Twitter, May 2021

Twitter in May is always so great here at Daughter Number Three, because my round-up is shorter than usual, given the missing week or so of coverage. Ahh... maybe I should miss more weeks. 

It's not as if nothing happened during the month, of course. Republicans are attempting to march us toward fascism, Israel was provoking Palestinians so it could bomb its people, and we ended the month with the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre.

___

Republicans will tell you they just want it to be "Easy to vote, and hard to cheat." What they really mean is "Hard to vote, and easy to accuse you of cheating if you do."
Matthew Chapman @fawfulfan

The white establishment is not learning any meaningful lessons from the Tulsa massacre when they’re simultaneously funding militarized police forces to terrorize Black communities today. Folks have to demand more than pageantry.
Bree Newsome

As we acknowledge the racist massacre of Black people that began in Tulsa 100 years ago today, remember it was a part of a larger history of white racial violence in New York (1863), Wilmington (1898), Atlanta (1906), East St. Louis (1917), Rosewood (1923) and many other cities:


Keith Boykin

The number of conversations I and other black colleagues have had with white people in Tulsa who doubt the massacre happened or that “it was as bad as they’re saying” is disturbing. I suppose it’s good that they’re not even bothering to lie?
jelani cobb

What would be different if we were to see ourselves healing climate change rather than fighting it?
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

Maybe the worst piece of public art I have ever seen:


Adam Kotsko

If critical race theory threatens your Christianity, you may be worshipping whiteness.
Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis

Let's be clear. If 10 Republican Senators cannot even vote for a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6th insurrection, 10 Republican Senators will not vote for anything meaningful to improve the lives of the American people. We must abolish the filibuster and act now.
Bernie Sanders

If there’s anything good in this rewriting of American memory, it’s that the underlying assumption is that racism is shameful. The principle that we’re all created equal haunts white supremacy, especially since the Civil Rights Movement. Can’t be proud of slavery—so erase it.
T.J. Stiles

Perhaps the most central lie of white supremacy/structural whiteness is that white domination of institutions, government and wealth is owed to a natural superiority of the white race (there is no biological white race) and not an organized system of theft and violence.
Bree Newsome

Private Equity firms should not be able to buy single family rentals. Horrible to tenants, no investment in the community and distorts the SFH housing market.
Nate Pentz

Let me know if you've solved the tension between the asphalt lobby, car culture, and impending climate catastrophe. All I can see is hunger for profits, inability to call suburbanization the disaster it is, and tiny tweaks to the status quo. Have a couple bollards, kids.
Mary Morse Marti

EVs are great, but scaling down the automobile industry and reducing private car ownership is better.
Jason Hickel

It’s still mind-blowing that Republicans politicized a pandemic.
Adam Miller @ajm6792

Republicans conjured up a Democratic plot to steal the presidential election out of nothing, out of whole cloth. If they can do that at will now, why wouldn't they do it for every close election from now on? Such conjuring is a pathway to status inside the party. They'll be competing to do it.
David Roberts

It's actually a very new thing to have your hair be exposed outside the house all the time. And while some of y'all are talking about it looking ghetto or whatever? That same look will be coming to a runway near you. You'll like it better on white people I guess...
Mikki Kendall @Karnythia

“While electric vehicles emit no exhaust fumes, they still produce large amounts of tiny pollution particles from brake and tire dust, for which the government already accepts there is no safe limit. Toxic air causes 40,000 early deaths a year in the UK.”
Brent Toderian

22 minutes apart:

American Propagandist @ArmyStrang

we're collectively joking about a year of quarantine ruining our social skills and ability to function in the regular world -- but we just can't understand how people come out of prison after 5 or 10 or 20 years maladapted / how incarceration only continues cycles of harm.
@esmietee

History is everywhere. A Tulsa resident pointed out to me that the bricks in the facade of this building were reclaimed from buildings that burned in 1921:


jelani cobb

To anyone who says that bicycling is dangerous, just remember, if the only things on our roads were bicycles and people walking, we would have virtually zero deaths due to traffic crashes. It's not the bicycles that are dangerous.
Charles Denison IV

The same party that blocked a bipartisan investigation into the insurrection is pushing 400 bills to make it harder to vote inspired by that insurrection. Don’t forget that.
Ari Berman

There is a political party that uses (incorrectly) the word "communism" as a synonym for "totalitarianism" and then *behaves* in totalitarian ways.
Paul Thomas

51 senators can seat a Supreme Court justice but 54 senators can’t establish an independent commission to investigate a violent insurrection in their own damn building.
Steven Mazie

America has over 2 billion parking spaces - 8x more than there are cars. Imagine if we had 8x the # of homes we need in our cities? Parking gobbles up land and space. Reclaiming this land for better uses will be one of the most powerful outcomes of AVs:


Jennifer Keesmaat

The lesson after Sandy Hook was not that gun control was impossible, but that Republicans would never be good faith partners no matter how innocent the victims of violence. The lesson here is that a genuine insurrection aimed at Congress will not move Republicans, so ditch’em.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

The five neurodivergent love languages: infodumping, parallel play, support swapping, Please Crush My Soul Back Into My Body, and "I found this cool rock/button/leaf/etc and thought you would like it"
@neurowonderful

Good move to change the term from "Single-family zoning" to "apartment bans."
William Lindeke

The GOP line that government is inherently totally incompetent and corrupt (e.g., Reagan's "nine most terrifying words") is incredibly self-serving because it is designed to rationalize their own inability to govern to the voters.
Aaron M. Renn

Call me old-fashioned, but I think ending poverty and hunger on Earth is more important than colonizing Mars.
Robert Reich

The funniest thing about this current conservative obsession with critical race theory is how their moves to ban it both popularize it AND cede the premise of critical race theory. They're like the Greek tragedy version of the Streisand Effect right now.
Elie Mystal

The effect of mixed use is hard to understate. People spend ~half their waking day at home, and the other half at work and shops. When you segregate commercial and residential into different areas, an area's infra sits unused half the time. In other words, you need twice as much!
@ScootFoundation

Plant trees in the middle of residential streets:


Andrew Hunniford

"The vaccine manufacturers absorbed billions in public cash and have told their shareholders to expect a rosy future in which they charge $175/dose for annual boosters. Their CEOs took home tens of millions in bonuses based on those promises." - Cory Doctorow
@ratgrrl

Fascinating juxtaposition about how we view and value automobiles and bicycles from WIRED: The $5k Tern Bicycles GSD family bike (while great!) is “preposterously expensive.” The $40k @Ford F150 EV truck? “The most radical thing about [it]? The price.”
Blake Trask

We have all these laws that protect cars (with mandatory insurance) from property damage but no similar safety net for people with health problems.
Angie Schmitt

I can’t say this enough: Murder rose proportionately across all cities, progressive or not. So why no bylines from red cities headlined “this city resisted reforms, but saw its murders rise too. Maybe the status quo doesn’t work?”
John Pfaff

This is what a blade of grass looks like under a microscope. Next time you take a walk outside, know that the grass is happy to see you Smiling face with open mouth:


@DrBethNichols

Modern cars beep at you when you depart from your lane to safely pass a bicyclist. They do not beep at you when you exceed the speed limit. Values of a manifestly evil industry on full display.
@peatonx

The fact that Cruz is on the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee should:
1) Frighten you.
and
2) Absolve you of any lingering imposter syndrome related self-doubts.
Leah McElrath

The point is this: it was never about Trump. He was the perfect vessel for destructive profit and societal anger. That his fate was cultivated by media profiting off his ineptitude and hatred, and all of it was embraced by the Right in a fascist move is what remains. The Trump Years, and this remaining fascist/criminal crisis, are all side-effects of an economic system wired to reward destructive and dangerous behaviors. Trump was a symptom, not the disease, and we can’t forget or ignore the role media played in assisting all of this.
Jared Yates Sexton

Looks dumb, right? This is how we design cities:


Brent Toderian

There’s Just One Problem With Ford’s Electric F-150. Joe Biden says the pickup truck is fast. It's heavy, too. The e-truck is 6,500 pounds. The gasoline powered F-150 weighs between 4,201-5,540 pounds. A Toyota Corolla is 3,150 pounds. So a gas-powered pickup weighs about 1.3-1.7 Corollas & an e-pickup is about 2 Corollas. Either way, it's a lot of Corollas. For all large vehicles, the extra vehicle weight can increase the risk to other drivers and pedestrians during a crash. This is why we have to make our streets safe for everyone, while also electrifying the vehicle fleet.
Costa Samaras

The I.R.S. is more likely to audit poor Americans who use the earned-income tax credit & typically earn less than $20,000 than to audit people earning $400,000. The county in the U.S. with the highest audit rate is Humphreys County, Miss., which is poor & three-quarters Black.
Steven Greenhouse

Unpopular opinion: time spent educating a four year old is just as valuable as the time educating spent a 21 year old. I will never understand the disparity in respect given to educators based on the age they work with.
Leah Shoemaker

The favored measure DOTs use for transportation performance is "travel time savings" or "travel time reliance," but IN NEITHER CASE do we measure travel time. We measure speed of vehicles (without induced demand) and assume higher speeds mean faster time. Ignored in this...
• Nondrivers, who are often blocked or have to go out of their way so that no one on the corridor has to slow down so they can cross
• Those trying to cross the corridor, who can be blocked or have to go out of their way so those on the corridor don't have to slow down
• Those trying to get off the corridor — turning slows "travel time" on the corridor, so those turning might have to take 3 rights or go blocks out of their way to preserve speeds on the corridor
• Actual travel times
Beth Osborne

Love how we’re obsessed with our five year micro-generations but also like “medieval peasants were the same thing for a thousand years.”
Sean Thomason

What not enough people are seeing is where there's anti-Semitism, Islamophobia is often right beside it & vice versa. Our communities have much more in common than what divides us. We share a common foe, white nationalism, that is actively hostile to us both here & in Europe.
Wajahat Ali

I like this:


@Suave_young50

The conflation between Judaism and Israel makes antisemitism worse.
Hannah Lichtsinn, MD @DoctorLix

I always give a little speech early on in my science classes that goes something like “when someone uses “common sense” as a substitute for evidence it means they probably don’t have any.”
Zach Deegan

Opinion: past time to redo the pledge. No need to pledge to a flag. We can pledge to our core values and institutions: equal rights, constitutional democracy, freedom of religion/expression. And it’s time to get rid of the “under god” part. Should’ve never been added in the 1950s.
Samuel Perry @socofthesacred

Being silenced and no longer being the only ones speaking are not the same thing
Kate Manne

Yang's campaign ideas are a perfect blend of things that cannot happen and things that are already happening.
WillyWicki

This is what indigenous land sovereignty looks like in the state of Washington:


@SarahEMyhre

I love how 95% of the solutions for preventing anxiety are "work less and don't be poor" when you really look at it.
Rory - ADHD Autistic OCD @roryreckons

The only thing worse than an electric pickup truck is a gasoline-fueled pickup truck.
William Lindeke

Every time you look at a proposed freeway/highway/roadway/street reconstruction project, ask these questions:
1. Does it reduce car lanes?
2. Does it reduce VMT?
3. Does it *prioritize* non-car transportation?
If the answer isn’t ‘yes’, then it’s just Climate Change Denialism.
Lou Miranda

To understand the Republican Party, you must understand
Projection
Gaslighting
Paul Thomas

Thinking about reducing car usage (VMT) in cities, including suburbs, for Climate Change. Residents worry about congestion. But where? Near highway on ramps and off ramps. We’ll never reduce VMT unless we get rid of freeways in cities. Put transit there.
Lou Miranda

Maybe I live in a fairytale world but when they said they were switching to EVs I imagined little sedans and not...tanks
Anu Wille @biker_anu

Ever wonder why our healthcare system is so expensive and ineffective relative to the rest of the world? Because MBAs — not MDs — are calling the shots.
@ShahidForChange

"Critical Race Theory" is today's version of "secular humanism" from my childhood. And this statement may not fully make sense to you unless you grew up in a household where the lyrics of  John Lennon's "Imagine" were seen as one of the most important tools of Satan on Earth.
Andrea Pitzer

I’m sad that time and time again, we’re told that there is no room for protected intersections, but we can find all the room in the world for nice wide turns for people driving floating living rooms with six empty passenger seats:


@DaveLikesBikes

motion to reframe billionaires as "parasites"
Dr. Genevieve Guenther

I am so ready for a president who gets as thrilled about riding an electric city bus as he does about driving an electric truck.
Amity Foster

If capitalism didn’t require poverty, it would have already eradicated it.
Robin4mpls

Malcolm X would have been 96 years old today. One quote by him that often doesn't get talked about as much that I think about often is: ”If you have no critics you'll likely have no success.” Receive that.
Ernest Owens

My understanding is that the dominant Republican theory of democracy is “Republicans are entitled to govern even if voters prefer Democrats”
Scott Lemieux

Asking Republicans to investigate 1/6 is like asking Al-Qaeda to investigate 9/11. The people who helped plan/promote the attack aren’t going to be partners in the investigation.
Kurt Bardella

I love trains. But I might hate railroads.
@bcmartinson

The Senate may be split 50-50, but the Democratic half represents 41,549,808 more people than the Republican half.
Rep. Steven Woodrow

I always pick up after my dogs. I've had multiple people stop me to lecture me about picking up after them. They weren't even pooping at the time. Parking in the crosswalk should be more socially unacceptable than not picking up after your dog:


@Ollie_Cycles

Kids: Literally maimed and killed by drivers on our streets.
Your city traffic “safety” engineer: “Yes, but drivers save up to 16 seconds a day speeding through that intersection, so, it’s a fair trade-off.
This has to change.
Matthew Lewis @mateosfo

it will never stop being fucked up that a failed game show host got to install a third of the united states supreme court
@goldengateblond

It is wild that economists and policy makers are directly or indirectly say they think you can fire half the people in the restaurant sector for a year and should he able to easily hire them all back in like 3 weeks.
Jon Walker

E-bikes are only cheating if you view cycling through the prism of being only for exercise. It's a harmful viewpoint that reinforces auto-supremacy.
Alex Phillips-White

A picture is worth a thousand words..in this case two pictures.  Same location taken 100 years apart:


@AmberD1116

Parking, the biggest killer of retail business...pretty much no exceptions...
Steven Burgess

OAN is literally a Russian propaganda outlet masquerading as American media & Trump is proclaiming it the only reliable source of information. He is a traitor.
@malinablue

Even if someone were actually using children as “human shields” the only non-psychopathic thing to do would be to not fucking shoot them.
Ben Ehrenreich

Imagine if we charged a car driver $2.50 every time they start their car. And another $2.50 for each passenger. And then we charged them another $2.50 if they make a single stop and want to drive again that day. That’s what it’s like to ride transit in the Bay Area.
Patrick Traughber

Reminder: e-bikes are throttled, by law, to 32kmh. For safety:


Martyn Schmoll

“Safety is a shared responsibility”
@mplsalex

Apartheid states aren’t democracies.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

“The 85th Percentile Method is perhaps unique in American law in empowering lawbreakers to rewrite the law to legalize their conduct. Given that speed is a leading factor for deadly crashes, this arbitrary and capricious method has serious real-world consequences.”
Don Kostelec

All new fossil fuel developments are incompatible with a habitable planet. Investing in fossil fuels is madness.
Extinction Rebellion

Think of a virus where 70% of kids are totally asymptomatic, less than 1% have severe symptoms, and less than 0.05% die. Phew that's no big deal for kids then! Don't worry about them! Oops actually it's polio in the 1950s
@Samanticka

Someone on tv just said, “when we want to incentivize rich people we give them money but when we want to incentivize poor people we take away money,” and holy fuck that’s so true.
feminist next door @emrazz

"We now know that children who grow up in homes with gas stoves are 42% more likely to develop asthma symptoms. And it’s especially dangerous for kids whose families live in smaller spaces, like apartments, that have less ventilation." —Dr. Lisa Patel
Mary Anne Hitt

You'll hear a lot of explanations as to why we can't build narrow streets like this anymore, but they're all really just excuses for prioritizing places for automobiles, not people. (Waverly St in Center City Philadelphia):


Daniel Trubman

Obviously we are way way way past “family values” but it is worth remembering what a vicious cudgel that was used as and it was all a con.
Chris Hayes

Children love books about boarding schools because they love the idea of living with their friends in a single building where magical things happen. A school is just a plot device to create what many humans (young and old) crave: a walkable, close-knit community.
@Iconawrites

Car brain is so real that I'm telling myself that $1,900 sounds too expensive for a bicycle, meanwhile I'm over here making $500 monthly overpayments to pay off the car I only use 2X a day to commute to work and back.
David Gifford

nodding in quiet horror as a patient explains she's inconsistent with her daily meds because one went from $41/mo to $450/mo, thus precipitating a hospital visit that will cost six to seven figures
@haircut_hippie

Pittsburgh has lost population, expanded freeway capacity by 8% and seen congestion increase 90%. Quite a record, Pennsylvania DOT and Governor Tom Wolf.
Beth Osborne

Talk to me about what Hamas is doing when we start funding them, arming them and bragging about our special relationship with them.
Katie Halper

If all the Tyrannosaurus rex that ever lived were resurrected, there'd be about one Tyrannosaurus rex for every three people
UberFacts

 "In a new study ... Lise Eliot, a professor of neuroscience at Rosalind Franklin University, analyzed 30 years’ worth of brain research (mostly fMRIs and postmortem studies) and found **no** meaningful cognitive differences between men and women."
Claudia Sahm

Next time someone argues "where will the water come from", show them this:

@rgbkrk

The way some Republicans talk about the January 6 insurrection you'd think it happened in 1921 and we only have grainy photographs to give us vague indications of what happened
Seth Abramson

“are you getting vaccinated?”
“nah. the odds of me getting covid are like a thousand to one”
“what if, in return for getting vaxxed, i enrolled you in a lottery with odds of a million to one?”
“sign me up”
Allahpundit

It's like innumeracy jujitsu
Scott Shaffer

It's wild that a huge chunk of the jobs discourse right now,  from wages to working from home to wanting customers no to harass workers, is "workers got their expectations raised, and that's a problem."
@mattdpearce

The point is that I don’t hate men for being men I hate misogynists for being misogynists and it just so happens that there is quite a bit of overlap.
feminist next door @emrazz

“Nobody wants to work” is just “nobody wants to date a nice guy” for business. If NOBODY wants to work for you, you’re the problem.
@mckenzee

You rarely hear that men have poise.
Chris Steller

This planet, the one we're ripping asunder with our emissions, so many brutal and exploitative choices? There's nothing like a good tangible repair of an item in my care to make me believe in my own physical body that we--all of us, together--can weave our world whole again.
@happifydesign

BREAKING: During the pandemic, more than half of the country’s 100 largest low-wage employers bent their own rules to give CEOs 29% avg raises while their frontline employees made 2% less.
Inequality.org

Every time food is iffy from a food safety perspective, I just eat it. So far this has never failed me
Angie Schmitt

In America if you make enough money you can continue to have teeth.
@benigma2017

So the dairy industry wants to ban vegan products from using terms like milk, yogurt and cheese. Why don't we compromise? Vegans agree to stop using terms like  'plant-based milk', if the dairy industry stops using pictures of happy animals in its marketing.
Rutger Bregman

Happy Minnesota Statehood Day. Smoke 'em if you got 'em:


Vic Thorstenson

If Palestinians do nothing, they are killed, their houses demolished or taken, and the world looks away. Refuses to see, refuses to care. If they fight back, by rock or rocket then "there are two sides" to the conflict and Israel is acting in self-defence, in the past and future. There is literally no permissible way to resist colonisation in the eyes of colonisers.
Omar Sakr

“A new cost-benefit study in New Zealand finds that investments in cycling & walking facilities outweigh the costs of building them by 10 to 1. The research found that the most important economic benefits were health gains from use of active transport.”
Brent Toderian

Sarcasm and snark are, in the end, very corrosive ways of interacting with the world. There’s a place for sincerity and open-heartedness
Johann Hari

Beauty-protected bike lane:


Bartek Komorowski @CyclistBartek

I have come to see the realtor as the vanguard of the reactionary everywhere I have loved, selling yesterday to tomorrow for their 7pcs cut, as often as possible.
Graham Sinclair @esgarchitect

Capitalism takes community away from you & then tries to convince you that because as an individual, you can’t complete communal tasks, there’s something wrong with you. There’s no amount of self care that can replace our need for community care.
@conamorgloria

I just came up with the phrase "the hangover from the anthropocene" and I think I'm gonna be using that a lot
Charlie Jane Anders

Did you see this? Over 100 parody car advert posters were installed on billboards and bus stops without permission by a guerilla activist group in England & Wales. A lot of the messages will probably look really familiar:


Brent Toderian

Feeling scattered & unsure
We take the step
And find others
Looking for chestnuts
We find, take, and plant them
In the places where we live.
And years later, under old trees,
Look back at how much we did.
we need to move now; raising chestnuts, not consciousness. we are in a position to make the world that much better.
BUILD SOIL; Plant Chestnuts!

Someone who’s got more than $50 million in the bank can afford to pay two cents on their 50-millionth-and-first dollar, and every dollar after that—plus a few more pennies if they become a billionaire. It is time for a #WealthTax in America.
Elizabeth Warren

The moon photographed over 28 days at the same place and at the same time:


@FeelGoodPage11

So much misogyny. So much ableism. So much old power.
@jlms_qkw

I think about this every time a student does something that upsets or offends me. I try my best (hopefully successfully) to remember my power position and not “hit back” so to speak, remembering that not all harm is intentional and creating more harm doesn’t help.
Dr. Sami Schalk

Pfizer, Biontech, Novavax, Moderna shares plunge to session lows after U.S. backs waiving patent protections on Covid vaccines
CNBC Now

I know it's obvious but it needs to be explicitly said: The stock market dropped in response to a decision that will demonstrably save lives
Jerry Iannelli

Cars eat cities.
Brent Toderian

New study: "biomass and wood are the leading sources of stationary source air pollution health impacts in 24 states, and the total health impacts of natural gas surpass that of coal in 19 states and the District of Columbia."
David Roberts

When we let a species go extinct we must not continue to use it as a metaphor; we lose that right. Its name is sacred. We tell its story but it doesn’t get to be used to illustrate some other point.
BUILD SOIL; Plant Chestnuts!

You can't be a billionaire and serious about tackling the climate crisis. Not only because of your own consumption but because of - much more importantly - the way you amass wealth and continue to hoard it. Extracting wealth is another form of deadly extractivism.
Sam Knights

In 1855, white clergy in the United Stares owned a total of 760,537 slaves whose total market value amounted to $246 million. Adjusted for inflation it is the equivalent of $8 billion today.
Kevin W Cosby

What if we saw repairing the ecology of this planet as the next great adventure?
BUILD SOIL; Plant Chestnuts!

A tenet of the Republican party is that white people, while they might possibly commit crimes sometimes, are never criminals. Some *other* people are criminals by default, without regard to their actions.
nothings monstered

There is a nontrivial segment of the electorate that thinks “affordable housing” means cheap SFHs in desirable neighborhoods and I don’t know, man. That isn’t possible. Full stop.
Adam Miller @ajm6792

Conservatives made a whole thing of emphasizing that his name is “Barack Police cars revolving light HUSSEIN Police cars revolving light Obama,” but now folks have no concept of this notion that “ethnic-sounding” names can impact one’s social or political advancement here. Because after all, America isn’t racist.
Bree Newsome