Everything that is typically rented can and should be collectively owned instead. Not in some hypothetical “post-revolution” but right damn now
People who already rent or would like to collectively own pool their resources, either (preferably) the material goods in question or else money to buy them
The goods are collected and, if need be, stored somewhere for use by the customer-owners
If fees need to be collected (for maintenance/repair/replacement, or fuel, or to pay off loans that were taken out to buy the good) they are managed by the customer-owners democratically. Any excess profit is either used to expand the offered services or donated to other local orgs (e.g. Food Not Bombs, community gardens, etc)
This model has been applied to everything from tools to cars to housing and it works great. And if money needs to be collected (rather than surviving solely on donations), the rates are much, much lower than conventional rental services because none of it is going to line the pockets of some bourgeois whose only contribution was having the money to buy up something that people need
“Why can’t Trump be impeached” because the democrats don’t control the house or the senate. “Why doesn’t the Supreme Court stop him” well the lower courts are stopping him but he stacked the Supreme Court in his first term. “Why can’t they do the 25th amendment” because that requires the president to be basically unconscious. “When will congress do something” probably in January when the new congress comes in if the democrats pick up a lot of seats in the midterms
So what you’re saying is that our only hope is to render him permanently unconscious?
look if something happens to him then it happens to him.
This place matters, and our goal is to keep Tumblr thriving for a long time. That means Tumblr has to keep evolving. There are things we know could be better. You probably have a list too. Some of it will be easy to fix. Some won’t. That’s exactly why we want to work with you.
The Tumblr User Panel will be a group of people on Tumblr who’ll work with us over time to give feedback on how this place works today and where it’s going. We know we have to earn your trust, and we want to change how we build features and include you more in the process. We’re looking forward to shaping this together.
Why a panel instead of just listening to everyone?
We won’t stop reading tags, comments, reblogs, and support tickets, but a panel helps us paint a more complete picture before we build, and go deeper than a reblog thread allows.
Who are you looking for?
A mix of experience levels, devices, countries, posting habits. People who’ve been here a decade and people who showed up last month.
Will everyone who fills out the survey get in?
No. We’re keeping it small enough to have real conversations. If you’re not selected, it’s because we’re balancing across a lot of dimensions, not because your response wasn’t good enough. We may expand or rotate members over time.
Will critical feedback affect my account?
No! We want your feedback and criticism, and that will never result in any action against your account.
Can I leave?
Whenever you want. No penalties.
Questions before filling out the survey? Leave a comment.
Everyone has already pointed out the obvious but I’ll add my two cents in support for them too: We don’t want an advisory panel, and I would have thought that was clear in the responses to original post.
In general, regular users DO want to be more involved in the decision-making of the platform and I think finding ways to include us would be wonderful; only a panel of users chosen by the staff isn’t really the democratic “working together” way to go.
because it would mean leaving the feedback and decision-making to a minority of people, rather than having everyone (or as many people as are interested in this) participating
because it’s very difficult for the userbase to trust staff to choose a good diversity of users, who may not have the interest of everyone at heart
there are also fears that forming a panel of users could be used as a shield from accountability for new implementations
ALSO, the regular polls are right there!! Or even the type of survey used for joining this panel; why not just ask people’s opinions on potential and desired changes directly? Surely it could be a good way of getting a pulse on what people want here!
If Tumblr Staff really wants to work with the users to build something good for everyone, then I think there’s a lot of potential for building that democratic mechanism. But as everyone said, a panel just isn’t it.
I’m also gonna take this opportunity to remind people that most blackout strikes have passed, but there is still one going on tomorrow, for April 1st and I personally will be participating in it.
The only benefit I can see of this is that it is clear from the recent attempted ‘improvements’ Tumblr has been pushing through that the people involved in decision making (including this decision) are not, themselves, recreational tumblr users. Maybe if they get a panel of 50 people who each, independently say, 'Come, sit by me, and let me explain how this site is actually used’, they will finally understand why the proposed 'improvements’ go against tumblr culture and prevailing usage, and finally see that what we need is for solutions addressing problems identified repeatedly in tags and reblogs of posts like this one, and not fundamental changes to how the site operates.
The thing is, Tumblr. We don’t trust you.
We don’t trust you to make good decisions on your own. We, therefore, don’t trust you to pick a good panel of users, or not use a panel to shield yourself from criticism.
HERE’S HOW TO MAKE MONEY:
Have a good product.
How do you make a good product? By meeting the wants and needs of your customers. How do you know what we want and need?
By asking us. Not by cherry picking a tiny panel.
Tumblr can be profitable by being unique and giving what most of the internet wants right now in the face of global fascism: a decent, working website that isn’t hostile towards us. That’s it. That’s a massively untapped market you’ve got here.
Make polls. Ask for feedback. Be an honest, humane company.
You’ve seen how ready people were to throw money at Discord back before it was purchased by Microsoft. We want to fund companies that are honest and have our best interests at heart.
By banning porn, and showing discriminatory behavior towards trans users, you won’t get a userbase that trusts you. By trying things like this (making a panel to hide behind rather than listening to us), you won’t get a userbase that trusts you.
Becoming the best social media is child’s play right now, with all your competitors crumbling around you. All you needs to do is step up and consider doing an honest job making a good product. A product that people want to not just use, but support.
Happy users mean more money, means happy investors. Business 101 for you, free of charge.
So kids in my district are organizing a walkout tomorrow. The district, however, are being Huge Assholes about it, and threatening all kinds of punishments if they go through with it. And as faculty, we’ve been told that we cannot say anything to the students on the topic aside from: “Our focus is on teaching and learning, if you have questions, talk to an admin.”
Which is such bullshit.
Anyway. Several kids wanted to talk to me about the walkout yesterday afternoon. Didn’t say anything. Just gave them the I Can’t Say Anything And You Know Why look. One of them was like, “Don’t worry, Ms. S. We got you.”
And then today? They came back. WITH FUCKING PAPERWORK. Those beautiful darlings went to the city clerk’s office and got a protest permit for the park down the road and they’re organizing a protest after school, they’ve coordinated with a local immigrant rights group, they have police permission, and they’ve notified the school district that all the paperwork is filed, legal, and in order. District said: no walkout, or we’ll suspend you, take your parking, kick you off of sports teams. Kids said: sure, fine. Be that way, jerks. Let’s make this a whole-ass community thing and go loud.
I’m so impressed. And one of them was like, “We were talking about it, wanted to organize a protest, and we remembered how you said in class that most substantive democratic states there are still requirements to register large protests, so we looked up how to file for a permit. We’re not giving them a reason to say we didn’t do it right,” and I wanted to fucking cry.
I don’t teach US Government. I teach a Comparative Government class. I said that stuff about permits and protests about the UK back in, like, September. But they remembered and connected it to the world around them and they USED it, and I’m just so fucking proud of them.
in which BBC Business Editor Robert Peston explains revolutionary socialism to a six-year-old
[Image: photo of a part of a magazine page. Text on it reads, “Ask a grown-up
Why do I get just £1 pocket money a week? Ennis, 6
BBC business editor Robert Peston replies: You are given £1 a week because the people that look after you think that’s fair. And even if you think it is not fair, they have all the power and all the money, so there is little you can do about it.
You could scream and scream till they give in and give you more pocket money, but that is not a nice way to behave (although some so-called grown-ups, such as movie stars and bankers, have been known to do that). So you will have to acquire some power, and there are two ways to do that. There is capitalist individualism, which means you need to become brilliant at doing something people need, so that people pay you lots of money to do it. Or there is the syndicalist way, where all the six-year-olds gang up together and ask the grown-ups nicely to share their money with you (democratic socialism), or where you threaten to break the grown-ups’ things unless they share their money with you (revolutionary socialism).
If you’re 10 or under and have a question that needs answering, email ask.a.grownup@theguardian.com and we’ll ask an expert for you.”
End description.]
Why do I get just
£1 pocket money
a week? Ennis, 6
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Hey. Look at me. Please leave yourself a note somewhere you’ll see it later that says “it is going to take years if not decades to get the United States government to the level of functionality it had in November of 2024.” If we elect a democrat in 2028, we are not going to be up and running by 2032.
Please make sure you have a reminder in your phone reminding you to not look at 2028/32/36 Democratic candidates and say “why are they not promising/delivering Cool Shit?” because you are going to understand that to get Cool Shit we must have competent people running a decently funded government, and we are not going to have that.
We are not getting UBI. We are not getting single payer healthcare. We are not getting free college or free preschool. We are not redistributing wealth on a large scale. We are not getting free internet. We are not getting ranked choice voting.
If we are lucky, we are going to get an IRS that can collect taxes, qualified schoolteachers, research grants, Social Security, and a government that thinks maybe it should be a priority for people around the worlds to not have AIDS, malaria or TB.
To be clear, I don’t mean we should forget or take our eyes off the ultimate long-term goals of getting Cool Shit, but to get there, we’re gonna have to support things like “half-measures” and “small steps” and “not tearing down people who won’t get us all the way there” and “understanding that they are starting from the basement basically because every government institution is being decimated”
Again, if this is true, it means Democrats have an incentive to let these assholes come in every few years and smash things up. Perfect excuse to never do things they already didn’t want to do. But I don’t think it’s true.
Mamdani ran against *Cuomo*, who was running as a spoiler candidate because he was salty about not winning the primary. Y'know, the thing I see people complaining about ostensibly leftist candidates doing during major elections.
Despite that, and being an open democratic socialist pitching radical policies, Mamdani won over a million votes - approaching the TOTAL NUMBER OF VOTES CAST in 2021’s election (which gave us Eric Adams).
If you’re going to complain about percentage points, you better know how much they’re a percentage OF.
Because winning 50% more votes, period, than any previous Dem candidate, yeah that’s a fucking mandate and a blueprint for winning campaigns in NYC. Turns out open populism activates a huge number of untapped voters and isn’t just the terminally online left.
I disagree. He won because people were out voting, and when we vote the country goes blue. The fact that he couldn’t muster a larger margin when large voting pools historically go more blue is telling. Mandani nearly lost despite it being enormous.
…he got more votes than any mayoral candidate in NYC has gotten in 60 years. Eric Adams may have won with 67% of the vote, but Mamdani got 33% more votes than he did.
And he did so despite the fact that huge chunk of the party didn’t respect the fact that he won the nomination, and the candidate he beat in the primaries–by double digits– ran against him in the general.
And he still got more than 50% of the vote in a three way race, and he beat the second place guy– the spoiler from his own party with a tremendous amount of backing– by almost 9%.
Listen… the first thing that happens when a progressive candidate wins an election is that their opponents start trying to invalidate the victory.
My favorite example of this was when the media reported Obama’s electoral college victory – 365 to 173– as a “landslide”, and the GOP talking heads said that didn’t really qualify as a landslide– despite the fact that most of them had predicted that McCain would win in what they themselves described as an “electoral landslide”… of 365 to 173 votes. (My least favorite, of course, is the time that one guy said the election was rigged and tried to get his followers to overthrown the government.)
It’s never a mandate (unless G.W. Bush wins 50.7% of the popular vote, then that’s a clear mandate). And when Republicans lose, it’s never about the values of the GOP, it’s never because the voters actually wanted the other guy, it’s never because the voters were rejecting their guy– it’s about voters being dissatisfied about national trends that, despite being the result of GOP policy, are not the fault of the GOP, or the old warhorse of “voters are dissatisfied with congress as a whole and are just taking it out on the party that’s in power.”
Mamdani won in NYC in a fucking landslide. By over 200,000 more votes than Cuomo
Democrats held onto the Governors seat in NJ
Virginia just elected its first female Governor, flipping the seat from Republican to Democrat. And it doesnt stop there. The Lt. Governor AND Attorney General also flipped from Republican to Democrat.
Pennsylvania voted to retain all 3 Supreme Court judges in its state preserving the Democrats 5-2 Majority
Maine elected to NOT pass a law that would force people to “prove citizenship” before voting. Which is good because only citizens can vote anyway and passing a law like that would only serve to allow discrimination of POC.
Colorado voted to tax the wealthy higher to fund free school meals AND use the excess from that to fund SNAP
AND Prop 40 is looking like its going to pass with flying colours.
It wasnt all wins. Texas passed a draconian Parents rights law that allows them even more control over their children’s lives - likely in an anti-trans bid and they passed their own version of the whole “prove citizenship” thing.
BUT LOOK!! LOOK AT ALL THESE WINS!!!
THE RESISTANCE IS THERE AND ITS LOUD!!! THIS COULD BE JUST A TASTE OF WHAT WE CAN DO COME MID-TERMS. If we all collectively keep up the energy and VOTE LIKE HELL we can make a Blue Wave happen and SERIOUSLY kneecap this attempt at an Authoritarian Regime!
I know that we get a lot of bad news and we get it every day. But the good is there! The regime is failing left right and centre and this can be the first glimpse at what we can do!
Dont let them win in your head! Dont let them silence you into complacency!! We have the momentum! Let’s ride it!
The reason the fandom loves the Forsaken so much is because as far as terrifying, evil villains go - they have nothing on the Seanchan.
The Forsaken are fun! They’re so over-the-top evil that it often wraps back around to being entertaining instead of frightening to read about. And while they’re presented as terrifying villains, once you learn more about them you learn that they’re actually a bunch of dork-ass losers who are too busy squabbling to be much of a real threat.
The Seanchan, though? A whole army of fascist slavers with the military might to take over nations? The Seanchan aren’t fun. Their evil is banal and ordinary and terrifyingly impersonal. The Forsaken embrace the idea that they’re evil and self-serving. The Seanchan just honestly believe that they, as a people, are superior to other nations and that it is just and right that everyone else serve them.
The Forsaken are fun to read about. The Seanchan make me so uneasy that I honestly hate it every time they show up.
For me Seanchan are more fascinating than Forsaken. Seanchan are the people with whom you have to work with for saving the world. It makes the dilemma much more juicy with how much you can cooperate and how much can cost the fate of the world.
Also funny how people always bash on seanchan’s evil when Ishamael is responsible for the better part of it. Or how Seanchan Aes Sedai acted in the Shadow’s favour (and we don’t know how big percentage of them were Darkfriends) for 2000 years to result in their mess with the ordinary non-channelers living in constant terror. We don’t know what would happen if these didn’t mess up with Seanchan and yet Seanchan have to take all the responsibility for themselves like they weren’t rigged to fail and they made their choices on a blank space. Not so bad for dork-ass loser after all, huh? You see Seanchan’s downfall and see how the Shadow has actually succeeded with them and no one gives credit for that. This is not how it worked out. Seanchan aren’t supposed to be fun. The Shadow itself is supposed to be banal and ordinary and terrifyingly impersonal. The Forsaken are just the extra human flavour which we cherish.
Also I love how ordinary strict imperial structure of you know - it is how an imperium should be and has been in history - is always mentioned with the modern 19-20th century term “fascism”. These two are not the same, people. I know that the media loves to radiate (in USA especially) with that fancy word over and over but it doesn’t mean that it can be used for every single occasion of dictatorship. To have a fascist regime - you need to have a democratic rule in the first place. When you have a monarchy for 3000 years how fascism is supposed to work there? You know that the famous fascist leaders were chosen in “legal” democratic elections, right? Fascism didn’t invent the idea of people who “just honestly believe that they, as a people, are superior to other nations and that it is just and right that everyone else serve them.” This was how civilizations worked for thousands of years. The whole world not just some random lunatic who lived 100 years ago.
Look, I am not saying that Seanchan turned good all of sudden. I am not excusing their actions. These are still terrible actions. What I am saying is that people still cannot even properly criticize and analyze Seanchan’s evil. If you cannot realize why and how Seanchan’s evil happened how it is supposed to recognize its nature? Just repeating the mantra that seanchan supremasists are the reason for evil when they are the causality of evil events won’t serve that goal.
Let the Light keep you safe.
LightOne
We don’t even know if that’s true, about the Seanchan Aes Sedai. We have it from a very biased source. What seems irrefutable is that by the 1000s AB, the Lesser Blight had been nearly emptied of Shadowspawn, and that whatever Luthair walked into, a thousand years after *that*, he was able to take over.
Hey. Look at me. Please leave yourself a note somewhere you’ll see it later that says “it is going to take years if not decades to get the United States government to the level of functionality it had in November of 2024.” If we elect a democrat in 2028, we are not going to be up and running by 2032.
Please make sure you have a reminder in your phone reminding you to not look at 2028/32/36 Democratic candidates and say “why are they not promising/delivering Cool Shit?” because you are going to understand that to get Cool Shit we must have competent people running a decently funded government, and we are not going to have that.
We are not getting UBI. We are not getting single payer healthcare. We are not getting free college or free preschool. We are not redistributing wealth on a large scale. We are not getting free internet. We are not getting ranked choice voting.
If we are lucky, we are going to get an IRS that can collect taxes, qualified schoolteachers, research grants, Social Security, and a government that thinks maybe it should be a priority for people around the worlds to not have AIDS, malaria or TB.
To be clear, I don’t mean we should forget or take our eyes off the ultimate long-term goals of getting Cool Shit, but to get there, we’re gonna have to support things like “half-measures” and “small steps” and “not tearing down people who won’t get us all the way there” and “understanding that they are starting from the basement basically because every government institution is being decimated”
If this were true, it would be the best argument I’d ever heard, and I have heard a lot, for not voting, not trying to change laws, and moving straight to a violent dismantling of the government. Because what you just said is that Democrats, who largely don’t want the straightforward, societally valuable, in most cases easily implementable things you so dismissively referred to as “cool shit” here, have an incentive to let an incompetent fuckwad come in every 4 or 8 years and break enough stuff that they have an excuse to keep not doing it. And if that’s true, there is no fucking point in trying to deal with them.
Listen, let’s say you have a public school building, and it basically works as a building, but it’s seismically unsound, there is asbestos in the walls, and lead paint that has been painted over but not removed. The building needs to be repaired, updated, renovated. But city hall is dragging their feet, because it’s expensive and they’d rather put in the effort and money for other things. Now say that school building is virtually destroyed in an earthquake. That’s bad, obviously. Rebuilding is gonna be even more expensive than fixing the existing building would have been, lead and asbestos were released into the air and will hurt people, and that’s to say nothing of the immediate cost in human lives if there were children inside at the time. But you don’t rebuild it with the asbestos, with the lead paint, with the same seismic instabilities, because that would be fucking stupid and it’s gonna be almost as easy to rebuild without those issues as with. This was like, the least preferable way to get a new building without those problems, but obviously, when we rebuild, we’re going to use modern, less toxic materials, and we’re probably also going to build it with a modern HVAC system and wheelchair ramps, even though most people weren’t even asking for the absence of those things to be addressed because they were lower priority than the immediate hazards. Do you see?
If we have to rebuild the department of education anyway, it’s not gonna be that much harder to do it with free college and preschool than without, and in some ways it may be easier than adding those things to a system that wasn’t built to include them. If we have to rebuild medicare and medicaid anyway, it would almost certainly be easier to go single payer than to reinstall all that eligibility and means testing crap. If we have to rebuild the IRS anyway, that could, although I’m less certain on this one, be a good time to get UBI underway, since they’re the most logical agency to administer it.
Like I agree that we need keep voting for Democrats and that there are areas where we will have to tolerate slow progress, but only if you’re wrong (and I both largely believe and sincerely hope you are) that the current administration has successfully put a functioning social safety net out of reach for the foreseeable future and progressives will just have to lower their standards. Again.
Reblogging my own response since apparently this post is back. Had to scroll through a fair amount of the notes, a remarkable amount of which are “No, OP is saying you should accept that you will die of bad policy and you should be grateful if that happens with a democratic in office, but not in a defeatist way!”
Literally not what I said. OP is saying people on this webbed site need to stop flinging up their hands and saying “government is doomed forever, let’s stop trying” and “both sides are the same because neither will give me UBI” when the next democrat president doesn’t radically change everything overnight, because they will not be able to.
I didn’t say that you were saying “you should accept that you will die of bad policy and you should be grateful if it happens with a democrat in office”, I said a remarkable number of people in the notes both seem to believe that’s what you’re saying and agree with that sentiment.
