tea-me-and-smut:

lorax177:

i never realized how much i hate modern art until i took a class in modern art

it’s so pretentious. like half of the pieces we’ve looked at have been purportedly commenting on elitism in art and income disparities when the piece itself sold for thousands of dollars to be put in a museum for rich people to look at. you’re supposed to look at barren canvases with vague splotches of color and meditate on the nature of life, navelgazing for an hour. bitch I can do that in my own home for free. most of the time the pieces themselves don’t require any skill, it’s just an asshole with some bright idea that ~~~no one has ever thought of before~~~ (which is bullshit, originality is a myth) and the gall to pretend that they’re saying something meaningful. A bunch of postmodernists specialize in literal plagiarism but with a different title. wow so edgy. really thought provoking. you sure are making a statement that’s relevant and people care about.

the most egregious example is this bullshit:

this is an overhead view of a plaza wherein some famous guy was commissioned to design a public art piece for. The brick and nonfunctional fountain was already there. The sculpture? a literal wall of iron bisecting the courtyard. this guy was paid over 100k to design this. 

Now, this is located in a city, smack dab in the middle of a bunch of office buildings. Workers who had to spend 8 hours a day 5 days a week doing menial desk jobs had to look at this ugly piece of shit. You want to have a nice picnic during lunch break with your work buddies? tough shit. You get tilted arc instead fucko. You can’t see from one end of the courtyard to another because some dick thought rebar sheet metal was more important. It also impeded movement between the buildings so that you have to go around this fucking obstacle instead of just fucking walking from one side to the other. 

So yeah, these workers got pissed, because you’re making an ugly place even uglier for obscene amounts of money without thinking about the ppl who actually have to look at it every day (who had no say in the design). There have been countless studies done on stress and related health problems in office workers and having to look at ugly as sin shit like this piece of work actually contributes to stress and decreases mental and physical health (as opposed to pretty scenery or plants etc). 

When the designer was told what people thought of his masterpiece, he threw an absolute shitfit. “art doesn’t have to be pretty”, he said. “art isn’t for the public”. 

while it is absolutely true that art doesn’t have to be aesthetically pleasing to be meaningful or relevant, putting this fucking monstrosity in a place where people are forced to look at it day in day out, in addition to the ugly buildings and streets and shit that comprises the rest of their lives is just kind of a dick move. Yes, people are painfully aware that life and art and all that shit isn’t always pretty. they’re the ones who have to live with that fact, not some pompous asshole who thinks he’s god’s gift to man because he put some metal wall in a plaza. 

And yeah, not all art is for the public. Art can be self-expression or just for your own enjoyment. But if you are being commissioned by the state, paid hundereds of thousands of tax dollars to make a PUBLIC art piece, yeah, it’s for the public! saying that other people have no say in what that public art piece looks like, implying that if other people don’t like your art that they just Don’t Understand True Art TM, is this hugely egotistical self-masturbatory elitism that puts the artist above the working people (when like the whole point of art is supposed to be disrupting this kind of bullshit thinking). 

But that’s not even the best part. This fucking douchebag, upon being told that people don’t want this metal wall in their courtyard and that they want him to move it, freaks the FUCK out about how he “designed it just for this space and taking it out of its context would destroy it”. Which like, yeah context is important when understanding the meaning of a piece. but literally the only meaning of this piece was “i got paid obscene amounts of money and im gonna use it to make the ugliest thing i can think of literally just because”. If you move it out of the context of the plaza it wouldn’t be impeding foot traffic or being an eyesore to the workers who are forced to spend their days there, which is destroying the purpose of the work. So in the end this guy opts to have the piece destroyed rather than moved because he can’t stand to have his ~~~high art~~~ removed from its PurposeTM which is to be unpleasant. i dont give a single goddamn fuck about ‘advancing sculpture’ or whatever the fuck, if it’s causing people stress on top of their already stressful lives just because you thought it would be great to create this atrocity in a place where no one can escape from, you’re not ‘advancing’ anything, you’re just being a dick.

So now the space has been converted to a rather plesant little oasis with plants and lots of benches. 

anyways thats my dissertation on how much i hate contemporary art and find it to lack relevance or meaning to the people it supposedly represents or defends. it takes itself too seriously and imposes arbitrary and hypocritical statements on the nature of art at the expense of any real substance. in the world we live in, pretty things for the sake of being pretty, having stories that are entertaining and engaging and relatable, having fun and feeling good in a world that devalues those things, etc. are far more impactful and radical than anything sitting in a museum created by some millionaire who jacks off to their “fine art”. thanks for coming to my ted talk have a good night

Thank you for completing this and not stopping halfway through with “in this essay I shall…”

Voter purge frenzy after federal protections lifted, new report says

iammyfather:

news-queue:

Nine states with a history of racial discrimination are more aggressively removing registered voters from their rolls than other states, according to a report released Friday.

After reviewing voter purges nationally from 2012 to 2016, the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice found that the mostly Southern jurisdictions that had once been required to get changes to voting policies pre-approved by the Justice Department had higher rates of purging than jurisdictions that were not previously subject to pre-clearance.

A key section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was designed to protect minority voters from state disenfranchisement, was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013, allowing states to begin making changes affecting voting without first getting federal approval.

“Two million fewer voters would have been purged over those four years if jurisdictions previously subject to federal pre-clearance had purged at the same rate” as other jurisdictions, the Brennan Center estimated.

In Georgia, for example, 156 of the state’s 159 counties reported an increase in removal rates after the Voting Rights Act was changed. In 2016, advocates sued Georgia for making voter registration harder.In 2017, the American Civil Liberties Union sued a Georgia county and the state Secretary of State for its purge practices, too.

“There’s cause for concern when the purge rate goes up this much at the same time we’re seeing controversial, sometimes illegal voter purge practice, in addition to changes to other voting laws that make it more difficult to participate,” said Jonathan Brater, counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program and one of the report’s authors.

The Brennan Center’s analysis found that election officials were purging voter rolls more aggressively nationwide, too, with some using imprecise or possibly illegal methods to do so.

Voter purges — cleaning up and pruning voter rolls down to remove inaccurate information — are a normal part of all election roll maintenance. But if purges are done too aggressively or with bad information, advocates warn, they can disenfranchise eligible voters, who may not know they’ve been purged until they go to the polls on Election Day and are unable to vote.

Brater said that under the Trump administration, “the Department of Justice has abdicated its responsibility to protect against bad voter purges.”

“They’ve actually been encouraging jurisdictions to purge more aggressively,” he said.

In 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court recently approved Ohio’s method for purging voters from the rolls. The Obama Justice Department had supported the challengers in the early stages of the court fight, but the Trump administration switched sides and supported the state.

I cannot stress enough the need to verify that your registration is still valid.

Voter purge frenzy after federal protections lifted, new report says

just saw that you are moving to sweden! I was there for the past 5 months on exchange and I loved it. don’t know where you live now but I am from AUT and lemme tell you it was weird that all the supermarkets are open 7-11 hahah swedes love to sing, dance and drink (a deadly combination) but are otherwise a bit shy and introverted so you gotta do the first step and they are rly nice and kind people :) I am also pretty sure that wherever you are going you gonna need a bike ;) best of luck to you!

I’ve been living in Finland for most of my life, so technically it’s not that big of a change 😀 I just worry about how fast I’ll be able to learn the language. I understand Swedish pretty well, but omg speaking it is beyond me lmaooo also their currency is smth i need to get used to, i’ve been using euros since the EU blessed us with a sensible currency.

Thank you!! ❤

hello hello hello :) just wanted to let you know that I really love your work and appreciate so much that you’ve kept going at it for years now! can’t wait to read the new chapters, every time I see you’ve updated I cannot stop from smiling! thank you so much!! ♡♡♡ (and I hope ypur pc doesn’t crash ahahah ^^’)

Hi! Thank you! I’m really hyped about editing them and starting to post regularly for a while 😀 Also because a lot of things are finally happening in the plot, and that’s always fun for me to write 😀

(if u ever catch me writing e.g. lily x snape, u have my permission to put a hit out on me lmaooo <3)