Monday, November 1, 2021

Twitter October 2021

October ended and started with Facebook news (changing its name at the end of the month and the day-long outage at the beginning). Other than that, it was a lot of the usual topics these days (you know what I'm talking about if you hang out here much). White supremacy was focused around the current faux outrage about Critical Race Theory, and some of the late-month climate crisis tweets are related to the beginning of COP26. I managed to not include many related to the local elections in the Twin Cities. Yes, you can thank me, non-local people.

Everything below the line is a quote from the attributed Twitter account.

____

Almost ever climate reporter I know is a little broken cause they're looking at how the US handled covid — something with a discrete cause and effect that's in line with out preexisting understanding of the world — and realizing how ok this country is with mass death.
Kendra Pierre-Louis @KendraWrites

Another name for “Critical Race Theory” is “Actual American History”
christine @christi02127678

Republicans are not afraid of Critical Race Theory. They don’t even know what it is. They’re afraid of theories critical of racists. They know what they are.
John Pavlovitz

They should’ve just renamed Facebook “cringe”
C. Gardner @AbkKyle

The antibodies you make after getting a vaccine are just as natural as any other antibodies you make. Calling it “artificial immunity” is like calling a treadmill run “artificial cardio.”
Nathan Boogeymanstra, MD @PedsGeekMD

I wonder what it’s like to have your entire political identity be couched in the belief that nothing matters so long as you can gleefully offend people who don’t look like you.
Simon Balto

SpaceX Under Fire After Autonomous Rocket Hits Pedestrian:


The Onion

I need people to understand that art evolving is pretty much the only necessity in this conversation. I don't like minstrel shows and decline to consume a lot of media from that era. But a lot of it's persistence is because some people think of them as classics.
Mikki Kendall @Karnythia

one of the funniest things in the world is maga guys being appalled by jail conditions for capitol rioters but thinking it's some special political punishment and not what jail is
mark @kept_simple

John Eastman should be disbarred, fired from all positions, and removed from all professional organizations. No one should associate with him in academe.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

I’ll say this, I think I teach middle school history about as hard and honest as any teacher in america. I’ve spent my entire career in PWI private schools. And when kids learn the truth about this country, they’re shocked and pissed off they’ve been lied to. Not uncomfortable.
Peter Darker @IAmLeoGlaze

Next up: VOLDEMORT changes name to BENEVOLENT
Betty Tisel

Motor vehicles kill 10 times as many people globally as armed conflict. I mean I knew it'd be more but I had no idea it'd be *so much* more
Matthew Downhour

I hate the lazy analysis on here of “the right are better at messaging!” The right is building on 600 yrs of antiblackness and racism that we all start breathing in from birth. They aren’t political geniuses. No one is being tricked into being afraid of crt..
Kaitlyn Greenidge @surlybassey

I wish editors would devote less space to culture war bullshit, and more to the fact that, in New York, elderly, immigrant taxi drivers have spent the last ten days starving themselves in front of City Hall as a last ditch effort to save themselves from debt peonage.
Molly Crabapple

nothing sinks faster into history than the objects and places that felt most like the future.
@elenaperez

This lane fights climate change (via @copenhagenizers):


Jon Owen @anotherJon

Can we call Facebook “Reagan” now since we don’t use it for dca??
Mark Popovich

Industrialists who made their fortunes laying railroad track, building skyscrapers, and constructing the infrastructure of modernity plunged their money into corrupting government, funding eugenics, and backing fascists to eliminate reformers. The internet barons will do the same
Jared Yates Sexton

Elon Musk just became the first person in the history of civilization to be worth $300 billion. If your salary was $1 million a year and you never spent any of it you would reach his current $302B net worth 302,000 years from now. He pays an effective tax rate of 3.3%
@DanPriceSeattle

I don't have a strong opinion about whether EV charging stations need to be subsidized, however the argument that "gas stations don't get subsidies, why should EVs?" neglects the fact gas stations are the 3rd largest category for SBA 7a loans by volume.
Samuel Hammond @hamandcheese

Hearing the old claim that building highways creates land value. Just look at all the value...


Beth Osborne

Not calling the new Facebook “Dystopia” seems like a missed opportunity.
Susie Meister

One of the most irritating delusions I often hear from self-proclaimed moderates and VSPs is that Al Gore "polarized" climate change — or more broadly, that there was some way to approach climate change that could have *avoided* polarization. Betrays fundamental misunderstanding.
David Roberts @drvolts

I would go further: The evidence is clear that predatory delay on climate actually began *before* there was any substantial organized movement to demand action. The "backlash" preceded the activism. At no time was there ever a non-polarized debate. It's always been broken.
Alex Steffen

it's wild that [courts, as in Charlottesville] choose a jury based on having the emptiest brains in the world but then they try to teach them the law so they can actually understand the case.
molly conger @socialistdogmom

Those climate protestors blocking the roads aren't trying to inconvenience you. They're trying to wake you up. YOUR driving contributes to climate change, and 1000s of preventable early deaths per year. You either support climate protestors, or you're utterly selfish
@WilliamNB

cheers for climate world that is not only contending with insanity on infrastructure negotiations, but an oil disinformation hearing, incoming EPA regs, and oh yeah a major international climate summit. oh and most outlets still have up to 1 or 2 reporters covering all of this.
Rebecca Leber

Some people read IPCC reports and think they are not apocalyptic. That's because they leave open the possibility that global emissions will be slashed this decade. But the truth is the actions needed to make that happen are not on the agenda at COP26 or anywhere else.
Extinction Rebellion

At 4 weeks postpartum I was: sleeping 3 *nonconsecutive* hours a night; breastfeeding every 2 hours for at least 30 min a session, so about 6 hours a day; and bleeding through everything I wore. If men did this, the whole fucking world would be structured around parental leave.
Katie Gutierrez

Do you ever notice how few teachers are ever interviewed in these so-called CRT stories? Simply allowing Republican operatives posing as “concerned parents” to fear-monger about what they don’t want or what they say is happening, isn’t actually good reporting.
Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones

Why does anyone oppose paid family leave when it's so obviously beneficial for children, parents, and families? Because paid family leave increases gender equality. And that further erodes the male monopoly on power, money, and independence.
Jill Filipovic

"he," "she," and "they" are all one-syllable words that are quite easy to say for English speakers. "they" works quite well and doesn't cost you nuthin'. but you being an a**hole can and does cost other people who live at margins you don't recognize. grow up and be decent
Paul Thomas

Having the billionaire tax killed by a yacht-owning Senator named Manchin (pronounced like mansion) from a state that has zero billionaires is a pretty nice touch by the writers room.
Seth Cotlar

The fact that Louisiana and Mississippi have the highest poverty rates in America and also the lowest homelessness rates show that while wages are undoubtedly a factor in our homelessness crisis (we need a living wage), it's not the primary factor. The primary factor is housing costs
Aaron Carr

Common green magpie:


Rajeev Tyagi

* Nobody defunded the police
* The police have no answers for the crime surge...or there would not be a crime surge
WE SPEND 80 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR ON POLICING IN THIS COUNTRY
If police are the answer....why is there a problem?
Joshua B. Hoe

The right wing book banners justify their censorship of anti-racist books by appropriating language from the Haidts, Chaits, Friedersdorfs, et al., who have long argued that left wing anti-racism is the most dangerous illiberalism in American society. As we warned them.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

One thing I realized long ago, over the almost 30 years doing what I do — Residents fighting against badly needed change in their neighbourhood always think they sound completely reasonable and justified while angrily raising even the smallest inconvenience to their status quo.
Brent Toderian

I love how politicians think banks are "too big to fail" but don't apply that same thinking to our Earth
Peter Kalmus @ClimateHuman

If you use legislation to create a system that protects ALL white kids from simply having to LEARN the history that Black and indigenous people actually endured… Then aren’t  you PROVING that CRT was correct this whole time?
Michael Harriot

Cities have to stop making cycling possible and start making cycling preferable.
Bicycle Lobby

In my opinion, the nation-wide attempt to organize right-wing mobs to intimidate and threaten local school boards is a more substantial threat to norms of free thinking and free speech than racist and transphobic speakers being denied gigs at exclusive liberal arts colleges.
David Roberts @drvolts

It's sad people think bus travel just means slow travel. It doesn't have to be that way. Slow buses are a policy choice.
Courtney Cobbs @FullLaneFemme

“Among white admits to Harvard University, 43 percent are recruited athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff — and roughly three quarters would have been rejected if they had been treated as non-ALDCs.”
@AlecStapp

One frustrating aspect of contemporary politics is that we seem to have abandoned meaning-making almost entirely to the right. It feels subjective and fuzzy to the over-educated left, so they try to find clarity and comfort in "the facts." It has been disastrous. This gets us back to the perennial question: what does meaning look like in a secular, scientific, multi-cultural milieu? The lack of answers to this question is why so many are retreating to pre-modern fundamentalisms and superstitions. I forget why I started this rant.
David Roberts @drvolts

I think governments should seize fossil fuel assets at this point. It may sound radical but there has never been another point in history when human actions were on the verge of destroying the habitability of our planet. It would allow for equitable emergency control of supply.
Peter Kalmus @ClimateHuman

Peter is a NASA climate scientist. Scientists are warning us we are killing ourselves and need to take emergency action. The media is not reflecting the urgency of their warnings and so the public do not fully understand what we face.
Matthew Todd

You know what *actually* ruins neighborhood character? Drivers. Speeding down residential streets. Honking and door slamming and blaring music. Bullying/threatening anyone ‘in their way.’ Clogging the public space with their private property.
Chris Jones @PickledEntropy

Republicans: Democrats don’t want you to say Merry Christmas!
Also Republicans:


The Volatile Mermaid @OhNoSheTwitnt

Last week I got a letter from a left-wing dude who works in the financial sector. He gets irritated about the "self-censorship" stuff because he constantly bites his tongue about taxing the rich, women's rights, diversity, etc. It's probably true that in a very narrow swathe of institutions it's getting harder for conservative straight white dudes. Leftist online magazines, activist NGOs, the women's studies department at Antioch. Fair enough. But these are far from the only or most important institutions in American life. The Harper's crowd is relentlessly focused on documenting conservative disadvantage in *the only places where they are disadvantaged.* Gee I wonder why.
Michael Hobbes @RottenInDenmark

Fun fact: "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 @drvolts

So I am getting quite tired of people (OFTEN older white male academics but not only) going "it's unlikely we'll be able to ramp down emissions fast and far enough in 2-3 decades, it would take a mega-revolution" AND THEN GIVE UP. YOU do not get to give up. NO ONE gets to give up.
Prof Julia @JKSteinberger

If you identify conservatism with any principle, you inevitably end up finding hypocrisy. But if you conceive of conservatism as efforts by dominant groups to maintain their dominance, with principles occasionally deployed instrumentally, the contradictions/hypocrisy fade away.
David Roberts @drvolts

Another entry in my ongoing series: "All pickup trucks should be this size":


anti-car crusader @cinemachagrin

Joe Manchin could have been a Profile in Courage, the courageous senator from a coal state who bucked corporate interests and backed Biden's ambitious plan to combat global warming and help save the planet. Instead Manchin is a Profile in Non-Courage—a blindered, parochial politician
Steven Greenhouse

Funny how the politicians causing the climate crisis are the ones who complain the most about civility. Apparently it’s civil to bring drought, famine, and natural disasters to billions, but it’s unacceptable to call out the people causing this.
Resist Line 3

The actions necessary to improve living conditions aren’t even remotely radical, but the people profiting off human misery have spent mountains of cash to convince people that they’re radical and dangerous.
Jared Yates Sexton

Trying to disprove the existence of white fragility by banning use of the term white fragility is one of the best self owns I have ever seen.
The Volatile Mermaid @OhNoSheTwitnt

imo not being able to get every kind of fresh produce at every time of year is actually good, and something we should both be aiming for and getting used to
michael wave @SzMarsupial

Fossil fuel ad from 1962 bragging about melting glaciers.


Climate Ad Project

People talk a lot of crap about scientists not being able to communicate their work. I interview climate researchers day in/day out, and their explanations are almost always lucid and concise. Corporate and finance people, on the other hand, spout absolute unholy gibberish at me
Dave Vetter @DavidRVetter

Brunswick, GA where Ahmaud Arbery was killed, is predominantly Black. BUT the trial is taking place in Glynn County, where only 16% of the residents are Black, 4% are Latino and 78% are white.
@tiffanydcross

If the “free speech” you claim to be defending is always punching down, maybe you are defending something else entirely.
Victor Ray

Sometimes I think about when tobacco executives testified before Congress and it was *such* a huge deal. Then I remember that back then there was only one media, the MSM, and they agreed to make it a big deal. If it happened today it would absolutely be lost in both-sides shouting.
David Roberts @drvolts



ImAHamberder

I do not understand why people assume that learning about slavery and Jim Crow history will make white children feel bad. Kids learn about WWI and WWII and no one worries it will make white kids feel bad - even though Nazis had light colored skin.
Aylett Colston @EveryVoiceNC

A lot of transit activists don't like to get involved in zoning battles but ultimately you have to. Modern American cities were smashed down to give cars advantages, you are not going to run 10 minutes or less bus service in a city of parking lots and single-family houses
Darrell Owens @IDoTheThinking

None of this posturing or debate would take place if Congress was considering throwing billions at an unnecessary weapons program that probably wouldn’t work anyway. These people believe government should only redistribute money to the wealthy and that we deserve nothing.
Jared Yates Sexton

Excellent tweet here about hypocrisy and fascism by Julius Goat:


Leah McElrath

I'm increasingly convinced, especially after seeing all the data collected by @TXsharon and others on methane emissions, that the industry has strategically pushed the framing of "methane leaks" which sound accidental and fixable, versus the reality: which is massive, intentional releases.
Amy Westervelt

The way America works, Joe Manchin will obstruct climate action now. Then he will retire and become a coal lobbyist and investor. Then, with a few years left on the shot clock, he will start a foundation to promote solutions to climate change.
Anand Giridharadas

If you look at the world’s advanced economies, those countries invest an average of $14,000 per year for a toddler child care. America invests about $500 per year — less than 4% of what our competitors invest.
The White House

Only renters should be allowed to vote in local elections. Homeowners are real estate speculators with too many conflicts of interest. We need voters who are invested in the community, not property.
Daniel Trubman, MPP @dmtrubman

We have to stop saying the Democrats "control" the Senate. The Senate has 50 Republicans, 46 Democrats, two independents who caucus with Democrats, the Joker, and Poison Ivy. That is our 2021 reality.
Mark Harris @MarkHarrisNYC

Virtually all the materials on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration site are focused on driver and pedestrian behavior, education and enforcement. There is almost nothing about the role road design plays in deaths and injuries. It's like trying to prevent lung cancer without mentioning smoking.
Bella Chu

probably the biggest stumbling block we talk about in intro to data ethics courses is that "informed consent under duress" isn't a thing
Ali Alkhatib

Literally our entire economic system is built around pressuring people into presenting the surface appearance of consent.
Avram Grumer @avram

People who are ready to give up and let the Republicans retake power because Biden hasn't solved everything in nine months are the most unserious people in politics.
Ragnarok Lobster @eclecticbrotha

Overheard: If paying a cashier a living wage will make prices go up. Why doesn't replacing cashiers with self checkouts make prices go down?
mohamad safa

If Manchin's looking for a "culture of entitlement," he should read the Pandora Papers. There is no class of people in the world that feels more entitled than the global wealthy.
David Roberts @drvolts

Agencies can’t say safety is their top priority when they are widening arterials for motorists who won’t exist until 2045 while at the same time ignoring sidewalk gaps on already-widened arterials:


Don Kostelec

When will wheelchair technology catch up to bike technology? Why does my electric wheelchair weigh 500 lbs and cost $30,000+? When will there be a wheelchair equivalent to the e-bike?
@SpringHawes

“The idea that the Earth is an inert repository of resources that exists primarily to be exploited by (some) humans, had its origins in the apocalyptic violence unleashed by Europeans … in the Americas and Africa... It is no accident that climate denialism is strongest in the settler-colonial countries of the Anglosphere.”
Ben Ehrenreich

Really tired of "future historians" getting all of the press and the praise while *current* historians are mostly ignored and overlooked.
Courtney E. Thompson @Dr_C_Thompson

I don’t have kids. I still think every parent in the country should get a direct payment WITHOUT means testing. For the rich, we just charge them taxes on the backend to make up for it. It’s much more effective.
Brianna Wu

The Child Tax Credit already has a work requirement: you have to spend 18 years turning a nonverbal neonate into a functional human being.
Max Ghenis

If we focused more policy around increasing access to health care, providing quality and culturally-competent health care, providing a living wage and workplace protections, etc, we would likely see higher vaccination rates. Let's try to avoid the "us vs. them" messaging.
uché blackstock, md

Thesis proposal:                        Thesis:


Daniel Bolnick

The idea that the child tax credit should have a work requirement — that children's food and shelter should be contingent on Joe Manchin's judgment of their parents' choices — is so facially repugnant to me that I hate sharing a species with the people who support it.
David Roberts @drvolts

We all wanted normalcy when Biden became POTUS - predictably that's not what's happening. The GOP is quickly sliding into fascism, and Democratic corruption is hindering the fight. People need to take back America, in the ballot box and the streets.
Will Bunch

COVID resulted in the single largest transfer of wealth from the working class to the ruling class in modern history but if you turned on the news, you'd never know it. Crisis after crisis keeps happening while tHe ExPeRtS avoid any mention of this transfer of wealth.
Fifty Shades of Whey @davenewworld_2

I'm convinced that woke is the new pejorative for n!%%@ lovers.
KD @Fly_Sistah

Nobody is serious about challenging racial capitalism who doesn’t show more than a passing interest toward Black organizing in the south. And every time folks talk about blue state secession or scapegoat Black southerners, it’s obvious that anti-Blackness remains the stumbling block. Folks keep acting like they have some greater insight into what it takes to build working class solidarity with white folks than the Black people who are living within miles of where their ancestors were enslaved and have been experiencing terrorism from white ppl for generations. Stop. If you care, then come down here and follow the lead of Black folks who are organizing their communities. Go help persuade white people to change and don’t run away when white ppl label you a race traitor and the sheriff’s department shows up with the good ol boys
Bree Newsome Bass

Forever, progressive and climate activists will blame "Biden" or "Democrats" for this while Joe Manchin sleeps every night like a baby on a bed of lobbyist cash.
David Roberts @drvolts

Yes yes the work you do matters. But the research shows that climate communicators who fly around the world are less trusted and less effective. And looking through a socially normative lens, one could even view them as counterproductive. So to communicate the need for decarbonization while simultaneously Telegraph your unwillingness to make utterly transformative changes only confirms that decarbonization is too painful and not worth it.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @DoctorVive

A $3,000 e-bike is viewed as expensive. A $15,000 car is viewed as inexpensive. That has to change for our planet to survive and our cities to be livable.
Michael Schneider

How is it that the top 1% evade $163,000,000,000 in taxes every year, but immigrants are called the freeloaders?
Adriano Espaillat @RepEspaillat

Just found this excellent photo on my husband's phone. #copsinbikelanes


Lindsay Banks Bayley

After decades of being rewarded for sabotaging caucus priorities, having learned that he will never face negative consequences for any of his actions, the coal millionaire Senator of the poorest state says "Go fuck yourself" to the Democratic Party and all life on Earth. Why does this man have committee chairships, an office that isn't in a basement on the other side of town, any staff whatsoever? The caucus should have come down on him like a fucking ton of bricks ages ago.
David Weiskopf @daveregrets

A system that can't self-correct in the face of existential threat is pathological.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin

Using Nextdoor these days is like venturing into a web of paranoia from people who have succumbed to genuine mental health issues onset by the media they consume.
Jett Goldsmith

"In 1960, 80% of the Twin Cities’ Black population lived in the areas where I-35W, I-94, and Highway 55 were placed." Highways are racist, environmental injustice. #RethinkI94
SierraClubMN

“Hostile architecture imagines a model citizen who is expensively caffeinated, constantly perched and poised, never in need of anyone or anything to lean on, forever ready to get up and go earn and spend.”
Mike Lydon

Show me one person on a bike rolling through a stop sign and I’ll show you 100 drivers speeding in an elementary school zone.
Tom Flood

If walking costs you $1, we all pay $0.01. If biking costs you $1, we all pay $0.08. If bussing costs you $1, we all pay $1.50. If driving costs you $1, we all pay $9.20. Via @thediscourse study. This isn’t just about choice. It’s about who pays for your choice:


Brent Toderian

the three biggest shipping companies own 80% of the world’s container freight and consolidation led them to shed 13% of their capacity in 2020. meanwhile, shipping rates have quadrupled. hapag-lloyd, for one, expects profits to rise between 815% to 1025% over last year’s levels
@as_a_worker

How come a website can remember how many free articles I've read this month but not the fact that I'm already a subscriber who's signed in three times in the last week?
Josh Gondelman

The rule of law is a radical, serious commitment, the promise that the state police power will treat every person the same, regardless of who they are and who they know. Former Presidents, big pharma execs, tech CEOs, and someone charged with grand larceny in Queens. If we don't enforce obstruction of justice laws, or use criminal laws against connected CEOs, but do send people to Rikers when it is a death-trap and they haven't even been found guilty—that's giving up on the rule of law. We have a rule of law crisis right now and its everywhere.
Zephyr Teachout

20 year olds are out here with baby pictures that just look like a current picture of a baby and not like a grainy still from a true crime documentary like the rest of us.
Ian Karmel @IanKarmel

A reminder that artificial austerity has destroyed almost every sector of American life and that the investments the GOP and so-called“moderates” are calling socialist or radical don’t even come close to making up for DECADES’ WORTH of neglect.
Jared Yates Sexton

It is both just and necessary for people to experience professional and social consequences for overt bigotry. And doubly so for powerful people.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

I’d recommend WALKAWAY and certain other fiction (like THE DISPOSSESSED) to folks as an introduction to leftist concepts over books of theory any day of the week. They’re much more accessible IMO.
Radical Goats

Remember the only eco-friendly businesses are the ones that close up their warehouses and cede them back to nature.
Lyz Lenz

any time you critique an oppressive system, people come to you demanding a perfectly articulated step-by-step plan for creating a flawless alternative system, today. as if the system we are currently locked inside of were meticulously designed from the top down. it wasn't. it's fine to ask questions about  short- and long-term strategy, tactics, concerns about who might get overlooked, etc. but it's very absurd we hold the people demanding change to a far higher standard than we have ever held our actual systems, which are cobbled together messes
Devon Price @drdevonprice

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics is awarded, in part, to an economist who proved:
1. Raising the minimum wage does not negatively affect employment rates,
2. Immigrant workers do not depress the wages of native-born workers.
So we can stop touting those labour myths now.
Louise Erskine @jeez_louiseee

Learning one fact about historical figures when you were six and getting pants-pissingy scared of changing your view in light of new, adult information is maybe not the brave stance some people think it is.
Jennifer Wright

I don't want to listen to folks fussing about "bike twitter" as if the people posting in it are not just trying to create a habitable planet for you and your children. Yeah some of them can slow down, too. It would help if we built some bike infrastructure.
@MaryMorseMarti

To produce 1 pound of beef, it takes approximately 55 square ft of rainforest, which is approximately 45–55 trees. If you went an entire year without eating any beef, you’d be saving 3,432 trees:


Plant Based News

The reason the fascists and right-wing extremists always talk about things being a false flag operation is because it’s a tactic they use. As called out by every single activist on the ground in the Twin Cities, but ignored by almost all media.
Anil Dash

New PRRI polling finds 30% of Americans believe God intended America to be promised land for European Christians.
ProfB @AntheaButler

What has happened in Minneapolis is that the police department triggered a profound crisis in the city, then imploded in the wake of the crisis. But pro-police forces have spent a year dishonestly blaming the implosion not on the crisis, but the reformers that cropped up after.
Will Stancil

There are guns everywhere right now. Way more guns than there were two years ago, even. When there are guns everywhere, people get shot. If we want fewer people getting shot we need fewer guns on the streets.
Charlie Rybak

parking ramps should get the opposite of historic preservation / landmark review: an expedited demolition process
anti-car crusader @cinemachagrin

If you don’t live near this clever bookstore ... buy books from any place other than the big A:


Andrea Learned

Here is what’s anti-democratic and immoral about conservatism: It has no empathy. Democracy depends on empathy. Authoritarianism has no empathy. It values only power.
George Lakoff

NFTs sound like something the Ferengi would make up on Star Trek and it would be the plot of an episode to get them to cut that shit out
@JenKatWrites

The thing about newsletters is I would pay to have less email. "delivered every day to your inbox" is menacing language
Chris Steller

Modernity has ripped people out of their old community ties and attendant myths that gave existence meaning. In its place it has left people with nothing but consumption and the all against all fight for status. That is tough terrain for climate messages to take root in.
Chris Shaw @kalahar1

Put another way: The Democratic Party’s fundamental crisis is that it cannot satisfy its corporate donors and also solve the problems created by those corporate donors. And quite often, the party refuses to do anything other than satisfy its corporate donors.
David Sirota

There is no possible executive privilege claim regarding Bannon, who was not a government employee.  Any lawyer who files a document in court claiming such a privilege should immediately be referred to the state bar disciplinary committee.
Daniel Goldman

I think a lot about how filing taxes is free and easy in every other country but here there's a multi-billion-dollar tax prep industry that lobbied to make it so complicated you have to pay them every year, and Congress just goes along with it. Think that sums up a lot.
Dan Price @DanPriceSeattle

Why is it so predictable that people who block the sidewalk drive vehicles like this?


@SerafinaScheel

“Positions I took long ago feel comfy as an old armchair, but the kids that tear the statues down, they challenge me to see the gap between the man I am and the man I wanna be”. The latest from the ever-brilliant Billy Bragg
Ali Clarke

Even after construction finished on Line 3, Enbridge still hasn’t cleaned up all the drill fluids from their frac-out spills. The pipeline hasn’t even gotten oil to the end yet, and it’s already been responsible for multiple spills. How many more spills before we #StopLine3?
Resist Line 3

know that saying, “tell the truth and shame the devil?” I am turning it over in my mind. the devil isn’t real to me. shame is. telling the truth, for me, dissipates shame.
@dopegirlfresh

Is there anything more opposite than wellbeing and being in a well?
Chris Steller

Here are a few helpful disclaimers for journalists to insert into their stories when talking about "crime data" or "crime rates" reported by the police, or when police ask them to report on a "crime wave":
"Property crime data excludes most property crime, including illegal seizures by police (which roughly equal all reported burglary), wage theft by employers (which is about 5x more than all reported property crime), and tax evasion (which is about 20x more than all wage theft)."
"Violent crime data reported by police excludes nearly all of the violent crimes committed by police and jail guards, which experts estimate to include several million physical and sexual assaults each year."
Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec

Insofar as young people are feeling doomed, the absolute best thing older people could do is lecture them... oh wait, no, what I meant to say is ***fix a wildly corrupt, dysfunctional political system and take real action***. I bet that would cheer them up! I mean, imagine being born into this shit — wild income inequality, democracy crumbling, fascism rising, politics utterly captured by oligarchs, multiple inexorable global threats (including climate change) being neglected — and being scolded for being too down about it!
David Roberts @drvolts

BREAKING: More than 330 U.S. scientists just sent a letter to @POTUS urging him to use his executive authority to stop all new fossil fuel projects and declare a Climate Emergency.
Center for Bio Div

If I could do anything to make American transit planners and agencies understand it is the difference between how 15 minute and 10 minute headways feel as a passenger
@Ryanfor3F05

Suggested transit pricing:
10 minute headways: $4
15 minute headways: $2
30 minute headways: give each passenger a $1 for wasting their time.
GoogleResult

Oh look, the oral drug that reduces Covid death by 2x (in lieu of the 10-100x of Vax) was developed with funds from US taxpayers but then sold to Merck so that they could sell it back to Americans at a 4,000% profit. Shouldn't things developed by a gov't benefit its own citizens?
@drhicks76

Wh.ite people need to stop being surprised at racism in this country. Black people told you it was and is horrible. You chose not to believe us.
@LeciaMichelle11

I've always said, when people want government run like a business, just remember that in a corporation every vote is represented by one share of stock. Whoever holds the largest share of stocks gets the most votes. Workers with no stocks get zero votes. That's just fascism.
Matthew Merkovich

That looks like a corner where no one ever comes to a full stop:


Chris Steller

One of the many failures of traffic safety in the US (among many) is we don’t attempt to reduce exposure. Almost all our safety advances are immediately reversed by increased driving miles (and more recently larger and more powerful vehicles)
Angie Schmitt

One of the problems is that slavery is taught as the history of Black people and not the history of white people.
@TweetsByBilal

I'm quite surprised that most people still only feel outrage over oil pipelines when there's a spill. Their primary damage is to our climate system - day after day of normal operations.
Peter Kalmus @ClimateHuman

Fossil fuel industry gets subsidies of $11 million a minute, IMF finds. Is that how much it costs to destroy the world?
Mark Z. Jacobson

I am mystified by most of this [about Kyrsten Sinema]. Nobody forced her to become a public figure. There are other jobs where you don’t have to talk to anybody.
@mattdpearce

We are collectively subsidizing disease, pollution, flooding, intense storms, and instability at 11 million dollars a minute.
Zephyr Teachout

There are more hairdressers than coal miners in the US.  Somehow the latter have like 4 or 5 Senators that talk only about their plight.
Yetsuh Frank @newyorkgreen

‘All civility means is the insulation between power brokers and their actions.’ Lyz Lenz
Bruno Navarro

The UK government, hosts of the 'last chance' COP26 climate conference in a few weeks, plan to open an entire new North sea oil field, Cambo. Staggering.
Extinction Rebellion

The global supply of fresh water is dropping by almost half an inch annually, the @WMO warned in a new report. By 2050, about 5 billion people will have inadequate access to water at least one month per year, the report said.
Inside Climate News

Highway spending is just like a tool politicians try to use to juice the economy a little. To me it's just not at all clear that expanded childcare spending wouldn't be a better way to do it.
Angie Schmitt

whenever you're tempted to say "seminal", think "spermy" and find another word
Matthew R Francis @DrMRFrancis

A Melanistic fox, one of the rarest animals on our planet. Beautiful:


@AudreyStJames1

In the time it takes to build the typical nuclear plant, the cost of solar power tends to fall by about 75%
Noah Smith @Noahpinion

Why don't we have an elite consensus in favor of policies that will actually create a better future?
Paul Krugman

That it’s (apparently) so hard to go from car-dependency to car-free is one of the reasons I’d call [car culture] a cult.
@happifydesign

It's perfectly fine to start using that notebook you were saving for something special.
Anil Dash

Can we try whatever happened to Facebook on climate change next?
Brian Kahn

Each Facebook user produces 12 grams of carbon dioxide by using the company’s services every year. So Facebook being down is literally good for the planet.
grist

To put that in perspective, burning a gallon of gasoline results in 9,000 grams of CO2
@ban_SUVs

BIG NEWS! Birmingham just announced a transformative transport plan to make the car-centric city a “super-sized low-traffic neighbourhood,” with roads closed to thru motor traffic, a new fleet of zero-emission buses and new protected bike-lanes.
Brent Toderian

For your North American followers a bit of context. Birmingham is the home of the UK’s car manufacturing industry, and the city that arguably embraced urban freeways the most. It’s a hugely symbolic move.
rwatmo

Why the fuck
You drive that big ass truck
So fast in the
Neighborhood?
@StPaulBikeScum

I am BEGGING for an editor at one of the big news orgs to do a story on the importance of WhatsApp to many countries’ communications infrastructures. What was today like in India? Myanmar? What’s it like to have a sick relative across the world and not be able to contact them?
@lostblackboy

Canada let Enbridge complete Line 3 the day after the first-ever National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, “intended” to honor the country’s Indigenous communities. You cannot make this up. #StopLine3
Resist Line 3

Amendment 14, Sec. 3: No Person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President . . . who, having previously taken an oath . . . to support the Constitution of the U.S., shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.
Mary L Trump

1990: The Internet is a magical distributed system that instantly routes around any instability, surviving lines being cut, servers crashing, and even nuclear war.
2021: Three companies own the internet and one of them broke.
Daniel Feldman

Silly as it is, the War On Christmas clearly exposes the fundamental struggle unfolding in the US. To some of us, the essence of the US is as a neutral framework, where any culture can thrive, anyone from any background can succeed, all are treated fairly and with dignity. Obviously the US has never lived up to that ideal, but as Obama said so eloquently, the struggle to come closer and closer to that ideal *is* America — it's the most American thing of all. All those outsiders who forced the US to be more fair and open are the real American heroes. Reactionaries, on a deep and fundamental level, do not share that vision of America. To them, America is a white, patriarchal, "judeo-christian" nation -- a particular people, a particular culture. Sure, we'll accept guests, Others can live here, but never forget who's in charge. In some sense it's a trivial question: Do you say "happy holidays" and accommodate everyone or say "merry Christmas" and implicitly tell everyone who's not a Christian to accept, without complaint, that they are secondary, subsidiary, peripheral — *less*. But w/in that trivial question is embedded ALL the questions facing the US. Are we trying to be a genuine multiethnic, multicultural, diverse society, united by a framework of neutral rules that treat us all the same? Do we want everyone to feel welcome, w/ equal citizenship? The real question this raises for me — the ultimate question of America, really -- is whether it's *possible* to have a true multiethnic multicultural society of equals. Is it possible for everyone to be happy even if no one gets to hear their special holiday greeting in public? I dunno. (I used to be a confident Yes, a confident believer in the possibility of true democracy, but now ... I dunno.)  Anyway, that's what the War on Christmas gets me thinking about.
David Roberts @drvolts

Not being on Facebook or Instagram, makes me feel like a hermit learning about a stock market crash.
James @STPBike

Thanks to all of you for your recs. We reached out to Smart Set and they have been a dream to work with so far. Looking forward to seeing our posters very soon!
Heavy Table

I kind of wonder if Facebook zapped all its sites at the same time as a way to say "THIS IS WHAT A WORLD WITHOUT FACEBOOK IS LIKE SEE YOU NEED US" and then was dismayed as everyone went "oh, actually we don't, a Facebook-free world is kinda nice actually, thanks for reminding us"
John Scalzi

Don't be born in America if you can't afford it. Don't be a minority if you can't afford it. Do not get a chronic disease if you can't afford it. Don't live in a house if you can't afford it. Learn to code. If everyone learns to code, all wages will be above average.
@BrooksMcnew

Yale is 7–8% black (prolly less than half of that African American) and somehow we the scapegoat for every white kid denied from every university. The shot don’t even make sense. This country is just racist.
Jason Coupet @ProfessaJay

BREAKING: Guy who acts like wearing a mask in a coffee shop is oppression thinks Indigenous people should 'just get over it'
@TheEagleist

Hot take: It's safer [for pedestrians] to cross in the middle of the street because vehicles can only come at you from 2 directions instead of 4.
Kid Charles

The private automobile is the cigarette of the 21st century. #ClimateActionNow


@Matt__Chambers

I take the lane if a driver can’t pass me safely and/or it’s a semi-pedestrianized street. I even have my kid do it even though he’s slow. People wait and deal. If everyone got used to that because there were more cyclists and slower roads, enforcement wouldn’t be as necessary.
Shannon Brescher Shea @storiteller

I know you know this, but "moderate" and "centrist" are two of the most ideology-soaked terms in common use in political newswriting.
Jay Rosen

Having to explain the concept of a power differential and how it inserts implicit intimidation into a conversation is tiring. And just reading the above thought makes me realize that we don’t have an intuitive way to communicate about this stuff.
@TomBasgen

America is a police state. It spends more money in individual cities on police (domestic military arm) than most/many nation states spend on their entire military budget. The only purpose of this is to control the population (mostly the Black population)
Kamau Franklin

Note to Washington reporters: coalition politics isn’t chaos. It’s democracy in action. Especially if you spent the last four years normalizing an assault on democracy, please don’t now cast as abnormal the ballet of negotiating interests in a vast, various republic.
Anand Giridharadas

Enjoying our skeleton flamingo family picking apart the snake this year.


Prairie Czar

I know there will be scolds who lecture me about "different buckets of money" and all that, but the fact remains that institutions are getting wealthier yet faculty (and thus students) are being treated as if the university is broke. It's mission failure.
Kevin Gannon @TheTattooedProf

Notice how quickly corporate media moved on from discussion of Afghanistan and concern for Afghan civilians once the US military acknowledged they killed an entire family including multiple children for no reason. And there’s been little mention of ISIS-K since.
Bree Newsome Bass


No comments: