Twitter January 2022

It didn't seem as though January was that long, but the early tweets do seem to come from a while ago. 

The month started with a few New Year's stragglers, then went through the anniversary of the January 6 insurrection and Martin Luther King Day, followed by several Supreme Court cases and hearings, along with various instances of voter suppression and the failure of filibuster reform, book banning, and other right-wing activity. There were constant dribs and drabs of information about how Trump and his minions conspired to overturn the election and attempt a coup (still on-going). All while Omicron surged and deaths mounted and there was way too much stupid chatter about NFTs and cryptocurrency (so much that I have both terms muted, though they manage to seep in just a bit). And the month ended with Stephen Breyer announcing he would retire from the Supreme Court and Biden saying he would appoint a Black woman to replace him, allowing for a new round of racist crap from the Right.

It was a lot. I'm sure I've forgotten something major.

Everything below this line is quoted from the italicized source on Twitter, despite the lack of block quote format.

_________

interviewer: how well do you perform under pressure?
me: I'm better at bohemian rhapsody to be honest
Adam Cerious @Browtweaten

This is why the anti-trans movement is so obsessed with bathrooms, pronouns, "censorship" of comedians etc. — they're looking for the miniscule ways cis people will have to adjust to social progress and calling them existential threats.
Michael Hobbes @RottenInDenmark

Congestion is so bad for the economy that we have to fix it even if it requires removing the economy. Where have you seen this approach?

Beth Osborne

When I took history as a naive young student in Tennesee, I learned that McCarthyism and Watergate were examples of reactionaries going too far. As a nation, we were collectively abashed and ashamed by these episodes. But what I've realized as an adult is the only thing reactionaries learned from those episodes is that they need a giant media machine so they never again lose control of the narrative, so they never again have to pretend to be abashed, so next time they can *do it all again, without penalty*.
David Roberts @drvolts

why does America put income caps on disabled people but not billionaires
@babythedivine

how can we get plastic straw ban energy but for stopping freeway expansions?
Adah Crandall @adahrae11

More people have died of covid than have been murdered in the U.S. since I've been alive.
Philip Bump

Apple's Park in Cupertino has so much space dedicated to car storage that you can fit all 272 Apple USA retail locations inside of its parking structures. To put that in perspective, Disneyland is the same square footage of all the parking at Apple Park:


Hayden Clarkin @the_transit_guy

If we simply required gun owners to carry liability insurance, the insurance industry would destroy the gun industry
mohamad safa

"Any exchange, be it of ideas or of goats, will tend toward gift if it is intended to recognize, establish, and maintain community."
Barrett Scruggs

It's nuts Spotify had that much net worth to lose considering how much they pay artists.
@ItsTheBrandi

An abandoned block turns into 16 homes in Cincinatti. (2011 > 2016):


@mnolangray

You know what I feel like damaged the legitimacy of SCOTUS? Stealing a seat based on a made-up principle then reversing that principle to steal another seat and, in the meantime, confirming a justice who screamed I LIKE BEER while rape victims wept on the steps of the Capitol
Magdi Semrau @magi_jay

Every Republican presidential candidate is on the record that they’ll only appoint Federalist Society judges and I don’t see anyone in the right griping about that
Jon Reinish

Still remarkable how they co-opted “woke” to refer to everything except the murderous police state & then doubled down on the murderous police state
@BreeNewsome

is there anything more frustrating than cooking/baking by yourself and being fully incapable of opening a jar
@lieholepiehole

Simply, if you didn't have a problem with Ronald Reagan promising a woman nominee but you have a problem with Joe Biden promising a black woman nominee, there's really not a lot of reasonable explanations there.
Schooley

You ever notice how you never hear anyone say Trump could have won if he campaigned harder? Like no one ever says he should have visited Arizona more. Makes you wonder if that whole concept isn't make believe pundit nonsense.
@agraybee

FUN FACT: Kids who read Maus don’t grow into adults who constantly compare minor inconveniences to the Holocaust:


Lawson Clarke @Malecopywriter

Covid19 is killing police at far greater rate than anything else yet the establishment stands by its let-it-rip strategy w/ omicron. This suggests they’re not concerned w/ police death as much as constructing narratives about violence to justify further expanding the police state
@BreeNewsome

Here's a fun fact: Over the last 50 years, eighteen justices have been sworn into SCOTUS (from Harry Blackmun in 1970 to ACB in 2020). And none — not a single one — attended a public or state institution of higher education.  Not for undergrad. Not for law school.
@Bilalbay

Our cities are TOO DENSE for new infrastructure but also our population per square mile is TOO SPARSE for new infrastructure. The US is SPECIAL and cannot ever adopt a solution created anywhere else.
@jordanclock

Wedge issues like book bans appear when fascists have no plan to govern and just want to direct white rage at public institutions like schools to erode support for the public good.
Dr. Lisa Corrigan

Apparently Neil Young packed my popsicle:


Chris Steller

Just finished my book on the 1898 Wilmington, NC white supremacist coup with this stat on pg 330...
"The number of registered black voters in NC plummeted from 126k in 1896 to 6k in 1902."
Newfangled Dad

They call COVID the "Nextdoor Disease" because like Nextdoor, the anti-vaxxer response to COVID made millions of people across the country realize how terrible their neighbors really are. And by "they" I mean me.
Molly Priesmeyer

I'm sorry, but claiming that a long-term masking policy is unsustainable is not based on evidence, and is quite frankly a racist take. Many Asian countries have had a strong masking culture in place for several decades. It's not ok to ignore their successful experiences.
Dr. Lucky Tran

What "Beloved" and "Maus" share, content-wise, is an unflinching look at nearly unfathomable human atrocities and no Good White Person to save the day.
A Rose, Blue And Wild

Our path to safety does not come from moving or becoming preppers. It comes from working together to end the fossil fuel industry and out-of-control capitalism and inequality as rapidly as we can.
Peter Kalmus @ClimateHuman

Boys are easier cause parents give up on us early. No emotional teaching, not a talk about love or nothing
Growth is Silent @NazHmSlf

I assume all the bogus electors are looking at life in prison — after all, one improper vote got a woman in Texas five years in jail.
Dean Baker

Went back in to my office for first time in ...a year? Noticed this C&H cartoon I'd taped to the bookcase ... 15 years ago? Predicted Bongino and Rogan before there was a Bongino and Rogan:


Pat Bagley

Not only did Bill Watterson predict the future direction of the Republican military industrial infotainment complex, he also accurately forecast the direction Republican political philosophy would ultimately take: Calvinball.
Don Hammond @bluestatedon

Gentle suggestion: Next time you hear "Black Americans have a slave mentality," don't get angry, take a bow. *Look at what our elders and ancestors survived.* Our enslaved ancestors were powerful. Their "mentality" made a way out of no way. Got us through. Never disavow them.
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas @Ebonyteach

The city’s bikeshare system has never recieved taxpayer subsidy and carries 54k people per day. The city’s ferry system has recieved hundreds of millions in taxpayer subsidies and carries 45k people per day.
Shabazz Stuart

Robert Bork lives in SCOTUS folklore but his confirmation battle is quaint by modern standards. Bork got a hearing. He got a vote. In a Democratic-led Senate. He was not filibustered. He was rejected 42-58 on bipartisan opposition. Reagan’s next nominee was confirmed unanimously.
Sahil Kapur

This thread is worth reading in full but this is something I want to expand on: Holocaust education is becoming more and more literary rather than historical. Kids read books like “Number the Stars” where kids can envision themselves as the good gentiles, who save a Jewish family
@Curve124

In past major plagues, has society been as willing to disrupt regular life for the purpose of protecting the elderly and ill as we were during COVID? Is there maybe some story of moral progress in all this misery?
Joseph N. Cohen

Y’all notice that every single “expert” worrying about ongoing inflation fails to mention the decade-plus of below-target inflation that came before?
Adam Miller @ajm6792

How does a belief in meritocracy and social mobility survive knowing that there are 330,000,000 Americans and 9 Supreme Court justices and two of them went to the same high school.
@edburmila

Do not be fooled.  There is no anti-abortion ideology or agenda that draws the line at a specific gestation age. A 20-week ban is just a step toward a 15-week ban which is a step toward a 6-week ban which is a step toward an outright ban.
Elizabeth Nash

With Supreme Court audio open to all now, hasn't it really been obvious to people listening in good faith that Kagan, Sotomayor, and Barrett consistently ask *the best* questions while the dudes just make speeches or engage in hypothetical pontification. Like, can we just be HONEST about that? Like, I hate everything that ACB stands for, but when she's got the mic I listen carefully cause she's gonna do a thing. When Kavanaugh has the mic I listen carefully because his about to say some dumbassery I can dunk on. Question format for each justice:

• Roberts: Isn't it true that all these problems have been solved already?
• Thomas: Why should the federal government exist?
• Alito: Question? Fuck You is my question.
• Breyer: Can you help me out of this hypothetical I've lost myself in?
• Sotomayor: Yes, but what if we considered the non white people as ALSO people?
• Kagan: Have you read about...laws?
• Gorsuch: Thomas Jefferson asked me to ask you why you are so stupid.
• Kavanaugh: Bro, I read on FanDuel that the government can't do that. Is that true?
• Barrett: You want it to be one way, but isn't it the other way?

Elie Mystal

My 6th grade teacher assigned “Night” by Elie Wiesel. Some parents complained about “appropriateness.” Mrs. Gussky stared down the whole PTA. “The author was 12 when these things happened to him. Such things happen to 12-year-olds every day.”
Captain Awkward

The key to understanding the Maus thing—and I really do mean this—is that these are people for whom Jews mostly exist in theory, the same way that in third grade you learn there's a thing called tectonic plates This is the same root cause as the appropriation of Holocaust tropes among antivaxxers. The lack of shame in the appropriation is because it is to them really nothing more than a historical abstraction.
Jake Anbinder

You probably live in a city with serious driver entitlement if this is the number of signs required to simply cross the street.
Tom Flood

Message to driver: don't slow down as you turn but look out for people and stop immediately if you see one. If you fail, it is your fault.
Beth Osborne

I'm sorry, but I am not interested in any economic growth that is facilitated by the death and sickness of millions, or the destruction of the planet.
Dr. Lucky Tran

I’ve said this before but it is not Black people who give you the Tim Scott, Candace Owens or the Clarence Thomas’s of the world. Their audience is WHITE people. White people keep those Black people financially stable. Not us.
@Ange_Amene

White privilege is not about "freedom" or being left alone. It's about having permission to actively impose harm or danger on others with no consequences. It's about a kind of freedom that, by definition, only one group can have.
David Roberts @drvolts

Quarter of nanoplastic pollution found in core from remote Greenland ice cap are from vehicle tyres.Damian Carrington

Honestly fucked up that anyone could think that electing the Republican Party into power is a good idea
@un_a_valeable

In the USA, the ruling class won’t even offer social democracy to save itself or capitalism, just death spiral neoliberalism and fascism.
Nick Estes

Just to be clear: if I have degrees and am struggling with student debt I should’ve not wasted money on college and gotten a real job, but if I have a blue collar job and am struggling with low wages I should’ve gone to college and gotten a real job.
Jessica Ellis @baddestmamajama

The right is accelerating so quickly it's almost impossible to keep ontop of the state and local attacks on democracy and shared reality. This is fascism. Full stop.
karl @brainnotonyet

in many ways this kind of public holocaust denial is the opposite of a canary in a coal mine — if they’re getting to blatant public antisemitism, everyone else is already fucked
@RubyGraceLevine

Can't be said enough: every new bit of science on air pollution finds that it's worse than we thought. Every single one. Hazel Chandler moved to Arizona from California in 1977 and found the air cleaner, but as Phoenix’s population exploded, so did her asthma and breathing problems. Also can not be said enough: a national transition to clean energy would *more* than pay for itself through the health benefits of reduced air pollution alone. You don't need to bring climate change into it at all.
David Roberts @drvolts

Originally the filibuster was used as a wild card. Now it is every card in the deck.
David T. Bentley @iqof163

It is always sorta weird when people say, "nobody can live on that annual wage" when for many Europeans that IS your wage and your family of four has an apartment and health care. Permit enough housing and give people health care and $15 is more than people need.
GoogleResult

Civil Resistance is an act of love:


XR South East UK (Street art from Paint the Streets)

lololololol the Tesla "cyber-truck" is absolutely ridiculous. This is going to serve as an a-hole self-identifier in a way Hummer could only dream of.
David Roberts @drvolts

Wow – China just built more offshore wind capacity, in 2021 alone, than the rest of the world had managed in the last 5yrs put together. Its 26GW now accounts for half of the world's 54GW total. Also, it added twice as much in 2021 as IEA had forecast in…December 2021
Simon Evans

Imagine as a race making up the concept of race then gaslighting other races about their race’s existence
Agitator @shawnjay92

A simple law that every city could pass would be to prohibit police departments from having a “public relations budget.” LAPD and LA Sheriff (only two of Los Angeles' dozens of police forces) have a combined 67 full-time employees working on public relations propaganda.
Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec

two things are true: the best case scenario for the climate crisis is worse than our current reality AND the worst case scenario is so hideous, so terrifying that it makes our current reality look like paradise.
Mary Annaïse Heglar

Almost 5 times as many people in the U.S. die from air pollution as *all homicide combined.* Wage theft costs $50 billion/year, more than 100 times *all robberies combined.* Tax evasion costs $1 trillion, more than 2,000 times the value of all robberies. Why the media silence?
Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec

... a crackdown has *never happened* for wage theft, which costs over $137 million *per day,* 100s of times more than train theft. It has never happened for illegal evictions or home foreclosures. Might that be because the media treats these harms differently, with less urgency?
Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec

two things are true: the best case scenario for the climate crisis is worse than our current reality AND the worst case scenario is so hideous, so terrifying that it makes our current reality look like paradise.
Mary Annaïse Heglar

A perfect world isn't possible. But a better one is.
Mary Annaïse Heglar

There are 2 billion acres in the US.  It would take 14 million acres of solar panels to power the US. Less than 1% of total acreage. If you say that can't be done, explain to me how we can plant over 30 million acres of corn to make ethanol to mix with gasoline.
Justin Mikulka

A study of 700,000 hours of tv found that a fifth of references in entertainment programs to Africa came  on Jeopardy; Wakanda was the fourth-most commonly referenced African ‘country.’ Meanwhile, it's the continent most endangered by our carbon emissions.
Bill McKibben

Why do they never ask black parents what they want taught to their kids in school?
@BlackKnight10k

Here's the thing: if we're going to treat petty shoplifting as a crime, if we're going to treat accidentally passing a counterfeit $20 as a crime (!), we sure as hell need to start treating wage theft AS A CRIME.
Naomi Kritzer

Yes keeping roads safe is important. So are sidewalks! One great way to reduce salt usage without endangering the motoring public? Don't build a 7-lane road for a 3-lane traffic volume.
Sean Hayford Oleary

The Supreme Court was stolen in order to give conservatives and corporations a backstop to undercut any challenges to their power while systematically unraveling decades and decades of necessary reform.
Jared Yates Sexton

Tucker Carlson losing a brand advertiser because he says something extremely racist is not an attack on free speech Passing a law prohibiting businesses from talking to their employees about race is an attack on free speech.
Judd Legum

that hashtag tho:


Gritty is the Way

People have spent years complaining about the supposed left-wing assault on free speech but did I miss when liberal lawmakers proposed dozens of bills restricting what ideas people could talk about? Because that is exactly what right-wing legislators are doing now.
Judd Legum

A wealth tax would bring in over $928 BILLION a year. Extending the child tax credit for ONE year costs about $185 billion. We can afford to tax the rich and invest in our feminist future.
Rachel O’Leary Carmona

when most people are kind of like "yeah, abortion, good idea, we should have that option as a society" and a vocal minority is like "i will shoot a doctor in the face about this" it averages out to "contentious"
@RubyGraceLevine

I do not want to live under right-wing Christian judicial tyranny, which seems to be a permanent feature of American government regardless of electoral outcomes, for the rest of my life. I'm not sure what to do about that really except push for SCOTUS expansion on the left.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

We take things that are generally very silly -- football for eg -- SO SERIOUSLY just because (mostly) men like them. The media coverage of these sports games. You would think it's life or death.
Angie Schmitt @schmangee

In 2021, Canada's oil sands — world's dirtiest oil patches — delivered more oil than ever. Canada is spending billions to keep it up. (Oil sands generate 160 pounds of carbon per barrel vs 26 for US oil shale.) Yeah, but wind turbines are an eyesore...


Assaad Razzouk

Originalism is such a brain-poisoned way of thinking holy fucking shit. Imagine having modern day decision-making dictated by dead people from over two centuries ago
@TheOmniZaddy

I was looking at some of the original Sesame Street episodes for instance and even the opening sequence which is clearly focused on Black and brown children from working class backgrounds feels progressive compared to today
@BreeNewsome

Only 12% of Metro bus riders make more than $50,000 per year. Almost 60% make less than $20,000 per year. So I agree, ticketing cars that block bus lanes is a form of class warfare. Just not in the direction some may think.
Aaron Green

Ivanka Trump is older than any of the three women Donald Trump has married were on their wedding day.
Jamison Foser

Up to 23,000 voters prevented from casting ballot in 2016 in two of Wisconsin's most Democratic counties because of state's voter ID law according to UW study. Black voters 3x more likely than whites to say they were deterred from voting
Ari Berman

If a driver strikes a pedestrian or cyclist with their car, they should lose their license for 5 years. If a driver kills someone with their car they should lose their license for life. It should be that simple.
Jordan Burns @WalkableCityBoy

Somehow I'd never noticed this before hidden inside Hennepin County Library's 1940 Atlas of the City of Minneapolis. It's way better than anything recent I've seen so far as explaining Minneapolis's street and avenue orientations, directional designations, and even/odd numbering:


Max Hailperin

The continued killing, imprisonment, harassment, and arrest of Black people in the US is looked upon with complacently, while the bourgeoisie leadership of both parties and the media is convulsed by horror at the idea of not funding the police.
Kamau Franklin

More Americans have died of COVID in the past 12 days than have died of homicide in any calendar year ever.
David Menschel @davidminpdx

Imagine being a reporter at the most influential, prestigious news org in the U.S. and writing a major story at a time of rising fascism and just repeating police and corporate talking points about needing more punishment without seeking a single other perspective. Incredible.
Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec

Asked my 9 yo how she felt reading this book, as a white person; she said "I think the only white people that feel bad or mad or uncomfortable reading about the stuff that white people did in history are the people who want to do it again.” #StopBanningBooks:


Jessica Hulick @happyqueer

Billionaire campaign donations per election:

• Before Citizens United: $31 million
• Now: $1.2 billion

Citizens United was 12 years ago today. It is the Patient Zero for most of our modern problems.
Dan Price @DanPriceSeattle

Your Friday reminder that “Civil Rights” is not an era.
Laura Coates

In the U.S. more people died of Covid in the past week than died of Ebola during the whole 2014–2016 West Africa epidemic. Maybe it’s me, but the slew of ‘the pandemic is essentially over’ articles seem a bit premature.
Craig Spencer MD MPH

Car-dependent suburban sprawl is the most publicly expensive and publicly subsidized form of human habitation per capita in human history.
Brent Toderian

Sometimes it seems like political scribes write about Biden/Harris as if they miss covering a reckless and chaotic administration that drew heat and a weird kind of “can-you-believe-what-he-did-now” sizzle that bumped up ratings much like a natural disaster
Michele Norris

Omicron really shows how little the US has invested in nonpharamceutical interventions. Half the reason for two years of intermittent lockdowns was to buy time to build state capacity but we just...didn't. So now there's no tests, no hospital beds, no substitute teachers...
Dan Greene

Colonization is a wild experience. You look up & realize you’ve been skillfully indoctrinated into believing you’re part of an empire that was actually forced on you through violence. You are not the empire. You are among the natural resources being extracted by the empire.
@BreeNewsome

“Racist ideas love believers, not thinkers.” —Dr. Ibram X. Kendi
Ahmed Ali
 
Remember: If the environment you're driving around *looks* green and verdant, you're hurting it. Take a train back to the city and touch concrete
Alex Armlovich

Stop asking Black and Brown organizers to out-organize oppression so that you don’t have to legislate an end to it.
Morgan Sparkles @morganlowe813

Basic, genuine kindness is seriously underrated as a force for good. I suspect that if we taught all young men why kindness is a key sign of being manly, strong, desirable and respect-worthy, we could prevent a lot of pointless tragedy in this tough world.
Alex Steffen

You don’t break free from a 500 year-old, highly-organized system of slavery and genocide without the ruling elite responding violently. I’m definitely in the camp of people feeling more motivated than defeated right now because I see that system breaking apart everywhere I look.
@BreeNewsome

Are you anxious or just fully aware of the many threats that exist
donni saphire

Journalists, stop calling the failure to pass the voting rights bill a “major setback” for Democrats. It is a major setback for DEMOCRACY. The right to vote is not a partisan issue. Stop framing it as such and legitimizing anti-voter efforts.
Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones

“Too far left” is white society’s coded way of saying that Biden is being a little too appeasing toward the Negroes and needs to tighten up or there will be repercussions
@BreeNewsome

Generally speaking, “density” means homes.
Brent Toderian

I wonder what an electoral process that didn’t self-select for narcissistic, histrionic, and sociopathic tendencies would look like.
Leah McElrath

The people who say "We're not a democracy, we're a republic" have no idea what they think a "republic" is, they're just saying they don't like democracy
Noah Smith @Noahpinion

Also a good number of them confuse "republic" with "federation."
David Acheampong

Despite the outraged sugarcoating from Romney, Collins, McConnell, Sinema, and Manchin, I think historians would agree the filibuster was used today to advance its most consistent purpose thru history: to block equal rights for Blacks and other minorities
Ronald Brownstein

All gendered "-men" nouns immediately become delightful when you substitute "-folk": fisherfolk, countryfolk. And even when there's a perfectly suitable gender-neutral alternative, firefighters & guards pale in comparison to firefolk and watchfolk. In this essay I will
Laura Hirsbrunner

Box of rocks > Jordan Peterson
Paul Thomas @plthomasEdD

$5 million to install 8–10 truck parking stalls each at rest areas in Avon and Enfield to increase safety and provide rest for truck drivers.
@ByJanetMoore

TIL that truck parking costs between $250,000 and $300,000 per stall. "we don't have a lot of places in our most populous metros to store 72-foot-long 40-ton freight vehicles" might be a good reason to look at other ways of moving cargo the last few miles:


Scott @scttdvd

“The total mass of plastics on the planet right now is more than twice the mass of all living mammals, and about 80 percent of all plastics ever produced remain in the environment today."
One Breath

The chimera of "energy independence" is pretty much always a fig leaf for investments in fossil fuels, no?
David Roberts @drvolts

If you try to pit biking and transit against each other what you're really doing is supporting cars.
Rabi Abonour

As of today, Jan. 19, the average citizen of the US has emitted more greenhouse gases than the average denizen of sub-Saharan Africa will emit in all of 2022.
David Roberts @drvolts

On media coverage of traffic crashes: "Narratives tend to erase driver agency in collisions while highlighting agency for cyclists, and pedestrian deaths appear as isolated incidents rather than part of a wider structural pattern."
David Zipper

We are in a climate crisis and driving is a major source of greenhouse gasses. The fundamental relationships among transportation, development, climate, and our shared prosperity should be the STARTING point for an analysis of future highways, not an afterthought.
John Levin

Instead of expanding highway capacity and locking in billions in future repairs and maintenance, we should offer communities a cost savings bounty for any unnecessary roads  or lanes they decommission.  Hundreds of millions for local schools, affordable housing, etc.
@The_Albatross

Canada is two mining companies and a fracking company in a trenchcoat
Liz Fong-Jones @lizthegrey

We could build new, low-car, zero-carbon, walkable, affordable, vibrant districts on brownfields, transit areas, sprawling parking lots and dead malls, everywhere, drop our climate impacts permanently—and do it *fast*. Not being "able" to do so is a political choice—a wrong one:


Alex Steffen

How is it, that in elite policy debates, patent and copyright "protection," are routinely referred to as "free trade."
Dean Baker

I’m not sure people truly appreciate just how much of a positive impact fewer cars in our cities would have on all of our lives.
Jonathan Berk @berkie1

Justice Gorsuch acidly referred to "the so-called separation" of church and state today.
Mark Joseph Stern @mjs_DC

Stop using your car as a 2-ton umbrella
@Ollie_Cycles

If you fight affordable housing, or just diverse market housing projects, in the low-density neighbourhood you live in, can you really consider yourself a “political progressive?”
Brent Toderian

If you can get five years in jail for casting one illegal vote in Texas, shouldn't these Republican clowns who tried to steal tens of thousands of votes be facing life in prison?
Dean Baker

Parking lots aren't the result of free market incentives. They're the result of subsidy and tax incentives.
Strong Towns

for the entirety of human history, land ownership has granted people immense power over others—tenant protections and housing abundance are two ways to rebalance the scale of power towards the rest of us
Armand Domalewski

Honestly it really is sad that people experience our convoluted, expensive healthcare system, soaring rent, lack of childcare etc, and think “this is normal” but gas prices go up or bread is sold out and they’re like “the president did this to me and must immediately take action”
James Medlock @jdcmedlock

Why is it that MLK boulevard in just about any city is always some type of miserable stroad/arterial that no human being would ever enjoy walking along?


New American Planning

It’s interesting to look at freeways when they were first built in the 1950s—they are devoid of cars! It’s only when they were combined with low-density, car-oriented suburbs, with FREE PARKING that freeways really took off (became busy and were utilized)
Lou Miranda

Why Sweden clears walkways and cycle paths before roads: "Three times as many people are injured while walking in icy conditions in Sweden than while driving. And the cost of those injuries far exceeds the cost of snow clearance."
Pink Helmet TO

If the wealthy paying Krysten Sinema and Joe Manchin to kill anything helping regular people wanted voting rights protected you can bet the filibuster would’ve been dead
Jared Yates Sexton

Question: is there an episode in American history when conservatives defended the power of state governments against alleged federal overreach ... that WASN'T just about preserving racism? Is there a counter-example?
David Roberts @drvolts

I will be honest with you since it’s late. Sometimes I *do* get a smidgen tired of people with no sense saying so much.
Tressie McMillan Cottom

I continue to be stunned at how kooks, attention-seekers, and slime balls who would barely have been taken seriously 10 years ago have so quickly come to dominate our national stage. It's not even political. It's a kind of moral collapse.
Patrick Chovanec

If you’re wondering what Martin Luther King, Jr. would have said about climate change, that means you don’t understand climate change as part and parcel of colonialism and capitalism. In which case, you don’t have to wonder what he would have said because he said what he said.
Mary Annaïse Heglar

A good day to remember that before the forces of power and wealth revised history, Martin Luther King, Jr. was accused of being a Communist puppet and the Civil Rights Movement as a "sham" operation to destroy America. It's the same tactics. Over and over again:


Jared Yates Sexton

Can’t think of another usage of “mild” to mean “fatal in some cases.”
Martha Lincoln @heavyredaction

Can we please just have a civil dialogue about how I prefer to purge the vulnerable from the population so I can just move on with my life? Reasonable people can disagree on this. How dare you take that tone. I can’t believe I’m being attacked simply for sharing my beliefs.
wsbgnl

Every woman’s deodorant is called Delicate Whisper and every man’s deodorant is called Beef Shazam!
Jill Twiss

Democracy dies in shitty incompetent news coverage.
@Nebula63

How divorced from reality do you have to be to think US schools are indoctrinating people into Marxism
@garfxist

I use this photo in a talk I give to medical students on childhood vaccinations. Five siblings killed in one week from diphtheria. Vaccines are an incredible gift:


Lauren Wilson MD

Yes. I think an actual anti-vaccination movement for children would be self-limiting if it got large enough. Right now those people are a minority protected by herd immunity. If it gains more traction this will change, and it will reverse. But it will come at a great, great cost.
zeynep tufekci

If your economy requires people to produce and consume things they don't need or even want, and to do more of it each year than the year before, just in order to keep the whole edifice from collapsing, then you need a different economy.
Jason Hickel

It's amazing how anti-law-enforcement conservatives are when they are treated equally under the law.
@kar_nels

The fact that Americans use gasoline prices as a metric to judge our leadership is all you need to know about how messed up of a society we are.
Brandon Lust @AmericanFietser

EVs are the future of cars, but cars are not the future.
Alex Lee

The US spends more on police than all but 2 countries in the world do on their military. And one of those is the US, which spends more on its military than the next 10 top countries combined. We spend $100,000,000 an *hour* to police the world, including ourselves:


Assal Rad

“Clothes should cost $1,” isn’t the radical, anti-capitalist stance some of y’all seem to think it is. Especially when placed alongside your own important demands for higher and more equitable pay.
@lingerie_addict

I’ve always been pretty cynical about politics and white suburban swing voters, but what really solidified my worldview was the 2010 midterms. Two short years after Republicans gave us the worst economic crash since the Great Depression, these people gave them back the keys! And the same people are getting ready to do the same damn thing later this year. Because that’s what they do. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Cliston Brown

Imagine if the media spent as much time on the climate crisis as they did on whether a tennis player got to play tennis or not.
Dr Stuart Capstick

God grant me the serenity to close all the tabs I'm never going to read
The courage to read the open tabs that really ought to be read
And the wisdom to know the difference
@AudreLawdAMercy

I think the “anti-nuclear” hippies actually believe nuclear waste barrels are glowing green sludge and not compacted hazard suits and radioactive dirt encased in concrete:


@geoddo

There is no bipartisanship in autocracies.
David Plouffe

The Supreme Court's decision blocking Biden's vaccinate-or-test mandate is not rooted in law and barely pretends to be. Six justices dislike it so they made up a reason to block it. Celebrate the outcome if you'd like but let's not pretend this is "law."
Mark Joseph Stern

The US struggles with two conflicting ideas: civil liberties and extraction of labor and resources. For a brief period in the 20th century, SCOTUS leaned slightly to the former, but with GOP majority, we are solidly back in the latter. Extraction and short-sighted financial gains.
@general_ludd

It may be your property, but I can pretty much guarantee it's not your land.
@stubbscrew

Peter Principle + Dunning-Kruger = Joe Rogan Experience
Matthew Sheffield

Problems arise when we apply infinite skepticism to the things we don't want to believe, and infinite credulity to the things we do want to believe. A skeptical outlook, broadly applied, is a good thing.
Yomp Jimply

Democracy depends upon empathy. The whole point of democracy is caring about what other people feel and what their interests are, and seeing that their interests are represented. In general, Republicans don’t care about these things.
George Lakoff

123 Fahrenheit in Australia today; it's never been hotter in the southern hemisphere. Thanks for 30 years of climate lies, Exxon:


Bill McKibben
 
I want everybody to remember that the Supreme Court has said the government doesn't have the authority to make people wear a mask when it later says it *does* have the authority to force women to give birth against their will.
Elie Mystal

If you’ve ever felt embarrassed to admit that you care about polar bears or that the loss of some bit of nature that makes home home to you makes you sad, that’s Big Oil in your head and you should absolutely tell them to shut the fuck up.
Amy Westervelt

I just cannot get over how state-level Republicans are passing wave of new voter suppression laws on simple-majority, party-line votes to keep Dems from ever winning another fair election but Manchin & Sinema say it would be too partisan to stop them with simple majority
Ari Berman

A country that treats the filibuster as more sacred than the vote has no business calling itself a democracy
@RevJacquiLewis

Sinema says she "has listened to Arizonans" but she hasn't held one town hall with constituents since being elected in 2018.
Kai Newkirk

We no longer live in a stable climate. The instability is worsening quickly. This should terrify everyone alive. And it was all brought to you by the fossil fuel industry, which has known for decades, and did what it could to stop any action.
Peter Kalmus @ClimateHuman

Many people don’t realize that a single EV battery can power 150 modern e-bikes, meaning nobody would ever be stuck in traffic and you’d get home to your own bed sooner.
London Bicycle Café

Many people don’t realize modern long-range EVs like a Tesla have more stored electricity than a typical entire house uses in *multiple days.* With a charged battery, you can watch Netflix or play video games while staying warm, fume-free, for a *LONG* time in a traffic backup.
Steven Dennis

And y'all wonder why young people don't want to become teachers:

Lorena Germán @nenagerman

In-person conferences are very, very bad for the planet: "[Pre-pandemic] the global conference industry was contributing to 0.14-5.31 billion tons of CO₂ equivalent/year, or the same as the annual greenhouse gas emissions of the entire United States."
David Zipper

FYI, when an officer dies of COVID—it’s considered a line of duty death, with all the benefits. When a nurse or doctor dies of COVID, which over 3,600 died the first year—no one cares. Also, COVID is eligible worker’s comp for law enforcement, but not for healthcare workers.
@womenbaseball1

A wonderful dream for your afternoon: if 54 high-income countries shifted to a more plant-based diet, they could cut their agricultural emissions by almost 2/3s and rewild enough land to capture almost 100bn tonnes of carbon.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @DoctorVive

What *really* happened to streetcars? They stopped running efficiently because they were swamped by private automobiles.
Taras Grescoe

In middle school my daughter wanted to do her 'compare and contrast' project on Catholics and Protestants. Her teacher forbad it saying "There's no difference," and then let my daughter's friend do a project on Versace and Gucci.
Harry Brighouse

Kinda wild that Democratss created the two most popular programs in American history (Social Security and Medicare), which created 40 years of Democratic political supremacy… and then they were like “let’s never do something like that ever again.”
David Sirota

I respect the individual choices of all Londoners in this 1854 cholera epidemic. If you have cholera and want to defecate in the drinking water, that is your individual freedom. If you are afraid of getting cholera yourself, simply don't drink, cook, clean, or bathe with water.
Neoliberal John Snow

HOW COOL IS THIS NEW COUNCIL CHAMBERS ART:


Sherry Johnson @FacilitatorSher

NFTs are just beanie babies for people who get mad at whenever there are black women in Star Wars
Guy Freire

For a powerful segment of the population, climate and Covid are the very first encounters with a total disregard for their lives, and a total lack of control. They have been in the tantrum phase for a couple years now, I honestly don’t know what comes next but I’m bracing for worse
Amy Westervelt

Folks if you don't get that it's not just the senate but the states gerrymandering every thing to hell idk what to tell you. This is why the get out and vote isn't enough. It is being destroying voting rights on federal and state level and follow Ari Berman
ProfB @AntheaButler

When people of color don’t finish school, they are “dropouts”. When wealthy, white kids drop out, they are embraced as innovators, where school was holding them back. Holmes, Zuck, Ellison, Ted Turner, etc
Barry Graubart

Systemic racism does not mean “lots of racists in the system.” It means even if there were zero racists present, the system would still disproportionately harm people of certain races. It's disheartening that many educated people in extremely high places don't understand this.
Kenny Akers

"The people trying to make things better are going about it wrong" is the template for about 80 percent of online hot takes and it is so, so tedious.
David Roberts @drvolts

“…the better we make transport systems for people using cars, the worse it is for everyone else.” —David Levinson
Søren Have

A Rawlsian cost–benefit experiment reveals that 45% of Black respondents prefer to be robbed or burglarized than to be questioned by the police “without good reason,” and 52% prefer it over being searched. Confrontational police stops, then, may be as traumatizing as crime.
Justin T. Pickett

Chris Christie nuking his future political career because he felt the need to take revenge on the Democratic Mayor of Fort Lee for not endorsing him in a race that he was up 20 points in at the time will never not be funny
@maxtmcc

cried reading a book last night that talks about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire - 146 people died and we still remember them - their compatriots allowed the horror to motivate them to action and it changed the world for the better. today we’re throwing people away by the thousand. my grandmother was born 12 years after the fire but in that part of New York, and it had a huge impact on her. She would often describe the fire in her dementia as if she had seen it. Memorialization is so important and we have no space to do any right now
@RubyGraceLevine

I love my wife beyond measure, and our marriage being happy is not a sufficient reason for our whole society to be structured around an institution that is honestly incidental to our happiness.
Marion Teniade Johnson

You can be a safe driver, yet risk of dying depends on local road conditions, emergency response capacity, and actions of other drivers. You can take all Covid precautions, yet risk of dying still depends on local spread, hospital capacity, and the actions of those around you.
Jerome Adams

We are experiencing the expansion of disposability and that will always be framed as inevitability.
Puff the Magic Hater @MsKellyMHayes

Woke Mitt Romney’s Dad. Unfortunately I recall Obama Admin HUD Julian Castro was criticized for essentially attempting to do the same thing as Romney in 60s. If I recall, this effort/rule was repealed upon Trump Admin start?


Nate Hood

Reading the recent Supreme Court transcript, it occurred to me, not for the first time, that in an increasingly crowded, technological society the scientific illiteracy of lawyers is a real problem.
Charles C. Mann (about the vaccine mandate case)

In a sane world, Covid would be inspiring us to adopt new policies to avert future pandemics. In the real world, we're going to get rollbacks of longstanding MMR/TDAP mandates and new epidemics of diseases we conquered years ago.
Matthew Yglesias

streaming supreme court oral arguments has been great. before if you wanted to convince someone the court was full of hacks and morons you had to walk them through years of jurisprudence. now you just let them listen to 5 minutes of these dipshits talking
@The_Law_Boy

Not sure the OSHA arguments could have gone any worse. The fact that we let these six people run the country is something we're just not going to survive.
Elie Mystal

Shoup has a quote about how cities now "limit the density of people in order to limit the density of cars." Mitigating the impacts of cars and driving is the principal purpose of modern zoning. No American city is even close to overcrowded, except with motor vehicles. Not one.
Daniel Herriges @DanielStrTowns

The easiest part of NIMBYism to understand is that many people basically like things the way they are, and view any change as risky.  This impulse is common to left-NIMBY and right-NIMBY.  This is the "loss aversion" cognitive bias.
Kenneth Duda

If you’re 45 years old or younger, more Americans have died in the past 22 months from COVID than have died in your entire lifetime from homicide.
David Menschel @davidminpdx

The GOP’s five racial talking points on repeat.

1. Proclaim that structural racism is a “left-wing myth."
2. Say that CRT or the 1619 Project or antiracism is the real or new "racism"—and say it's widespread. Deny the paradox and carry on.
3. Call the antiracist writer “woke,” a “grifter” or “Marxist.”
4. Read (and misrepresent) a quote with the number “1619” or the words “White,” “Whiteness,” or “discrimination” from a book they haven’t read.
5. Self-identify as “not racist” and evoke MLK.

Did I miss anything?
Ibram X. Kendi

the most infuriating things about the teacher union debate is that there are already states that ban teachers unions, the result has not been better schools (most of these states have below average outcomes), and this is basically never mentioned.
mark @kept_simple

I just assumed after two decades of getting groped shoeless at the airport that if you tried to force your way into the locked down capitol with half the chain of command inside you’d die instantly in a hail of gunfire and well happy anniversary to learning boy was that wrong
kilgore trout @KT_So_It_Goes

All these conspiracy theories, whether it’s the New World Order, the Deep State, or QAnon, rely on a public misunderstanding of globalism and neoliberalism, and replace greed and systematic capitalism with supernatural evil and dramatic plots.
Jared Yates Sexton

Ohio's lawyer arguing at the Supreme Court against OSHA vaccine-or-test mandate for workers is arguing remotely today because he tested positive for the virus as part of the Supreme Court's own test mandate for lawyers.
Lawrence Hurley

These people declared war on you and tried to murder you. Why are you still begging them to play at government with you? Republicans are very clear and organized on what they’re doing. It’s everybody else who’s struggling to coordinate a response. I see folks yelling at them about not participating in the commemorations today like that has any impact on their agenda.
@BreeNewsome

Traffic projections abd models too often use the past (where we’ve been inducing driving) to predict the future. They’re ALL based on assumptions that are often wrong. And even if projections end up “right," it's usually a self-fulfilling prophesy resulting from the model itself.
Brent Toderian

computer culture used to be “information wants to be free”, now it’s “how can i bring ownership to things you can’t own”
@afivegantenna

This is a favorite line in the GOP arsenal. “Stop being so divisive,” said the white nationalist inciting violence at the Capitol and disenfranchising millions of Black and brown voters.
Mondaire Jones

The word of the day among pro-Trump media in response to Biden's speech appears to be "divisive"
Eugene Scott

Don't confuse arrogance with expertise.
Lyz Lenz

If they want to keep the federal minimum wage at $7.25 great just adjust the price of college to $500 per semester and rent on one bedroom apartments to $400/month and we’re even
Julia Claire

Maybe this is too obvious to even be worth pointing out, but the *minimal* response of a sane country to Jan. 6 would be to bar Donald Trump from ever again holding elected office.
David Roberts @drvolts

The GOP is the single biggest threat not only to democracy but to life on Earth. That’s not an exaggeration.
RobertOSimonson

I really hope the rest of the world knows that the Republican Party is a threat to not only this democracy but international stability.
John Pavlovitz

"In a pandemic, all options are bad" is the thing that our extremely coddled political and media class absolutely refuses to accept, at least in their personal lives.
Will Stancil

I keep thinking about how much Jan 6 was prepared for by years of rhetoric that that some Americans are more “real” than others. People like the rioters internalize that and decide that if too many less-“real” Americans get to legally vote, that election is illegitimate.
James Poniewozik

Please ask yourself why the breakdown of public education, the free press, and public health is a primary goal for dark money. Ask yourself why *billions* in private funds are being spent to discredit Black scholarship and journalism instead of eradicating the virus.
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas @Ebonyteach

Stephanie Grisham, speaking on New Day after talking to the Jan. 6 committee, says Trump was “gleefully” watching the Capitol attack from the White House dining room, hitting rewind and saying: “Look at all those people fighting for me.”
Manu Raju

Kids are people. Mothers of children are people. Both groups are disproportionately low income and have high social needs. If your political philosophy is the government should do more to help people but parents should be solely responsible for children, it’s totally incoherent
Angie Schmitt @schmangee

Slaves already told us what we should do with plantations: burn them down. But y'all wanna do everything but that.
@Lamiasdottir

False scarcity turns natural allies into enemies.
@MichaelMoroneso

If the DOJ does *not* hold Trump and his circle accountable, all hell will break loose, AND, if the DOJ *does* hold them accountable, all hell will break loose. But the latter upholds the rule of law.
Leah McElrath

75% of women experiencing domestic abuse said they would go to their church first for help but of those who did, only 4% said they would ever do so again.
The PCA Cares

Some people on this website are justly angry but should still probably log off because it doesn't seem great for their health or furthering positive discourse
Dave Blomquist

"Somebody will stop it" is a feature of democratic backsliding. It's a comforting but naive complacency, an assumption that institutions we're born into are like physics, and not fragile constructions that can falter if powerful people stop honoring them and others let it slide.
Nicholas Grossman @NGrossman81

We endured a homegrown terrorist attack and a year of dangerous, traitorous nonsense, all because a really insecure man was incapable of simply admitting he lost—and tens of millions of people were willing to destroy their nation to shield him from reality.
John Pavlovitz

Reminder: Both are wearing black but only one will be faulted for it:


Tom Flood

I think I'd actually prefer an even less subtle version of Don't Look Up, wherein the the earth can be saved from the comet if people stop driving SUVs, but no one will give them up and everyone dies as a result
@cafedujord

Since the CDC says a 10-day lockdown would tank the economy, it stands to reason that if US labor went on general strike for 9 days we could demand anything we wanted
Ryan Houlihan

The police spending is generally in liberal states, the highest homicide rates are in the South.
Matthew Yglesias

One thing the pandemic showing pretty obviously is the absolute lack of ability the state has to make non-punitive interventions. They could do grocery drop offs, mail free tests to people, etc, etc. But that doesn’t involve police so it’s not a reputable solution!
Amanuel Teferi @AManYouLove_T

People who live in New York City greatly overestimate the interest with which the rest of the country is invested in your mayor.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

Pro-climate leaders are relying entirely on electrification to meet their transportation climate goals while driving up vehicle miles traveled by sticking with old bad projects and not doing near enough to electrify to the extent needed period, much less to make up for increasing VMT.
Beth Osborne

If you’re frustrated about the higher-impact measures that have to be taken now because less dramatic measures weren’t implemented earlier, just wait until you hear about climate change policy.
Stephen Turner @st3v3turn3r

Hello to all the new followers I haven't already blocked. You may also enjoy my "Dunning-Krugerrands" tag.
@jwz (commenting on cryptocurrency)

"Attempted coup does not change public opinion" is one of those things we've grown so familiar with over the past few years: hitting the reductio ad absurdam and then ... just continuing right on.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

So much of this country's politics would change if its young men received regular psychotherapy.
David Roberts @drvolts

Once again I'm begging you: please stop using the phrase "reduce emissions." Over 90% of fossil fuel use needs to end permanently. That is not conveyed by the verb "reduce." People have no idea, but you can help fix that! Try using "virtually eliminate emissions" instead.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @DoctorVive

Congrats to the health insurance industry execs and the govt officials who decided that teeth aren't part of the body. Just a real slam dunk there.
@0debtzone

If you want an idea of just how fast everything went to shit, in 2010 Pat Toomey was considered too much of a lunatic conservative to be a viable candidate. Now he's retiring cause his caucus is full of lunatics.
@JoePostingg

I'm always amazed when people who'd never publicly admit to, say, having a substance abuse problem think nothing of describing themselves as a "really competitive person" — apparently oblivious to the serious psychological dysfunction (and moral defect) that they're revealing. They're not saying only that they feel compelled to excel (which, like any compulsion, is troubling enough) but that they need to triumph over other people — i.e., to succeed by making others fail. In a healthy (non-adversarial) culture, this would be seen as a cry for help.
Alfie Kohn

Display ad detail, Minneapolis Journal, Jan. 3, 1903:


Gary Hornseth

What if I told you that your ideas about politics are actually just your ideas about childhood extrapolated?
Toby Rollo

Science deniers are the worst, but some of the most damaging takes on the pandemic have come from those who *understand* science and data, but don’t understand inequity and injustice.
Dr. Lucky Tran

Apparently in Luxembourg your commute is part of your workday and that made me wonder how cities would look different if the employer was obligated to pay you for your commuting time. The difference it would make in the kinds of infrastructure that is prioritized.
@gindaanis

Don't forget to enjoy the world you're trying to save. Social justice, health, wealth, love, and happiness aren't mutually exclusive.
Bougie Black Girl

All kids want to learn. Don’t confuse school with learning. Not all kids want to learn what you have to teach. you have a captive audience. You are holding the hoop they must jump through.
@Sisyphus38

in a world where we claim to care about climate change, driving shouldn’t be mandated to participate in society, and parking shouldn’t be free
@walkabilityfan

I love how we celebrate New Year's by dropping the ball.
@Wieneraaron