kohenari:

What I propose, then, is that we ought to start a new tag called “Global Affairs.” It wouldn’t be curated by editors chosen by Tumblr, but anyone who is interested could track it in order to keep an eye on posts that fall into this category and to find new Tumblr users whose blogs they might want to follow. This makes it a whole lot more democratic than an official Tumblr tag. What’s more, since it’s not official, it would be possible to include reblogs in this tag so that people might actually engage in civilized discussion and debate. Of course, being an unofficial tag also means that some posts will turn up that weren’t tagged; it’s not a perfect system and we’ll all just need to zip past those to get to the posts that were intentionally tagged.

What I would ask, for anyone with an interest in this idea, is that you start tagging anything that deals with “Global Affairs,” broadly understood. The only thing I don’t want is U.S. domestic politics, since that’s already covered by the Politics tag. So I have in mind posts dealing with foreign policy, domestic politics of countries other than the U.S., international human rights and humanitarian affairs, and so on. I’d ask people, if they’re going to tag something, to include some original content (I’m thinking something like five lines of text or more). This will prevent links and pictures with no added information or commentary and it will prevent reblogs from showing up that are simply in agreement with the original post but that don’t add to a conversation about it. And, of course, please aim for respectful debate and disagreement.

If you’re interested in trying this idea, then I’d ask you to please reblog this post — sorry for the length! — so that as many people as possible will be made aware of what we’re attempting and can participate.