The Last Tweets of 2019 and the Decade

It's time for one last Twitter round-up of the twenty-teens. This morning before I got up, I had an idea for this intro but by the time I started working on it I couldn't remember what it was, so — as my mom used to say — it must have been a lie. Or at least, not a very good idea. I hope.

The New Year, New Years Eve, and 2020:

I don't know what will happen in the future. That's exactly why I remain hopeful. Certainty is the death of hope. Looking forward to working with comrades in 2020 to do what we can, where we are, with the resources we can marshal to continue working towards the horizon we seek.
@prisonculture

If you were born in 1981 or before, then on more than half of your days on Earth, the year contained "19." Tuesday is your last such day -- THAT IS, IT'S THE LAST DAY YOU WILL BE ALIVE IN A YEAR THAT CONTAINS "19"
Chris Steller

My wish for 2020 is for people to stop asking climate activists what gives us hope and start asking “how can I help?” Quit worrying about hope and start worrying about not being complicit.
Mary Annaïse Heglar

Christmas-related:

One of Langston Hughes homemade Christmas cards from 1950:


Beinecke Library

The moral of a Christmas Carol is that it takes extreme supernatural intervention to get the rich to be generous so it’d probably just be easier to tax them
@hobbsisme

Christmas Celebrates the Birth of a Refugee Who Was Killed by the State:


Alexis Goldstein
Don't fear what lies ahead as we head into the new year, y'all. Be brave. Be bold. Remember that what freedom we have is owed to the bravery of those who came before us and pay it forward by being brave today.
Bree Newsome Bass

Am I the only person out there not afraid to say that after weeks of this bruising election, the new Banksy piece made me cry? Sprinkling empathic imagination dust in a world that has forgotten what both those things mean. "Art is the highest form of hope" –Gerhard Richter:


Rob Hopkins

The race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination:

Only 17% of Americans trust the government to do the right thing at least most of the time. I get the cynicism -- but that's what the wealthy and well-connected want. They want you to give up so they have free rein to get more special tax giveaways and roll back public health rules. Elizabeth Warren is saying we shouldn't give up. We should take on the corruption head on. And when we win, we'll restore faith in government and the great things we can achieve together. (And we'll fix those tax rules so giant corporations have to pay up.)
Bharat Ramamurti

by voting for elizabeth warren you can simultaneously give the finger to both neera tanden and david sirota, I can make no stronger case for her
Will Stancil

Sanders and Warren sweating where they buy pens while Trump LIVES at a business that charges a $200,000 membership fee to watch people open Diet Cokes for him is the Aesop's Fable of this time.
LOLGOP

Clock it! My child has been alive 54 days before a random stranger at a holiday party, unprompted, gave me pro-tips on juking 529 college savings plans. Here, smart ins-and-outs of grandparent-owned 529s. But we can't have universal free college because a better-off person might benefit.
Mike Konczal @rortybomb

Free college is about PUBLIC higher education. There are over 4000 colleges in the U.S. Of those about 1600 are public. That 1600 includes:
~1100 community colleges
~450 regional comprehensives
~50 research and flagship unis
Yet most people think about those 50!
Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab

If you want to see America encapsulated, it is this: A bunch of white people talking about how money corrupts politics after they kicked the black people out of the room for not having enough money.
michaelharriot

I wish there was a way to endorse multiple candidates. Or at least have people understand that you can like one candidate most but still respect several others and would be excited for their campaigns?
Mary Annaïse Heglar

Too bad two billionaires are engaged in a losing vanity project to spend millions on a Presidential campaign when they could be funding a takeover of the Senate.
@DrJamesJTeeth

Steyer candidacy almost feels like a political scientist designed an extremely expensive experiment into the efficacy of TV ad buys.
Chris Hayes

Bloomberg and Steyer's TV spend could have paid for EVERY SINGLE Democratic candidate running for state legislature in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin in 2018. Every. single. state. candidate.
Catherine Vaughan

It’s not escaping my notice that Biden and Sanders have been skating through this last month with almost no scrutiny as press trains their fire on Warren. Again.
@TheStagmania

pete buttiegig represents everything that formerly gifted kids never wanted to become. just a fervent white knuckling psycho hell bent on resume building nonstop since he was 13 years old, who nobody was ever brave enough to tell how absolutely fucking miserably irritating he is
@argumentwinner

If I were Joe Biden, every time I was asked about Hunter’s qualifications to serve on the board of an energy company, I’d say “Ivanka Trump is serving as an advisor to the President of the United States. Please show me her qualifications.”
@littledeekay

The treatment Warren is getting from the media just goes to show that it was never “but, her emails.” It was always “but, she’s female.”
The Volatile Mermaid @OhNoSheTwitnt

If you think a 3% wealth tax only on those assets you have above a billion is vilification, you need to get out more. You may be living in such a cosseted, cotton-ball bubble that you don’t even know what it means to have anybody tell you the truth.
Anand Giridharadas

I have now heard more about trumped-up dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter than I have heard about who paid off Brett Kavanaugh’s $92,000 country club fees plus his $200,000 credit card debt plus his $1.2 million mortgage, and purchased themselves a SCOTUS seat.
Andrea Junker

Jill Lepore in THESE TRUTHS makes a compelling case that every program exclusively for the hard-up has been in perpetual trouble, whereas every program that has been for everyone has wide support. Subsidizing rich usage (which they’ve paid taxes for) helps buy political support. Imagine two ships. On one, the public rafts are free to all passengers and workers. On the other, the public rafts are free to workers and economy passengers. But first-class passengers have to pay $100. So they organize private ones. Which ship’s public rafts will be better?
Anand Giridharadas

Money spent on ads so far:
Steyer: $47M
Bloomberg: $39M (in two weeks!!!))
All other Democrats combined: $15M
Nate Silver (as of December 7)

The reason it’s worth paying for millionaires and billionaires to use public goods is because you end up with public goods for everyone so good even millionaires and billionaires use them.
Anand Giridharadas

I think we should all just take a minute to appreciate the fact that Pete’s explanation for why he can’t tell us what he did at McKinsey is literally that he’s at the mercy of a giant, predatory corporation.
Adam Jentleson

Kirsten, Beto, Kamala. All 3 out MONTHS before any votes have been cast based on fundraising, media coverage and polls about how predominantly White voters in predominantly White states feel about them (if they even know they exist). This is what they’re calling a primary now.
Propane Jane™ @docrocktex26

If you don’t think racism and misogyny are playing a role in the Dem primary, ask yourself, what is a single data point that Mayor Pete is actually “electable?” What’s a single sign he will actually be the one to beat Trump in the Midwest? The Southwest? Let’s be real, folks.
Stephen Miles @SPMiles42

At Kamala Harris's lowest moments in the polls, she has outpolled Mike Bloomberg. That she is now out and he's just getting started tells you so much about how money, power, race, and gender work in America. So don't tell me Mike Bloomberg is too rich to be corrupt. His candidacy incarnates the fundamental corruption at the heart of our political order.
Anand Giridharadas

There’s something really wrong with a system where Kamala Harris can’t make it to Iowa and billionaires with no base and no message are just gliding through.
Jared Yates Sexton

Remember when Sanders had a heart attack a few weeks ago and basically it’s down the memory hole? A dude whose only winning election had 8000 votes and with no black support is treated as a front runner. Yet Harris couldn’t sneeze without four articles attacking her.
Bartleby @the_scrivener

No matter your candidate, you have to recognize that going from the most diverse field ever in January to a potentially all-white debate stage in December is catastrophic. The implicit racism and sexism of "electability" is deeply damaging to democracy.
Leah Greenberg

I'm primarily a Warren person, full disclosure, but it's infuriating to me that Kamala's dropping out while Bloomberg waltzes in, buying entry. She's a great candidate who'd be a great president.
Elizabeth Spiers

The single best thing Mike Bloomberg could do for US democracy is buy Fox News and shut it down (or make it into a real news outlet). Would that even be possible? Discuss.
David Roberts

Mafia Mulligan, including his impeachment, but also his policies and appointees:

John Bolton: He's brave enough to send your kids to war with Iran, but he's not brave enough to testify about Trump for two hours.
Matthew Chapman @fawfulfan

The destruction of the liberal international order -- i.e. break up of NATO, EU, WTO, etc -- and weakening of democracies. He'd love to go back to the 19th century with Russia as a major power in a multipolar word in which values do not play a prominent role in int affairs.
[Former ambassador to Russia] Michael McFaul, answering the question: what would you say Putin’s ultimate goal is?

I’m all for impeaching/removing Trump by any means necessary, but it’ll never stop being appalling to me that a sociopath with blatantly progressive cognitive decline was permitted to make it this far and put us all in danger in the first place.
Propane Jane™ @docrocktex26

why are the navy SEALS who speak out against the "freaking evil" guy not the ones being celebrated by the president? It's almost as if he ... prefers evil.
@tomtomorrow

Well, now we’re up to 55% who say the Criminal should be removed. Does it have to get to 100% before Republicans grow some fucking spines?
Rob Reiner

They are still crying about Hillary’s emails. But Jared Kushner chatting over WhatsApp with Mohammed bin Salman on how to get away with murder after the Saudi prince slaughtered Jamal Khashoggi is totally cool, apparently. Can we please lock this treasonous weasel up already?
Andrea Junker

Giuliani arguing that he is “more of a Jew” than a literal Holocaust survivor is the logical conclusion of Trumpist Jews’ argument that liberal and left wing Jews (the majority of American Jews!) are not really Jewish.
Adam Serwer

(IDEA FOR MEDIA) Stop asking Republicans if what Trump did was wrong. You already know the lie they'll tell. Instead, pose this question: "Will you here, today, invite your 2020 or 2022 Democratic opponent to put out a worldwide call for foreign intelligence-sourced dirt on you?"
Seth Abramson

Hillary's emails were the most covered story of 2016. But Stephen Miller's emails to Breitbart, which proved beyond any doubt that Trump's top adviser is a white supremacist, were a one-day story and then corporate media moved on.
Frank Conniff

Remember after Bush/Cheney left, even Republicans you knew were like “okay, that was awful.” And then like six months later they were all crazier than ever? It’s gonna happen again isn’t it?
@GhostPanther

The Trump family isn't allowed to operate a charity in New York state because they STOLE money from a CHILDREN'S CANCER charity. Trump is taking away food stamps from 700,000 DURING CHRISTMAS. This year alone, Trump detained 70,000 children. Republicans call him "Christ-like."
Mikel Jollett

If I wanted to hear morally bankrupt cowards deny reality and praise the dear leader in identical talking points I’d have stayed in Russia. The GOP has sealed its fate as the party of Trump and Trumpism, and nothing else.
Garry Kasparov

You just don't meet too many people in life who consciously pick fights with widows by suggesting their husband is in hell
Sam Stein

Imagine being a morally depraved, lying, cheating, racist, sexual predator who was 73 years old before ever being held accountable for anything you’ve done.
Clint Smith

Listening to my spouse watch the news from another room has gotten more interesting in the last few years. Hearing random shouts of "projection," "liar" and other unrepeatedable words
kar nels

i'm going to bet that the biggest failure to occur to this nation besides slavery will be Donald J Trump's presidency.
@AntheaButler

Maxim: Men who whine about being subject to witch hunts are the very same men who would have burned witches, given half a chance.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

BREAKING NEWS: Bizarrely envious 73-year-old man who sends 123 barely coherent tweets in one day tells 16-year-old Nobel Laureate Greta Thunberg with Aspergers, named TIME’s Person of the Year, to “chill.”
Laurence Tribe

Trump could sit on his couch eating KFC until next November and would get 40 percent of the vote, because white patriarchy. He can barely read or put two sentences together without uttering a malaprop or something traitorous. Of course he might not debate.
Jamil Smith

The attacks on Hunter Biden really bring into stark relief just how much our party and the press have given the trump kids a free pass.
Adam Parkhomenko

I want to point out again that the impeachment process has never had as much support from Americans as it does in this moment. The entire machine that wants to preserve white supremacy is trying to skew things toward Trump remaining in office one way or the other. Let me say it again a better way: in all the previous instances of a president being impeached, there was never as much public support for it as there is now. So when people are downplaying the support for impeachment they're ignoring history.
Bree Newsome Bass

Trump's White House Counsel Pat Cipollone was appointed one year ago today. The Office of Government Ethics still has not certified his initial financial disclosure report.
Citizens for Ethics @CREWcrew

There is simply no way for anyone to say honestly that they thought Barr would be a noble institutionalist. That's a cover. His crimes were his pride. Like Trump, Stone and others, he was openly corrupt for decades. Damning info on him was Wikipedia-level easy to find.
Sarah Kendzior

There's a real danger that if the Senate does not convict on the obstruction of Congress count, congressional subpoenas will be forever unenforceable. If Congress itself rules that defiance of congressional subpoenas is no error, how could the courts in any future litigation?
Gabriel Malor

Stephen Castor, GOP impeachment lawyer, just argued that Hunter Biden wasn't qualified to be on Burisma board. Fair point. So what say House GOP and Castor about Ivanka and Jared, who are even less qualified for their White House positions. Or Ben Carson, Betsy DeVos, ...
David Cay Johnston

One party is engaging in rampant criminality and blocking all attempts at investigation. The other party is trying to stop them, using established Constitutional procedures. I *suppose* that reflects "polarization," but is that the most relevant descriptor? "As RICO investigation proceeds, relations between the FBI and the mob grow frosty"
David Roberts

There are many things galling about the Trump cuts to SNAP, but perhaps most galling is the fact the savings amount to 1/14th (!) of the annual cost of the Trump direct welfare payments to agribusiness to make up for his trade war.
Chris Hayes

lol you fucking idiots. She said: Trump "can name his son Barron, but he can't make him a baron." That's not an attack on Barron, nor a smear on the president.
Lis Power

Calling minor Trayvon Martin a “thug” is a lie and an insult.
Calling minor Greta Thunberg a “freak” is a lie and an insult.
Calling minor Chelsea Clinton a “dog” is a lie and an insult.
Saying minor Barron isn’t a baron is a fucking factual statement.
Fuck your fake outrage.
Tony Posnanski

This non-attack on Barron will get far more attention than the very scary and vicious death threats made on Ilhan Omar's life.
Rebecca Katz

The fake Baron Trump controversy that all reporters know is fake and stupid but are dutifully reporting on anyway is why 2020 is going to be a nightmare.
Susan J. Demas

So to recap Bill Barr's platform:
1—govt should promote a particular religion
2—govt should kill people
3—no "respect," no protection
4—no need to investigate the Ukraine shakedown
5—I'll do what ethics officials say if I agree with them
6—Say, any of yous guys got dirt on Biden?
Walter Shaub

Remember when it came out 12 hours ago that Trump had directly, personally commandeered the Pentagon contracting process to steer $400 million to a GOP donor, which would have been the biggest US scandal in a third of a century, and then this morning everyone forgot about it?
Will Stancil

Am I losing my mind? Because from where I'm standing, the GOP is practically declaring allegiance to Putin, and all the Very Serious Beltway People have no answer but to just repeat the Ukraine facts over and over in the hope that the ninetieth recitation will finally slay Trump
Will Stancil

It's official: William Barr is the most dangerous man in America right now, whose name will live in infamy for centuries. He is turning our country into a Christian dictatorship, without caring what anyone thinks, and without the narcissistic insanity of his nominal boss
Will Bunch

Racism, white supremacy, and police brutality:

Whiteness is a political construct under European colonialism that is organized around the exclusion of various ethnicities. White is not an ethnicity and not really a "race" (there is only one human race). Whiteness is built upon systemic oppression & has no ID apart from it.
Bree Newsome Bass

In the very first session of my Race/Racism module, the first thing that I teach my students is that any kind of 'theory' that argues culture/language/history makes a WHOLE CATEGORY of people superior or inferior is simply euphemising biological race.
Laleh Khalili

I don’t think we are prepared as a society for what happens to public memory when the generations that lived through Jim Crow leave us
Adam Serwer (written after it was announced that John Lewis is being treated for stage 4 pancreatic cancer)

Watching people’s Don Imus tweets is a reminder that for so many white Americans racism is an incidental side-issue that says nothing about someone you like’s character but rather is just an unfortunate opinion to be overlooked and not rudely dwelled upon.
Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones

Right now we are living the vision of white men who died 200 years ago. You have to be bold and courageous enough to envision a better way for yourself and for those who come after you and to not just accept what others gave you even though it's killing you. Y'all get up everyday and live this thing called racism that was imagined by white men who had far less knowledge about humanity and the world than we have now. Why does it make sense to keep living according to an order established by people who died centuries ago?
Bree Newsome Bass

a lot of white northerners assume that they're not as racist because they typically exist in mostly white spaces.
@disco_socialist

I support the cultural mainstreaming of Kwanzaa. White supremacy is mainstreamed all day everyday. Society can't be transformed w/o new concepts & ideas moving from the margins to mainstream. I don't need to feel I have exclusive knowledge. I need society to stop being anti-Black. I want to wake up tomorrow in a society where no one needs me to tell them about Black liberation because it's common knowledge, and no one needs me to tell them about white supremacy because everybody's moved past it. I want anti-racism to be the norm, not the exception.
Bree Newsome Bass

Repeat after me: Identity politics is a right wing slur to describe civil rights. Repeat. Till it sinks in.
Sunny Singh

A lot of these claims by cops that they're targeted for harassment by food service employees seem to fall apart upon any investigation. Probably not worth thinking about what that implies about literally any part of a cop's job otherwise
@depechejoe

My mother deliberately surrounded me with positive conceptions of blackness & awareness of Black American history growing up so it's still jarring at times to recognize how wedded to white supremacy much of society is. Many people really think we should be grateful to Europeans for teaching us to be civilized & that we aren't capable of governing ourselves without the white ruling class. It's textbook racism but people believe it's both historical reality & the natural order of the world.
Bree Newsome Bass

I think that no white supremacist should be allowed to serve in our military or in any police force.
Matthew Dowd

Calm down, everyone. Those cadets were just flashing the white power hand gesture, it’s not like they did anything really disrespectful and offensive like kneel during a song.
The Volatile Mermaid @OhNoSheTwitnt

The cruelest thing the Devil ever did was decide racists could win with extravagantly flawed messengers but anti-racists had to have perfect messengers.
David Brauer

Nothing exposes liberal hypocrisy more than efforts to integrate their children’s schools. Nothing.
Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones

Gaining physical proximity to the ruling white elite is not freedom.
Bree Newsome Bass

A Starbucks employee who called a police officer a pig is fired. Police officers who kill innocent people because they think they are Rambo aren't fired. The police are the least accountable people in the country, when the opposite should be true.
Existential Comics

There are one million cops in the country and 700k social workers. One group goes through less than a year of training and is licensed to kill, and the other has to get loans and a degree then 900 hours of supervision to get a license just to listen to people talk.
@ryandspox

The refusal to confront racism will be the ultimate undoing of this nation. It's a time bomb that was embedded in the nation at its founding.
Bree Newsome Bass

One-third of all Americans killed by strangers are killed by police.
Haymarket Books

On the anniversary of John Brown’s hanging, I’m thinking of all the ways white filmmakers want to insert fictional white saviors into Black narratives but won’t touch an *actual* white abolitionist who put his life (and his family’s life) on the line.
@mos_daf

cops lie about big shit, they lie about little shit, as a *matter of course.* there are no consequences for it. if you've been stopped for some BS reason and both you and the cop know it was BS, you bet that cop certainly logged it as something other than "complete bullshit." a cop stops you for bullshit. you both know it's bullshit. oh, and you point out that it's bullshit? oh, well that's "disorderly conduct" then. oh, you get mad at the disorderly conduct charge? that's "resisting arrest." it's all officialized bullshit. you know the reason they stopped you — *turns to camera* — but they aren't going to say that's the reason they stopped you, and so there's this entire universe comprised of thousands upon thousands of police records that are all effectively polite fictions. And each of those bullshit arrests that resulted from a bullshit stop ultimately helps shape larger, policy-level fictions about policing.
@GeeDee215

Sexism, misogyny, and toxic masculinity:

Can't tell if my desire for men's clothing to come in smaller sizes is because of my gender identity or my desire for pockets that I can put my hands in.
@risahustad

Have you ever noticed how every time an industry is completely dominated by men -- finance, tech, traffic engineering, autos -- their products are a complete catastrophe for humanity?
Angie Schmitt

bizarre that you all think bows are going to make your babies look more feminine rather than draw attention to their bald-headed androgyny
Kerry Howley

I'm watching a Simpsons marathon with my daughters. Is there a better role model than Lisa Simpson?
Joseph N. Cohen

In case you ever wondered why so many poison clusters happened throughout history...


Mikki Kendall @Karnythia

As I apply for writing residencies, I'm continually struck by how what they offer - peace and quiet, meals cooked for you, limited domestic labour to distract from your "real" work - is what so many men authors have had forever by virtue of having a wife.
Chloe Angyal

The climate crisis and clean energy:

The fact that capitalism's growth imperative is driving species extinction at 100-1,000 times faster than the normal rate renders it obsolete as a legitimate economic system for the 21st century.
Jason Hickel

I don't actually believe in Hell. But if it does exist, it should have a special place for climate science deniers who are motivated by political or financial convenience — which is basically all of them
Paul Krugman

"BP CEO BobDudley revealed that his daughter's friends are taking antidepressants because of their concerns about climate change" "...confessed he hated seeing 'young people so unhappy, so anxious about global warming"
Arne Storrønningen

Critics in 2030s Ask Why Teen Climate Activist Isn’t in Abandoned School Bailing Water and Shooting Enemy Foragers:


The Onion
This was the decade when the dangers posed by climate change became increasingly clear, and when governments worldwide woke up to the risks, signed the Paris Agreement, yet still failed to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions at the pace & scale needed.
Inside Climate News

If the global economy continues to grow at 3% per year, we will consume as much energy and materials in the next 30 years as we did cumulatively in the past 10,000. This trajectory will radically destabilize earth systems. To assume otherwise is madness. #postgrowth
Jason Hickel

The fossil fuel industry has really convinced people that they can either have a job or a livable future. Not both. It’s wild.
Mary Annaïse Heglar

Please, for fuck's sake folks, DO NOT look to Europe as an example of how to live. It's super nice. But it's also a completely unsustainable model that's built on subjecting the rest of the world to terrible things. We need to do BETTER than Europe, not imitate it. The Slow Food movement in particular can go fuck itself. It's a whole movement based on "look how much better Europe is than you! You should all live leisurely like us even though you're the ones MAKING colonial tribute payments, not receiving them." Vacations and good food and universal healthcare access are all GOOD THINGS. But we need to have better ways of getting them than by uncritically aping European economic models. You can only carve up Africa once and you shouldn't have done it that one time either.
Dr Sarah Taber

Every time a media outlet gives updates on GDP growth, they should be made to also give updates on emissions, global temperatures, deforestation, soil depletion, insect biomass and species extinction.
Jason Hickel

Extinction Rebellion's 1st demand is to tell the truth. Yesterday the Welsh government agreed to do just that. They will work with us and other environmental organisations in Wales on a public messaging campaign which communicates the severity of the climate and ecological crisis to the people of Wales.
@XRCardiff

Yesterday, a court in The Hague ruled that rich countries violate human rights by failing to protect the climate. This means, legally, climate action is now inseparable from human rights. This is what it feels like to start winning back our future.
Eric Holthaus

Driving around in giant polluting death machines in soulless car-dominated suburbs, eating shitty fast food and guzzling sugar water, living in houses lit and heated by 19th century technology, getting ever-more lonely, resentful, and physically unhealthy ... to own the libs.
David Roberts

Kinda weird when people act like climate change isn’t a racial justice issue when the largest emitters are disproportionately white and wealthy and the people losing their homes and migrating around the world due to droughts and floods are mostly black and brown.
Waleed Shahid

Imagine thinking we need to find a compromised "middle ground" between saving the planet and the financial interests of some billionaires who don't want their stocks to lose value. –Existential Comics
Extinction Rebellion Twin Cities (XRTC)

An entire continent’s average temperature was 105 degrees yesterday. Let that sink in.
Eric Holthaus (describing Australia)

If someone says that migrants from Europe or the Middle East or Latin America or wherever are "adding to our environmental burden" or taking us past biocapacity or whatever, have they previously spent all their time trying to dispossess the landed aristocracy?
@JKSteinberger

"The authors estimated, conservatively, that methane equivalent to 2.3 percent of all the natural gas produced in the nation is leaking during the production, processing and transportation of oil and gas every year."
William Lindeke

In an era of climate collapse, the most entitled thing an American can do right now is shit tons of carbon into the air so they can take the same fucking selfie they always take in a new place where the locals probably fucking hate us and only humor us for our dollars.
@girlziplocked

Question: What is the thing in your household that almost certainly uses the most power when in use?
Answer: Your shower! It's using energy at a rate of ~15 kW and uses a total of about 2 kWh of energy.
Brian Siana

Orders of magnitudes more livelihoods are put at risk by climate delay than are threatened by climate action. Not to mention the fact that climate delay is killing and impoverishing many people today, and will kill and impoverish many millions more if we let delay slow action.
Alex Steffen

A healthy air quality index is less than 50. In India, after Diwali, the air quality index was maxed out at 999. Right now in Sydney, Australia it's 2552. We are in a climate emergency.
Eric Holthaus

I think traveling is a little bit overrated/over-celebrated, especially in the age of Instagram. We might be able to learn more by reading a book sometimes than dropping into some unrepresentative tourist spot in some other country that's culturally similar to our own. It's also sort of a status symbol.
Angie Schmitt

The EU's Top 10 polluters were coal-fired power plants — until this year. Now a shipping group is No. 8, and an airline joined the list this year, too.
Inside Climate News

We must reject the assumption that scaling up clean energy will automatically replace fossil fuels. So far, clean energy is being added *on top of* fossil fuels, and emissions keep rising. The only way to achieve a clean energy transition is to actively scale down fossil fuels.
Jason Hickel

One of the things that keeps me up at night is all the people who think that 1.5 degrees of global temperature rise is actually safe...
Mary Annaïse Heglar

Don't miss this blockbuster report. Oil & gas from existing fields would push global temperature past 1.5 degrees. Meanwhile, in just the next 4 years, the O&G industry has plans to sink ***$1.4 trillion*** into new extraction projects. "85 percent of the expanded production is slated to come from the United States and Canada over that period." North America is going to lock in unthinkable suffering & irreversible damage in the next four years, while everyone is busy squabbling about stupid bullshit.
David Roberts (link in the original)

starting to think that a system that plans primarily in 3 month increments, treats basic human needs like chips in a global casino, and must produce millions of tons of useless stuff to stay solvent is not equipped to deal with climate change. ~@islacharlatan
Extinction Rebellion Twin Cities (XRTC)

Natural gas - industry's so-called 'greener' fuel - is now the main driver of global emissions rises. Energy companies are locking in decades of future emissions in the name of a "transition" fuel that needs subsidies to stay profitable #ClimateEmergency
Patrick Galey

"The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses." Never forget that you were born at exactly the right time to change everything.
Eric Holthaus

Washington State Ferries -- 2nd largest in the world -- is switching from diesel to batteries. Eliminates 20 million gallons per year of diesel, reducing GHGs and pollution while saving millions per year in fuel costs.
@facts_tesla

Transportation sanity and sustainable cities:

“I don’t have time to bike commute.” Well, this year I spent:
0 minutes looking for parking
0 minutes at gas stations
0 minutes stuck in traffic
0 minutes getting oil changes
0 minutes of work for car payment, gas, insurance, tires, etc
Not much time at the gym but stayed fit
Momifornia

Friendly question on a snowy Monday. A lot of my urbanist/transportation allies push/ask for what they think is politically feasible, not what we actually physically need for our communities/cities/planet. How can we break this deadly habit and work within our climate reality?
@happifydesign

lol 2 of 3 new passenger vehicles sold in the US this year have curb weights upwards of 3 tons and it was 60 degrees in chicago yesterday. anyway i'm sure these two phenomena are completely independent of one another and everything's fine. just thinkin about how many things have gone wrong with US policy for $50K+ 3-ton vehicles with less than 20 mpg to be the most popular consumer choice as we fly past even the most dire climate change predictions and income inequality grows the worst it's been in decades
@lieholepiehole

Same car model, 40 years between them:


@erik_griswold

Over the next few decades we’re going to have millions of Americans aging in place who can’t drive anymore in a place you can’t walk anywhere and have no transit access and we’re going to treat it as a private family problem for all the unpaid caregivers. It’s difficult to solve these access problems when a lot of suburbs whole reason for being is to be inaccessible for low income folks.
Angie Schmitt

People who love to argue that a bicycle isn’t a useful form of transportation bc it’s not built for long-distance road trips and/or hauling concrete somehow seem to miss that an SUV is absolutely the wrong vehicle for the vast majority of trips it takes
Momifornia

You can view the entire 20th century though the lens of the automobile. From the bitter lake agreement to atmospheric lead to sit-down strikes developed in unionized auto plants to white flight to chain stores to exurbinization to climate change to defunding public transit
John Leavitt

Unsignalized crosswalks are a decades-long gaslight perpetrated by traffic engineers on America's pedestrians.
@WarrenJWells

Japan has trains that can reach nearly 200 miles per hour. France began high-speed train service in the '80s. China has the world's fastest and largest high-speed rail network. And the U.S., well the U.S. has next to nothing.
CNBC

Chevy Blazer SUV vs. new Ford F-150. (Don’t ask me why I’m walking around a Walmart parking lot taking pictures like this):


Don Kostelec

We don’t need tech companies to redesign the wheel. We know what works in congested cities: put many people in one large vehicle and give it priority over many vehicles with few people in them.
Angie Schmitt

In the search for cleaner energy, options are:
1. A shift towards electric cars.
2. A shift away from cars.
One of these options makes most sense. The other one leads to corporate profit. Pick yours!


@fietsprofessor

It really is incredible. The convenience of people who want to park on the street for free overrides the law AND an opportunity to earn revenue in a city that seems like it’s in perpetual financial crisis
The Dependent Clause

Once again, the challenge to winter biking isn’t temperature. It’s space. Snow or parked cars, or both, have gone into the space where people would bike.
@ajm6792

Seattle going all the way down to 20mph on residential streets, 25 for arterials downtown. Take note!
William Lindeke

the biggest fallacy in Home Alone is that the McCallister family lives in the suburbs in a McMansion but 8-year-old Kevin can walk to get groceries.
@abigailmaryth

Paying for transit fares (that percent of the budget) with some other kind of tax would be a lot more efficient (less waste). In addition, it would almost certainly be a much more progressive source of funding.
Angie Schmitt

Is $9 billion too much for connecting the majority of Ohioans with passenger rail? Consider that ODOT is proposing a $6 billion bypass around Cincy. A bypass around *one city.*
@MobileHarv

Every time I see a picture of one of these shitmobiles I have the same thought: This is the vehicle of a society that has given up on hope and is getting ready for Thunderdome. This is the car of a failed people:


Karin Robinson


Ugh. This checks out. From gated communities to panic rooms to personal MRAPs, selling people "security." “The Cybertruck is not a Pickup Truck. It’s the First Entry in the New Industry of Secure Vehicles.”
Tara Goddard

The best thing about ending single-family zoning (or parking minimums) is that it doesn't cost cities anything to make these changes. Print a few new rulebooks and signs, that's it.
William Lindeke

One absurdity I haven’t heard many people talk about is heated parking ramps. How much energy is being used to keep empty cars warm so their owners don’t have to be cold for 3 minutes?
Philip Schwartz

How are these legal? Not to mention that the dude parked it on the sidewalk. My elderly cousin has enough trouble walking...


Martha Roskowski

I don’t understand when people rant about bikers not following rules. Daily, I see drivers blow through red lights at 40mph, roll through stop signs, and never stop for pedestrians. Do people really think bikers slowly rolling through a red light when clear are dangerous? Our traffic laws, roads, and signal timing are designed to move motor vehicles quickly and manage the operation of metal machines weighing thousands of pounds. Just because jaywalking or rolling through signals on a bike is illegal doesn’t make it dangerous.
Lindsey Aster Silas

These fancy European cities might have fast, comfortable intercity train travel but do they have 103 of these billion-dollar concrete spaghetti thingees that makes cars fly and saves suburban commuters 49 seconds? I'll wait.


Angie Schmitt


Are EVs clean when run from the grid? New article with Argonne’s full lifecycle model (batt+mfgr.+150K mi) shows EV cleaner in all US states, even Wyoming!
Lifetime tons CO2:
69 ICE car
56 EV, 98% coal (Wyoming)
31 EV, US grid avg.
6 EV, 100% renewable
Willett Kempton

Free choice may be a tenet of our society, but when the choices we make threaten the well-being of others – or the world we live in – government has a duty to intervene. That’s rationale for speed limits, pollution standards, smoking bans. Why should it be any different for SUVs?
G_Penalosa

Tips for pedestrian safety so often read like the “how not to get raped” tips, when it would be so much more sensible to focus on the actual culprits
Stacey Burns @WentRogue

People walking are not doing something dangerous. People driving are. Responsibility for safety should primary fall on those doing something dangerous.
Adam Miller

When you're trying to walk somewhere and every car is a tank, it's a depressing to know that the people driving them paid $10-$15k additional (new) to drive a car that would look intimidating to you.
Angie Schmitt

A question for you. How many ways would your town or city authorities ban this street if you dared to build it today?


createstreets

It is weird that Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed was probably one of the most famous and successful-at-galvanizing-change nonfiction book in American history and it was followed up by basically no additional books about traffic safety ever. This is an issue that kills ~40,000 Americans annually.
Angie Schmitt
86% of car fuel never reaches the wheels, most of what’s left moves the car, not people, and 96% of US car time is spent parked. Via @PhilippRode
Brent Toderian
Journalists: What's a story you wrote that flew under the radar but that you think about all the time? Mine: How police chases kill 355 Americans a year. 1/3 are innocent bystanders. Victims 3X more likely to be black.
Angie Schmitt

Almost 1% of US road fatalities are due to the police chasing suspects in cars.
@RachaelLudwick

I marvel (shake my head) at the endless infrastructure like concrete barriers and guard rails that have been installed to stop motorists running off the road and into things. It looks like evidence of a flawed system to me. Protective infrastructure for vulnerable road users should severely damage the vehicle of any driver that ignores it. More power, speed, size, cabin quietness (less sense of speed), plus in-car distractions. Every trend in car design (except perhaps anti-lock braking - but also see "risk compensation") has increased the risk to everyone else except the occupants. Street are really, really safe without cars. If people want to make them unsafe by driving on them (and they do), they should pay to make them safe again. Don't put this cost on people who aren't doing anything dangerous.
Neil Winkelmann

Protected bike lanes are car infrastructure
Bump-outs are car infrastructure
Sidewalks are car infrastructure
Signalization is car infrastructure
Speed limits are car infrastructure
Pedestrian refuge islands are car infrastructure
And car infrastructure is GHG infrastructure.
@happifydesign

What if there was a movie that showed a high-speed car chase, but instead of it being a plot device someone got killed and everyone just grapples with the aftermath of that? Probably everyone would hate the movie but that's the reality.
Angie Schmitt


My train take: Take a map of the US Interstate highway system. That's where the high-speed rail tracks should go.
@3amWaffleHouse

The way you can tell policy makers don’t ride the bus is that there aren’t bus lanes on every single downtown street, he tweeted, pressed against the wall of an overfilled bus stuck behind maybe fifteen single occupancy Honda CRVs.
Alex Schieferdecker

Still wondering why there’s been a spike in pedestrian deaths in cities in recent years?


Brent Toderian

Wage theft and worker mistreatment, income and wealth inequality, and better ways to organize an economy:

Isn't it kinda disgusting that banks made $34 billion in overdraft fees in 2017?? That's $34 billion they took from people that literally. Had. No. Money.
@elizahardy121

Zuckerberg raked in $75 million per day for destabilizing democracy and turning our privacy into a commodity.
Adam Best

ask who benefits from the patently absurd notion that 'our' economy is a natural thing of ebbs and tides and cycles rather than a fundamentally and permanently predatory construct
Saladin Ahmed

Do you think this is accurate?


@thischairrocks


Your holiday reminder that total consumer debt — including credit cards, auto loans, mortgages, and student debt — is now higher than what it was in 2008, before the financial crisis. This can’t go on forever, folks.
Robert Reich

Based on logs from 28 Amazon facilities in 16 states, the study found workers at Amazon are more likely to be injured at work than lumberjacks or coal miners are. The injuries don't involve small cuts and bruises — they're serious enough where 88.9% involved have to miss work...
Noname's Book Club

We never went on food stamps because mom had been convinced they were only for poor white trash, and that we somehow weren’t. We ate less as a result. Kids everywhere qualify for free school lunches, but don’t apply. That’s the human cost of stigmatizing public assistance.
@DanRiffle

Twenty-five yrs ago, when my kids were little, I was a single mom on welfare. One Christmas, their presents were Christmas Cap’n Crunch & candy, bought w food stamps, because that’s all I had. The next time you judge the person in front of you at the grocers, be kind.
@mckra1g

How capitalism works: Walton family (of Walmart) and Bezos (of Amazon) are the richest because Walmart and Amazon workers are among worst paid with fewest benefits and least job security.
Richard D. Wolff

It's shame-inducing to many wealthy types to know they are prosperous for reasons other than their hard work and sacrifice. That they might merely be no better than Soviet style apparatchiks of US planning.
JimNichols

For the first time in history, U.S. billionaires paid a lower tax rate than the working class last year:


@TheRealMsMurphy

capitalists are really out there claiming it is human nature to give a third of your salary to your landlord because he inherited an apartment complex from his dad, on account of how humans are...uh...selfish or something
Existential Comics

Anyway, shaming poor parents for having trouble affording food is like saying:“oh, so you chose to be born into a society that distributes resources most generously to people over 40, while also choosing to be born into a body that’s most fertile in your 20s. Real smart buddy”
James Medlock

I want to emphasize that two companies that do nothing but pass paperwork and pharmaceuticals (that someone else manufactured) back and forth between Pharma and retail providers are the *8th and 10th biggest companies in the country* now.
@edburmila

"Boomers have removed the rungs of the ladder for those who come behind, all the while tut-tutting about the supposed irresponsibility and fragility of millennials." —From @IAmRichBenjamin's latest for EHRP and @latimes
@econhardship

"capitalism breeds innovation"


@bambipotf

The free-market says a banana duct-taped to a wall is worth $120,000, so it’s probably the best way to decide the value of healthcare, education and basic social services.
Ashley Fairbanks @ziibiing

If Republicans were willing to scrutinize billionaires *half* as much as they scrutinize people on food stamps, this country would be a much better place.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Real Estate Investment Trusts are going to buy these boomer houses and rent them at a premium to the next generation, who will struggle to afford home ownership because they've been saddled with student debt and anemic wage growth.
Ted Tatos

I would urge people to use a phrase like “unemployment sanctions“ instead of “work requirements” to better convey what they are: harsh punishments (in the form of not being able to eat, access medical care, etc.) for people who are unable to find or hold work.
Ben Spielberg

Giving back may be a sign that you took too much.
Anand Giridharadas

Health care:

Best wishes to all the expectant moms out there inducing birth today because they’ve hit their deductible for 2019, and to every single payer advocate trying to scrap this utterly ridiculous system.
@DanRiffle (written on New Years Eve)

SO MUCH WINNING -- Nearly 20 rural hospitals closed in 2019, more than any year in the past decade. And more are expected to close, with most closing in Southern states that did not expand Medicaid.
Steven Greenhouse

Imagine if Spotify was like U.S. healthcare:
- Pay $9.99/mo premium for some music
- Pay $7 per song listen til you spend $100, after that it's included (resets each yr)
- Pay $0.49 copay every listening session
- If you get fired, we cancel your Spotify and songs cost $999/listen
Michael Sayman

Has anyone tested out “do you support a healthcare system with no premiums, deductibles or copays, but higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations; or a healthcaera system with premiums, deductibles, and copays but lower taxes on the wealthy and corporations”?
@csilverandgold

"Much of what we accept as legal in medical billing would be regarded as fraud in any other sector."
Ben Taub

Guns and mass shootings:

Just like we got "used to" school shootings, we're getting "used to" attacks on Jews, gays, and blacks. This is the Bad Place.
Steve Silberman

The fact that Donald Trump is willing to spend taxpayer dollars to review toilet efficiency but not to study gun violence tells you pretty much everything you need to know about him.
Andrew Weinstein

Education:

Internal memos obtained by NPR show career staff at the Education Department recommended full debt relief for student borrowers who were defrauded by some for-profit colleges. Then Secretary Betsy DeVos stepped in.
NPR

“In 1988, a teacher most commonly had 15 years of experience. Less than three decades later, that number had fallen to just three years leading a classroom.”
Paige Williams (linking to a story from The Atlantic)

I get how charter school parents are sympathetic, but as far as I can tell, at the absolute best all charters do is redistribute resources from kids with less engaged/involved parents to kids with more engaged/involved parents, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing.
@csilverandgold

I don't know what to call this grouping, but it's about the right and fascism, both in the U.S. and globally, and includes media coverage of such:

the right using their judicial court-packing to ban scabby the rat is one of the purest displays of "fuck you that's why" power politics - absolutely no principle or consistent rule at play, just "we don't like free speech when its used by unions":


Michael Tae Sweeney

Conservative friends keep telling me how lefty NPR is, and then once a year or so I listen to NPR and it just boggles my mind how much they bend over backwards to present conservative viewpoints.
Noah Smith

we really need to talk about Muslim-bashing as a central unifying factor across global fascisms
Saladin Ahmed

The Koch brothers oligarch network has systematically removed all spines from Republican office holders. They're all "on the take" now, often with big payoffs that arrive AFTER they've left office, a neat wrinkle in bribery!
Langdon Winner

I just read another one of those ‘worst trends of the decade’ pieces and yet again none of them was Fascism.
Hari Kunzru

Guess what? There is virtually perfect overlap between countries that count ballots observably in public by hand and those that have uncannily resisted engulfment by the global far-right electoral wave: New Zealand, Germany, Ireland, Norway, Holland, Canada, France (mostly)...
Jonathan Simon

Yes! Garry Kasparov says it: We’re used to hearing from both sides — Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals. Today it’s simply truth vs. lies. #Media must focus only on facts and STOP GIVING EQUAL TIME TO LIES. The outdated sense of balance is killing our democracy.
Paula Chertok

Media discussions on “the center” and polarization fail because they rely on a completely fantastical belief that it’s been a symmetrical destruction instead of a planned, weaponized strategy exercised by the Republican Party in the face of diminishing power. This didn’t just happen. It’s trench warfare by Republicans who understand straight democracy and appeals based on actual political opinions won’t win anymore and necessitate rhetorical escalation, disenfranchisement, and a muddied game. Treating our polarization as anything besides Republican scorched earth policy is not only disingenuous and unhelpful, it actively gives cover to the GOP to continue scorching earth while hiding behind shared responsibility. The conversation has to be better, has to evolve.
Jared Yates Sexton

Watching Fox News for more than 10 seconds makes perfectly clear how we’ve arrived here.
Clint Smith

29% of Americans identify as Republicans. They are disproportionately white, male, racist and fascist. The (bigger) problem is that our political system empowers them to control at least two branches of the government and structure our entire society. Major structural deficiency.
Samuel Sinyangwe

why are old white man republicans always acting the most persecuted, like you want all the privilege and also all the persecution, pick a lane
Aparna Nancherla

The fixation on finding common ground with the party that represents white nationalists and is trying to currently overthrow what semblance of democracy we have in this country is insane. I don't understand anyone operating with that framework or anyone supporting it.
Bree Newsome Bass

History will record this era as one in which general voting populations repeatedly punched themselves in the face, while oligarchs swilling champagne flipped them small coins and said "That was great. Do it again."
John Scalzi

The collapse happening in the West right now is an inevitable outcome of colonialism and imperialism. They once said that the sun never set on the British empire. Now look.
Bree Newsome Bass

Imagine waking up from an 80-year coma and being told that the US and UK have been taken over by the far right and France is in flames and Russia is wreaking havoc across the globe and only Germany can hold liberal democracy together.
Aaron Wiener

I am full of grief and dread and have no wisdom, so I'm going to say what I think I need to hear to function. Fascism is the democracy killer. That is what it does, and that's what we're seeing. But nothing lasts forever. The work is mutual aid and protection until we win.
Erin Kissane

It’s time for the Left to formulate a new vision and message that addresses the inherent inequalities and cruelty of neoliberalism while declaring this worldwide Right Wing march toward madness what it is: an escalating crisis. Nibbling around the edges and living in perpetual fear that conservatives will call you a liberal or a socialist has gotten us here. The Left needs to be bold and meet the moment and it has failed in that regard.
Jared Yates Sexton

While we’re on this Richard Jewell thing: The real bomber was Eric Rudolph, who also bombed two abortion clinics (one in GA, one in AL) and a lesbian bar; he’s still alive at ADX Florence; and the Venn diagram of his ideology and the current GOP are basically a perfect circle.
@pinkrocktopus

People who play their game by tweaking ethnic fears and animus often come from monocultural communities. It is free for them to destroy the institutions of pluralism and tolerance. Pluralism is an important cultural institution upon which people in multicultural societies rely.
Joseph N. Cohen

As Republicans in Congress decry the downfall of our democracy during the impeachment inquiry, just *one Republican* voted with the Democrats yesterday to protect voting rights. That should tell you all you need to know about their priorities.
Robert Reich

The truth is not always “in the middle.” Especially when one side is blatantly lying.
Hari Kondabolu

Starving people is within acceptable politics. Fascism is within acceptable politics. But things like universal healthcare and debt relief are too extreme for the mainstream.
Bree Newsome Bass

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

It's important to be politically engaged and informed when you are young, because the second you turn 30 your brain crystalizes and you never change an opinion for the rest of your life, so if you don't have informed ideas before that time you'll have shit opinions forever.
Existential Comics

Obvious point but worth noting re: latest Census projections — in many cases, red states are gaining House seats because of population growth in their blue-leaning areas (suburbs) and blue states are losing seats because of population loss in their red-leaning areas (rural).
Ben Pershing

You have to be really dumb to trust the government. Instead I trust Company, whose stated primary purpose is to maximize profits at any cost, and who gets caught committing fraud every 5 years
@InternetHippo

I think my ancestors were full humans who probably had a whole lot of dreams and identities that had nothing to do with my lil basic self. If my great great grandkids walk around saying they're my wildest dream I will haunt them. child my wildest dream is to own a t-rex
@eveewing

Searching for ways to humiliate and diminish other people doesn’t make you edgy, it makes you a shitty shell of a person who, when faced with the choice to fill the hole in their soul with kindness or with venom, gleefully chose the latter.
feminist next door @emrazz

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but Planned Perenthood has prevented 100x as many abortions as all the Republican “pro-life” laws combined.
almightygod

I hate when people talk about having children like they are pets.
Mother Bae I @tiersaj

The glass wing butterfly. Nature is amazing!


@StrangeAnimaIs

I never knew that growing up in an alcoholic home would provide me with superpowers but it did. I am always ready for violence and unexpected bad things, I usually know where the truth is hiding, or dad’s secret liquor money, and I always know when the adults are lying.
Xeni Jardin

Millennial sadly drinking in bar: Man, J.K. Rowling sucks…
Generation Xer angrily slamming down glass: LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT HOW MUCH I LOVED ENDER'S GAME WHEN I WAS 13, OKAY?!?
@ouranosaurus

In case you were wondering, "how long has the Salvation Army been terrible to queer people?" I'm reading a file now where they denied a 17 year old homeless girl shelter because her mother said she was a lesbian... in 1948.
Hugh Ryan

Remember: "Fiscally conservative but socially liberal!" is a lie, because it means "I want low taxes and don't want to pay for programs for the betterment of society, but I am okay with gay people sometimes."
@betweenstations

90% of the House Republican caucus are white men. 90%!
Chris Hayes

Often, when people carp about social justice issues (which I mostly support), I wanna say, "Lighten up! Don't you realize how much progress we've made?" But that would make me just another OK boomer asshole, so I don't.
pete hautman

That baby toucans exist and look like this makes me smile:


@Shawpsych

88% of Tory ads contained lies.
They lied re Brexit, 50k nurses, 40 hospitals.
They faked a video and fact check site
They faked news about a 4-year old & Labour spending
They paid for bots to spread fake news.
They suppressed the Russia report.
CONCLUSION: Lies work
David Schneider

imagine having a passport that allows you to move freely between, live in and work in 28 countries, including many of the worlds most affluent, with excellent free health care and social services wherever you go and voting to tear that passport up and be stranded on an island.
Philip Gourevitch

There's an overton st in Portland and, as far as I know, not one person has opened a walk up coffee place called the overton window.
Doug Hageman

I’m sorry I haven’t replied to your email but I glanced at it, vowed to deal with it later, and now the very thought of even opening it fills me with crippling dread.
Olivia Nuzzi

Something about this group is strikingly different from The Squad, but I can't figure out what it is:


Gabe Schneider

awhile back someone tweeted at me that being a social scientist who isn’t a marxist is basically just repeating “well,,,it do be like that” until you die and i think about that every single day
@papa_rosh

White evangelicals are twice as likely (82%) as US Jews (40%) to believe God gave Israel to the Jewish people
Conrad Hackett

I almost never let myself get angry over anything in tech these days but holy shit am I tired of the implication that putting ethics at the center of career choices is some combination of unprofessional and childish.
Erin Kissane

I tripped over my weighted blanket and spilled farro salad on my rug and I have never been so far from where my people started.
Tressie McMillan Cottom

i think they should stop making nerd movies for like 20 years. no more star wars, marvel, DC or ghostbusters. i think we all deserve some peace.
@9_volt_

Took Me Eleven Minutes to Do That Thing I've Been Avoiding for Three Months: A Memoir
Kimberly King Parsons

This fact just floored me: “The United States has allocated more than $133 billion to build up Afghanistan — more than it spent, adjusted for inflation, to revive the whole of Western Europe with the Marshall Plan after World War II.”
Yonah Lieberman

I'm going to have a big celebration the first time a reporter notices the connection between patent monopolies and the incentive for drug companies to push opioids
Dean Baker

people who lecture about civility usually just mean they want you to make less noise when they're hitting you
@behindyourback

Yes, Bloomberg may be outspending any candidate, but does he come close to the real leader in ad spending?


@sciencequiche


It’s weird that the ones who say facts don’t care about your feelings are often the least willing to accept facts.
feminist next door @emrazz

I think we have turned politics into entertainment. That's what our problem is.
Sophia Ignatidou

I used to think one of the reasons celebrities are nuts is because constantly being watched/recorded/shouted at ruins you psychologically and now we've expanded that life to everyone. Probably fine
@InternetHippo

funny how Twitter/Facebook are capable of acting on copyright complaints, but insist they are too incompetent (especially Facebook) to remove lies
Dean Baker

Successful societies are those that believe in the potential of regular people. Unsuccessful societies are those that believe large portions of their populations are useless trash.
Noah Smith

JFC I want an atheist to run for office and be like - hey - know who’s gonna help us? Nobody but ourselves... we gotta do this shit on our own...
@rawales2