The most basic problem with "redlining as catch-all explanation" is that when you look at the famous redlining maps (e.g. below left, Philly 1937) it's instantly obvious to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the local historical geography, that the redlined districts were vast, working-class and racially mixed. At right, you can see from Brewers map of minorities in Philadelphia (1934) that of course the vast red-lined areas were quite mixed: Af Am (pink), Jewish (blue), Italian (green). (FWIW the deep red is industry, which the banks were also interested in bc they anticipated that this was going to decline and become blighted). Boston example next post
Here is a redlining map of Boston. Again, anybody with even a shallow level of understanding of local historical geography knows that Charlestown, Cambridgeport, South Boston, North End, West End etc, were mixed or in some cases homogeneoulsy Irish or Italian or Jewish. Roxbury (lower center of map) was black. I don't quite understand how intelligent, educated Boston progressives look at this map and suppose that the story it has to tell is a "white-vs-black" story. Even the @ watermarked there ("Segregation by Design") seems to assume we're supposed to look at this map and draw the conclusion that it's showing "Northern Jim Crow" or something...but how could anyone even slightly familiar with Boston possibly suppose this, from looking at this redlining map??
Next example is Seattle

Back in mid-2021, I wrote a Subst6ck keeping track of all the ways the NYT in particular stigmatized the lab leak theory during the period Feb 2020 through March 2021. Link in next post, and also this 🧵will screenshot the main examples the stack discusses. Feb 2020. "Fringe theory." ("It's just Tom Cotton trying to start a war!")
bellriotsreview.substack.com/p/the-nyts-egr…

Why did I say a few weeks ago that no grad student or young academic would be allowed to write or publish Alfred Crosby's classic 1986 "Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe" now? For starters, consider the frames of reference. 🧵

https://twitter.com/JacobAShell/status/1867298706183147535

A Nietzschean frame of reference. "We" (meaning...whoever Crosby intended his book for) are the "supermen"; we are "Columbus."

This a *fascinatingly* bad map. I can't quite wrap my head around the badness of it. Map rant🧵

https://twitter.com/hubriskets/status/1858969073046220818

1) The odd angle looking from the NW would be ok except it blocks all cities "behind" Moscow and there are a bunch: that's an important corridor of population along Trans-Siberian RR

I visited Shipton’s Arch, an eerie, otherwordly physical feature a few hours drive west of Kashgar. Despite its obscurity it is reputedly the tallest natural arch in the world, able to fit the entire height of the Empire State Building in its void.

The Arch is named for an English explorer, Eric Shipton, who did a brief survey of these mtns in 1947. Subsequently the arch’s location became lost to the outside world until a joint National Geographic / Chinese govt expedition in 2000.

Controversial take, Indiana Jones was already completely exhausted as a movie concept by the 1990s, bc it turns out there are no other esoteric Macguffins with mass-appeal besides Holy Grail and Ark of Covenant. Lucas/Spielberg already knew this after Raiders, that the "esoteric Macguffin" thing wouldnt work that well for a movie franchise. That's why they went in a totally different direction in Temple of Doom, with the whole "justification for colonialism" thing, which...

Map from 1899 of historical African interior slave trading routes. Numerous details in the map make it unusual, and deeply informative (if interpreted carefully). Map-focused 🧵 (apologies if some visuals are blurry, Twitter sometimes converts map-res poorly).

Nussbaum's evil proposal in the New York Review of Books to manipulate predator species away from their natural behaviors of hunting and killing. Nussbaum is shamelessly projecting her own human culture war baggage onto species who are not in fact to blame for whatever it is in the Romantic movement or tourism culture or whatever which she doesn't like.

Snippets from my new article w/ Compact:
"The freezing of protesters’ digital bank accounts is a new technique of social control and suppression of dissent...Yet left intellectuals who critically study the machinations of power are oddly silent about it."
compactmag.com/article/the-be…

Academics' unwillingness to point a theoretical/critical lens at the issue of protestors losing their digital bank account access reveals a massive shift in the role of the academic in societal deliberation. As an anology: academics' treatment of the Boer War (thread) 15 yrs ago I remember academics being willing to openly theorize and critique the British Empire's use of concentration camp tactics against the Boers during the 1899-1902 Boer War -- despite academics not really sympathetizing with the politics of the Boers.

This has always been the inherent awkwardness of the Berniecrat desire to swing more resources to the public unis and make them free for their local populations. At end of day the Berniecrats value the same internationalism the Ivy League does.

https://twitter.com/JacobAShell/status/1593274983089930241

Asserting a prole internationalism as distinct from, opposed to, the PMC internationalism of Harvard and Yale would have resolved this, but the Berniecrats never really had the desire to intellectually conceptualize this.

The WWF report is deeply upsetting. It also promotes the idea of making wildlife pop loss and climate change one and the same issue. I think that's a mistake. 🧵
theguardian.com/environment/20… From the Report:
"We are living through the dual crises of biodiversity loss and climate change driven by the unsustainable use of our planet’s resources. Scientists are clear: unless we stop treating these emergencies as two separate issues neither problem will be addressed."