Remember, when you're on the jury, a good "that cop's story didn't add up" will sway a lot more Chads and Karens than "fuck the police."

Had jury duty, can confirm!

An innocent man is home with his family instead of spending his kids' whole childhoods in jail for "resisting arrest" when none of the cops could agree on why he was being arrested in the first place. (But it definitely had nothing to do with him being a Black man in a nice car, honest! 🙄)

And it still took like two hours of delibration after we'd heard all the evidence because one lady was so gung ho about believing everything the cops said, even when not a single goddamn one could agree with their own testimony, let alone their colleagues'.

Pointing out all the inconsistencies and admitted misconduct and letting people slowly come to their own conclusions as the trial played out was fucking hard, I won't lie. I can be patient, but it doesn't come naturally to me.

But. Yelling about how this was obviously a bs case would have shut everyone down and made them stop listening. Asking questions and letting people discuss how the cops tried to make xyz sound suspicious but it was totally normal, or about how if things played out the way the cops said then logically events should have proceeded in a totally different direction, and positing different theories that actually lined up with the evidence presented?

That got people thinking, and everyone realized that for a variety of reasons we all had reasonable doubts that the defendent had committed any of the crimes of which he was accused.

Being able to raise reasonable doubt among a jury of one's peers saves lives. If you get the chance, take it.

"Jury Room / The Holdout" (1959) by Norman Rockwell. One of my favorites of his. Particularly the gendered dynamic he depicts here.

bear in mind that i'm mostly interested in medieval english history, but... do you really think that all women suffered miserable, joyless lives? that no man ever loved his wife? that no gay person ever lived in peace? that no child ever grew up to live a life they loved? that no parent ever saw their disabled child and cared for them anyway? that nobody ever had sex, and enjoyed it? do you really think that it was just suffering day in, day out, unless you were the richest of the rich? do you really think that simply living in a different time made people stupid, senseless, violent? do you really think that people living in the past were so different from us, that they never had thoughts and feelings and dreams to rival our own?

do you really think that people in the past were not people?

This is also why Tumblr is hard to make profitable. Individual users have relatively little power to create good content. It's interactions between users that actually creates the good content, and therefore, no one involved in the good stuff on Tumblr can really claim to "own" it or be the "creator."

Posts have to navigate through Tumblr to pick up the people that can add to them in a constructive way, and then when users interact, the whole interaction can spread across the website as a new evolution of the content. There's no way to simplify this process.

Theres a whole ecosystem running here. It's not as simple as Creators and Consumers, and you can't simplify it to that. That's not how ART works, let alone posts. There's symbiosis. The users that do the nitrogen fixation aren't the ones photosynthesizing. The detritivores can't also be the predators. The "rappers doing normal shit blog" has a different niche than the person that asks why Lil Wayne has socks on in the jacuzzi, who has a different niche than the person who says "those are his hooves, you bitch!"

It's like bioavailability, you see. The user that responds "Those are his hooves, you bitch" is like a predator on a high trophic level, unable to directly feed on producers, needing primary consumers to convert the post into a form that makes a punch line possible.

[ID: A screenshot of the original post with almost every line fully blacked out. The only letters still visible spell out "cocks." End ID]

Enter THE HOTEL OF THE MINDSCAPE.

HOTEL
I think the sole advantage of this place,
This hellish, warping, twisted tumbler,
Lies buried in collaborative art.
When sings again the song, another may
The words repeat, and add upon their tale.
To make a jest, or illustrate the piece,
To answer, mock, or Shakespearificate.

This, too, is why 'tis hard to draw out gold:
Thou cannot draw a pail from show'ring rain,
Thou cannot catch the desert in a net,
And, similar, thou cannot find the source
Of so-called "content" when 'tis all around.

When written first, a song begins its life,
But not the whole of art it has within --
To breathe the air of life and light and wit
It must be shared, improved, attached upon,
And then, at last, the multi-headed beast
Can reach its full potential in its song.

This place is like a forest, ground to leaf,
With bears and fish and bees and trees and worms.
'Tis not the simple "made, and then consumed",
For, truly, art 'tis never simply that.
There's symbiosis in these darkened woods,
There's ebb and flow, the predator and prey:
When songs are written of the Little Wayne,
And of his hot tub stocking hooves most fine,
The gentles here who say "they're hooves, you bitch"
Are just as vital as the author's song.
Each word in verse is sung by someone new,
And in this way, the poem comes to fruit.

For though the wolf who stalks across the heath
Takes diff'rent station than the grass beneath,
Still, both are needed in this wood we carve,
For with no grass for sheep, the wolves would starve.

Enter FALSE PUCHIKO, the CLOWN.

CLOWN
'Tis well and truly said, Madame Hotel,
But please consider this riposte: a cock.

This is a old post and I have never seen this addition. Brilliant.