And we can use pictures to show people what neighborhoods with lots of high-density housing might look like, too.
And with a lot of effort, we can even draw pictures of what our cities would look like if they were denser and more transit-friendly!
If we don't draw pictures of what we mean by "density" and "transit", people's fevered imaginations will envision superblock dystopias when we utter those words!
Art and design are the most important tools we have for visualizing the future.
Any YIMBY or urbanist movement needs the power of urbanist art!
1/OK, let's talk about the Climate Left, and what their real impact on society is.
This is going to be a "swerve" thread, where the first half just makes fun of the Climate Left, and the second half says "BUT ACKSHUALLY they might be really helpful"...
2/By "the Climate Left", I mean groups like Sunrise and Extinction Rebellion that explicitly mix climate with other leftist causes, as well as leftists like Andreas Malm who have decided to focus on climate as their new reason to hate capitalism.
3/Andreas Malm has a book in which he urges people to blow up fossil fuel pipelines.
That's an insanely stupid idea, but fortunately neither he nor the rest of the Climate Left has any intention of actually doing that.
One thing non-Texans don't often consider about Texas is that we broke off from Mexico, not from Britain (and seceded rather than being seized). This gives Texans concepts of race and nationhood that are a little different from other American,s in ways that are hard to describe.
The clearest way I can describe this is that white Texans generally don't see ourselves as the "sons of the soil" in the way that white people in much of the country do. We see Mexican people as the "sons of the soil". It's more subtle than that, of course.
When I first became aware of the virulent xenophobia that existed against Mexicans in California in the 90s (and a bit of which remains today), I was just utterly baffled. How could Californians think of Mexicans as foreign? It made no sense.
General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, thought Trump might attempt a coup after the election. He and other military brass were prepared to stop it.
He explicitly and repeatedly compared Trump to Hitler, and MAGA activists to brownshirts.
1/A brief thought about the Critical Race Theory wars.
When my dad was in high school, a girl he knew got pregnant. Abortion was illegal, so she had an illegal underground abortion, which was botched and rendered her permanently infertile...
2/She was also a devout Catholic, so this caused a huge rift with her family. She developed severe mental issues because of this, and was basically incapacitated for life.
The ban on abortion utterly ruined her life.
3/When I was young, Culture Wars in America were all about abortion. Right-wingers would picket abortion clinics and pass laws to make abortion harder to get. Occasionally someone would even murder a doctor for doing abortions.