Saturday, July 31, 2021

Twitter July 2021

Let's see, July 2021 was a month of drought, extreme heat (first in the Pacific Northwest and now here, too), with bad air quality because of forest fires. Meanwhile, there was flooding elsewhere. Covid is resurgent with the Delta variant, and in the U.S. that's because too many people are refusing vaccination. A couple of billionaires took off for space. Oh, and the Gulf of Mexico was on fire early in the month because of a pipeline rupture, remember that? Plus there's always the ongoing rise of the white supremacist Right and its attempt to control elections and pretend this isn't a pluralistic society.

The tweets are in reverse chronological order, as usual these days, and are not set up in a block quote because it just makes the whole thing longer and harder to read. So this is your notice that the rest of the post is one long quote.

___

A lot of people still express skepticism about whether Russia’s 2016 disinformation campaign could have actually changed voter behavior, and I would just like you to look at our pathetically low vaccination rate if you still don’t think disinformation can affect behavior.
Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D @RVAwonk

Increasingly convinced the core math class everyone takes in 8th or 9th grade needs to be probability and statistics rather than algebra I.
Julian Sanchez @normative

Less than .08% of vaccinated Americans have tested positive for COVID. Vaccines work.
Kaivan Shroff

Review of research on grades, with special emphasis on university science classes: "At best, grading motivates high-achieving students to continue getting high grades — regardless of whether that goal happens to overlap with learning." And "at worst"? Don't ask...
Alfie Kohn

Quite a powerful picture. By Marta Frej:


Daniel Moser

Seeing a lot of asking the medical and scientific communities to reflect on how they caused a collapse in trust in them and very little reflection on how legalizing a massive industry of quack medicine supplements and multi-level marketing health scams caused a collapse in trust.
Michael Tae Sweeney

Fun Fact: We’ve received less rainfall [in the Twin Cities] than Death Valley for July.
Sven Sundgaard

Reagan: yes, I am still mad.  He destroyed unions, and in doing so destroyed the middle class. The root word in his "trickle down" economics is trick. It turned millionaires into billionaires, and the working class into the working poor.
Deacon Blues

MEDIA ON HILLARY CLINTON: She lost. Why won’t she go away forever?
MEDIA ON DONALD TRUMP: Despite inciting a violent white supremacist insurrection at the US Capitol, here’s what he got right.
Ethan Grey

On average, a UK car emits 1.7 tons of carbon dioxide each year.
On average, a US car emits 4.6 tons of carbon dioxide each year.
Akshat Rathi

Someday I will love something as much as people love crowding themselves into a floating gas-station restroom during a pandemic
andi zeisler (responding to news of a covid outbreak on a cruise ship)

"To think of climate change as something that we are doing, instead of something we are being prevented from undoing, perpetuates the very ideology of the fossil-fuel economy we’re trying to transform." –Genevieve Guenther @DoctorVive
Dr. Aaron Thierry

You’re telling me I have to buckle my seatbelt even though I have airbags!!! Either the airbags work or the seatbelt works but it can’t be both!!!
Chris Hayes

The seatbelt analogy is only half the story, the vaccine refusers are arguing they have the right to drive drunk, because  the rest of us can wear seat belts
Dean Baker

"I Invented First-Person Clickbait Headlines. Here Are Some Cruel Punishments I Deserve"
Alfie Kohn

Just realized that uninsured people have very lowest vax rate of any adult demographic, per Kaiser Health News. Lines up with other reporting suggesting U.S. healthcare system is hampering vax efforts: ~1/3 unvaccinated cite "fear of cost" as reason, and many don't believe it's free
Natalie Shure

So many people throughout the history of the world, including many of our heroes, dealt with mental health issues. And they treated them by abusing drugs & alcohol & having other unhealthy coping mechanisms. Mental Health is NOT a new phenomenon. Taking care of yourself is.
Hari Kondabolu

What employers really want. 1970s ad for a temping service:


Joseph N. Cohen

i cannot overstate how much of the divide between perception of cops comes down to people who have interacted with them and found them wholly incompetent or  unwilling to do their very well paid job vs people who haven’t and just project their favorite tv characters onto them
@rkmpls

Our addiction to the urban car is the ultimate form of societal decadence. It reflects our complete inability to think about collective good. We know it’s bad for the environment and grossly inefficient, but it’s just so damn comfortable & convenient for “ME.”
Shabazz Stuart

A reminder that the 60 Vote Senate (that anything and everything takes 60 votes) is a 2010s abuse of a 1975 modification of a 1970 procedural reform of a 1949 rewrite of a 1917 rule of 1880s reforms of a 1841 abuse of an 1806 glitch. Medicare Part D passed the senate in 2003 with *54* votes on final passage
Reconstructionist @un_a_valeable

Begging people to look at a map and put this dumb "across the river" shit to bed:


@ban_SUVs

"Why don't we have better predictions of how climate change impacts extreme events"? Lots of reasons (it's hard). But one big reason is that no one is paying for it. To me it seems funding for climate modeling is paltry compared to other big American research endeavors.
Cristi Proistosescu

The combined emissions of 3.5 average Americans kill one other person with global heating. You would need to combine the emissions of 146.2 Nigerians for the same result. Tell me again that Americans don't need to stop flying for pleasure.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @DoctorVive

Jesus, is there some sort of pundit bat-signal for defending bad takes? Trump is a halfway decent con artist. That's it. If he wasn't born into ridiculous wealth he would have ended up bleeding out in a ditch after the wrong person caught on to his grift.
@Kaesmis

The way some white people are going on about Simone Biles you’d think they bought her at an auction or something. She don’t know you and never will.
@Steph_I_Will

I'm not sure people realize that if you proposed policies that gave mayors the degree of control over police that the president wields over the military it would sound like some crazy left wing wacko scheme
Jake Anbinder

The Porticoes of Bologna, Italy, just inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List! Bravo!


@UNESCO

The "same road, same rules" shit needs to stop. It's absurd to suggest that someone on a 20lb pedal bike should be shackled with the same exact laws that apply to multiton street-legal anti-personnel carrier and dragsters capable of going from zero to the inside of a daycare in 4 seconds.
@CarHelmets

The reason the US *appears* to be split evenly between normal people and cultists is that the cultists have their power amplified by numerous features of the US electoral system. Hyper-polarization is, in many ways, an artifact of that tilted playing field.
David Roberts

fun fact: more people ride the new york city subway every day than live in the entire state of arkansas
sam deutsch

“Pretty sure my clowns are about to lay eggs” is an absolutely terrifying sentence coming from anyone other than my coworker with a saltwater home aquarium.
@mockingnerd

Think about how many politicians in the last 50 years have promised to “stop crime” and how few have promised to stop poverty. These two facts are deeply related.
Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec

The actual work-horse of American contractors and tradesmen is something closer to a Ford Transit Connect, i.e. a tall van. Enclosed storage area, infinitely customizable, 24 mpg for city driving as opposed to a Ford F-150 Supercab truck’s paltry 16 mpg. Even farmers don’t, for the most part, drive modern pick-ups, because they’re basically useless for most farm work. Too tall, too heavy. The used trade for ’90s models among agricultural workers is huge, because that was the last time trucks were made they could practically use.
Post-Culture Review

“A study suggests that honouring the global climate target would, in fact, increase net jobs by about 8 million by 2050.”
David Wallace-Wells

The world's been playing this game for decades now — grander and grander targets for carbon reduction without the concrete, present-day policies needed to phase out fossil fuels. But time's up; the contradiction is collapsing; the choice must be made.
David Roberts

One of these days, I’m gonna write a piece about why the “Land Back = ethnostate” discourse is blatantly wrong
Deondre A. Smiles, Ph.D.

“Land Back” neither implies nor requires a state of violent apartheid, nor mass expulsion; the inference of either is likely a lack of settler imagination thanks to centuries of racist programming. There are many ways of administering and inhabiting land beyond the colonial model.
Rob Taylor-Case

Seeing this society pit parents and nonparents against each other as they scramble for scraps is so infuriating. What looks like ‘preferential treatment’ to you quite simply is not. Get mad about handouts to Amazon, not a lousy few hundred bucks.
s. e. smith

Everyone wants a Native scholar for land acknowledgements. Not enough folx want a Native scholar who advocates for Land Back.
Autumn Asher BlackDeer, MSW

Good morning Shell, a variation of the trolley problem for you today. You can divert a runaway trolley and save the planet and all life on it, or you could continue focusing on fossil fuels, do some green washing and make a profit in the short term:


Ethics in Bricks

Crazy that Frito-Lay workers had to go on strike nearly 3 weeks just to win the right not to have to work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. Now they can "only" be forced to work 12 hours a day 6 days a week. Going from 84 hrs a week to 72 hrs sounds like a 19th century labor victory.
Steven Greenhouse

Be the awkward weirdo you want to see in the world.
Cora Harrington @lingerie_addict

you aren't ignorant about agriculture because you're a city slicker, you're ignorant about agriculture because rich people evicted everyone else from farmland 60+ years ago and have been lying to you about how farms work ever since
Dr Sarah Taber

I’ve been doing a lot of threads about clothing lately, so I just really want to emphasize that it’s genuinely okay if you didn’t know any of this stuff before. It’s deliberately been made opaque and hidden so we don’t have to think about it.
Cora Harrington @lingerie_addict

I dream of the day I come upon a sign that says “Car Lane Ends” and the bike lane continues.
Robb Dooling

The #1 source of carbon pollution in the US is transportation because we’re moving 200lbs humans with 5,000lbs cars
Wayne Ting

Once you start noticing the blight on our world that is road traffic, you can't escape its oppressive presence. There is no getting away from it.
Sarah @Henryz_mom

Every single time I go for a walk, ride my bike, or hop on transit, I'm thinking about this. The waste of space, the ever-present danger, the noise and air pollution.
anti-car crusader @cinemachagrin

I’m proud to have no genetic link to royalty. Nor do I want any. Kings and queens by definition are a terrible thing. Note: I dated a prince once and it was awful.
Nnedi Okorafor, PhD

We live in a country where calling someone a liar is considered ruder than lying; where calling out a racist is worse than being a racist; where corruption, greed, endangering lives, lying, cheating are all fine, as long as it's done by a white man with the right kind of accent.
Joanne Harris @Joannechocolat

“In private calls with voting rights groups and civil rights leaders, White House officials and close allies of the president have expressed confidence that it is possible to ‘out-organize voter suppression’”
Liz Goodwin


April Glick Pulito

To people who say “you can’t say anything anymore”: They just started letting some of us talk like 5 years ago, so maybe you can shut up for a few decades.
Hari Kondabolu

Why do we describe animal wheelchairs as freeing the animal to be able to run around and human  wheelchairs as confining and limiting their users?
@InAutistic

If the person who paid Brett Kavanaugh’s $92K country club fees is traveling west at 50 MPH, and the person who paid his $200K credit card debt is traveling east at 45 mph, how soon before the FBI does a real investigation to find out who paid his $1.2 million mortgage?
The Volatile Mermaid @OhNoSheTwitnt

I could go on for a very long time. But I will briefly say I have a theory. lol big surprise. If you are familiar with sudden repulsion syndrome? I think there is a racialized version of that. Black women crying triggers disgust in almost every group, to different degrees. Our emotions can only trigger social contempt/disgust, which many believe are the antithesis of the feelings necessary to see a person as human. Don’t listen to these people about crying at your job.
Tressie McMillan Cottom

Uh oh zucchini time again:


Dan Marshall

White supremacy is a war of attrition and always has been. White supremacists are 100% ok with their own people dying — as long as someone else dies faster. I don't know what about this isn't clicking for people.
Dr Sarah Taber

Isn’t it something that Republicans for generations have used “personal responsibility” and “its their fault” for shaming poor Black people but when it comes to Trump voters not getting vaccinated and putting society at risk it's “we need to understand their valid concerns.”
Marcus H. Johnson

Selfish assholes equate 'respect' with 'not paying social consequence for behaving like a selfish asshole.' When they think their behavior will carry social consequence, they threaten worse behavior. This is to frame the worse behavior as someone else's fault.... A selfish asshole isn't your project, and he isn't your fault. His beliefs don't need to change; just his actions. Selfish assholes are making life difficult for all of the rest of us. Let's make a society where being a selfish asshole is difficult. I propose thinking of our current configuration as an *environmental* problem. If we’re optimized for selfish assholes, we get things selfish assholes want. So: we have an environment of fear and confusion [and] an environment that harms the vulnerable.... Selfish assholes *love* when the answer is “convince them” ... because they know it's ineffective. Selfish assholes *hate* clear boundaries and enforced consequences, because they are effective. And that’s why I advocate boundaries and consequences.
A.R. Moxon @JuliusGoat

Every time I see a public space used for a protest in a dictatorship, I think “Good thing the dictator wasn’t smart enough to convert that space into a parking lot.” It’s very hard to meaningfully petition the government without functioning public space.
Rik Adamski

i hate this capitalist “i don’t owe you anything” culture. nah, you do owe people kindness and respect and assistance. refusing to help when you have the ability to is immoral and ignoring your community’s needs makes you a bad person. societies thrive only when ppl work together
lucy gray baird @raccorns

Did you know that in the United States, air pollution from sugar and sweetener production (sugarcane, sugar beet, and corn) causes more deaths than from all fruit, nut and seed, vegetable, and bean and pea production combined?


Jason Hill @jdhill

Magic messaging words only matter if you have the power to get them in front of people. Republicans have a main line directly into the brainstem of every conservative. Dems just toss their words out to mainstream media reporters and hope for the best. (Yes I've written this tweet 10000 times.)
David Roberts

remember when we thought people might be kicked out of congress, or at least sanctioned, for supporting the insurrection? oh, we were such sweet summer children.
Tom Tomorrow

Hide and Seek Level: Genius:


Paul Bronks @slender_sherbet

*whispers* People really seem to think that all clothes would be even cheaper without capitalism as though clothing wasn’t one of the the most valuable and expensive parts of an average person’s belongings prior to capitalism.
Cora Harrington @lingerie_addict

The US is a strange place where riding a bike or transit is an act of privilege but buying a $20k-$40k vehicle averaging now 6 years of debt is a working class thing. Really shows the power of the fossil fuel and car industry here.
Darrell Owens @IDoTheThinking

American governance be like: The free market has decreed that every adult citizen must purchase and maintain incredibly expensive and deprecating assets, in perpetuity. Also it might kill you. No you can't have healthcare.
@EMF_EMF_EMF

There's just enough time to save all that can be saved. But we have to start for real.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

My homelands are burning. In smoke so thick it’s hard to see, Enbridge builds a new tar sands pipeline thru dry riverbeds and sucks out what water is left. When do we wake the fuck up? Will we yell ‘economy’ at a wall of fire? At a dead lake? #StopLine3


tara houska @zhaabowekwe

Traffic! Is there anything it can't mess up? Highly invasive ragweed disperses along roads the faster and the more intensive the traffic gets. Most likely this holds true for many weeds growing near roads.
Wrath Of Gnon

It’s not density of people that’s the problem. It’s density of cars.
Brent Toderian

Our entirely unscientific comparison shows these 3 popular SUVs are about 90% of the length, 80% of the width and 70% of the height and footprint of a common mid-war, mid-range, WW2 tank.
Andy Arthur @cocteautriplets

The pandemic and the rise of fascism are horrific. But when you start to let in the reality — and especially the acceleration — of the climate crisis? It’s hard to focus on much else. (And, of course, those three things are all interrelated.)
Leah McElrath

Could you imagine if cars had to go through 2-year community reviews, impact studies, affordability requirements before they were sold out onto the street? The problem is we regulate housing the way we should regulate cars and regulate cars the way we should housing.
Darrell Owens @IDoTheThinking

One of the greatest achievements of the car industry is convincing business owners that parking spaces lead to more revenue. By @urbisaustralia:


Lior Steinberg

if your only solution to tackle climate change or the housing crisis is to wait for a communist revolution, then you simply don't care about addressing those issues and making meaningful changes to improve people's lives, you're just LARPing
sam deutsch @samdman95

The Earth's wealthiest person, worth over $200 billion, thanked his customers and the employees of his company — where the median wage in 2020 was $29,007 a year — for paying for his trip to space.
NPR

The notion that privatizing everything is a good idea or a goal we should aim for is simply an elitist ideology that isn’t supported by evidence. If privatization solved problems we’d be moving away from disaster instead of hurtling toward extinction right now.
@BreeNewsome

We just found out that "sharrows" is short for "shitty arrows." We are as shocked as you must be.
Bicycle Lobby

We need to talk space-efficiency in transport. Why is it that while technological advancement in other sectors goes to micro, for cars it’s gone macro? We’ve only got a finite space to work with in cities! Why are we using that space for bigger metal boxes?


Charlie Hicks

To me, [the increasing size and power of SUVs and trucks] seems like a failing of the legal system. To a large extent, car makers respond to consumer demand. Imagine how much demand there would be for slower, safer cars if DAs aggressively prosecuted drivers who's aggressive and unsafe driving led to injury or death.
MadMadMadMadRN

Capitalism is unsuited to solving the climate crisis because a principal vector for being profitable is offloading costs onto someone else. Thus, capitalist systems have no incentive to solve the problem of climate change; they just turn the results into an externality.
Jesse Heinig

“2101 — the year most political discussion seems to feel is too distant to concern ourselves with, when climate models end and policy discussions fear to tread — is now closer in time than the making of Bambi.”
David Wallace-Wells

CONSERVATIVES: Why isn't there a white history month?
SCHOOLS: Ok.
*Kids learn about slavery and genocide*
CONSERVATIVES: Wait. Stop.
Jesse McLaren

An incredible graphic from the Washington Post. Our country is almost literally off the chart:


Alec MacGillis

The oldest flute, carved from a bear femur, is 43,000 years old. The oldest reports of trousers are 14,000 years old. Our need for sick tunes predates our need for wearing pants.
Robert Komaniecki

Right wing definition of freedom: You can't tell me what to do. I can tell you what to do.
Aaron Klemz

Can you even imagine how bad smug white dudes with no sense or humor are at sex!?
Molly Priesmeyer @mollypeonies

A lot of the media and a lot of the political system interprets being “tough on crime” as an antonym for being concerned about racism, which tells us a lot about what the media and political system thinks causes crime, but less about who is sincerely concerned with the problem
Will Stancil

Some in the press suggest those of us who want a serious, responsible dialogue about crime (rather than a sensational fear-mongered panic about it) are “not taking crime seriously.” It’s nonsense – a petulant demand that we embrace a cynical politics and irresponsible journalism.
David Menschel @davidminpdx

I quit my teaching job and now make more bartending for 15 less hours week.  Also I get blamed for way way less and get told thank you way way more. No lesson plans or grading papers. Remember this when people ask about the teacher shortage.
Abby Norman @abbynormansays

They say headlines should be concise, so I fixed this one:


Aaron Klemz

Scientists:
1970s: We’re seeing concerning patterns.
1980s: Yep, definitely worrisome.
1990s: Seriously folks, this could get bad.
2000s: Do we need to explain this another way? We’re very alarmed.
2010s: *marching in the streets in lab coats*
2020s: Media: Science failed to predict flood and heat intensity
Holly Witteman, PhD

Twitter is cool because it’s like hey here’s a dumb joke, here’s a profound truth, here’s a soul-crushing injustice, here’s a cool hat, fuck you that hat’s not cool, here’s a fuckin lunatic, here’s your buddy
Ristolable

You know what would be “tough on crime”?
• funded schools
• guaranteed access to healthy food
• high-quality affordable housing
• universal health and child care
• care instead of incarceration for people with substance use disorder and severe mental illness
Hannah Lichtsinn, MD @DoctorLix

There seems to be a gap in understanding where people believe wealth inequality results from us not doing capitalism correctly as opposed to reality — that capitalism is organized around racism. Black people are the perpetual extractive capital on which the economy is built. The economic system and white wealth exists because of the perpetual extractive relationship between the white owner class and the perpetual slave class of Black people. Racism and capitalism go hand in hand. We can’t resolve racism without dismantling capitalism and vice versa.
@BreeNewsome

Maybe a hot take, but we shouldn’t be spending millions to rebuild highways threatened by climate change.
Joshua Davis

Life imitating art warning about death. #ClimateCrisis:


Brent Toderian

The only rational course of action at this point is to immediately begin the work of shutting down the fossil fuel industry, rationing fossil fuels with a decreasing cap, and putting all available resources into greenhouse gas-emissions-free energy, food, and infrastructure system transitions.
Peter Kalmus @ClimateHuman

Engineers who install center guardrails on highways but won't allow bollards along sidewalks are grossly negligent in their duties and should lose their license to practice.
Charles Marohn

The disabled community has watched for 18 months as arguments minimizing the danger of COVID because it “only” affects people like us have been mainstreamed. Passive eugenics isn’t just a right-wing phenomenon. Many people don’t care if we die.
Leah McElrath

When reporters (rarely) cover rampant domestic and sexual violence by cops, they don't call it a "wave" or an "epidemic" or give readers context about how often police domestic/sexual violence happens in every city. Same reporters, but different language for crimes by the poor.
Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec

"49% of the fossil-fuel-burning energy infrastructure now in operation was installed after 2004."
William Lindeke (quote an Ezra Klein column in the New York Times)

The 21st century is going to be defined by pandemics, extreme weather events and the wider fallout from climate change. Whatever else society is learning that right-wing libertarianism is utterly the wrong philosophy to handle  these challenges. Its every impulse is misconceived
Will Hutton

A Republican Senate will never confirm another Democratic president's Supreme Court pick or any court pick. And the only person alive who doesn't know that is Stephen Breyer.
LOLGOP

Truck Guys in the Suburbs: Minneapolis is a hellhole of crime and violence!!!
Also Truck Guys in the Suburbs: Here’s my large stick family of automatic weapon decals:


Brendan Kennealy @ExtraPaleMale

Every time someone says I shouldn't complain about some aspect of society because things are SO MUCH BETTER than they were 50 years ago, I think about how lucky we are that people 50 years ago ignored the same advice.
Katie Mack @AstroKatie

3,683 gun deaths a year in Texas: let's make it easier to carry guns
16 cases of false addresses on registration forms out of 11 million votes in 2020: let's make it harder to vote
Ari Berman

A full-time, minimum-wage worker can’t afford a modest one-bedroom apartment in 93% of U.S. counties, a new report found. Nowhere in the U.S. can a person working a 40-hour week at the federal, state or local minimum wage afford a modest 2-bedroom rental. To afford a modest one-bedroom place, workers in the U.S. would have to earn $20.40 an hour. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, and the average renter earns only $18.78. The typical minimum-wage worker would have to work 79 hours a week to afford a one-bedroom apartment.
Steven Greenhouse

Part of the reason the US is struggle with vaccination has to be the fact that we don't have universal healthcare and millions of Americans are disconnected from the healthcare system and have experienced bad treatment.
Angie Schmitt

Money does not 'store value', because value resides in people and ecological systems. Money might mediate access to that value, but can never hold it
Brett Scott @Suitpossum

General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, thought Trump might attempt a coup after the election. He and other military brass were prepared to stop it. He explicitly and repeatedly compared Trump to Hitler, and MAGA activists to brownshirts.
Noah Smith @Noahpinion

What a chart:


Marcel Dirsus

Starting in the 1950s, we transformed the entire country in a couple decades to a car-centric sprawl. But according to most everyone, we can't change the built environment. And therefore, we will keep transforming it for the worse.
Beth Osborne

Notice how we are labeled as “divisive” for demanding equal citizenship but white society is not “divisive” for trying to overthrow our right to vote
@BreeNewsome

If the oil majors were compatible with the survival of life on Earth, they would have transitioned to renewables by now. In reality, none of them even have a plan to do so. They must be stopped.
Extinction Rebellion

A reminder that rocket fuel is fossil fuel, and that the billionaire joyride was over 100x as destructive per passenger mile as flying (coach) which was previously the worst thing a human could do for the climate
Peter Kalmus @ClimateHuman

kind of obsessed with how there's a never-ending treadmill of of humans thinking everything used to be better exactly 30-40 years ago, right before our personal memory banks start
Dr Sarah Taber

When you were growing up, could you have ever imagined that you were going to live in the second Gilded Age?


Economic Hardship Reporting Project

What some people are afraid of, simplified: When you demonstrate to students that historical wrongs have not been fully righted, they tend to want to fully right them.
Anne Lutz Fernandez

It's interesting that the speed bumps we do have in town are mostly on private drives. Landowner's want their space safe from passing drivers and figure out how to plow their roads inspite of hassle of speed bump. But on public roads, the drivers and plow trucks decide.
@kar_nels

When people talk about hating cities, all the things they hate about them are due to cars: loud, dirty, poor air quality, too much traffic, hard to park, not enough trees, too hot, etc etc.
@missurbanist

Everything is about race. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise, especially the folks who made everything about race in the first place.
Octavia Butler knew... @NotNikyatu

It was clear since Moynihan Train Hall opened that the waiting area was too small and didn’t have enough seats. Today, the waiting room is full and dozens of travelers are sitting on the floor:


Inga Saffron

We live in a society that would rather have a hundred people sit on the floor than one person sleep on a bench.
David Cole AIA

Demanding schools or playgrounds for your kids gets you branded as entitled. Those are things we’re all supposed to be guaranteed. You can bet your ass I feel entitled to school for my child. It is my right. It is all of our rights. I shouldn’t have to fight for it.
Angie Schmitt

Every few days now somebody posts a photo of an actor in the 70s or 80s with a caption like “HE WAS 37?!!” And yes sunscreen and no smoking and plastic surgery but honestly, I think most young people just have no idea that they used to allow average looking people on television
Amber Sparks @ambernoelle

The racist white people in South Dakota are like—“what the fuck?”


Lakota Man

Deadly heat, storms, and rising water everywhere. Please don't tell me you need faster, safer roads anywhere. Tell me instead how fast you plan to build protected bike lanes and how fast you will offer comfortable, frequent transit in your town and across the entire country.
Mary Morse Marti

Nothing lays ideology bare like looking at a map and trying to convince a 4-year old that Europe is a continent.
Erica Robles Anderson @fstflofscholars

Listening to billionaires talk about creating “equal access to space” and I’m over here thinking we should start with equal access to housing, healthcare, education, childcare - you know, actual necessities
Rep Liz Boldon @LizBoldonMN

It’s the end of the world as we know it and we feel rage.
Extinction Rebellion

How’s this headline: Branson, Musk, and Bezos who could tackle child hunger, climate change, racial injustice, health care, the rise of fascism etc and still be richer than 99.9999% of us choose to be narcissistic assholes and shoot their money into space. That about right?
Mary L Trump

People ask why I don't support bipartisan compromise on voting rights. There is no middle ground between the arsonist and the firefighter.  That is why.
Marc E. Elias

Same picture:


BUILD SOIL; Plant Chestnuts!

I don’t believe that billionaire space jaunts should be treated as news.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

You can not enforce segregation by direct law anymore, it is maintained through the sensibility of who belongs and who does not, not individual smatterings or exceptions but in mass. Their "what are we gonna do without police?" is their same argument they use, same deep root as "we don't want to lose the character of our neighborhood."
D.A. Bullock @BullyCreative

It’s endlessly depressing that the US had a once-in-a-generation $6 trillion moonshot government spending program, and it was spent on occupying Iraq and Afghanistan
Tom Gara

It appears that the war in Afghanistan cost considerably more than all post-1950 NIH and NSF expenditures combined. (After inflation adjustments.)
Patrick Collison

It might just be me, but there's something hard to put into words about the era of filmmaking where they were inventing the entire medium between alcohol binges
Morgan Russell @Historybuff2013 (referring to Citizen Kane)

The US isn't even a country, it's just three corporations in a trench coat
@shawarmacommie

Atlanta and Barcelona have a similar number of people and length of rapid transit, but Barcelona’s carbon emissions are 83% lower and mass transit ridership is 565% higher. It’s a perfect illustration of how housing policy and transit policy go hand in hand:


sam deutsch @samdman95

The issue is not statues and flags. The issue is a society organized around slavery, genocide and anti-Black and Indigenous racism — the ideology embodied in those statues and flags. The issue is too many still cling to this ideology in 2021 and refuse to let it die so democracy can be born.
@BreeNewsome

Everyone On Camping Trip Just Gets Out Of Way While Friend Who Knows What He’s Doing Takes Care Of Everything
The Onion

Jeff Bezos would pay just over $6.3 billion under my wealth tax with Elizabeth Warren
 — less than the $8.4 BILLION he made on TUESDAY. The ultra-rich can afford to pay their fair share.
Pramila Jayapal

It just really slays me how much of every ag reform movement the US has right now — from the tech industry to organic and everything in between — silently revolves around the idea of BIPOC farm workers themselves as a problem to be eliminated.
tech: let's automate them away
organic: for when you need cheap migrant labor but you prefer that it be white
It's funny how nobody's big wild idea is "there are people already doing this job quite proficiently, what if we PAID THEM?? and stopped sending them to jail for working here??"
Dr Sarah Taber

Anyone who is actually serious about extending human life expectancy would be pushing for better sewers, water filtration, free healthcare, cheaper food, food safety regulations, etc. None of which meshes with the politics of guys who only read self-help books.
Anosognosiogenesis @pookleblinky

One Confederate monument I'd really like to get rid of is the U.S. Senate.
LOLGOP

I used to have the newspaper delivered but that little boy kept eyeing my guns and Bibles so I ran him off.
Susan of Texas

Enslaved human beings on General Robert E. Lee’s Virginia estate, which is now Arlington National Cemetery:


Michael Beschloss

Some landlords have stories about horrible tenants and many tenants have stories about horrible landlords but somehow the horrible tenant complaints of landlords seem to get far more media attention
@kar_nels

It would be weird if you weren't mad, sad, and scared while your life support system was being sabotaged for profit.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

what even is the point of having a complete streets policy or the transportation action plan or the mode-shift commitments in 2040 if we just ignore all that shit every time we rebuild a street and put in parking and car lanes instead of protected bike infra?
Avocadoplex

Your regular reminder that Delft’s historic market square was being used as a surface parking lot as recently as 2004:


Melissa & Chris Bruntlett @modacitylife

Roughly 100% of society's problems stem from the fact we humans evolved bodies, minds, and instincts to cope with a world of scarcity and now have literally no idea how to live among abundance.
Patrick S. Tomlinson @stealthygeek

it’s wild how some people will look at a dense city with transit and think that’s “social engineering”  and then turn around and think that suburbia, which requires exclusionary zoning, massive highway spending, and car ownership is the natural way of life:


sam deutsch @samdman95

California is going to have to cut 500,000 acres or more of farmland from production to stop unsustainable groundwater overdraft. Conservatively, solar panels on a portion of that would more than completely replace ALL existing fossil fuel electricity.
Peter Gleick

If you’re just now starting to become aware of the severity of our situation with the climate, welcome. This sucks AND we evolved to metabolize survival threats together so LETS DO THAT.
Caroline @spacecrone

People say transit projects are expensive, but the renovation budget for just a single terminal at the San Francisco airport is $2.4 billion.
woolie

At this point I've literally heard every argument for cryptocoins, and I can say with some authority that there is no intellectual centre to any of it. It's all a pile of gish gallop and whataboutism driven by post-hoc rationalisations for greed, gambling and scams.
Stephen Diehl

It’s not Mom & Pop versus Big Box. It’s human-scaled complex antifragile systems versus a scaleless, subsidized, unsustainable model. The economy, zoning, Land use, housing, etc. must be in sync to create prosperity. Simple, gigantic fragile systems can never do that.
@izurietavarea

If you buy a car, you just have to work a couple hours longer per day to pay for it, and then you can get home in 40 minutes instead of 70 on a bike.  Then, do one hour at the gym and you're good.
@enobacon

It’s only an insurrection if it comes from the French Revolutionary Valley. Otherwise it is just a sparkling white kerfuffle.
@BmoreBaker42

Functionally a huge portion of American culture is obsessed with life after death to the detriment of supporting actual life. We're a pile of death cults gilded with an exceptionalism mythos. And it manifests over and over. It's how we can be against birth control and abortion
Mikki Kendall @Karnythia

People who get righteous about how you "can't build transit fast enough" to provide urban mobility, did you know: It takes less than one week to install a bus-only lane? And that your city ALREADY HAS all the street capacity it needs to provide ubiquitous bus-only-lane service? "But where will I park" ... Ah I see, this ain't about climate change or transit, is it. 8 weeks from right now, most U.S. cities could have bus-only lanes serving large swaths of their populations. aybe, as our country roasts in deadly heat, ask why they're not doing that.
Matthew Lewis @mateosfo

I just saw a video about how daycares in Australia send home ready-to-cook meals for parents and it’s subsidized by the government and I continue to be astonished by how shitty America is.
ashley fairbanks @ziibiing

Wealth concentration at the very top now exceeds the peak of the Gilded Age:


Gabriel Zucman

Images are a curious thing. The orderly image on the left should scare us much more than the disaster photo on the right. The fossil-based system working is far more destructive than its accidents. #climate


Wolfgang Blau

God grant me the confidence and perseverance of a typo that’s made it through 45 rounds of edits.
Dea Poirier

Democrats, why won't you end fossil fuel subsidies? Joe Biden, why won't you cancel the Enbridge Line 3 Tar Sands Pipeline? It is INSANE to subsidize the fossil fuel industry at this point. It is INSANE to build more oil and gas pipelines.
Peter Kalmus @ClimateHuman

If you see individual actions and systems revolutions and culture shifts as distinct from one another, it means you’ve got some pernicious status quo frameworks to dismantle in your thinking
@happifydesign

My current mood: fuck subsidies, let's roll out the defense production act to build panels and turbines and reintroduce the CCC to train people to install them. We can sell some fighter jets to pay for it or just print the money, for all I care.
@BicycleHannah

“1,317 people have been waiting in county jails for more than 3 years. For 332 of them, it’s been longer than 5 years” without a trial much less a conviction. State-sanctioned kidnapping of poor people—another crime that doesn’t show up on evening news or in “crime statistics”
Adam H. Johnson

Bologna builds and maintains colonnades. This is what Houston builds and maintains. We suck. And local electeds balk when we ask them to stop more of this:


@bnjd18

If you are new to thinking seriously about climate change and the planetary crisis, one of the best favors you can do yourself is avoiding the trap of believing that just because you are now seeing the crisis clearly, that these problems just suddenly got worse.
Alex Steffen

And yeah, not all white women, yeah not all Black men, but do you know how much further we would all be if the "some" was none? Misogynoir does more to advance white supremacy and baby I don't understand why they aren't tired of this shit. But I guess when you're not fighting...
Mikki Kendall @Karnythia

What we learned in 2020? That oil is worthless in a society without consumption. That healthcare has to be public because heath is public. That 50% of jobs can be done from home while the other 50% deserve more than they’re being paid. That we live in a society, not an economy.
mohamad safa @mhdksafa

some of you really want to pretend the enslaved and the colonized were just somehow insensitively left out of the declaration of independence, like it was a diversity committee mistake and not the entire infrastructural basis of this country
Saladin Ahmed

The FTC started doing its job last Thursday after forty years of somnolence and Jeff Bezos is like, Let me get out of here already. As far away as possible. Bezos is over-appreciated for his product and under-appreciated for how good he was at manipulating and exploiting weaknesses in antitrust enforcement.
Zephyr Teachout

Public perception of crime and actual data on crime often don’t correlate. These graphs run 1993-2016. You can see the actual drop in crime reflected in perception at first, but then perceived crime rose as actual violent crime kept declining:

Nicholas Grossman

Raising the gas tax isn’t regressive. Building our society around cars and forcing people to drive almost everywhere is regressive
sam deutsch @samdman95

If properly priced gas is regressive, and we have to keep subsidizing gas to make it affordable — have ya’ll looked at home rental prices lately?
Phil Ritz

In Norway gas is $7.35 a gallon, vs $3.05 a gallon in the US. But Norwegian people spend .53% of their income on gas, vs 2.16% of income in the US.
James Medlock

Instead of stating "we are defunding the police because they are incompetent in going after straw buyers who are flooding our streets with guns that end up killing people," Liberals cower in the corner afraid they will be portrayed as soft on crime.
D.A. Bullock @BullyCreative

people using [the image of the burning Gulf of Mexico] for anti-capitalist or anti-socialist dunks are all completely missing the point in my opinion. oil companies exist to satisfy the demand we have for oil, and we must demand that our governments create structures to reduce that demand as much as possible
sam deutsch @samdman95

Countries where heat records have been broken in just the last 30 days. The planet you think you’re living on no longer exists. [And then listed all the countries, which took 2 tweets to fit them all in.]
XR Cambridge

Being well dressed [in Tulsa in 1921] made people increased targets! Targets of lynchings and murders were often people who threatened the status quo with their education, prosperity or attempts to vote. Black soldiers in uniform especially. The respectability politic is ahistorical and dangerous.
@BreeNewsome

"check your sensitivity setting, it seems to be interfering with your sense of humor"...motherfucker, I'm hilarious. I'm just not mean. If you can't be funny without punching down, get a bigger range
Ian Coldwater

“In the United States, two e-bikes were sold for every electric car.” The E-Bike Spike Continues With 1 Selling Every 3 Minutes. in ⁦@Treehugger
Brent Toderian

I actually don’t think we’re angry enough about rich people going to space while the world burns
@JoshuaPotash

Going to start tweeting out scenes from that 2004 doomsday blockbuster 2012 as news clips and see if anyone notices:


ashley fairbanks @ziibiing

So this billionaire "space race" is nothing more than a dick-measuring contest between Musk, Bezos, and Branson. They are not investing billions to forward science or the bounds of human possibility. They are doing it to be the first rich guy to bounce around uselessly up there. And it's utterly despicable when you understand that they're funding it with the hoarded wealth of workers who are struggling just to exist. With ill-gotten money made from supply chains that enslave people and are destroying the future possibility of life on earth. But if it troubles you that they might SUCCEED, that those three assholes might ever spend more than a week in space and ENJOY it, let me put your mind at ease. Not in this lifetime. With all their billions, they have no power to make space a better place to be than earth. Join me in enjoying the fact that they won't find anything up there but a lot of time to sit with the gaping void inside them, which space certainly won't fill, while forcibly holding their asscheeks to a suctioning toilet seat, because they're constipated as hell from astronaut food.
Sim Kern

I wish the Bible was half as good as Christians imagine it to be.
almightygod

I wish Anthony Bourdain were alive today to articulate the insanity of living in a country where cooks were the largest occupational group to die in a pandemic and restaurant owners are pouting that nobody wants to work in restaurants anymore
cassandra @GothestSloth

It is completely natural to feel hopelessness. But if you can, try to fight it. Remember that fossil fuel rhetoric and the language of politicians in their pockets have pivoted heavily to: "This is too far gone anyway it's not worth trying to fight it." Let's not let them win.
Erin Biba

I’ll say this: of course rising gun violence is a concern. But why is gun violence only seen as a liberal/Democrat problem when mass shootings are up and Republicans continue to block any and all gun control legislation? That is called framing and is not about the reality.
Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones

What happened here, quite literally, is:
1) In 1982, some conservatives (including John Roberts) urged Congress to pass a narrower version of the Voting Rights Act
2) Congress did the exact opposite
3) Roberts, Alito et al. went ahead and "interpreted" the statute as if their side had prevailed
Scott Lemieux

The ridiculous thing is if Exxon had decided to spend the what is probably billions at this point transitioning out of fossil fuels instead of fucking everyone over they would probably be making more money now than ever.
Owen Thompson @Technicallyowen

People love to talk about the price tag of the Green New Deal here in the US (bare minimum climate policy) but forget the price tag of unending economic downturn due to climate change! The size of THAT price tag grows exponentially the longer we wait to even begin to address CC
@walkabilityfan

the existence of a space race between billionaires is a clear sign these people aren't being taxed nearly enough.
Oliver Willis

As we watch in horror at the heatwaves scorching North America, remember that on our current policy trajectory huge parts of our planet, and more than half of the world's population, will face conditions of deadly heat. This is not an acceptable future.
Jason Hickel

The ability to remove asphalt and kick cars off roads permanently without cumbersome anti car engineering is why light rail is ideal over buses in my opinion:


Darrell Owens @IDoTheThinking

The “Keep _______ Weird” crowd needs to learn that the way a place gets weird is by having cheap housing so people can work part time or not at all and still make rent
Alex Yablon

When Tip O'Neill retired, after an impossibly long-seeming career, he was 74 years old. Today, he'd be the youngest member of House Dem leadership.
Dave Weigel

More people died of heat than of violent crime in the Pacific Northwest in the same week it was unveiled that Fossil Fuel companies all knew they were killing the planet and their lobbyists were openly bribing politicians. Our "News" is still going on about a "crime wave"
Alexander The Meh

We will never settle the issue of voting rights until white supremacy is firmly and unquestionably defeated.
@BreeNewsome

As we experience the effects of climate change in real time, I can’t help but side-eye some reporting. Before churning out another article about farmers who are worried about their crops, maybe consider covering the health and well-being of the migrant workers picking those crops?
Tina Vasquez

If we learn one thing from the Miers to Alito exchange, it should be this: While any law school can produce "bad" judges, nobody is a dangerous as a person who goes to liberal-ass Yale Law School and comes out *conservative.* That is nature's warning sign right there.
Elie Mystal

one of the things that still amazes me after 15 years in the system is how cops, judges, and prosecutors reflexively, with all their souls and no hesitation, see a Black man with a gun as a "danger" to be caged and a white man with a gun as a patriot exercising his sacred rights.
Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec

Never forget: If Mitch McConnell had not stolen 2 Supreme Court seats for Trump there would be 5-4 progressive majority protecting voting rights instead of 6-3 conservative majority gutting them
Ari Berman

In a new piece, I lay out and explore 3 principles that now define the pandemic.
1) The vaccines are still beating the variants.
2) The variants are pummeling unvaccinated people.
3) The longer 2 continues, the less likely 1 will hold.
Ed Yong

One thing about urban education is I don't think there's enough concern about it overall to get past *one grand theory of the problem.* Only niche groups, teachers and parents, are very invested in it. And parents, ends up being mostly women, and for relatively short periods.
Angie Schmitt

what it looks like when ivy is pushed off of a building, apparently:


Rusty Zimmerman

SCOTUS conservative majority is quite literally making it easier to buy an election and harder to vote in one
Ari Berman

"The U.S. cages Black people at 6 times the rate of South Africa at the height of Apartheid." Sit with that for a minute.
Jo Kaur @SikhFeminist

We’ve made being a white supremacist genocidaire one of the most secure, comfortable and profitable lives one can lead. And your punishment is people laughing when you die gently in your old age, in your rock garden over your finished memoirs. The profession is an inviting one.
Yannick Giovanni Marshall @furtherblack

Today's reminder that a reality we take for granted may not be universal or inevitable: In Iran, (tuition-free) public universities are generally high-quality and prestigious, while (expensive) private universities are for those who couldn't get into a public institution.
Alfie Kohn

Unfortunately, when you design a city around cars, that necessarily comes at the time/inconvenience of others, which the current system doesn't measure. The truth is that we still absolutely have a car-first approach to transportation planning. i.e, many highways that were built precisely to "improve travel times" either cut through street grids or create new barriers, making time/convenience far worse for others who are entirely ignored in our current, "designed around cars" planning processes
Transportation for America

No comments: