I don’t understand the anger many drivers have towards people walking and biking. You’re in your comfortable living room on wheels driving around a city that is entirely designed around your convenience.
Why does people wanting to safely walk and bike places make you so angry?
@siobhanwanders Part of it is probably just standard confirmation bias. If they are stuck behind a cyclist for 30 secs once, they remember it for months. They are stuck for minutes and hours behind other cars every day and forget it right away. There’s also the somewhat silly belief that if everybody was in cars, traffic was faster because individual cars can be faster, when people experience every day that more cars make traffic slower.
@WTL@siobhanwanders I’d think a first step would be for the media to talk about these things and point out examples like the Netherlands where car traffic sped up as other modes of transport became more attractive. Right now they just regurgitating talking points of the car industry who care about selling cars, not improving traffic.
Weekend reading: I wrote about the worldview of the people behind “Project 2025”
They see themselves as noble defenders of “real America” against a totalitarian “woke,” “globalist” assault. “Project 2025” is their declaration of war on multiracial pluralism.
@tzimmer_history From CPAC via a Dan Rather post on Post: Posobiec said without irony or sarcasm, “I just wanted to say, welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.”
Weekend reading: In the wake of the Colorado decision, I reflect on the concept of “militant democracy” from 1930s Germany through America today - and on the demands and limits of democratic self-defense in the face of extremism.
@tzimmer_history We shouldn’t forget that the insurrection has been well under way for some time - or what should we call voter suppression laws or gerrymandering? The idea that fascists get to choose who gets to vote makes the entire argument of defeating fascism at the ballot box oh so much more cynical.
@taylorlorenz I’m not quite ready to go ‘kids these days’ quite yet. This sounds like if there had been camps for comic drawing or movie making when those media came out. As long as the focus isn’t on monetizing and the content isn’t too bad, this seems like an interesting concept.
@tzimmer_history Thanks for posting these, especially the Centrism episode. I started listening to the pod a little after that and it’s interesting to go back and listen to it. I used to call myself a centrist in the sense that I looked at the spectrum on most issues and rarely tend to find myself on the extreme when looking across the range of views in established democracies. Of course that tends to put me left of center on most issues in the US. 1/
A bizarre kind of political journalism: It’s “reporting” in the sense that a reporter goes to a place and collects impressions and interviews. But the result is a kind of tendentious collage that entirely obscures that which it ostensibly set out to illuminate.
@tzimmer_history The one statement that gave me a little pause and as that the belief that Trump won the election would imply some sort of justification for Jan 6. We have the counterfactual with Bush v Gore where many Democrats were convinced Gore won but decided to accept the outcome of the election as proclaimed by SCOTUS. Republicans are regularly installed despite losing the popular vote with not much more than Dems pointing out how that’s antidemocratic. Imagine that in reverse.
@jeffowski A-fing-men. Bragging about how much people work is like bragging about how much gas their car consumes. I rather aim to improve the quality of things I deliver.
Pundits and journalists, in particular, need to grapple more seriously with the fact that the empirical reality of crime levels and the perception of crime-associated threat are two entirely separate things.
It’s true for many public policy issues, but most pronounced here. 1/
@tzimmer_history It is kind of remarkable that the people who have extra privileges so they can inform the population get away with writing articles how weird it is that the population is misinformed. They're advertising that they aren't doing their job and nobody seems to care much.
Shamefully silly to publish such utter nonsense even at the best of times - a complete disaster doing it in the current situation in which a paper that has adopted “Democracy dies in darkness” as its official slogan should have other things to alert and inform the public about.
@tzimmer_history The part I find fascinating about this is that Republicans in general and Trump in specific dress like shit. Their suits never fit. Pants are too short, pleats too bountiful, sleeves too long, and ties all over the place. They really only check the boxes for decorum, but as far as dressing goes they look worse than most people in well fitting casual clothes.
It now looks like, per another brilliant report by ProPublica, that our dear Justice Clarence Thomas also participated in Koch Network donor events. Is there no end to his corruption and influence peddling? Don’t answer that, I know the answer.
@georgetakei At some point I wonder if this is all just a brilliant legal strategy to avoid being convicted of quid pro quo corruption. I mean, if there so many quids it’s impossible to say which quo they were pro maybe he’ll get off fee.
@tzimmer_history
Re 1) Yeah, I'd rather not spend my family holidays with Nazis if I can help it.
Re 2) Do we generally consider the fall out of the Nuremberg trials political violence? Because if Trump gets elected again and the consequences are as he promises, I'd like to see the enablers in the NYT, WaPo, etc. prosecuted in that manner.
@tzimmer_history I'm sure you did your homework here, but I'm not sure that intuitively it seems that Dems are moving left on immigration compared to prior eras where borders were more open and amnesties, such as the one under St Ron were common. Sure, the right saw this more as a way of safeguarding access to cheap labor, but the outcome was the same lax/liberal enforcement policy and substantial accommodation of undocumented immigrants.
@tzimmer_history I'd like to offer a small measure of defense for Zakaria's proclamation that the issue is minority rule on both sides. I'm increasingly getting the feeling that much of the agenda on the left is set by grads from 'elite' universities that benefit from the status quo as much or more than the conservative donor class and support any pluralist society only to the degree that they maintain their monopoly on the access to power and influence.
So that shrieking windbag Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has admitted she is openly coordinating with Trump to keep an “impeachment inquiry” into Biden open for as “long and excruciatingly painful” as possible. This is the real “weaponization” of the government: going after the President with absolutely no evidence, solely for political points.
@georgetakei While the mainstream media is working themselves in a frenzy about ‘but his age-mail’. Because people say that people say they heard somebody mentioning they think they saw somebody test somebody about that on the metro.
Even when Joe Biden proves he is well up to the task and rigors of being president, the media uses it to bring up his age again, while giving “215 lb” Trump who is already slurring his words and is only 3 years younger than Biden a pass. It’s shameful.
@georgetakei Biden’s getting Hillaried. Just hope the press responsible for this will be found fully responsible for their actions in our Nuremberg trials.
@tzimmer_history Maybe one way of squaring the weird support of the nominally liberal media for this conservative fiction is that it underpins their own privileges. Most elite institutions in the US aren’t particularly good at what they’re doing, mostly because they’re staffed by nepo babies and grads from elite universities who aren’t good at producing competent grads. It’s all about access to networks that hide behind unearned reputation.
