Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò Profile picture
Associate Professor of Philosophy and African Studies at Georgetown. Author of Reconsidering Reparations and Elite Capture, @cpluscp member.
Oct 8, 2023 6 tweets 1 min read
I am old enough to remember 2001, when many adults advocated non-violence after the police murdered Timothy Thomas in Cincinnati, almost all of whom turned into believers in the transformative power of overwhelming violence that September when hijackers destroyed the Twin Towers. the world would be better off if it had more actual, committed, principled pacifists. but I suspect that what we have instead are mostly people who believe that violence is only the legitimate province of some people, and what is morally required of everyone else is submission
Sep 29, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read
a lot can be done about urban flooding and stormwater. none of it will be, as long as our public institutions function primarily as sites of extraction for cops and corporations Louisiana yesterday, New York today. Where tomorrow?

Aug 30, 2023 11 tweets 3 min read
what do "nudges", personal carbon footprint, and calorie labels have in common?

As you might guess: strategies to protect corporate interests. Today, a major journal debates how these corporate interests may have distorted & distracted behavioral science
cambridge.org/core/journals/… Chater and Loewenstein call things like carbon footprints "i-frame interventions". These aim to overcome "individual limitations" like cognitive biases as sources of social problems. Behavioral scientists have investigated these more than "s-frame interventions" (laws, norms).
Jul 12, 2023 18 tweets 5 min read
one thing to accept intellectually that the world revolves around capital. but what's solidified ecosocialism for me in recent years is water: a critical resource to all life *literally falls from the sky* but isn't secured for all because it's more profitable to be dumb about it "Access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene is the most basic human need..two billion people live without safely managed drinking water services."

this is fucking silly

un.org/sustainabledev…
Jun 1, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read
come for the notes on the role of social status in class development, stay for the sidebars about two-stage theory (if you're paywalled there's still iwallerstein.com)

iwallerstein.com/the-bourgeoisi…
Dec 8, 2022 6 tweets 2 min read
folks at @ProjectDrawdown have estimated that regenerative agriculture could remove ~22 gigatons of CO2/year from the air. I've been skeptical. but: here @UCLAIoES reviews studies finding avg increase of ~50% of soil carbon from adding compost *alone*.

ioes.ucla.edu/project/carbon… caveats: this is a "systematic quantitative review" by @UCLAIoES (not quite a meta-analysis) of 21 studies. also timeframe issue: the authors say that 5 years would be a good duration to be surer about the results. activity of compost itself depends on its composition as well
Dec 8, 2022 5 tweets 1 min read
one thing I'm trying to get better about from here on out is writing and thinking even less defensively. trying to craft sentences into fortresses is a waste of valuable time and effort. what would you say if you were speaking to someone who's trying to understand you? say that. so much wasted effort goes into trying make fortresses out of sentences. inattentive/dishonest criticisms have the most to teach about this: the clearest examples of the fact that this just isn't a power that you have as a writer. you don't have this power because words don't.