Twitter managed to make it through another month, though I guess Melon Husk's evil minions are now mining my data for their nefarious ends, and I'm complicit in supporting him in some way by continuing with the platform despite his escalating antisemitism and racism. I wouldn't see any of his dreck if people didn't keep talking about it and amplifying it, and I do my best to block every ad that comes through my feed. I have no idea what that does for their statistics (does it count as a view?), and therefore the company's income, though.
I continue to hang on at Twitter because there are some writers who just don't appear to be moving elsewhere. Almost all of my Saint Paul and Minneapolis mutuals have migrated to Bluesky, but the people who I think of as climate and racial justice thinkers, plus some prominent urbanist/housing writers, have not and may never. It's frustrating; I would love to get off of that stinking ship.
As far as new topics go, November was a second month full of slaughter in Palestine and continuing Trump legal machinations. It began with relatively good news in the 2022 U.S. elections.
Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account, and is in reverse chronological order, except some of the visuals, which I move up and down to get better image balance in the post.
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The Tesla Cybertruck reveals our true priorities. It will cost >$50K, weigh >3 tons, with extreme power and acceleration and a stainless steel body. It will qualify for $7,500 federal + $5,000 Colorado EV tax credits and also for a 100% tax work truck tax deduction.
Jim Charlier
The world just doubled installed solar capacity in a mere 18 months. Because solar power is the cheapest source of electricity in history.
Assaad Razzouk
A Texas bumper sticker:
Leah McElrath
Sen. Rafael Edward Cruz, who uses the preferred name Ted, has introduced a bill to limit the use of preferred names and pronouns.
San Antonio Express-News
Pay attention to what happens with SEC v. Jarkesy. If it goes the wrong way, has the potential to demolish every government institution that has inconvenienced the rich, the powerful, and the conservative since the dawn of the New Deal.
Charles P. Pierce
Kissinger: “If it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be antisemitic…. Any people who has been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong.”
hannah gais
Years of private equity-gutted newsrooms, the collapse of the financial structures that made deeply reported news more profitable than clickbait, and social media algorithm optimization have produced a propaganda behemoth dedicated to telling us everything is bad all the time.
Armand Domalewski
I was reading about why Japanese cities have such healthy, thriving, walkable small business districts: Permissive zoning and low barriers to entry … and it makes many of their streetscapes look and feel fantastic. A classic case of: Chaotic, but smart.
Nathaniel Hood @natehoodstp
One of the wildest features of US politics is that if you took the average person on the street and accurately described the GOP's behavior and plans to them, *they wouldn't believe you*. The party is so shit that it is literally unbelievable. It's immunized itself!
David Roberts @drvolts
For nearly every year for the past several decades, the police have chosen to arrest more people for marijuana possession than all "violent crime" combined. This is their own data. They chose to do that with their budgets rather than even test 100,000s of rape kits.
Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec
The block that votes most reliably (those over 65) has given themselves:
- UBI (SSI)
- Free, universal healthcare (Medicare)
- Affordable housing (Prop 13, rent control for properties before 1994)
- Inflated the value of their assets (NIMBYism)
Keep voting.
Bella Chu
Everyone is “the law is the law” about bikes and scooters until you suggest zero tolerance and zero margin enforcement for speeding in cars, and then it’s “well but the speed limit is too low” and “exceeding the limit is akshewally legal when passing donchaknow.”
Jeremy Cole
Just showing that people will judge others no matter what they do:
Jade Kelly @FatallyFlawed5
To be honest, if Trump wins we all know this incessant coverage about cost of living will literally end the next day. Maybe in part because Trump will be so chaotic the media will chase that instead of trying to be "even-handed."
Darrell Owens @IDoTheThinking
Given that inflation is the American electorate’s top concern, the fact that Donald Trump is campaigning on a comprehensive plan for making stuff more expensive should really be getting more attention.
Eric Levitz
A century ago, with incomes much lower, Americans spent only 1–2% of their income on transportation. Today, as Jerome Segal says, the average American family works from January 1 until March 14 just to pay for transportation.
Aaron Lubeck
It’s interesting that nobody seems to care or have noticed that the proposed aid to Israel has been indefinitely stalled in the House over GOP demands to help rich people cheat on their taxes. The politics of this issue are 99% vibes.
Matthew Yglesias
Some people struggle with the notion of privilege and the whole idea that "to the privileged, equality feels like oppression," often because it's bound up with ethnicity and nationality and tribe. But if you want to see a clean, laboratory example, just take a look at: drivers. There's no group of people in US culture more consistently privileged, for longer. And there's no group that is more gobsmacked and outraged when there is the slightest reform in the direction of equality, or more prone to claiming victimhood.
David Roberts @drvolts
We can build more community-oriented housing in the US, collaboratively developed housing built and designed by residents. The building code needs to be reformed to allow co-housing projects like Seattle's CHUC that can be a model for community oriented infill across the US:
Sean Jursnick
I wonder if the development of the Disposable Society took away the mental tools we had for repair. We can repair this world, our communities, our food systems, our carbon cycles. We can repair past wrongs and work on this world so that it works for all.
@BuildSoil
“Either you let us kill your whole family or we let Republicans kill you” is not the sales pitch you think it is buddy
@uhshanti
So tired of people in education using this rhetoric: the world is unfair and cruel, so we should be replicate those injustices in our classrooms to "prepare them." Absolutely not. I want my classroom to be a safe place; not a reflection of the world as it is, but as it could be.
Zach Wilson
It feels like far too often the justification for bad assessment practices in the classroom is...to make sure students are prepared for more bad assessment practices. Quite the cycle we've created for ourselves, right?
@MarcusLuther6
As I put it last year in my blunt advice to Irish cities, “Your goal SHOULDN’T be to replace a million fossil fuel vehicles with a million electric vehicles. It should be to replace a million fossil fuel vehicles with 250K electric vehicles. The main answer HAS to be FEWER cars."
Brent Toderian
If you can only understand decolonization as some form of mass expulsion, you’ve got some work to do.
Ben Ehrenreich
"There is no such thing as society," isn't just an empty slogan: it's a weapon for dismantling the democratically accountable structures that can stand against industrial tyrants.
Cory Doctorow
Christians spend generations warning us about the coming of the Antichrist, and when he does show up, they line up to vote for him
Alex Cole @acnewsitics
We need to replace every Confederate statue left standing with this:
Robert Moffitt @justplainbob
If capitalism is ‘natural,’ why was so much force used to build it?
Rob Hopkins @robintransition
On this day in 1958 [November 24], the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Alabama's School Placement Law, which was designed to maintain segregation and allowed school boards to assign students to schools at their own discretion.
Equal Justice Initiative @eji_org
US coal power plants killed at least 460,000 people over the past 20 years - twice as many premature deaths as previously thought, with updated understanding of dangers of air pollution (PM2.5)
Dr. Melissa C. Lott (linking to The Guardian
Imagine if this had been incorporated into the price of coal power.
David Roberts @drvolts
What far right figures like Wilders and Milei offer is to make all the complicated stuff go away. They block any reckoning with capital (after all they are backed by VERY big money), avoid questions of power and control and deflect the blame for our dysfunctions onto scapegoats.
George Monbiot
What happens when we limit the space for cars? When we fill the space above with trees and the space below with thriving civic life?
Qagggy!
I can’t get over the practice of calling people “Palestinian” while also claiming Palestine is not a place with any history or ethnic groups
@BreeNewsome
Tax private luxury; fund public abundance.
David Roberts @drvolts
I hate true crime. Imagine being murdered and some girl out there is like “omg that’s my favorite murder”
@historicalfits
Roughly 90% of every group with ‘American,’ ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty’ in the title is a dog whistle for people who care nothing about those concepts.
@sircharlesohio
On this day in 1865 [November 22], the Mississippi legislature authorized local officials to identify all minor Black children who were orphans or whose parents could not properly care for them. Once identified, the courts were to “apprentice” Black children to white “masters or mistresses." This law sought to recreate the enslaver-enslaved conditions of involuntary servitude that existed prior to emancipation:
Equal Justice Initiative @eji_org
Dear AP Stylebook:
Will 2023 be the year you stop using "minority" to describe people of color and Indigenous people? Is it a word editors would still use in 10 years to describe white people? If not, then even among AP staff, the word has deeper connotations of power and dominance. Using "minority" as shorthand for groups that hold less political or financial power due to decades of structural racism/misogyny is a subtle but critical way it also reinforces that power dynamic of whiteness as the "norm."
MollyPeonies
Imagine looking at these and thinking: “my neighborhood is ruined”:
YIMBYLAND
The thing I want to point out about this headline [referring to Roslynn Carter] is that men are never called "outspoken," they just speak.
Amy Diehl, Ph.D.
There are many ways to become a monster but ethnic nationalism may be the quickest route.
Ben Ehrenreich
Folks — it is nuts to violently steal somebody’s land and then complain you can’t live in peace with them so they must be eliminated entirely.
@BreeNewsome
early 1990s corolla hatchback's total height is same as the present land
cruiser's front end. just an absolute abdication of political
leadership on safety:
Mike Eliason @holz_bau
It's extremely easy to see how a society created by selfish people is inherently doomed
@HighOnPopRocks
When I hear Biden say that Jewish people need Israel for our protection, I’m reminded that western leaders use Israel to shirk responsibility of protecting Jews in their own countries. Why should I need a US military outpost in the Middle East to protect me? This is all propaganda
Amanda Gelender @agelender
FYI:
David Cay Johnston
Today [November 19] is World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims. Notably, Americans are 2-5x more likely to die in a crash than those in peer nations. And the gap is widening.
David Zipper
As long as I live, I will never understand why most professional US media acts as if any kind of activism disqualifies you for life, but having been a soldier or general or cop who has killed people qualifies you to be a reporter, analyst, news anchor, or editor in chief.
Steven W. Thrasher, PhD @thrasherxy
People really are bothered that young folks aren’t as racist and bigoted as their grandparents
@BreeNewsome
The Dutch concept of ‘gezelligheid’ is hard to translate into English,
but can be best described as a shared state of coziness or togetherness.
While generally reserved for indoor settings, the idea also extends to the thoughtful way the streets and public spaces are designed:
Melissa & Chris Bruntlett @modacitylife
If you think the cost of driving is borne only by individuals who own cars, think again. A Harvard study estimates that the annual price tag for maintaining Massachusetts’ car economy is roughly $64.1 billion, with more than half coming from public funds.
Brent Toderian
If a city has a climate plan, but that plan is not the city's core strategy document, it doesn't really have a climate plan.
Alex Steffen
It’s difficult to put into words how demoralizing it is to watch ethnic cleansing play out using our tax dollars while the people we elected who have the power to stop it gaslight us for being upset.
Leah McElrath
If your street is too wide, too fast, lacks trees, and lacks seating then…I have a curb-bulb-speed-bump-tree-pit-park-bench idea for you:
Qagggy!
The price of Huggies diapers went up 6% between April- June. Inflation, right? Wrong. Kimberly-Clark, the maker of Huggies, reported that the cost to make its products *fell* by $75 million. They took the money and ran, banking $168 million in operating profits in Q3 2023.
Robert Reich
Thank god a white South African has weighed in on whether we should use the word “decolonization”
Heben Nigatu
Maybe each Justice should have an “Accountability Partner,” like Speaker Johnson has for his online porn viewing.
Brett Coughlin
The last decade was about driving down the cost of low-carbon technologies to make them competitive with fossil fuels. This decade is about building them as quickly as we can. Build, build, build. [note that this will drive the costs down even more]
Hannah Ritchie
Indeed:
David Cay Johnston
For all the wide range of topics I've covered on my podcast, when I pull the string and follow it long enough, I almost always end up in one (or both) of two places:
1. We need more planning.
2. Utilities suck and are in the way.
Every clean-energy path leads there!
David Roberts @drvolts
Its funny how every woman knows a victim but no man knows any abusers.
God’s favorite @j0vintage
It's kinda wild that once they dropped the overt climate denialism, the mainstream media more or less left them alone about it, even though "ok it is happening but we're still not doing anything about it" is even MORE psychotic a position.
David Roberts @drvolts
Older study that becomes ever more relevant: "While face to face communication sustains stable cooperation, computer-mediated communication makes cooperative agreements...extremely fragile, giving rise to waves of opportunistic behavior"
Alfie Kohn
The whole genre of "shed a tear for dying, exurban White America," is extra annoying because it always sets the beleaguered town against cities "stealing the youths and opportunity." When American cities died in the 1970s, the response was the mass incarceration of minorities.
Lyndon Baines Johnson
i'm sure social isolation crisis has absolutely nothing to do with tossing massive, anonymous buildings with poor social and economic mix of residents, onto loud, toxic streets - even in auto-centric transit-oriented development...
Mike Eliason @holz_bau
Less than 5% of calls are for fires. There are over 10 times as many deaths and 170 times as many injuries from car crashes than from fires, yet fire departments are often the strongest opponents of improvements to road safety. We are prioritizing big red trucks over human lives:
Bella Chu
Just a reminder, folks, that this Jew and just about every Jew I know thinks AIPAC is to Jewishness something like what the NRA is to conservationist hunters. It does not speak for me, or for Israelis I've known, and I've opposed it since I first learned its name.
Jeff Sharlet
The main ingredient of a child-friendly public space is just an absence of traffic danger. Anything additional is a bonus.
Alice Ferguson @aliceplayingout
Christmas decor isn’t meant to be sleek and minimalist it is supposed to look like joy threw up in your house
stoned cold fox @roastmalone_
Old growth prairies are sacred spaces, no different than a redwood grove.
Prairie Czar
NEW: Sources say AIPAC is gearing up to spend over *$100 MILLION* as part of a campaign to knock the Squad out of Congress in 2024. Cori Bush, Ilhan Omar, Jamaal Bowman, Summer Lee, and Rashida Tlaib are all marked for high dollar challenges.
Alex Sammon
Reporters please use the word “Republicans” rather than “Congress” thank you.
Brian Schatz
A new study from @IIHS_autosafety: "Vehicles with hoods more than 40 inches off the ground... were 44–45 percent more likely to cause pedestrian fatalities than those with... hood heights of 30 inches or less." SUVs and trucks are killing pedestrians:
Yonah Freemark
The key thing to understand is these features that are killing pedestrians have no functional purpose. It’s purely a style choice. The cars are selling because they’re designed to look threatening and they are
Angie Schmitt
It's kinda bonkers that we have a system of highway rest areas with public restrooms for drivers because they might fall asleep and kill themselves or others, but if you walk, bike, or ride transit, good luck with the restroom bit.
Heidi @laflaneuse
Remember when Trump was president and he wouldn't actually start working until noon and he wouldn't read briefings and he would watch Fox most of every day and he spent half his time playing golf? You might have forgotten because the media hasn't made it a goal to remind you every day.
David Roberts @drvolts
It is staggering to kill 11,000 people in less than 40 days. The Troubles in Northern Ireland, which are seen as a time of great violence, killed ~3,700 people — combatants and civilians — in 29 years
Martha Lincoln @heavyredaction
A lot of people believe Black children need to be "broken" when in fact it's the opposite
@ebonyabsolutely
so let me get this straight, the battle is between a nuclear-armed military ethno-supremacist superpower and the NICU ward infants on life support, and if you try to question the fairness of this ultimatum, you get deported or banned for anti-Semitism
@bobuqsayed
A Black person is more likely than a white person to receive the death penalty. Indeed, several times more likely. That's an uncontroversial fact. Yet, as white Americans increase in their adherence to Christian Nationalism, they're more likely to deny that fact. From @PRRIpoll:
Samuel Perry @profsamperry
We went from, "Israel would never bomb a hospital" to, "Israel's has bombed every hospital in Gaza, but it was justified," with no re-evaluation.
@leslieleeiii
The way that certain people read “Free Palestine” as “I hate Jews” feels remarkably similar to the way certain people read “Black Lives Matter” as “white lives don’t matter.”
@DrSamiSchalk
If you belong to a religion which espouses that human rights are not universal, there is something wrong with the religion.
Mirza Ahmad @AhmadPhotog
The American political cycle: elect Republican -> things get bad -> elect Democrat -> things improve -> forget how bad things used to be -> elect Republican
constans
feel like people have kind of memory-holed how bad the trump administration was
@vanillaopinions
“Republicans are all corrupt religious creeps who will stop at nothing to control your lives and bodies” seems like it shouldn’t be a hard message to deliver for the next year.
@JuliusGoat
20 years ago, I said the demand for educational "accountability" was "rooted in a top-down, ideologically driven contempt for public institutions"; it "didn't start in livingrooms but in places like the Heritage Foundation." Same applies now to Moms for Theocracy.
Alfie Kohn
I can't believe Joe Manchin eviscerated Build Back Better and killed the child tax credit and all the housing money, only to not even fucking run for reelection
@steamyporkbuns
Norwegians making us look stupid as hell and we totally deserve it:
Ally Maynard @missmayn
Most policy elites get the formula backwards. They think it’s “improve education and you’ll address inequality.”
Jack Schneider @Edu_Historian
Perhaps the media takeaway from Ohio shouldn't be "abortion remains a winning issue for Democrats!" but "what kind of political system lets abortion be criminalized when it is supported by a clear democratic majority?"
Danny Katch
Conservatives falsely think that art is nothing more than in-group signaling, because they feel alienated by the features that typically constitute good art: exploration of new concepts, boundary breaking, an ability to reveal the inner lives of people who are not ourselves. The fact that these features are what produce beautiful art makes conservatives feel cognitive dissonance. "If my values are so eternal and true, why do they not produce beautiful things?" They don't realize it is because their worldview is death-oriented and art is life-oriented
Daniel Baryon @AnarkYouTube
Sure, but can we also agree that this is an absurd belief: "49% thought Donald Trump’s top priority was bringing down 'prices on goods, services, and gas.'" It's bizarre that anyone would think he's focused on this.
John Reeves @reevesjw
there’s a certain sort of person who wants to blame Biden more for judges overturning Roe v Wade and blocking large-scale student debt relief (though he has wiped out $127B of it) rather than the man who APPOINTED THOSE JUDGES
Armand Domalewski
“My name is Elijah McClain...I'm just different! I'm just different. That's all!” Some of the last words spoken by Elijah:
blackness everdeen @traceyecorder
Not for nothing, but if all you can do is scream at the 22% of the Black vote thinking of going for Trump, but not the 55% of the white vote that WILL go for Trump, you might be suffering from a bad case of white media.
Elie Mystal @ElieNYC
Israel dropped almost as many bombs in Gaza in one week as the U.S. did in Afghanistan in one year -- the heaviest year. Gaza is 141 sq miles. Afghanistan is 252,071 sq miles. I didn't know this. "The United States provides the Israeli army with military and intelligence support, and is therefore required by the Geneva Conventions to ensure that bombing raids in Gaza do not breach international law."
Eric Umansky
Whiteness is the most prevalent form of terrorism. It’s the truth. At some point enough people will break free from their indoctrination into white supremacy that we can honestly confront and reckon with this reality. It’s a process of everyone (re)discovering their own humanity.
@BreeNewsome
A few years ago Harvard researchers calculated households in Massachusetts subsidize driving by ~ $14,000 per year. Drivers pay additional $12,000 on top of that out of pocket. In other words, driving is among the most heavily subsidized activities in American life.
Matthew Lewis @mateosfo
Banner at protest outside the BBC in London:
Liam O'Hare
Years ago, the distinguished education scholar John Goodlad summed up the case against vouchers (a.k.a. "school choice") in a single sentence: To focus on getting "a child [into] a school perceived to be good [is to] destroy the notion that all our schools must be commonly good."
Alfie Kohn
People don't seem to realize that if we cleaned all indoor air so well that it became close to outdoor air, COVID would become uncommon as the rate of transmission would drop so low that exponential decay would occur. And several other viruses like flu would nearly disappear.
Blake Murdoch
“The internet's great promise was "disintermediation" – getting rid of intermediaries. We did that, and then we got a whole bunch of new intermediaries.” —Cory Doctorow
Andy Proehl
We tax people and use the money to build and maintain roads and highways. We don't ask users to pay more to drive. We tax people and use the money to build and maintain transit systems. Then we demand more money from riders. Only one of these systems is a climate strategy.
Mary Morse Marti
It’s hard to have hope for solving the climate crisis when a genocide is happening before our eyes and world leaders are actively enabling it. I find myself wondering how our work could possibly matter when entrenched systems of power are rendering entire populations as disposable
Zoha Shawoo
Fossil fuel barons and their enablers have helped create this mess; they must support those suffering as a result. I call on governments to tax windfall profits of the fossil fuel industry and devote some of those funds to countries suffering loss and damage from the climate crisis.
António Guterres
People who say funny stuff online are the one thing holding this country together right now.
Angie Schmitt
This parking lot in Jersey City, a block away from a light rail station and a 10-minute transit ride to Manhattan, paid $110,000 in taxes per acre last year. The residential tower behind it? $2,689,000 per acre. Surface parking is highly subsidized in this country:
Hayden Clarkin @the_transit_guy
#ALandValueTaxWouldFixThis
Rik Adamski
it’s honestly absurd that we ended up with an environmental policy that makes it easier for Texas to tear down neighborhoods and widen highways than it is for New York to implement congestion pricing or build offshore wind
@sam_d_1995
I keep thinking how crazy it would be if an Arab country kept 2.3 million Jewish people in a cage, half children, cut off their electricity and water then indiscriminately bombed them. Beyond comprehension the anti-Muslim bigotry that makes the world applaud this as justified
Abby Martin
Telling conservative men about vaginal tears continues to be one of my favorite pastimes on this app. For having so many thoughts and opinions about childbirth, they are highly uneducated about it.
@_nomadic_soul
When fighting against powerful, unjust systems and so much hatred and ignorance that it feels hard to keep going, it can be useful to ask oneself: "what is the most courageous thing I almost did today?" Tomorrow, I'll do it, and then I'll ask myself the same thing again.
Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec
It’s a myth that bike infrastructure is only for affluent MAMILs (middle aged men in Lycra). Bike infrastructure is mobility justice:
Harvey J. Miller @MobileHarv
Straight cis men should be more suspicious why every media targeted at men is pushing violence, dominance and pathological manipulation that ends with them alienated from the rest of humanity
BL Lovers’ Link
new threat to civil society to worry about: home school enrollment has surpassed Catholic schools and is coming up on charters
Henry Grabar
Drivers will literally pay $70,000 (financed over 7 years) to own a heated leather chair in a climate-controlled pod with satellite radio... And still act like it's such misery they need to endanger everyone else on the road to escape it 90 seconds faster.
Sean Hayford Oleary
Genetics show that most Palestinians descended from Jews who stuck around and later converted to Islam. The bloodshed in Gaza and in Israel is among people who were once part of the same tribe.
Lee Fang
I will never accept the explicit idea or the suggestion/subtext pushed through much of Western media, that valuing the life of Palestinians is antisemitic.
@ProfJoshuaA
Kierkegaarden Cop @joshsteich
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