"We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world . . . a thing that by all the standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing."

I reviewed the Bird & Sherwin biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer in 2005:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/2005/04/10/fallout/cf4054f0-92d1-4d59-bf13-0b0701dcdf12/

#Oppenheimer

~one billion
~1,000,000,000

That's how many parking spaces there are in the USA. For every car? About 4 empty spaces... just sitting there, not absorbing the rain, making flooding worse, making cities hotter as they bake in the summer sun.

Our built environment and laws bend over backwards to make driving the only viable transportation option in nearly every imaginable context.

You need to pay for healthcare, but almost never parking.

(Pointing this out makes libertarian heads explode.)

Hey #neuroscience #neurotech #neurodon @neuroscience

I'm very excited about a truly distributed community for #neuroscience.

Let's make it easier for new folks (and #twitterexodus #twittermigration) to plug into the #neurodon community!

Please add your Mastodon information to this importable community list: https://forms.gle/sWZyxMGsNefy3kzr5

And please boost so we can make this a robust community!

#WorthARead

Only one form of anti-racism actually works: And it ain't "reasoning with racists".
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/29/antiracism-diversity-training-liberal-antiracists-vocabulary-direct-action

❝
The liberal tradition sees racism as essentially a matter of irrational beliefs and attitudes. Its founders, such as the anthropologist Ruth Benedict and gay rights pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld, were interested in understanding the rise of nazism in the 1930s. They concluded that, in societies where racial prejudices were widespread, liberal democracy could be undermined by political extremists inflaming race hatred to gain power. To remove this danger, they called on the liberal establishment to persuade the masses, especially the poor and uneducated, that racist opinions have no legitimate basis.

This approach remains at the core of liberal antiracism today, from the enthusiasm for diversity training – a $4.3bn business in the US
❞
•
❝
The radical tradition, on the other hand, sees racism as a matter of how economic resources are distributed differently across racial groups. In a 1938 article on “racism in Africa”, for instance, the Trinidadian writer CLR James argued that British colonial racism was not a set of beliefs or attitudes but a structure of generally observed social rules and policies that enabled economic exploitation. Individual racist attitudes no doubt existed but were not the decisive factor.
❞

❝
Radical antiracists argue that the only way to fight this oppression is to build autonomous organisations with the power to dismantle existing social systems and build new ones.
❞

❝ Liberal antiracists are powerless against this new structural racism. They demand we use the correct racial vocabulary, shaming Conservative MPs or sports commentators when they use derogatory terms; but abolishing a word does not abolish the social forces it expresses.❞

#racism #DismantleSystems #DismantleSystemicRacism #SupportJournalism #FuckShitlibs

80 years ago today, Willem Arondeus was executed by Nazis after he bravely bombed a building to destroy 800,000 identity cards.

He was an openly-gay Dutch artist who forged documents for Jewish people.

His last words were "Tell people that homosexuals are not cowards."

It's an absolute indictment of journalism and lawyering that we are only finding out now that the wedding website case -- which the Supreme Court used to endorse discrimination against certain people -- was fraudulent in pretty much every way.

https://newrepublic.com/article/173987/mysterious-case-fake-gay-marriage-website-real-straight-man-supreme-court