Twitter August 2020: Beyond Postal

August 2020: Fear, but no longer uncertainty or doubt. We know who this president is and what he's up to. It's hard to see how we make it to November 3, but we will, one way or another. As one of the tweets below says, I don't have any backup plans for a scenario where he wins.

First, the election generally:

Remember when we were told we couldn’t nominate any candidate who was proposing healthcare for all because the Republicans would call us socialists? Now we have no healthcare for all and also are still called socialists.
Gregory McKelvey

“I was leaning toward Biden, but now that I see all this violence in the street that the president instigated, I’m thinking he might be the only one to keep us safe.” Imagine how dumb you’d have to be to have that thought.
Dennis DiClaudio

GOP is becoming a cheerleading squad for a paramilitary far-right, and you’d think that contradicts ‘law and order’ messaging but this is just a masks-off version of what ‘law and order’ has always been.
Taniel

Trump basically trying to run a southern Redemption election campaign at the national level. Encouraging vigilante violence, election sabotage, etc. This is how authoritarian government was set up in the former Confederate states after Reconstruction.
Jonathan Ladd

I feel that many white pundits, journalists and progressives struggle to understand the depths of anti-Blackness in their community. They have to put away the notion that Trump voters are all gun-totin' toothless Confederates from Alabama. They are your coworker in the next cube. People keep questioning why Biden isn't blowing Trump out of the water and the answer is simple--but y'all don't want to hear it--and that answer is most white voters support racism. Biden can't out-racists Trump. Dems can't run on white nationalism like Republicans can.
Daryl Sturgis

The three craziest things about US politics:
— Trump has not attempted to appeal to the median voter at any point in his presidency
— He has decent odds of winning anyway thanks to the electoral system
— This is conventionally described as his opponents being out of touch
Matthew Yglesias

The New York Times has a piece titled, "Rival Themes Emerge as Race Enters Final Weeks: Covid vs. Law and Order," and I take it that Trump is pro-Covid and Biden is for law and order...
Joshua Holland

Best bumper sticker of the week: BIDEN NOT PUTIN
Shadow Cabinet

Before this election is over, they’ll come for every institution; for everything you trust and believe in; they’ll come for your heroes and try to denigrate them, as Trump has already tried with the great John Lewis. It’s about leaving nothing in the wreckage but them. Be ready.
Joy Reid

Two things I would say if I was advising Joe Biden: Do big things to help Americans, and ignore advisors who don’t have anything to say to you except No We Can’t.
Jamison Foser (in response to Rahm Emanuel’s advice to Biden)

Between the pandemic, economic meltdown, racial injustices, and demoralization Trump has brought to the country, the Dem platform should be squarely focused on a Second Reconstruction - one built to last no matter how much white supremacy demands a return to the status quo.
Phillipe Cunningham

Obviously Joe Biden is not a political conservative. And yet, last night’s speech—with its emphasis on flag, family, faith, and character—was more thematically conservative than any speech I’ve ever heard Trump give.
Sarah Longwell

I do not have a plan for 4 more years of this administration. Whatever is inside of me that's holding itself together will completely break apart. I just need to say so.
@metroadlib

electing joe biden won’t fix everything but not electing joe biden means we never get a chance to fix anything. that’s all
Sarah Lazarus

I know it is required but I would like a political speech that doesn't end with "God Bless You & God Bless the USA" It seems trite, and I would like religion out of politics.
F. Quick @quick13

Trump: "The only way we lose the election is if the election is rigged." Well there it is
Will Steakin

Knock it off with the takes of "lol look at the Trump campaign not knowing how to attack Harris. Inconsistencies are funny!" Throwing spaghetti at a wall hasn't failed them yet.
Rebecca Seidel @Casein_Micelles

I have two elderly neighbors. Today my friends, they took their trump signs out of their yards and threw them in the trash. I went and mowed both their yards. And I will be driving them both to vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
@Maddog4Biden

It's amazing how quickly "the President is going to cheat to win" is just normalized as a factor we must all work around because the system itself is far too corrupted to stop him.
Schooley

Cartoon:

Bill Bramhall

you know it's bad when republicans start making it hard for WHITE people to vote
blaine capatch

If Trump “wins” in November, how can anyone look at the outcome and go, “Welp, I don’t like it, but he won fair and square”? He’s cheating to try to stay in power, he’s doing things that no president has ever done before. The press needs to stop playing this game.
Parker Molloy

Wanting Biden to win this election, doesn’t mean I turn my brain off and agree with everything he does. These aren’t teams to root for. These are elected leaders to be held accountable. Your person winning is the beginning of your participation, not the end.
Hari Kondabolu

To everyone saying VP candidates shouldn't be picked based on color or gender, how the fuck do you think we wound up with white men in power all of these years??
@KikiAdine

The next three months are going to be the dumbest motherfuckers alive pretending a Catholic grandpa and a district attorney are Antifa terrorists.
@RandBallsStu

The Republican National Convention:

What Trump did at the White House was the worst example of racist revisionist history since Woodrow Wilson played Birth of a Nation at the White House. It may be worse b/c of the reach of media today and b/c he was able to get some Af-Am men & women to be props for his extreme policies and lies.
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II

This abomination may be the most visible misuse of official position for private gain in America’s history. It is an abuse of the power entrusted to this man, the breach of a sacred trust. It is the civic equivalent of a mortal sin—maybe a religious one too. And it is a harbinger:

Walter Shaub

When I said in Feb 2017 that America was about to find out that its government is based on the honor system, this is what I meant. Trump will do what he wants and say "so sue me," as he has all his life. And the GOP protects him.
Garry Kasparov

Trumpers use language differently than Americans. They say "drain the swamp" but mean crush dissent instead of root out corruption. They say "law and order" but mean subjugate black and brown people. That's why Trump can shatter the Hatch Act but call himself a law and order guy.
Walter Shaub

Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes shows us exactly what just happened:

Seth Abramson

Amazing to watch Republicans talk about the need to end endless wars when the people who protested and opposed those wars were basically treated like traitors back when it mattered.
Chris Hayes

Mike Pence is like if the banality of evil was turned into a cyborg.
Frank Conniff

My hunch is that for a significant number of Republican voters cancel culture means "my grandkids won't talk to me because I'm a vocal bigot."
Angus Johnston @studentactivism

The key message of the GOP convention tonight remains the same: Trump and his allies aspire to a single-party dominated state, in which trappings of liberal democracy—an opposition party, a simulacrum of free and fair elections, a press—exist as vestigial organs, like an appendix:



Greg Greene @ggreeneva

We should start saying 180K Americans were canceled by COVID-19, then maybe the GOP would do something about it.
@FullFrontalSamB

Mark Meadows today: “Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares” about Hatch Act. Mark Meadows in 2014: Government attorney should be investigated for tweets supporting Democrats. “She actually violated the Hatch Act… it’s troubling.”
Dan Diamond

The media on the DNC: Did Joe seem a little TOO sincere? I don't like the way Kamala blinked. It was just meh.
The media on the RNC: They didn't say death camps out loud! A triumph!
@TessRafferty

Nikki Haley once said "America has never passed a law based on race." I think that's wrong, but I'm only 3/5ths sure.
Patrick S. Tomlinson @stealthygeek

Let’s be real about where Donald Trump got the idea for this entrance segment from. The top is Putin’s entrance in 2015...the bottom is Trumps#’s entrance tonight. Shameful and disgusting:



Robert Diamond

This was a speech against nepotism:



Rory Cooper

I didn't watch the whole RNC last night but the strangest thing was the repeated assertion that Donald Cares, when they could barely scrape together enough footage to hint that Donald is Aware Other People Exist
@tomtomorrow

Folks: the RNC isn’t using Black speakers to engage Black voters. They’re using Black speakers to engage white people who want to vote Trump and not feel racist.
Matt McDermott

I agree with the RNC that this couple really truly does represent the Republican party!



Chris Hayes

That Black and Hispanic Americans are complete idiots who don't know any better than to park themselves in dangerous Democrat cesspool cities is a big theme of the Republican convention.
Will Wilkinson

Every time the republicans speak about AOC as if she is the end of America as we know it (hope so), it just reminds me how bright her future is and how much we need to protect her.
Frederick Joseph

Trump Jr. says his father's policies have been "like rocket fuel" for the economy. FYI here's GDP since January 2009:



Ben Swasey

The Democratic National Convention:

love how the guy who gave the american carnage speech as his fucking inaugural address is trying to portray the dem convention as too dark
@tomtomorrow

underlying message of the DNC (unless it’s been actually articulated and I missed it): Biden has had so much taken from him, and his humanity never faltered; Trump was given everything, and learned nothing
@SamuelAAdams

Julia Louis-Dreyfus: "Just remember: Joe Biden goes to church so regularly that he does not even need tear gas and a bunch of federalized troops to help him get there."
AJ Vicens

This big tent, every opinion is fine bullshit needs to stop. You either think we need to act on climate change or you think Big Oil needs subsidies, those two ideas cannot coexist in the same party.
Amy Westervelt

Sally Yates just reminded me about the Muslim travel ban. Trump said we needed the ban until we can figure out what is going on. It's been three and a half years, Donnie Boy still hasn't figured out what is going on?
Dean Baker

The right’s favorite new theme of “U.S. cities in chaos,” including white vigilantes… which relates now to the election and COVID and white supremacy…

To the degree that American cities are in "chaos," it's because of
* COVID
* Police brutality
* White supremacy
* POTUS exacerbating all of the above
Doug Mack

Can we retire the "white working class" nostrum w/r/t the vigilante mobs? $80k pickup truck/accessories, $1K long gun/ammo/accessories, $2K of "tactical" gear, $200 sunglasses—they're the petit bourgeoisie. Ski-doo dealers. Car dealers. Ag merchants.
Chris Labarthe

I suspect there's a much deeper "rioting and looting" story about local police forces, their level of hostility toward BLM, their level of resolve to discredit BLM/defund etc. by provoking violence and doing little about looting, and the degree to which mayors can't control PDs. Gunned-up exurban MAGAs burning coal through big city downtowns flying giant Trump flags from the bed of their F150s to harass BLM protestors ... is as close to the Platonic form of "outside agitators" as you can get.
Will Wilkinson

A person with a gun at a political rally is neither a “protester” nor a “counter protester.” The goal is intimidation or violence. In other words: terror. There’s a word for a person like that.
Walter Shaub

Prominent conservatives are now arguing that the recent looting and property damage - which historically isn't all that unusual - is some sort of existential threat, and that totalitarianism is an acceptable alternative. We're in a dangerous place.
Radley Balko

You know what keeps the peace? Justice. The reason dominant culture will *never* see protests as peaceful is because they are a direct confrontation of a status quo that brings them the comfort and privilege to which they believe they are *entitled.* They will always see that as a threat, no matter how non-violent.
brittany packnett cunningham @MsPackyetti

The GOP wants to keep it easier for a 17-year-old white supremacist to have access to a weapon of war than it is for a law-abiding citizen of color to vote.
Bradley Whitford

Folks want "peaceful protests," but mad at NBA, WNBA, and now MLB players for, checks notes... peacefully protesting. Just say you don't give a damn about anti-Blackness and love white supremacy. #StrikeForBlackLives
Treva B @divafeminist

Right-wing activists “get away” with committing acts of violence because they are performing them in defense of the ideals, values, structures, and systems upon which this society was founded.
Stanislav Vysotsky @professor_stas

12-year old Tamir Rice was playing with a toy gun and was killed by a cop.
Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly killed two people with an AR-15 and was allowed to walk right by the cops.
Rice was 12. Rittenhouse? He's 17.
Equally Divided

Kyle Rittenhouse drove across state lines with his AR-15, put on latex gloves to prevent gunpower residue on his hands, and murdered two people. That shit was NOT self defense. That was pre-meditated murder.
@mmpadellan

The civil unrest is a byproduct of the collapsing state, not the cause of it.
Bree Newsome Bass

isn't it cool how you can just choose a random ass town like Kenosha Wisconsin or Ferguson Missouri and see that every cop is already fit with gear ready to go to war with civilians
Paul E Cheese @paulbensonsucks

just to clarify, by “abolish the police” I mean that police as they exist today are gone forever. no retraining, no diversity initiatives, no modest reduction in budget. permanently end the scourge of violent, abusive, supralegal forces in the us.
@whaleMPH

If you're against abolishing the police because we don't know every detail about how a world without policing would work, I assure you that we as a society are capable of coming up with something better than people getting shot 7 times in the back for no reason
keziyah

People keep saying "defund the police" is unrealistic, and yet y'all are the ones who keep saying that we can make the police into something they've never been in all of their history.
Tahir Anderson Duckett

Trump and his party relentlessly attacking “Democrat run cities” for their problems is a good example of partisan asymmetry. Biden and Dems don’t go around bashing, say, “Republican-run rural areas” for their unique troubles like poorer health, lower educational attainment, etc.
Sahil Kapur

I know there’s a pretty common take of, “If you’re protesting police, why would you expect their protection?” It’s important to recognize how much more damning that is to modern American policing than to the protest movement. I would think a supermajority of Americans would agree that the state force with a monopoly on legal violence at least *should* protect everybody and not just people they view as friendly to them. That we all kinda agree that’s not the case is...very bad, folks.
Henry Kraemer

The cops are basically counter protesters that are allowed to beat you
@tommykellyinla

Newly released documents show that while the Federal Protective Service was obsessively tracking BLM protests — and documenting every stray case of graffiti — DHS didn't really pay attention to white supremacists inciting more violence. Like...at all.
Hayes Brown

It’s absolutely remarkable watching cops spray the residents of the city they work for with mace like it’s silly string at a child’s birthday party. Like clowns spraying each other with seltzer. The reckless abandon with which they deliver this brutality is truly astonishing.
@mrotzie

When those in power deny you the right to vote, the right to protest, to right to know who your accusers are and the nature of the charges against you before being thrown into an unmarked vehicle, it is they, who have opened the gates of anarchy.
Grant-Lee Phillips

As always, there had to be some general comments about Mafia Mulligan himself:

all my life I was told that we have the greatest system of government in the world but somehow a demented mobster moron is being allowed to break every single law while shoveling taxpayer money into his pockets while cheating his way to reelection. I mean what in actual fuck
Jeff Tiedrich

If Donald Trump is the "LAW AND ORDER" President, why are all his friends criminals?
Dean Baker

It's kind of amazing Trump's extortion efforts in the pandemic have not been a bigger issue. This is exactly what he was impeached for, except he was doing it to U.S. governors, instead of Ukraine and was entirely open about what he was doing
Dean Baker

Not important but why does he sit on every chair like it’s a toilet:

Jess Dweck

Have to understand that this whole freak show of Trump crooks and cast-offs have been trying to get inside presidential campaigns for years. No one but Trump opened the door. Bannon tried in 2004. He was obviously a nut. Trump’s a gangster. Honest people don’t work for gangstersxf
stuart stevens

It would be nice if Trump were occasionally held accountable for the things he says. He is after all supposed to be an adult
Dean Baker

What Trump is saying here is that he modified an important US foreign policy stance toward Israel in service of an end-of-days biblical prophecy credited by Evangelical Christians that features the great battle at Armageddon and ends with the Jewish people in hell.
@nycsouthpaw

Trump's brother was in the hospital, dying, as Trump was on the golf course. What makes you think he cares about you, America?
Wajahat Ali

When Trump insisted "I alone can fix it," I thought he meant "fix" as in "repair," not "rig like a crooked prizefight."
Kevin M. Kruse

I don't know if anyone else has said this, but payroll tax cuts are the hydroxychloroquine of economic policy. They won't do anything to solve the employment crisis, but will have dangerous side effects. Yet Trump remains obsessed with them as a cure
Paul Krugman

When Trump says “defer payroll tax” he is really saying “defund Social Security and Medicare.” Remember this when he claims Democrats want to “defund” the police.
George Takei

Trump lies that he got Veterans Choice passed after others had tried for almost 50 years, though Choice was a Sanders-McCain bill signed into law by Obama in 2014, and he's said this more than 142 times and how do I not have a keyboard hot key for this yet
Daniel Dale

Oh man when people hear what Trump said in that interview he’s finished, I mutter to myself 10 times a day every day for the last 5 years
Jess Dweck

Just a reminder that one day Ivanka will try to distance herself from her father’s shameful legacy - and it’s our job to make sure she can’t.
Jessica Valenti

President Covfefe19:



Mark Dolk @vrjrdgstknng

I had to make a catch-all to contain tweets about fascism, where our country seems to be at generally, and the devolution of the Republican party:

Fascists succeed b/c they‘re more laser focused in seizing power by every means possible than their opposition is in resisting their power grab. The fascists are not participating in liberal democracy and are making it clear that violence will be utilized to achieve their ends. Politicians who engage in a both sides narrative that pretends there is equal threat from fascists and anti-fascists enable fascism b/c they actively minimize the genuine threat. That’s all the opening fascists need in order to plow through with their authoritarian agenda.
Bree Newsome Bass

I know I’m harping on this but Hitler and the Nazis didn’t say “we’re going to scapegoat Jewish people and murder them by the millions”; they said “the Jews are a threat to the German way of life and we must defend ourselves.” The same “self-defense” rhetoric Fox and the GOP use.
Martha Kelly

Civility in America is people screaming that other people should be nice to people who want them dead.
@kashanacauley

The American Right has controlled the direction of this country for decades, has hastened this decline and national ruin, and is engaged in projecting the blame and rage for their own missteps and failures on nonexistent conspiracies, imagined traitors, and supernatural plots. They are so inconsolably rageful because to stop and consider anything would mean toppling the undeniably brittle and false illusion they live under. They cannot listen because their position is so untenable, so laughably fake, that they can only rage and rage and rage. We are a failing nation because of the Right’s demand for unending hegemony through military interventionism, because of their massive redistribution of wealth project and corporate/privatization worship, because of their poisonous adherence to white patriarchal dominance.
Jared Yates Sexton

The most chilling aspect of the last 4 years is knowing that 40% of this country can’t recognize evil when they see it.
John Lundin

It's wild that some folks are still pretending that things like "character" and "family" are conservative values. Conservative values have been exposed as racism, waving guns, coughing in people's faces, trolling, and yelling at women trying to get basic health care services.
Amanda Marcotte

2020 in a single remarkable photo - by @noahberger3884 in California:



Rupert Myers

That QAnon is fundamentally antisemitic, and that it preys on people's natural concern for children in order to manipulate them into acts of vigilante violence are just further reasons why this cannot be treated as acceptable.
Julia Carrie Wong

I know I’m cynical but, “We can’t fight our global warming fires with our hyper-incarcerated prison labor because too many of them are infected by the uncontrolled pandemic” is really too much.
Victor Ray

Republicans are not the arbiters of who and what is antisemitic, and I wish people would ignore their highly selective outrage.
Sara Luterman

When living in Russia, I used to say to friends for decades that I hope one day you will live in a boring, normal, democratic country. Now, I hope for the same thing for the future of my country.
Michael McFaul (former U.S. ambassador to Russia)

Children (age 7ish) outside my home right now are playing house — the imaginary game where you romanticize adulthood — but they're pretending they live in tiny houses and they're "not sure" if they want to bring kids into the scenario by being parents. This could be a case study.
Jessica Lee

(Not So) Fun Fact: I was raised in/survived a fairly radical Dominionist Evangelical church and I’m shook more people don’t understand how much Evangelicalism’s obsession with Armageddon drives the GOP’s policy platform.
Phillipe Cunningham

I don’t know if 2020 is the bad enough that slightly more people - enough people - will learn that good and competent government is good and vote accordingly. But a lot of Republicans are doing their best to make the lesson hard to miss.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

always find interesting the tension between classic conservative ideal of people embedded in local tradition, family and community establishment versus modern conservative fixation with forcing people to move for work
David Sligar

No mail. No healthcare. No jobs. No free or fair elections. Banned from the rest of the world. Our taxes blown on giveaways to corrupt corporations and institutions. Police violence against anyone who challenges this arrangement. We’re living in a failed state, no doubt about it.
Samuel Sinyangwe

It's just impossible to poll a new/different world. Realistically, people won't know if they like it or approve of it until they experience it. Progressives are always asking for trust, a leap of faith, which is a WAY higher bar to clear than the RW's "indulge your fears."
David Roberts

The United States treats israel more like a state than it does Puerto Rico.
Richard Medhurst

I just don’t understand Christians who refuse to wear a mask because they think God will protect us... but somehow they still need a gun.
Shane Claiborne

I think we need to come to terms with the fact that our life's work is, unavoidably, crisis resilience.
Jesse Kriss

know none of this is new but it feels so acute right now just how much time people have to spend defending things that shouldn't need defending. that Harris doesn't meet citizenship requirements. that we need a functional, funded postal service. that mail-in ballots aren't fraud. i realize this is intentional! it's just so disheartening right now to see the zone so totally flooded with shit that so many people have to expend massive energy just trying to make sure the most basic stuff/norms aren't destroyed hijacked
Charlie Warzel

sudden, chilling premonition that in fifteen years I’m going to be asking my daughter’s prom date if their family is mainline QAnon or reform
Tom Lee @tjl

We’ve just got to stop electing people who don’t believe in government
Adam Miller

Living in America now is like being on an airplane when an orangutan somehow takes over the cockpit, and half the passengers are thrilled and tell the others that the orangutan was chosen by God to fly this airplane.
Sandra Newman

you know, suddenly it makes a lot of sense now why so much YA dystopia only took place in America with no mention of what was happening with the rest of the world. they were all probably just chilling
@thechloegong

It’s really hard to express how much change we need and have people take you seriously.
Adam Miller

"Getting less attention is the death of churches and unions. Lower income neighborhoods are littered with boarded up versions of both, a result of America’s embrace of a noxious mix of centralized economic power and de-centralized personal freedom."
Strong Towns

And, of course, our new topic—the U.S. Postal Service

Remember when they dismantled the post office last week, and we got mad, but they refused to put it back, so now that’s just how it is, and fascism is a fast boiling pot
Zack Bornstein

In a market driven by networked digital infrastructure, the USPS scandal doesn’t just reveal how poorly maintained and managed our material infrastructure is, but also how massively profitable tech companies can’t serve the public’s interest. We got a lot of work to do.
Joan Donovan, PhD @BostonJoan

(Whispers) the postal service files more criminal search warrant than the FBI and DEA combined.
Seamus Hughes (after Steve Bannon was arrested)

Mail carriers have more direct contact with the public than any law enforcement, fire department, or paramedics. Mail carriers know the communities they serve better than any other civil servants. The United States Post Office is indispensable. #SaveThePostOffice
David F Walker

For as long as I can remember Republicans have pushed USPS to be run like a real business and then someone reminds them that no real business would have post offices or deliver mail in rural America at these low rates, and then they move on to something else.
Tony Fratto

USPS: A service, a lifeline, a unifier, not a business.
Amy Resnick

As I mentioned in a piece I wrote, UPS and FedEx each handled 5.5 billion packages in 2019. USPS did more than 140 billion, and a few billion were likely UPS or FedEx packages where it does final delivery.
Erik Sherman

I just want to remind everyone that every registered voter in the US mailed their ballot at 100 percent turnout that would still be far less mail than the USPS handles on Christmas.
Jessica Huseman

I don’t ever want to hear another word about “dignity of work” from a bunch of politicians who went on a month-long vacation during a pandemic and left people to get evicted and go bankrupt
Miles Howard

White men didn't care about kidnapped refugee caged, or 165,000 unnecessary deaths, or foreign alliances frayed, or bounties killed our troops, or Gestapo thugs gassed moms. Let's see what happens when their Viagra delivery is stalled.
Mr. Schmageggie @srivlin

Reminder that USPS makes more deliveries in sixteen days than UPS and FedEx combined ship in an entire year
James Medlock

Still no cancer meds in the mail today. 11 days late. 35k dollars. I really want to thank all the 2016 protest voters. This is what you wanted right?
brett irwin

If you think that USPS can be replaced by a free market company that would do the same thing all that means to me is that you’ve never lived in or visited rural America.
Jessica Huseman

In Florida's 2016 general elecction, 90k mail ballots arrived at county offices on Election Day. 80k more vote by mail ballots arrived one day earlier. So, 170k mail ballots were on the edge of being late in 2016. Even a slight delay in USPS deliver could lead to massive disenfranchisement of voters.
daniel a. smith @electionsmith

MAGA: Mailboxes Are Going Away
Santiago Mayer

The most dangerous enemy combatant the United States of America has ever faced is the U.S. Postmaster General. I'll admit I didn't see that one coming.
Alex Steffen

Thor bites and eats racists:



@thorbites

USPS ran like clockwork. There was no reason to touch it. But this is what Republicans do. They falsely claim government doesn’t work. Then they sabotage government to prove themselves right and find ways to benefit from that destructive process.
Adam Best

DeJoy and his wife have between $30.1M and $75.3M in assets in private USPS competitors. Hmmmm. I wonder why he'd be willing to destroy the USPS.
Randi Mayem Singer

I must confess, Trump hiring a corrupt GOP donor to destroy the US Postal Service so he could steal the 2020 election during a deadly pandemic was not on my Dystopia Bingo card. We always underestimate what this party of traitors is willing to do.
Steve Silberman

White supremacy, racism, police brutality (which may overlap with the subjects above)

Sometimes, as a white writer, you just have to accept that not every story is yours to tell. And that’s okay. It’s not oppression, it’s not silencing.
Vee Signorelli @findmereading

It is endlessly amusing to me that some folks find Black people's most basic statements about the world -- just facts, but delivered without adornment or softening -- to be "a shout of rage." Makes it so clear that they're only comfortable when we're grinning and lying to them.
N. K. Jemisin

If you're white.
And the issue at hand has to do with race.
And the only people agreeing with your point of view are also white.
How do you not even consider you might be in the wrong?
Steven Delpome @NA_Dellsey

You can’t reform the slave patrols
Bree Newsome Bass

I can’t recall any pairing of events as closely-comparable-yet-starkly-different:
-Black man is shot in the back 7 times, while getting in car w his kids;
-White youth carrying AR-15 walks away, after killing people.
By the same police force, in the same town, in the same week.
James Fallows

I was born Black, no one is born a police officer, Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives don’t exist
Anthony V. Clark

There is no such thing as biological race. There are human beings who have numerous genetic variations as a phenomenon of nature and there is a modern society that segregates people based on physical appearance to preserve a privileged class of people w/ pale skin. The rest is a bunch of myths you have been indoctrinated into to preserve the status quo of the modern society, to convince yourself that it is natural and that it’s always been this way the entirety of human history. It’s only been a few hundred years. Folks arguing that Black people must comply with police in every circumstance or be killed are the same ones saying mask mandates are a tyrannical overreach of gov’t that entitles them to throw tantrums in public & storm the capitals with guns.
Bree Newsome Bass

"officer-involved shooting" is failure-involved journalism
Jay Smooth

It's funny that resistance to tyranny as enshrined in the Second Amendment only applies to conspiracy theorist neckbeards and not those who are actually oppressed and under attack by state violence.
@IDoTheThinking

I'll never stop being amazed by white people's infinite compassion for other white people.
@eclecticbrotha

like, white people think the *Nation of Islam* is on the left because it's made up of Black people LOL. which tells you how central whiteness is to their understanding of the left-right continuum
@GeeDee215

“White liberals overestimate poor whites’ racism and underestimate their own.” –Reverend Barber
Katie Halper

Breonna Taylor is closer to being trademarked than to receiving justice. I'm sick.
@kingnigel_

The Republican Party: Rich white people robbing poor white people while blaming Black and brown people.
Mikel Jollett

some people learn about colonization in college and some people learn about colonization because they or their family members were subjected to it and if you don't know anyone in the second category, well that is something of a tell
Julia Carrie Wong

If every other person in history who has held a particular job has been white, trust me, it’s not the first Black person in the position who is the one got the job because of her or his race.
Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones

The entire premise of the white middle class in America is unfair wealth-based advantages over Black and brown people. In safer communities, in private and segregated public schools, in property taxes, and almost all of this manifests itself through housing.
@IDoTheThinking

It ever blow your mind that we are all living in this hellscape because 40 yrs ago a few rich white men were scared a black man may actually live to 75, own a home and retire. So they destroyed every safety net, school system and scheme for gov't based health care out there...like, this moment wasn't inevitable. This is a future engineered by the logics of white superamacy which says a country that isn't actively working to destroy Black life isn't worth having.
Kaitlyn Greenidge @surlybassey

So many book clubs this year about anti-racist literature. Very little discussion about what people intend on changing in their practice. What are you going to do differently as a result of your learning?
DrawntoIntellect

Older white homeowners need to understand that their home ownership was given to them on the basis of race. Subsidies for the suburbs was freely given to them while Black home ownership was denied. My Dad’s uncle was denied housing because. Well.
@in_a_backyard

"In terms of economic mobility, they found, the penalty for being born Black is the same today as it was in the 1870s."
Andy Kroll

One lie circulating is that only 1% of white southerners owned slaves In 1860, 1% of white southern families owned 200 or more human beings, but in states of the Confederacy at least 20% owned at least one and in Mississippi and SC it ran as high as 50%.
Sandy Darity

Nothing makes white people concerned about Black people in Chicago quicker than when a conversation about police violence comes up.
Breakdances With Wolves @BigIndianGyasi

If Black children are “old enough” to experience racism then white children are “old enough” to learn about it.
Blair Amadeus Imani

I don’t know why white support for Trump continues to be a shock for people when the whole reason we’re in this nightmare era is because white people didn’t like seeing a Black family in the WH and wanted reassurances that structural racism would remain in place.
Bree Newsome Bass

Conservatives would rather live under a dictatorship than address white supremacy.
David Hogg

If a meritocracy existed, people wouldn’t be hired for “culture fit” and fired for natural hairstyles.
Tatiana Mac

Please don’t ever allow the white establishment to talk about “patriotism” anymore. It’s a complete farce. It shouldn’t even be entertained. They were more outraged about Kaepernick kneeling than bounties being placed on US soldiers. They believe in racism. Period. Thassit.
Bree Newsome Bass

Whiteness is not an ethnicity and to the extent that it is a culture, it’s a culture organized around racial & ethnic exclusion. It’s purely a power construct.
Bree Newsome Bass

The establishment is trying desperately to co-opt the 60s civil rights movement and rewrite the narrative to make it seem that MLK’s dream was for Black Americans to have equal share & participation in the spoils of US imperialism and war crimes, but what else is new?
Bree Newsome Bass

If we don’t require social scientists to be fluent in the history and theories of racial oppression, they end up saying stupid mess that furthers racial oppression. Yes. This is probably subtweeting who you’re thinking. Because...all of them.
Phillip Atiba Goff

Tweets about COVID-19 are woven through tweets in other topics, but some are mainly about COVID:

Today would have been the opening day of the Minnesota State Fair. My friend Don points out that typical opening day gate count is around 180K people - which is around how many people the US has lost to COVID-19. "An entire Fair's worth of dead folks," says Don.
Nancy Sims @CopyrightLibn

More Americans died from coronavirus during the Republican Convention than died on 9/11.
David Litt

Trump, the anti-vaxxer, in trying to rush a vaccine for his own benefit, is doing everything anti-vaxxers claim makes vaccines evil and breaking every norm to do so, proving that previous vaccines were rigorously tested, but making it impossible for normal people to trust this one.
Catherynne M. Valente

The University of Alabama had more positive covid tests today than the country of Canada
McTapia @rockierage117

I got an email today promoting a webinar about "student death management." So, this is where we live now. It didn't have to be this way.
@kelly_j_baker

There is no bottom to polarization and motivated reasoning. Cultists would prefer mass death, even their *own* death, over giving up the meaning they've found in cult membership/belonging.
David Roberts

57 percent of Republicans think 176,000 coronavirus deaths (and counting) is acceptable. Holy shit.
Aaron Rupar

Saying that wearing a mask during a pandemic is "living in fear" is like saying that using oven mitts means you're "afraid" of the oven...
Mohamad Safa

At least 117, 898 incarcerated people have tested positive for COVID-19. At least 938 have died.
25,385 prison staff have tested positive. 72 have died.
Our government wants us to forget about the incarcerated people they’ve failed in every way during this pandemic. We won’t.
ACLU

I know we don’t want to go back to “normal” but what I do want is to go back to a world where we are able to talk with other humans and engage in basic social interaction safely without a mask.
@alwaystheself

It's not in the news as much anymore, but please don't forget that incarcerated people are still contracting and dying from covid at devastating rates. Covid cases in federal and state prisons have been 5.5 times higher—and death rates 3 times higher—than the general population.
Clint Smith

I like how conservatives are blaming a spike in crime in Minneapolis on dismantling the police, which hadn’t happened, rather than a global pandemic coupled with mass unemployment and homelessness
Baby Boy Monaghan

Just gonna leave this here:

@spooknine

I wish the discourse on why America got steamrolled by this virus was a little less "people going out and having fun" and a little more "this country has no paid sick leave, our health care is a disaster, and the GOP isn't the only party prioritizing the economy"
Aaron Bady @zunguzungu

How can I properly enjoy a movie while in fear of a mass shooter when I also have to be in fear of a global pandemic?!
@mikesonnALT

Have you noticed that the right has not mourned at all the death of Herman Cain.
@ImpeachmentHour

Why we need to get our response to the #COVID19 pandemic right. And in most places, we’re not. #ClimateCrisis:



Brent Toderian

The population of Seattle is 18% larger than the population of Helsinki; the police budget is 185% larger. Seattle PD kills on average 6 people a year. Helsinki PD has not killed anyone in the last 20 years. But, as Americans like to say, "That would never work here".
Sami Kukkonen @SnowOrDeath

Do I keep my classroom door open to improve air circulation or close it to protect my students from an active shooter? This is just one of the impossible questions teachers are facing this year.
Tiffany Mumm

# of men on California's Death Row executed since 1978: 13
# of men on CA's Death Row who have died of Covid in the last two months, after fatal screw-ups by prison officials: 12
Jason Fagone

Old enough to remember when 2,100 people died on 9/11 and the country came to a standstill. Now 1,400 people die a day and it’s business as usual? Who are we.
Lynese Wallace

Deaths as a proportion of cases tells you how deadly the virus is. Deaths as a proportion of the population tells you how deadly the Trump administration is.
Zoë McLaren, PhD

The government went from chastising young people for gathering to forcing them to gather:



Bree Newsome Bass

2 died of Ebola: They said Obama should resign.
4 died in Benghazi: They had Hillary testify for 11 hours, held 33 hearings, and launched a multiyear probe.
158,180 died thanks to Trump’s incompetence: They cheered him on, and demand 4 more years.
@Strandjunker

When my husband cares for a patient whose COVID status is unknown he wears multiple types of PPE (gown, fit-tested N95 mask, face shield, gloves) and is often in a room where air is recirculated every 2 mins. But sure, let's send teachers back to school wearing simple masks.
Carolyn Porter

I can't unsee it. and it's terrifying:



@intelligentwat

Has it occurred to anyone that the White House that wasn't concerned about Democrats dying because they weren't going to vote for them anyway feels the same way about school children?
@Rschooley

Sexism, misogyny, and toxic masculinity:

Seems like a good time for a reminder that the Women's Liberation movement grew out of leftist organizations in which women were harassed and sidelined as their concerns about sexism and discrimination were dismissed by leftist men as "hangups" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
andi zeisler

Realized recently that conservative men want to be the loudest voice in the room and liberal men want to be the smartest voice in the room. Both options silence my own voice.
Marianne Alyssa @MarianneDisney

Dismantling gender bias. Exhibit A.
Melissa Murray @ProfMMurray

Paris ENS is France’s top school and agregation there is highly competitive. This year, due to COVID they cancelled the orals, only had the (anonymous) written exam. As a result ~80% of successful candidates were women. 8-0. Eighty. Women usually represent ~40% of ENS agrégés
Prof Sandra Lapointe @mslapointe

I think there was a widespread sense that Clinton would win by large margins against a buffoon, a racist and sexual assaulter. Instead cable news needed a “horse race” so they covered Trump 24/7, called him a populist and dug up pretend scandals against HRC. And sexism,so much sexism.
@annegrace_C

Because of Black suffragists, WE are. The struggle for the vote was incomplete in 1920, but Black suffragists fought hard and long for the vote for ALL women in the United States.
Salamishah Tillet

as a man, there is no way to do misogyny ironically… the effects are the same as if it were sincere… thank you for coming to my ted talk
ellory smith

Criminalizing sex work only helps police abuse their power.
ACLU

Me: I wonder if the specifics of how we talk about female rulers has changed in the past 2,000 years
Dio, writing about Boudicca: she was very big, actually too big, and her voice was very rough and bad, and also her hair was messy, which I didn’t like
Anne Thériault

"KAMALA HARRIS IS TOO ANGRY TO BE VICE PRESIDENT," screamed the president, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and millions of other white guys.
Matthew Miller

honestly the best marketing scheme in history is men successfully getting away with calling women the "more emotional" gender for like, EONS, because they've successfully rebranded anger as Not An Emotion
Claire Willett

A 1,000 square foot mosaic of Ida B. Wells is being installed at Union Station in DC:



Jane Carr @janegreenway

Please note that the words "nasty," "shrill," and "strident" are never used to describe male politicians.
Jeffrey Toobin

god the number of emails that I get that are like "this is great but you could be better" from men is truly astounding
Lyz Lenz

Why are men so self-conscious about their height there are so many more important flaws to be self conscious about for example the lack of emotional intelligence
yasmine @yethmine_

Still wild to me how a racist misogynist lawyer murdered a federal judge’s son and the establishment just moved on like there was nothing much to examine there.
Bree Newsome Bass

what’s the dumbest thing that’s ever been mansplained to you? mine is one time I was driving and my husband let me know our home was “up ahead on the left.”
Priscilla @itsPKav

great news! I started removing "just"s and "i think"s and extra exclamation points in my work communications and started receiving complaints that I'm coming off as "attacking and aggressive"!
@juliajulesjuju

Media criticism

"Any news organization that uncritically describes Trump’s reelection campaign as premised on “law and order,” without placing his concerted efforts to destroy the rule of law front and center is helping to drain those words of all meaning."
Steven Greenhouse

I’m going to be thinking about this for a long time:


David Griner

good time for reporters to study up on covering cults
stacy-marie ishmael

Love that society is like "journalists need to stay exactly neutral, totally 100% objective, they prob shouldn't even vote, just to be safe!" and then nobody says a word when hundreds of cops with easy access to weapons of war are like "WE SALUTE YOU, SIR!" to a wannabe dictator.
Slade

It would be tempting to say that in the Trump era media has brought a knife to a gun fight but it’s far worse. They brought a bottle of wine because they thought it was a dinner party.
jelani cobb

It is utter journalistic malfeasance to talk about the USPS without mentioning the utterly ridiculous and punitive pension policy Congress forced on them to make them look financially incompetent.
Matthew R Francis @DrMRFrancis

Our political media learned either nothing or the wrong lessons from the 2016 debacle and it’s exhausting. It’s also very dangerous. The lessons of 2016 included: be less sexist, don’t let bad faith right wing congressmen play assignment editor, don’t assume the bad man can’t win, cover the bad man’s corruption, cover American racism, cover American sexism, hire experts on race religion gender, etc ... Outlets: shit we need more white male conservative commentators and to interview retired white conservatives in midwestern diners at 10 am and to treat fashy fucks as serious leaders.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

I can't imagine the economic anxiety of a late-middle-aged white man driving a $60k truck pulling a $150k boat. I wish the NYT would explore this for me.
@mikesonnALT

Climate change and renewable energy:

Almost all sectors have lower revenues this quarter than they did a year ago — but no sector in the S&P 500 is faring worse than energy. The MEDIAN energy company in the S&P 500 has seen their revenue drop in half vs a year ago
Alexis Goldstein

Some want to sell the Green New Deal as a policy to stimulate growth. This is a self-defeating strategy, as growth makes decarbonization more difficult. We need a GND, but we also need to question the assumption that growth is necessary to achieve our social and ecological goals.
Jason Hickel

Can we all, just for a second, appreciate how utterly fucked up it is that if any kid today asks their parents 'Will the planet be habitable by the time I'm old?' that the truthful answer is 'I don't know.' Especially when we know why it's happening and we *could* stop it.
Lauren McLean @climatelauren

#WhatIf:



Robintransition (billboard in Bristol, England)

Fascinating: Somewhat surprised social scientists say that the pandemic/economic crisis have not reduced support for climate action. Indeed, it's now second only to abortion as the issue Americans care passionately about; 68% want more govt action now!
Bill McKibben

It’s weird to think that if we didn’t waste food we would need half the agricultural land. And if we had it as gardens we would need a 15th. Or if we did both we would only need a 30th of the area. Then imagine if we did it in layers food trees above food plants below. This is why efficiency is only putting costs elsewhere.
BuildSoil by planting one million edible chestnuts

It blew my mind when someone said, “Stop thinking about this year as the warmest for the last 100 years, but the coolest one for the next 100.”
Rebecca Schwartz Lesberg

Oh and one other thing before I walk my dog: Biden should break up the Dept. of Energy. Put management of nuclear weapons/stockpiles in a dedicated subcabinet agency. And then create a cabinet-level agency specifically devoted to the clean-energy transition.
David Roberts

Ending fossil fuel subsidies is the smallest fucking thing. It's literally not *paying fossil fuel co's* to accelerate climate change. It's beyond low-hanging fruit, it's fruit that's been lying on the ground so long fossil fuel co's themselves can't believe it's still there
Brian Merchant

You know all the climate-related disasters pounding civilization right now? All the fires, heatwaves, floods, and storms? Climate scientists predicted all of it. We also predict that it will get MUCH worse if we keep burning fossil fuel. You might want to start listening to us.
Peter Kalmus (climate scientist) @ClimateHuman

"The evidence is now clear enough that it can be stated unequivocally: It would be worth freeing ourselves from fossil fuels even if global warming didn’t exist. ...the air quality benefits alone are enough to pay for the energy transition."
Alex Steffen

I was on a panel with Christie Todd Whitman... she said conservatives didnt believe in climate change because Democrats were really pushy about it
Sam Seder

People throw around warming of 2°C or 3°C this century as if it's nothing. The last ice age was about 5°C (10°F) colder than today & it was a completely different planet, w/ ice sheets covering much of N. American & sea level 300 ft lower.
Andrew Dessler

"leftists" who oppose gasoline taxes are consistently the dumbest people on this website
sam deutsch

We're not going to overcome 30 years of GOP civic sabotage on climate by treating this emergency as another checkbox on our list of issues. Because it isn't an issue, it's a new era—one that will redefine every aspect of life over the next decade, whether we like it or not.
Alex Steffen

There is something extra-excruciating about existential threats where we know what to do, it is technologically feasible, and we are collectively wealthy enough to do it and power structures prevent what needs to happen from happening.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

Now that we have cheap, effective air source heat pumps, it's time for public policy to help everyone finance them, beginning with the poorest Americans. It is utterly unnecessary to have a tube of flammable gas running into your house
Bill McKibben (after a gas explosion blew up a houses in Baltimore)

Now that we've learned the vast majority of flights are unnecessary, we should institute tradable personal carbon quotas for air travel, within a declining aggregate cap. I suspect people will be ready to accept this. Now is the time.
Jason Hickel

"As a single man-made substance, humanity produces more CO2 than it does *all other materials combined*. In 2019 the US manufactured around 6.5B tons of agricultural products, fossil fuels, metal ores and non-metallic minerals. In the same year we emitted 6.7B tons of CO2 ."
David Roberts

Livable cities and sustainable transportation:

I know it’s so hard to believe — but cars really do ruin cities. Cities aren’t meant for cars and geometrically they don’t fit. Too many cars causes traffic which causes stress. It’s just a bad combination. We know it’s true bc people move to the suburbs to escape traffic and—
@LindsayJS

I know I should be over it by now, but the frequency with which NIMBYs living in single family homes describe new apartments and condos as "luxury," despite them often costing half the alternative or less, still astounds me.
Max Ghenis

I'm 6' without the helmet. Get these monstrosities off our streets:



Rabi Abonour

Too often urban density and urban green are seen as a trade-off, a false choice. But creatively integrating green into urban density needn’t mean less density — it just means BETTER density. In other words, it’s part of Density Done Well.
Brent Toderian

Good Morning, Urbanist Twitter.
What if bikeshare were run by Metro Transit, instead of each individual city?
What if your transit ticket/pass included 15 minutes of bikeshare use at your destination?
Would the Twin Cities become more multimodal and less car-dependent?
Lou Miranda

We really need to challenge the assumption that if you can buy a car, no matter how big or polluting, society has a duty to spend whatever it takes to allow you to drive and park it wherever you want:



Iain Roberts @slowbikeiain

It's frustrating that drivers don't follow the rules, because it's so dangerous, the result is so horrifying (deaths injuries). I was thinking, people aren't really wired for driving. For the level of conformity and the amount of patience and sustained focus it requires.
Angie Schmitt

I’ve spent more time just walking outside in the past 5 months than I have in my entire life and one thing that I feel more certain about than ever is how important it is to have free public parks, playgrounds, and outdoor green spaces accessible to all people in all communities. And I didn’t have a strong opinion on this before, but I also think cities would be so much better if we banned cars from many of our streets and instead turned them into walking/biking/running spaces. It transforms cities and communities.
Clint Smith

Does no one own a broom anymore? Single family homes that endlessly use a gasoline leaf blower for a bit of lawn and driveway are the yard care equivalent of driving an SUV a quarter mile to get a carton of milk.
Christopher @lakeoftheisles

All of these blind spots could be eliminated using cameras and mirrors. But instead of demanding a few hundred dollars in safety equipment, we just tell cyclists and pedestrians, passengers, it's their fault of their get run over:



Angie Schmitt

"The biggest likely source of microplastics in California coastal waters? Our car tires."
Alex Steffen (linking to an LA Times story)

We need to get ahead of trees vs bike lane if road is widened. If trees are cut down to widen the road, it is done solely to protect parking interests.
@mikesonnALT

It’s really fucked up but there’s all sorts of ways kids are killed by cars that aren’t even traffic related. Hot car deaths. Kids get killed by power windows also. Back over deaths are not considered traffic crashes and are not counted in official statistics.
Angie Schmitt

There is no vehicle better adapted to compact urban centers than a bicycle. Conversely, there's no vehicle more *poorly* adapted than a car. (A cyclist who stops riding becomes another stroller in the city. A driver becomes somebody with a storage problem):



Taras Grescoe

Can you imagine how many actual children’s lives would be saved if anti-abortion activists and GOP fought for #gunsense?
Emerge California

The total annual costs of driving on society in the EU is estimated at €820 Billion ANNUALLY (5,7% of GDP) in unpaid costs such as fatalities, air pollution and climate. A conservative estimate, e.g. not including free parking in public space.
Cycling Professor @fietsprofessor

the revolution is coming and im not ready... i dont even have a compost bin...
@eternallyanna

Renters are expected to tolerate living along de facto highways, while rich Kenwood homeowners get to ban traffic in their neighborhood:



@ban_SUVs

Median cost of a house in 1960: $11,900, or $104,165 in current dollars. A bit over 2 years worth of income.
Median cost of rent in 1960: $71 per month, or $621.49 in current dollars. At $466/month income, rent was on average 15% of one's monthly income.
@pookleblinky

What if state depts of transportation were using percentage of children who walk/bike to school as a metric to measure their success instead of highway delay, highway delay, highway delay?
Angie Schmitt

Life is hard and joyless in the cruel hell that is European low-carbon living!



Alex Steffen

I am becoming convinced that autonomous vehicles are designed to solve the problem of "I live in a wealthy suburb but have a horrible car commute and don't want to drive anymore but also hate trains and buses." Alright, enough, I'm convinced. Autonomous vehicles are intended to be toys for rich suburbanites. May be some interesting "automated" features for buses. But that's not innovation buses need at the moment. Transit needs bus lanes and higher taxes. Who's got the startup for that.
Matthew FTP Lewis @mateosfo

Pretty cool: Kansas City is now the site of the world's largest passivhaus building, a 276-unit apartment community. Zero energy, zero waste, extreme thermal comfort, scrupulous air circulation, smart land use -- plus it just looks nice.
David Roberts

You can legally sell a multi-ton street-legal dragster capable of accelerating to 3x the posted residential speed limit in less than 3 seconds, but you're not allowed to sell an e-bike for use on public streets if it isn't speed limited to 20mph in the US because of course:



Car Helmets

ok one more hot take: the whole notion of a suburb; a place where people get the cultural and financial benefits of a city while getting to opt out of the tax base and any civic responsibility for the wellbeing of the city is looting.
Nate Marshall @illuminatemics

Manchester’s 1st new public park in a century focuses on ecological restoration as the anchor to a new district. A sharp contrast from the approach embraced by so many cities over the last century that uses roads, cars and parking as organizing principles.
Jennifer Keesmaat

Horsepower of a base F150
1980: 120 hp
1990: 150 hp
2000: 205 hp
2010: 248 hp
2020: 290 hp
Payton Chung

"It's not exactly the case that American auto manufacturers sat down and said "how can we kill as many pedestrians as possible?" They just design, build, and sell pointlessly huge SUVs and trucks they know for a fact are much more deadly for pedestrians"
Angie Schmitt

Ever wonder why cyclists seem to act erratically on streets? I blame incomplete and unclear infrastructure. Currently in most cities cyclists need to make a multitude of choices throughout the journey because infrastructure is ambiguous. NON-AMBIGUOUS cycling infrastructure:



Jennifer Keesmaat

When all you have is a car, everything looks like a drive-through.
Ian R Buck

Yikes, h/t @andrewdefrank:



Ryan Keefe

US automakers “design, build, and sell pointlessly huge SUVs and trucks they know for a fact are much more deadly for pedestrians [while being less useful for their stated purpose], and resist proposals to incorporate pedestrians into their safety rating.”
Greg Shill

This whole killer machismo in truck/SUV design is hugely profitable. The top selling U.S. vehicle, Chevy Silverado, GM makes $17K in profit on every one they sell, I was told. That's compared with like maybe $1,500 profit on a compact car.
Angie Schmitt

We’ve lost an entire category of wagons that were able to haul a lot but had a low front. This is the same car 30 years apart:




David Gouldin

"The front end was always the focal point... we spent a lot of time making sure that when you stand in front of this thing it looks like it's going to come get you. It's got that pissed-off feel."
Pete Bigelow

The auto industry wants you to feel painfully emasculated for driving anything smaller than a house. Then it wants them turn over 40% of your gross earnings or whatever to avoid that.
Angie Schmitt

Suburban sprawl costs 38% more in upfront public costs and 10% more in ongoing costs than compact development, PLUS has only 1/10th the tax revenue per acre, confirms report summarizing 17 studies. Important #citymakingmath via City Lab and Smart Growth USA
Brent Toderian

Chicago’s parking meters raked in $138.7 million in 2019. All told, private investors have earned $1.6 billion. That’s nearly $500 million more than their initial, $1.16 billion investment — with 64 years worth of parking meter revenues to go.
Chicago Sun-Times

I suspect a $1,000 credit for ebikes would have a bigger climate impact than a $10,000 credit for electric vehicles.
Owen Pickford

This is a policy choice. It doesn't have to be this way. 53 foot trucks don't belong in cities. I'll pay 5 cents more for my beer:



Bill Schultheiss

Urbanists are talking more about equity and diversity, which is good.
But, think: how much diversity and equity is there when *entire blocks* are redeveloped at once?
For ‘efficiency’, it’s easier to rent out large spaces to businesses. You don’t get small entrepreneurs there.
Lou Miranda

There is hard data, documented in peer-reviewed studies, that indicate that pedestrians who are hit by a large pickup truck are 300% more likely to die than those hit by a passenger car. Beware any auto industry shills who try to dismiss that as a culture war.
Peter Flax

I hate this country so much. This dumbass city I live in, and the cities around it, force me to drink shakes with paper fucking straws that are unusable but wont do anything to get people out of cars which are our largest polluters. Insane.
@IDoTheThinking

This is more selfish, disrespectful, and disregarding of the law than every cyclist who has not stopped at a stop sign, combined:



@SatiatedBike

The notion that we can keep expanding the private car industry indefinitely, as long as they have batteries, is ridiculous and we should have the clarity to say so.
Jason Hickel

Education, which sometimes relates to COVID

I remember people would ask how my son was doing in school. I would say, “He gets straight As, but he hates it.” Then they would reply with something like, “That’s how boys are at that age. He’ll get used to it.” People just ignore children, even when they spell it out for you.
Mother Bae I @tiersaj

That the boards of regents [governors/trustees] of public universities are packed with bankers, ceos, lawyers, real estate moguls .. and not educators ... is a big part of why our public universities are so fucked.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

There are several problems with “keep politics out of teaching,” but one of the most fundamental is that it allowed racists, reactionaries, and the like to accomplish their goals simply by opening their mouths and politicizing an issue.
Thomas White @thomasbenwhite

“Many high schools confuse ‘challenging work’ w/ ‘amount of work.’ Students are stressed by the volume of tasks, but that isn’t the same thing as being challenged by the work. Repetitious work that isn’t challenging does nothing but make kids hate school.”
Amy Fast, Ed.D. @fastcrayon

Just heard from a teacher friend prepping for the school year: they've been told they can't leave classroom doors open to promote better air circulation, because that would circumvent the school's automatic locking system that's in place for active shooter situations.
Gabriel Debenedetti

My kid's school expects him to be at the computer 8am-3pm, camera on, in uniform, no beds, couches, or "clutter" Yeah, uh, we'll see about that
Jeffemy Jerrress @kranzman

So due to Covid19, UK used AI to artificially assign GCSE grades. Result: 40% of students' grades were reduced based on where they attended school and (surprise!) racialized students are heavily impacted. Private schools are unaffected. So much for "if you only work twice as hard"!
Mohamed Duale

If private schools didn't confer unfair advantage, nobody would pay for them.
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar

New meta-analyses (reviews of multiple studies) confirm that substantive feedback WITHOUT GRADES is preferable for student motivation and achievement. Grades were worse than nothing at all re motivation to learn, w/most damage to struggling and older students
Alfie Kohn

The real choice behind "opening schools debate" was this: who will pay to make schools safe? Corporations and rich feared they would be taxed (the fairest plan). So they got politicians to focus instead on open vs shut schools. This system cannot face real choices.
Richard D. Wolff

7% of the UK population attend private school, yet they account for:
74% of judges
32% of MPs
43% of top journalists
44% of newspaper columnists
38% of the wealthiest in TV, film and music industries
30% of “popstars”
44% of the top earning actors
@O_SoChilled

if we don't send kids back to school during a plague how are they going to learn that society puts no value on their lives
@NoraReed

schools have spent FOREVER attempting to dictate all sorts of behavior, from dress codes to speech to the curriculum (ahem, sex ed?). but suddenly when it's an ACTUAL public health issue, they have 'no control' and they're not even gonna try?
@verysimple

Schools: I'm sorry we have no power over student behavior. We can't make students wear masks.
Schools: Also we're suspending students who take pictures.
Schools: Skirts below the knee, no baggy pants.
Schools: And then let's talk about your hair choices.
Schools: we are the cops
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

Income and wealth inequality and a better way to organization an economy:

The problem is not 2020. The problem is the trifecta of global capitalism, racism and colonialism.
La Profe @lorgia_pena

Always astonished that prosecutors waste time on so-called quality of life crimes when the real disaster, quality of life wise, is that for my entire lifetime they never really prosecuted white collar crime and instead let criminally rich psychopaths accumulate boundless power
Kristen Marttila

I like to think that a critique of these things is a fusion of those 2 issues. Hard to separate the 2” sides of a coin. The practical question of shifting distribution is directly connected w use of interstitial space to carve out alternatives to commodified stratifying economies. Money has us thinking that wealth is intangible; just the trading of records of comparison. But behind that is infrastructure, factories, fields, grasslands, magma, sunlight from crushed hydrogen, physical processes, trophic pyramid, human labor.
BuildSoil by planting one million edible chestnuts

Liberals: no one working 40 hours a week should live in poverty.
Leftists: No one should live in poverty regardless of their ability to perform labor.
@herosnvrdie69

MI is about to pay out $600M to victims of the Flint water crisis, when fixing the pipes would've cost $55M, to say nothing of the lives that wouldn't have been disrupted. Don't ever let people talk to you about fiscal responsibility or empathy when they've displayed none.
@JustAnt84

If you need a refresher on why "crime" is a social construct remember what happens if your boss shorts your check $100 vs if you walk out of the store with $100 from the till.
@TheGr8Aspie

One of the biggest blunders of the Left online is seeing taxation mainly as a punishment for being rich rather than seeing it as the main way of funding the Welfare State, to the point that raising taxes on Households that make $250K is very often treated as a taboo.
@AgiaTheBun

Imagine what we could accomplish with a shared language of oppression and liberation. Considering how pervasive alienation is, and peoples’ inherent desire to want to have a fair say in the decisions that affect their lives, alienation unifies the powerless against the 1%.
Arash Kolahi

If it's good for the economy but not good for people it’s not actually good for the economy.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

The federal minimum wage has gone up 0% in the last 10 years. The national average for rent has gone up 36%.
Public Citizen

They keep telling us resources are scarce when it comes to our basic needs, but somehow never run out of tear gas and other instruments of war.
Arash Kolahi

Our entire economy and society is premised on the idea that inequality works for us.... but it doesn’t. It’s not radical to want to change that.
@SydneyAzari

Give a man a fish and he owes you a fish. Teach a man to fish, and he'll be paying off student loans for the rest of his life.
Sandra Newman

And after all that… the best of the rest:

Police take more money from people through civil forfeiture than the total value of all property stolen in all the burglaries committed nationwide.
Samuel Sinyangwe

A rerun of “Knight Rider” was on the other night and I realized that for a time in the 1980s, William Daniels would have to take a break from giving a subtle, painstaking performance on “St. Elsewhere” to stand in a sound booth and go, “Michael! My tires hurt!”
Tim Carvell

This is a great map to illustrate how much the age of houses varies across the U.S.:



Jason Segedy

Here is your periodic reminder that while Henry David Thoreau was being "self-reliant," his mom was doing his laundry, the Emersons were cooking his meals, his sister bailed him out of jail and his dad kept his job at the family pencil factory waiting for him. #bootstraps
AKA Verity Reynolds @danialexis

I hate it when people say a celebrity had a "secret" illness. That implies strangers have a right to know. It's privacy, not secrecy.
Molly Hodgdon @Manglewood

Herpes is a weird virus. More than 90% of humans have herpes, and we don't usually know it because they are usually dormant. But ~half of all astronauts who spend time in space reactivate and start shedding herpes viruses again because of space stress.
Eric Feigl-Ding

The first symptom of being infected by an ideology is an insistence that longstanding social problems have obvious solutions instead of painful tradeoffs. If such problems actually had obvious solutions, they would have been solved a long time ago.
Bo Winegard @EPoe187

The “humans are selfish” argument for laissez faire capitalism is weird, because if you take that as a given, doesn’t that suggest we need distributive institutions that counterbalance that? The same people often say we can rely on charity instead of a welfare state:



James Medlock

Why is "the chosen one" always a teenager? We're really gonna put the fate of the universe on someone with an undeveloped prefrontal cortex? Give me a story with a chosen one who is a 42 year old mom that has already seen some shit and is totally out of fucks to give
@kathryniveyy

I do interfaith work and I've heard well-meaning Christians use "Judeo-Christian" to be inclusive to Jews. But that's not what does - it lumps us into your practice, your beliefs, your expectations, without consulting us or seeing us. So if this is new to you, now you know.
@mrotzie

I spent 20 minutes with my almost 4-year-old today asking him what kind of cake he wants for his birthday, and this is what we settled on. I am so excited, doing ridiculous things that my parents wouldn't approve of is literally the best part of being a parent:



Eric Holthaus

Ramona Quimby would be age 69 or 70 now? I wonder how her life turned out. Maybe she was a teacher or librarian. Stayed on the west coast, I think, Oregon or northern California. She gardens; she watches MSNBC. Has a sweatshirt of a cat holding a bone, "I found this humerous"
Beth Nguyen

Yay:



Rachel Cohen

If illegal immigrants are such freeloaders, why does ICE always arrest them at work?
@NYinLA2121

Because it takes the sun 250 million years to complete an orbit around the galaxy, dinosaurs lived on the other side of the Milky Way.
Stephanie (Hamilton) Deppe, PhD @SpaceSciSteph

Currently crying because I literally grew the most beautiful peppers ever:



@fIowerfemme

I’d be remiss not to point out I learned today that Census Bureau seems to have really undershot the runway in its temporary hires. Instead of reaching reported 2020 goal of 500,000, they hired 155,000 (by way of comparison they hired 711,000 in 2010).
Carlos Mucha

Did y'all know that a single possum can eat like five thousand ticks in one season? If you didn't it's bc possums stay humble and do the work without demanding recognition
Sarah Gailey @gaileyfrey

if you drive this car you turn into a smiling earthworm with a little tie and a fedora and briefcase and youre on your way to work at the dirt factory and you come home and kiss your earthworm wife and child. actually this sounds pretty good. im into it now:



@Slammy_P

Elon Musk's parents ran an apartheid emerald mine. Gate's dad ran the number 1 law firm in the world and his mom sat on the board at IBM. Zuckerberg's dad gave him $100k to start FB. Rich people beget rich people.
@TheHoustonWade

How do you determine the line where religion oversteps from healthy fiction to cultish mind and body control? And why do we defend their right to do it so hard?
Mary Morse Marti

Credit scores are astrology for landlords
Maddie Connors @personallyrich

The mortgage interest deduction literally makes the same home cheaper for a rich person than for a poor person.
Max Ghenis

Arguably the most INCREDIBLE aspect of humanity is that NOT ONLY can we understand our societal institutions, our place(s) within them and how they are affecting us but, incredibly: We can CHANGE our societal institutions for the better.
Arash Kolahi

Squash the state:



BuildSoil by planting one million edible chestnuts

when white people start saying "genuinely curious here" in a conversation my fight/flight instinct kicks in
@OliveOilCorp

If Dickens gets "Dickensian," chickens should get "chickensian."
Howard Mittelmark

Whew.