welcometotheartistslair

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funeral of dead butterflies: dante edition

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Former Minnesota Vikings punter, Chris Kluwe, who was blacklisted from the league for standing up for marriage equality, speaks at a city council meeting where he calls Trump a Nazi. He is subsequently arrested and carried out by police.

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@doglike-sparky you?

go crazy go stupid

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There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.

I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

• Betches News on Instagram (screencaps)

[welcometotheartistslair]

99.99% of rap haters have never even listened to rap. or if they have it's like one gangsta rap song & they treat the genre as a monolith and act like it's representative of every rap song ever. and well of course they are also just racist

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"they stopped talking about luigi mangione to silence us" his next court appearance is 9:00 AM at the New York Supreme Criminal Court, 100 Centre Street, February 21.

the reference number is IND-75657-24/001. it is within your constitutional rights to protest outside of the courthouse, make signs, and voice your opinions as loudly as you can. YOU don't have to stop talking about him. show up.

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@sign-language-is-pretty-handy @sh33bs @doglike-sparky all of us.

if you make an OC that you are genuinely insane over, like you are obsessed with this freak and can't stop thinking about them, then it will rub off on other people. the virus spreads

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I feel like I say this ad nauseam, but every time I worry I'm too annoying about promoting my work, someone always comments something along the lines of "I've been following you for over a decade, what do you mean you wrote an international bestselling book?"

And I'm like, welp, time to reblog some stuff, I guess ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

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I think I just found the only reasonable exchange involving two people with opposing views on porn to ever exist on this website

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Luigi's Mansion 3 if Luigi had Snapchat!

The third but hopefully not last installment!

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just for the sake of clarity, luigi mangione HASN'T BEEN CONVICTED OF ANYTHING. He has only been arraigned. News stories saying that the jury gave him the death penalty are misleading-- all those headlines mean is that he COULD be tried by a federal court instead of state, and if he's tried in federal court then the death penalty COULD be an option, since the death penalty is not legal in NY.

Luigi pled not guilty to STATE COURT charges, which is where the arraignment happened, which means he cannot get the death penalty for THOSE charges, IF he is found guilty. In reality, nothing has happened yet, he has not been proven guilty on any of the bs charges. It's extremely not over, in fact it hasn't even STARTED yet.

But gee I wonder why so many news organizations worded their headlines to make it seem like he had already been charged and it was over. Weird, how a news agency would release misleading information, considering how someone might see those headlines and stop paying attention. Sure hope nobody is defeated from taking further action because they think Luigi Mangione was put to death.

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being a humanities major who’s friends with stem majors is so funny because you’ll ask your friends what they’re doing today and they’re like “UGH it’s so stressful i have to stabilize the reactor core for my nuclear power midterm and then i have to build the supercomputer from i have no mouth yet i must scream for my electrical engineering homework :/ what about you” and you’re like “oh well i have to read a fun little book and write an essay about gender.” and they still think you have it worse

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spin this list of all the pokemon. you have to eat whichever one you get