.

The Star Tribune article got me thinking, though: What if I had been allowed to take the class, and was the only girl in it? I think one of my friends (who was from an all-girl family, too) may have also asked to take the class, but even if there had been two of us… what would it have been like?

There’s no way to know, obviously, but I’m pretty sure I never considered this question at the time. I wonder what effect it would have had on my life and worldview if I had taken the class and been subjected to overt sexism from either the teacher or my classmates? Or even just the subtle undermining that can happen, and is avoided in the girls-only class described by the Star Tribune?

Thanks to this teacher in 2016 for organizing the class and giving it a try. We're all better off when everyone knows how to solve their own problems and make their own stuff.

Daugher Number Three, Age Nine

Well, 2016 has been such a bad year that I forgot to mark my own blogging anniversary a few days ago, on December 16. It's been nine years since I started this odd combination of rants and admonitions, which means 3,408 posts have been uploaded into that ethereal space some people call the World Wide Wreck.

At age 9, I was in fourth grade. I don't have a school photo from that year since we only bought those for each of the four daughters in my family every other year, so we have to make do with this black and white snapshot from Christmas:


The year was 1968-69. Nixon was elected that fall. Eisenhower died at some point during the school year, and I remember that, though not a lot of other important stories. Oh yes, the Apollo space program was in high gear, in preparation for the summer landing on the moon. That was a big story at our house.

At school we were learning the times tables for the numbers six through nine, plus lots of spelling and vocabulary words. This was the year I learned to use an Oxford comma, though it wasn't called that. We learned songs, too — the Erie Canal song, "Come and Hear the German Band," "This Land Is Your Land." We had religious education (in school! during the school day! though taught by lay educators). And my teacher had a boy tie one of his teeth — which had fallen out — to a string, then dangle it inside a bottle of Coke for a few days so we could see how it rotted.

My grades were consistently Bs. There were just two Ss on my report card's fourth quarter, in music and physical education, of all things. I got minuses from my teacher for my language skills (grammar) in one quarter, two minuses for "works with accuracy," and an early minus for "shows skill in use of maps, charts, and reference materials." Maybe fourth grade is when I learned all of those skills; who knows?

On the plus side, I got no minuses at all for my social, work, personal, or health habits. I was absent 16 days total, so I guess I was healthier than in third grade.

So now I have begun the 10th year of Daughter Number Three. Thanks for hanging in with me as we check out the way to hell in a handbasket.

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Past anniversary posts, each with age-appropriate photographic evidence:

• First
• Second
• Third
• Fourth 
• Fifth 
• Sixth 
• Seventh
• Eighth

Daudt Wants to Go Backwards

Yesterday, the same day that a group of Minnesota legislators was announcing its National Popular Vote bill, the newly installed Republican Majority Leader, Kurt Daudt, was introducing his own bill to do just about the opposite.

Daudt’s bill would change how Minnesota allots its electoral votes to majority vote within Congressional district, as is currently done in Maine and Nebraska. Not coincidentally, that would have given Trump 5 votes and Clinton 3, with the final 2 going to Clinton, I assume, based on the overall majority in the state.

I am opposed to this idea because it goes in the wrong direction. We want less dividing of votes into districts, not more. If Daudt’s bill allocated our electoral votes proportionately on the statewide totals, I might be in favor of that, if it also had a provision restricting the change to wait until every other state had done the same.

But even that method still maintains the artificial boundaries of the states (and the over-representation of small-population states) that are key problems of the Electoral College.

At the NPV press conference yesterday, the state representatives shared this map:


It shows how many official campaign events (Trump and Clinton) were held in the various states, and how over-emphasized the swing states are. Just one event in Texas and California. Not a single event in 24 states, including New York.

Even worse, these realities of our voting system affect policy. Swing states get more disaster declarations and disaster aid, and narrow interests within these states get support and money — think ethanol in Iowa, for instance. It’s bad policy and everyone knows it, but still, it continues.

Yes, NPV would mean candidates would campaign in large-population states, but since that’s where a large percentage of the population is, would that be a bad thing? And campaign appearances are usually based on media markets, so in many cases those visits would cover the smaller states as well.

What is this opposition to the idea that every vote should count equally? It's a remnant from slavery, and plans like Daudt's only make it worse.