Bluesky, October 2023

I'm still waiting to see if there's a great switchover from Twitter to Bluesky. This summary is the longest one yet for Bluesky, and as with my previous ones, I once again liked relatively more posts with images than I did on Twitter. The topics are similar to the ones I included yesterday for Twitter, though there was significantly less content in my Bluesky feed about Israel and Palestine. That has to do with the nature of the people I follow on Bluesky vs. Twitter: some of the most active Twitter news-oriented accounts have not shifted to Bluesky.

As always, the posts are in reverse chronological order except some of the images, which I sometimes move up or down to get better visual distribution.

Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account.

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Here's to Diane Arbus's halloween photos—spooky, warm, intimate, tender:

Angus Johnston

Trunk-or-treating: It's not a rural phenomenon, but a suburban one; its origins lie in churches, especially Latter Day Saints churches; it's quite longstanding (at least 34 years old!); and it's a product of car culture and social ties.
Paul MusGRAVE @profmusgrave.bsky.social

Ron DeSantis: all the insecurities and malevolence of Napoleon Bonaparte with the charisma of Napoleon Dynamite
Geoff Nesnow @dontinnovate.bsky.social

People get all upset about candy at halloween but its the cars that kill the kids
@lordbusinessman.bsky.social

Maybe New Yorkers think it's normal but it is objectively funny that there are cops standing around doing jack shit everywhere
Michael Hobbes

Love that we have an extremist, Christian Nationalist Speaker who’s just openly saying God chose him to oppress people and the GOP front runner is a con man leading a religious cult that thinks he’s a messiah and journalists are just like, sure, fine, whatever.
Jared Yates Sexton

Two #localangle facts I've run across lately:
- Minnesota has the most cities on the Mississippi River of any state (above some pop. number, I think 10,000)
- Minneapolis has the most bridges over the Mississippi of any city
Chris Steller

MAGA homoerotica is definitely a thing:


@johnrossmd.bsky.social

"Change is hard." –person who benefits from change, empathizing
Chris Steller

In breaking Twitter, Elon Musk ensured that the incredible wealth of history bound up in tweets cannot be preserved – as for example if historians wanted to learn more about what people thought about the current genocidal attack on Palestinians and what kind of misinformation was spread as it happened
@sesmith.bsky.social

it annoys me a bit when they talk about theft and self-checkout bc... you chose to implement that. and I'm sure you had a good look at the numbers and balanced theft losses against wage savings, and you decided to implement it. so don't complain now. you can go back to employing humans, too!
@marximilian.bsky.social

I was on the sidewalk today when I was sideswiped by a bat who underestimated her wingspan. She was about four years old and was headed to a park with a fairy and a devil. This - friends, imagination, holidays – is what childhood should be for all children, never bombs, shrapnel, and explosions.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social

That Smithsonian employee is a fucking hero. Build them a monument:


@profgabriele.com

Progressive Jews and Muslims have the most nuanced, historically grounded and empathetic views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by far, but our voices are almost entirely drowned out by reactionaries on both sides. It’s so frustrating.
Joshua Holland

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

No one should be punished for the bad things their ancestors did. But if you’re going to insist that everyone else honor your ancestors specifically for those bad things, then yeah, you’re an asshole and you deserve to be ridiculed.
Radley Balko

Don't give the keys of power to the people who (for various reasons) don't think they need a planet. Also don't give the keys of power to people who know they need a planet but don't intend to share it.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social

every time i read about this chump [Sam Bankman Fried], i'm amazed at how low effort the con was. it basically amounted to going to rich people and saying "obviously a unkempt, antisocial white guy with money can't be incompetent, right?"
@jbouie.bsky.social

Like, just how techbros have accidentally re-invented a lot of existing products with so-called "disruptions," Elon's going to end up rediscovering Communism before he can make this work. What if we took micropayments withheld from paychecks towards a centrally managed fund overseen by a party motivated to create a public surplus and then used those withholdings to generate large works projects that would otherwise be unviable? And the withholdings were based on an individual's means
Patrick Gerard

Your regular reminder that solar farms take up less of the UK than golf courses:


Simon Evans

I think a lot (99%) of what wannabe edgy pundits blame on smartphones in terms of isolation and disconnection is actually cars.
happify

By the end of September, more than half of the world’s countries could fit inside the land burned this year in Canada. “I can’t think of any analogy for the extent to which the modern records were not only broken but destroyed here,” says climate scientist John Abatzoglou.
Katharine Hayhoe

Watching republicans try to get something done in a context where they can't use shenanigans like gerrymandering or voter suppression is illuminating.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social

I don't think most people understand just how badly the Hays code and the Comics Code destroyed American art, as well as creating the hallucinated alt-history America that fuels modern reactionary movements
@impemboganecue.bsky.social

"Inquiring minds want to know." Ah yes, the statement that absolutely tells you finding out the answer is 100% not what they want to do.
T. Zachary Watford @xehtfodrol.bsky.social

I'm seeing an uptick in "we don't have time for equity," about climate action and while I would love to live in a world where it is equity considerations that is delaying climate, that's not it, folks. It's the fossil fuel industry, which means we need power to overcome them and the way we build power is by building a multi-racial, multi-class movement. This requires including issues that are important to people's immediate needs, i.e. economic and social considerations, not just talking about transmission lines and greenhouse gas emissions reductions.
J. Mijin Cha

When you are a short person, sometimes tall people just sort of stand over you and start…talking. Like they exist on a different plane of existence and their sounds and food and what have you don’t filter down.
@tressiemcphd.bsky.social

You can disagree personally, but the science is very clear that most people only act when they feel efficacy; and that’s why my goal isn’t to make more unworried people worried but rather to activate the 62% who are already worried but not acting.
Katharine Hayhoe

I could not love this more:

David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

Pfizer produces the Covid treatment Paxlovid for $13. They’re charging $1390 for it. Pfizer donated $5.7 million to members of Congress since Covid began to get government contracts and keep drug prices high. Price gouging is legal because our campaign finance laws are broken.
Melanie D’Arrigo @darrigomelanie.bsky.social

The American Museum of Natural History in NYC has artifacts looted from dead children at the Wounded Knee massacre and has made no effort to return them. Extra infuriating, the people who attack NAGPRA always claim that returned artifacts are "lost to science." But (as the article notes) museums have had these objects for more than 100 yrs but researchers and curators have paid so little attention to them that they aren't even catalogued properly.
Charles C. Mann

Urban drivers will be like, "Sorry I almost killed you, I was just in a hurry to wait at a stop light 200 feet down the road."
Adam Kotsko

For all the talk about autonomous vehicles in San Francisco, automated traffic enforcement is the bigger story when it comes to road safety.
Ned Resnikoff @resnikoff.bsky.social

Weird label placement strikes again:


Jeremy Arr Jenkins

Just 11% of the world flew in 2018. A tiny group of very frequent flyers, 1% of world population, account for 50% of airline emissions. A French climate expert called for people to be limited to just four flights in their lifetime. 41% said they were in favour.
Will Yeates

Every study ever: Fewer cars, reliable transit, and safe active transportation options are good things.
Cities: Hmm I don't know, can we really trust every study ever done?
Tom Flood

The denial of the medical complicatedness of pregnancy is of a piece with the notion that pregnancy is a physically passive experience for the pregnant woman, something akin to charging your phone—and not the exhausting and taxing process that it is.
Moira Donegan

Anyone not currently in college who is obsessed with ‘campus politics’ is a freak, and I’ll say it, a perv, a deviant, a thing of great repulsion and terrible stench
Bill Corbett

“campus politics in america” is such an embarrassing phrase
Jack Mirkinson

Solar eclipse through an aspen leaf with ladybug – Montana:


Tom Astle @tjalamont.bsky.social

The problem with being "David Duke without the baggage" is a good chunk of the party is in it for the baggage
Gillian Branstetter

In my experience the people most despondent about our ecological predicaments are the ones who confuse the behavior of those at the top of the pyramid scheme of capitalism with 'human nature.'
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social

2000–2008 is all war panic fever dream false resurrection of the neocons, a zombie era.
2008–2023 is the zero interest playpen, what if an entire nation got a holodeck
John Leavitt @leavittalone.bsky.social

people who make a big deal about “moist” being gross are unprepared for the mind-blowing power of “sputum”
It’s Ruby @ruby613.bsky.social

Advertisement detail
Minneapolis Breakfast Food
International Food Co.
Minneapolis, Minn.
c. 1905
Image: Hennepin County Library via Minnesota Digital Library:


Gary Hornseth

exposure to the Fox News channel reduces local government revenues and expenditures because Fox News improves election chances for local Republicans, alters politician campaign agendas, and shifts voter policy preferences on fiscal issues
Matt Grossmann

Democide is the mass and/or systematic extermination of a people by its own government *without* necessarily targeting a specific group. Genocide is the most common type of democide, but the broader term includes things like government-caused mass famines or deliberately untreated pandemics.
Ada Palmer

"The problem is not that the public opposes wind and solar. The problem is that a few dozen people can block or waylay a project no matter how the broader public feels."
Heatmap News (What Polls Can Miss About Americans’ Love of Wind and Solar Power)

To limit global warming to '1.5°C with no or limited overshoot', the decline in global CO2 emissions relative to 2019 are:
* 48% by 2030
* 80% by 2040
* 99% by 2050
It is 2023 and global CO2 emissions are still rising!
Glen Peters

It's odd to pick Columbus as the symbol of Italian-dom, when he left Italy as quick as he could, never returned, and was ashamed of his Italian family and dumped his Italian name. If you want to celebrate Italians in America, how about great scientist and fierce anti-fascist Enrico Fermi?
Charles C. Mann

I need a word like ‘petrichor’ but for the smell of a heater when it’s turned on for the first cold day of autumn, after having been unused all summer.
Deb Chachra

College town NIMBYs when student housing is built to house the main economic drivers of their entire community:


YIMBYLAND

The occupation is an intolerable crime, and resistance to it is a fundamental right, and murdering civilians is wrong, and collective punishment of an entrapped population is immoral. We live in a world of ands, not ors.
Laila Lalami

I think one of the worst quirks of online spaces is the idea that if someone doesn't post about something, they don't care about it. It encourages performative posting often makes things worse. I care a lot. I just don't want to add another poorly-informed voice. I'm reading and thinking.
@bextraordinary.bsky.social

We are living through the most dramatic geopolitical realignment since the mid-1940s and the most dramatic rewiring of how humans communicate since at least the 15th century. Buckle your seatbelts.
Eric Roston

On about a third of days in 2023, the average global temperature was at least 1.5C higher than pre-industrial levels.
Will Yeates

This ad copy is art. It's like the winning entry in a one-sentence use-all-the-buzzwords contest. I've read it several times and I still have no clue what it means:


Binyamin Appelbaum

losing twitter is like losing the library of alexandria if the library of alexandria was 80% hate crimes but also 20% the most wonderful conversations and stories to ever exist
rosie @kiranerys.bsky.social

Imagine if those calculations of fossil fuel subsidies included highways and the value of parking spaces and the health system outlays for diseases of air pollution.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social

Transphobes who get mad about pronouns are weak. I speak Vietnamese. The pronoun I use for myself and the person I’m talking to or about depends on how old I am, how old they are, whether they’re a relative, whether they’re related to my mom or my dad, gender, and more. There are over 20 of them.
Trung Le Capecchi-Nguyễn @trungles.bsky.social

The world is now installing about one gigawatt of solar power daily--the rough equivalent of a nuclear power plant a day.
billmckibben

Oh the future — when to be human is to be a scab to a machine.
James Huctwith @sugartax.bsky.social

what I thought was the future, is a bunch of people who want to go back to the bad old past using tech spreading disinfo to try and drag everyone there
Kathy Gori

Was pondering self-checkout the other day, and came up with "hyper-failure,"  technological, political and ecological in one massive shitshow
@jimmyrayjones.bsky.social

I'd want an equitable low-carbon society and a highly efficient circular economy even if I didn't live on a finite planet with uncertain tipping points. How about you? A two-for-the-price of one sale: Peace, justice and beauty plus compliance with non-negotiable planetary rules.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social

Let's keep arguing about parking spaces, everybody:


Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social

Underemphasized how much "groomer!" stuff is fueled by how big conservative institutions — Catholic and Southern Baptist, Boy Scouts, school athletics — have been rocked for years now by actual examples of powerful people molesting kids and covering it up. It's a redirection of that real trauma response.
Andy Craig

The loss of twitter means loss of years-long cultivated academic communities, climate communities across researchers-practitioners-activists-citizens, Global South/BIPOC communities and so much more. Learning, sharing, building solidarities and kinship all fractured now. That’s the real tragedy to me.
Prof. Farhana Sultana

READ THIS: “Elon Musk admitted to his biographer that the reason the Hyperloop was announced — even though he had no intention of pursuing it — was to try to disrupt the California high-speed rail project to get in the way of that actually succeeding.” — @parismarx.bsky.social
Brent Toderian

Occasionally, somebody on the old site still gets it exactly right:


Charles C. Mann

"Right now millionaires alone are on track to burn 72 percent of the remaining carbon budget to keep the planet under 1.5°C of warming. This is an egregious assault on humanity and the living world, and none of us should accept it."
Jason Hickel

I think it's funny that people who believe gender is fake also believe in beta males and alpha males. Like that's two genders right there and we haven't even gotten to women
Gillian Branstetter

I don't understand how people write article after article about how cryptocurrency is a terrible scam (true) without even mentioning its massive carbon footprint. Crypto has a climate problem.
Leah Stokes

I think it is especially sad when adults focus on a period of their home countries' history that ended a 1000 years ago. This whole Vikings obsession is like a middle aged man still wearing their letterman’s jacket. But with added racist/anti-Semitic vibes
@llamaviking.bsky.social

Not suspicious:


Chris Steller

Op-ed pages have broadly decided that it is their business to publish falsifiable bullshit. It ain't great.
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

latin is basically spanx for dumbasses
@swimming-blerd.bsky.social

excellent system, where a handful of deranged nihilists can shut down the entire government on a whim, no notes.
Tom Tomorrow