Linkage

Most climate advocates have, I think rightfully, moved away from anything that is focused on this type of personal sacrifice. Land use changes mistakenly get lumped in with this strain of environmentalism. People think that we are going to have to force people to live in places they don’t want to live and that will be unpopular.

The reality is the opposite. We are currently forcing many Americans to live in auto-dependent, low-density places where they don’t want to live. Many of these folks would choose to live in walkable, urban neighborhoods if they could. This dynamic is most easily seen in the long history of surveys that ask Americans if they would rather live in a smaller home that is in a walkable neighborhood close to amenities and jobs or a larger home where you have to drive to get to those same things. While it’s true that a majority of Americans pick the bigger home, a large minority, 42% in Pew Research’s 2023 survey, choose the smaller home near amenities. The problem is that, today, very little of the US fits the preferences of that 42%.

In Smart Growth America’s 2023 Foot Traffic Ahead report, only 1.2% of neighborhoods in the 35 largest metropolitan areas met these criteria. This huge disparity in supply and demand has also contributed to big price premiums for more compact walkable neighborhoods. Many millions of Americans want to choose the smaller home that is close to things, but single-family zoning, large lot-size requirements, and a thicket of other regulations severely limit our ability to build new walkable neighborhoods and also make it hard to add homes in these existing neighborhoods. To get more climate-friendly land use patterns, we don’t need to force people against their will: we just need to remove those limitations so the 40% of Americans who are locked out of these neighborhoods can live where they want. 

Part 1 here. Parts 3 and 4 still to come, apparently.

In a 2015 survey of more than 27,000 trans adults, nearly 1 in 7 said that a professional, such as a therapist, doctor, or religious adviser, had tried to make them not transgender; about half of respondents said they were minors at the time. By applying this rate to population estimates, the Williams Institute at UCLA projects that more than 135,000 trans adults nationwide have experienced some form of conversion therapy.

Despite the data, lawmakers frequently don’t believe that conversion therapy is still happening in their community, says Casey Pick, director of law and policy at the Trevor Project, the LGBTQ suicide prevention group. “We’re constantly running up against this misconception that this is an artifact of the past,” she says. So, five years ago, the Trevor Project began scouring psychologists’ websites and books, records of public testimony, and known conversion therapy referral services, looking for counselors who said they could alter someone’s gender identity or sexual orientation.

As the research stretched on, Pick noticed webpages being revised to reflect changing times. “We saw many folks who seemed to leave the industry entirely,” she says. “But others changed their website, changed their keywords, [from] talking about creating ex-gays to talking about ex-trans.”

[…]

And in Las Vegas, Cretella drew a direct connection between the old work of the Alliance and the new work of gender-exploratory therapists. “It truly is very similar to how the Alliance has always approached unwanted SSA [same-sex attraction],” she told the assembled therapists. “You approach it as ‘change therapy’—or, even less triggering, ‘exploratory therapy.’”

It starts with asking yourself: Do you want families downtown and in urban places? A number of cities say they do, yet they’re not willing to do what’s necessary to make it happen, such as regulate. That’s particularly a problem in the United States, where regulation is a dirty word. It’s that ideology around regulation that can often keep cities from progressing.

[…]

Point two is, even if you have the homes, you need the services and amenities that support family living. Those start with daycare and schools.

[…]

Point three is, you design the public realm for kids and families, because that means it will work for everyone. You have to think about all age groups: the parents with their strollers, young kids and their need for playgrounds, and then teenagers and their distinctive needs, which are different than those of younger kids.

A University of Copenhagen study discovered a strange phenomenon: the decision to buy a breed which has lots of health issues may in fact be deliberate. These dogs require care, and this in turn produces feelings of love and satisfaction in their carers. We stunt and cripple them in order to nurse them, in order to feel good about ourselves. Can this really be true? Well, it makes a warped sort of sense. Cuteness is what we often look for in dogs, particularly since the advent of social media. But this also means we select for creatures who, with their big heads, short legs or awkward bodies, give every appearance of being unable to fend for themselves.

[…] 

But it’s not just their bodies we’ve bent out of shape. We’ve also messed up their minds. Studies of pet dogs find problems such as anxiety are rife. No wonder. The point of owning a dog is to make it emotionally dependent on you. […] But this dependence also subjects our pets to huge stress when left alone, or when they feel that you are displeased with them, or unhappy yourself.

[…]

In a personal essay on the website Love Fraud, a woman writes about her sociopathic ex, and how his treatment of his dog mirrored his treatment of people he tried to manipulate. He loved teaching it tricks, she writes; he loved punishing it for bad behaviour, and most of all he loved its submissive, forgiving, dependent love for him. The pattern is that of the psychopath.

The use of cars in cities has many negative impacts, including pollution, noise and the use of space. Yet, detecting factors that reduce the use of cars is a serious challenge, particularly across different regions. Here, we model the use of various modes of transport in a city by aggregating Active mobility (A), Public Transport (B) and Cars (C), expressing the modal share of a city by its ABC triplet. Data for nearly 800 cities across 61 countries is used to model car use and its relationship with city size and income. Our findings suggest that with longer distances and the congestion experienced in large cities, Active mobility and journeys by Car are less frequent, but Public Transport is more prominent. Further, income is strongly related to the use of cars. Results show that a city with twice the income has 37% more journeys by Car. Yet, there are significant differences across regions. For cities in Asia, Public Transport contributes to a substantial share of their journeys. For cities in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, most of their mobility depends on Cars, regardless of city size. In Europe, there are vast heterogeneities in their modal share, from cities with mostly Active mobility (like Utrecht) to cities where Public Transport is crucial (like Paris or London) and cities where more than two out of three of their journeys are by Car (like Rome and Manchester).

The Commons Library exists to make social movements smarter and stronger.

We are an online library for the change makers of the world and for those interested in social change, activism, advocacy and justice.

We support the power and effectiveness of progressive social change efforts by collecting and sharing resources from Australia and around the world.

In the United States, the federal government’s favored program for producing low-income rental housing has shifted from public housing to the LIHTC program. LIHTC provides tax breaks to for-profit investors who invest in lower-income housing. This means LIHTC essentially wastes our public dollars on enriching private Wall Street investors. The investors are earning more in tax breaks from the government than they actually pay into affordable housing. It would be more cost-effective for the government to directly fund the production of affordable housing instead of allowing this profit-skimming to occur.

[…] 

Nationally, 80 percent of LIHTC developers are for-profit entities. Moreover, many LIHTC landlords are increasingly profit-seeking corporations rather than mission-driven nonprofits. Corporate landlords also benefit from rent increases, evictions, neglect of maintenance, and deplorable conditions for tenants. Profit-seeking landlords are more likely to convert buildings to market rate once LIHTC’s temporary affordability restrictions expire.

[…]

State and federal governments must reform LIHTC to require that any housing it produces is permanently and deeply affordable, with strong tenant protections. Moreover, rather than tax breaks for for-profit investors, our communities need massive direct public funding for the creation of affordable housing.

Online, the idea that autism and ADHD can coexist is so widely accepted that it has spawned its own label – “AuDHD” – and a groundswell of people who say they recognise its oxymoronic nature, perpetual internal war and rollercoaster of needs. There are tens of thousands of people in AuDHD self-help forums, and millions more watching AuDHD videos.

Some of those videos come from Samantha Stein, a British YouTuber. “The fact that you can have both [autism and ADHD] at the same time is kind of paradoxical in nature,” she admits. “You think: ‘How can you be extremely rigid and need routines and structure, but also be completely incapable of maintaining a routine and structure?’”

[…]

Other AuDHDers give colourful analogies to describe the epiphany of diagnosis. Before the discovery, I’m told, it’s as if you are trying to fit in and be a horse rather than celebrating the fact that you’re a zebra. It’s like being trapped in a maze in the dark, then suddenly the lights are on and now there’s a way to navigate out.

I mentioned that the two reasons for not writing that I hear most often from people are variations on “I’ve got nothing to say.”

The first version is when someone says they’ve got nothing to say because they’re not qualified to write on a particular topic. “After all, there are real experts out there who know far more than me. So I’ve got nothing to say.”

But then once you do actually understand a topic, the second version appears. “If I know about this, then everyone knows about this. It’s obvious. So I’ve got nothing to say.”

In both cases, you absolutely should be writing and sharing! In the first instance, you’ve got the beginner’s mind—a valuable perspective. In the second instance, you’ve got personal experience—another valuable perspective.

In other words, while it seems like there’s never a good time to write about something, the truth is that there’s never a bad time to write about something.

So write! Share! Publish!

Charlie Kirk, the head of the MAGA propaganda behemoth Turning Point USA, recently unveiled a novel theory as to why young women tend to vote for Democrats. Unwilling to admit that women can think for themselves, Kirk floated the theory that birth control pills cause brain damage.

"Birth control like really screws up female brains," he falsely claimed before a crowd at a recent church event streamed on the far-right site Rumble. Claiming the pill "increases depression, anxiety [and] suicidal ideation," he then blamed women's voting patterns on hormonal contraception. "It creates very angry and bitter young ladies and young women," Kirk argued. "Then that bitterness then manifests into a political party that is the bitter party. I mean, the Democrat Party is all about 'bring us your bitterness and, you know, we’ll give you free stuff.'”

[…]

As the Washington Post reported last month, right-wing activists have been flooding social media with the same lies that Kirk was echoing in this video. It's a well-financed disinformation campaign, getting a major boost from MAGA billionaire Peter Thiel, who has aggressively financed teams of messengers to falsely claim that hormonal birth control "tricked our bodies into dysfunction and pain." Doctors report that the tidal wave of misinformation about birth control is creating a health care crisis, including women who "come in for abortions after believing what they see on social media about the dangers of hormonal birth control."