What if we could replace Thomas Jefferson with Frederick Douglass? Just decide who is going to be a relevant point of reference. In practice, that's what we do, but we just keep deciding over and over to center the same stupid asshole failures.
[Whiny voice:] "Oh yeah, I'm an American FOUNDER! I'm going to design a novel constitutional order and then make it impossible to change before anyone has even tried it! I'm going to design a whole Rube Goldberg death trap to keep the slavers on board and fail even at that!"
The Founders' brilliant constitutional scheme led directly to (a) the most deadly war in human history up to that point, (b) the abandonment of Black Americans to state-sponsored terrorism for a century, and (c) George W. Bush, Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump. GREAT JOB.
I just want to reiterate that the American Founders picked the most heinously immoral goal possible -- maintaining a Union with slavers -- and, when push came to shove, their stupid compromise failed even at that. It's not EVEN an ethos.
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My question is where to draw the line. Any protest movement is by definition going to represent only a small subset of the population. Is it anti-democratic for them to use protest tactics that disrupt society, in order to pressure elected officials?
The question becomes even more complicated when we realize how unaccountable elites are, despite the existence of formal elections. Does current policy reflect the popular will? Why can a self-selecting group of elites thwart popular desire for climate change action?
If Malm were calling for assassinations, that would be a different conversation, but I don't think he is. Blocking a highway, chaining yourself to a tree, laying down in the driveway of a missile factory -- those seem like closer analogies to the type of sabotage he's advocating.
A structural problem that no conceivable police reform can get around is that the officers on the street always have the initiative. They're the ones out there doing stuff, and reform has to rely on punishing them after the fact.
Even in the best case scenario where courts were not captured by police and there wasn't a huge social consensus in favor of giving police near-infinite leeway, abuses would still inevitably happen barring a perfect hiring process that gets only perfect people.
You can "ban" chokeholds all you want, but every police officer remains physically capable of performing a chokehold and if they decide to do it, there normally will not be an internal affairs person present to stop them in the act.
Advocates of walkable urbanism definitely need to be more clear on how they would provide mobility to the disabled. But at the same time, it makes me deeply tired when people say that advocating walkable urbanism or a car-free lifestyle is intrinsically ableist.
The fact that some disabled people need individual motorized transport does NOT mean that literally everything needs to be built around cars. That is one of those stupid "gotcha" false dichotomies that social media incentivizes but is just death to thought.
Part of the reason people don't mention disability when talking about walkable urbanism is that they're not thinking about it, which is bad and should be called out. But part of it is also that the solution is so obvious: limited car-based transport for those who need it.
Given that the existing political system positively *refuses* to take meaningful climate action and is in fact in the process of criminalizing even peaceful protest for climate causes, I think it's a little much to be scandalized that someone wrote a book advocating direct action
Something desperately needs to happen for the sake of all future generations. The ostensibly "legitimate" ways to make it happen are almost entirely closed off. You do the math.
In the US, the leaders of the party that supposedly cares about climate openly *mocked* the "the Green Dream or whatever," and even if they hadn't, they let a senator bought and paid for by the coal industry have the final say on what policies are acceptable. So you can't "vote."