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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   32968 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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While he allowed Minneapolis to burn in 2020 his wife found romance in the smell of the fiery destruction

What does this mean?

Presided over the redesign of the MN state flag to resemble the Somali flag

Extremely weaksauce claim. The similarities are:

  1. Flag has blue

  2. Flag has a star

Which coincidentally are also features of the US flag.

What does this mean?

Here she is recalling indulging in the smell of burning tires as an evocation of our times: https://x.com/JessicoBowman/status/1820975378485100928

There's another one of her hoping the riots / looting last as long as they need to. I'll post it when I find it.

What does this mean?

This interview clip from Gwen Walz has been making the rounds, including this weird quote

I could smell the burning tires…I kept the windows open as long as I could because I felt like that was such a touchstone of what was happening.

Back to you-

Which coincidentally are also features of the US flag

The Somali flag complaint is overblown, but the new MN flag is a lot closer to this, this, this, Texas, or Djibouti, than to the stars and stripes.

https://nypost.com/2024/08/07/us-news/gwen-walz-said-she-kept-windows-open-during-george-floyd-riots-to-smell-burning-tires/

“I could smell the burning tires, and that was a very real thing,” Walz said of the BLM protests that swept Minnesota and beyond, including the area near the governor’s home in St. Paul. “I kept the windows open as long as I could because I felt like that was such a touchstone of what was happening,” she added.

“Ted Kaye of the North American Vexillological Association called the new design "outstanding" and said that it has a place in the top 10 flags of the U.S. Despite praise from the organization, a poll found that just 23% of Minnesota voters supported switching to the new flag, while 21% supported replacing the flag with a different design and 49% wished to keep the existing flag. The flag officially became the new state flag on May 11, 2024.”

This one paragraph explains more about the American political situation than a thousand thinkpieces.

New slogan- Trump/Vance 2024: Stop Changing the Fucking Flags.

As a flag nerd I actually followed this process as it was happening. The original submissions are still up here: https://serc.mnhs.org/flags

An advocacy org but together a shorter list of the ones they liked here: https://newmnflag.org/designs

My personal favorite was #1304: https://21588026.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/21588026/Imported%20images/1cc6671bd76cede520772dafec0adfa2effd303d81b709c42ec59b16f5aff59c.png

There's been a recent push to change a whole plethora of state flags to look more akin to Microsoft Office clipart just because some rando with delusions of competency put out a pamphlet of what he thinks state flags should look like.

There are some people who really should have been bullied more in high school.

The old Minnesota flag was kind of dogshit, but the new one is too far into current year /r/vexillology trends, so I can understand why people were unhappy with it.

I generally like a lot of the vexillology flag ideas and am generally a proponent of flag reform. When it offers a good and memorable design, I think it serves as a great icon for a community.

But I think one of the issues is that they're deciding on flags by committee (or in NZ, by voting), and so you end up with bland, inoffensive, plain designs that don't take any risks -- and one of the big points for flag reform is specifically so different places can have distinct, interesting flags. Minnesota got to their flag by taking the blandest design and making it blander. That sea of light blue is just too bright.

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