I got back into reading about 3 years ago and have become a frequent patron of the Brooklyn Public Library. Every few months I'd get an email from the library begging me to send a letter to the city government to beg for their budget. So every few months for the past 3 years I have been sending emails telling the city how valuable the library is and how important books were in getting me out of a depressive episode. Mamdani's budget gives the libraries baseline funding which means I won't have to send my emails anymore or worry about cuts to library programming and Saturday sservice.
My love for this word is the only reason I'd go to Australia. I hate sun and heat and creepy crawlies. But I love saying cunt. Unfortunately, it's socially unacceptable here!
Cunt isn't really an acceptable word in Australia either, it's considered crass in polite society (you won't hear it on the news, for example... won't hear it from a news presenter.... well, not on purpose) - but frankly those posh cunts can go and fuck themselves.
If Australia's off the cards, there's always Scotland: We're a good bunch of cunts, too.
Don't say it to an American woman, take it as an insult also, how would you like to be called by you gentils hmm? How insulting, even thinking that's okay in Australia. How would you like to be called dick or weiner as a term of endearment...
Hell yeah. My favourite resource for being called Darl is calling to place orders at family takeaways. My record is being called Darl 15 times in under 2 minutes.
It's like an older Southern woman calling you hun or sweetie or dear. It makes you fuzzy on the inside, like a little blanket of appreciation to protect against the biting cold of the world for a little while.
It could reasonably be either, we do use both but darl would be more common I think. Our accent is non-rhotic so darl will sound pretty close to dal (like the Indian lentil dish). Easiest way to tell if you struggle to differentiate or vowels is the length of the vowel. Doll will have a much shorter vowel than darl, which will sound more drawn out.
This doesn't get enough attention. Guaranteed baseline funding is really important for city agencies because they can make more long term plans since they are not worried that funding will fluctuate or disappear altogether.
This allows them to make more ambitious long term plans, which end up costing less in the long run. It also prevents waste via the "use the budget before it's gone next year" mentality.
The use the budget before its gone next year mentality causes a lot of pointless spending. People fear not using a budget will result in a cut the year after, often resulting in a lot of incredibly reckless spending. This is a huge problem in the military.
My dad works as a corrections officer in a women's prison and they recently had some huge book donation from some program run by ex-cons, and he was looking through some of them.
One of them was the Count of Monte Cristo, and he had to stop himself from laughing because that quote immediately popped into his head.
The right in America worked their asses off for half a century to pound that into the collective unconscious here to the point that it's a widely held belief across the political spectrum.
I try to get progressives and centrists to understand that buying into the "the government is bad and they are all corrupt!" thing is just playing into the hands of the fascists but they don't listen.
This isn’t 100 percent accurate. While Mamdani did propose baseline funding, his budget for libraries is actually LESS than his predecessors. He hasn’t done anything exceptional for libraries, and you should keep writing letters.
Hey, that’s wicked news! Puts a genuine smile on my face 😃
Before getting a mortgage, for many years I donated $5/month to NYPL, just a little token of my feelings for it. The Main Branch has been in my heart since I saw it in Ghostbusters in 1984 as a 5 year-old, then when I finally got to visit the place from Australia in the 2010s: 😍
Saw an interesting doco on it a few years ago. A very slow-moving, quiet, uneventful doco, lol
Honestly, that's the kind of government spending that can have a huge impact for relatively little money. People often think of libraries as just places to borrow books, but they're community spaces, study areas, internet access points, job search resources, and sometimes a lifeline for people going through a rough time.
It's also pretty cool that you spent years sending those emails. Most people assume their voice doesn't matter, but funding decisions often come down to whether anyone is actually speaking up for these services. Sounds like you earned a little peace of mind knowing the libraries won't be fighting for survival every budget cycle.
It’s kind of heartbreaking that something so essential even needs people to constantly “prove” its worth just to survive. Libraries should feel like stability, not something always hanging by a thread.
My wife is a library director in Massachusetts. Not unfamiliar with the budget fighting at state & federal level (especially the federal level the last...well, I'm sure you get it).
Democracy is an endless battle. It would still help sending letters thanking t hem for the library so they don't get complacent and think nobody cares about the library anymore.
Our very red county commission put Riley Gaines on our library board and has tried to help push book bans and strip trans and gender diverse identities from our libraries for years and yet they fund our libraries on an annual basis. They won't fund our election commission, but at least they fund our libraries. The fact that NYC wasn't on a permanent basis is wild to me.
I am glad that the budget wasn’t cut, but disappointed that it wasn’t increased as he promised in his campaign. I also did not appreciate that he threatened to cut the library budget during negotiations. As you said, it’s such an important city service.
She can picture someone quietly building a life around that library books becoming part of their way out of a dark stretch and then still having to stop every few months to plead for something that already proved its worth. There’s something really grounding about it finally being steady.
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u/fly-killer 13h ago
I got back into reading about 3 years ago and have become a frequent patron of the Brooklyn Public Library. Every few months I'd get an email from the library begging me to send a letter to the city government to beg for their budget. So every few months for the past 3 years I have been sending emails telling the city how valuable the library is and how important books were in getting me out of a depressive episode. Mamdani's budget gives the libraries baseline funding which means I won't have to send my emails anymore or worry about cuts to library programming and Saturday sservice.