- cross-posted to:
- usnews@lemy.lol
- cross-posted to:
- usnews@lemy.lol
Gov. Ron DeSantis gave no explanation for zeroing out the $32 million in grants that were approved by state lawmakers.
…
Leaders of arts organizations in Florida, many of whom have worked in the state for decades, cannot remember a governor ever eliminating all of their grant funding. Even in the lean years of the Great Recession, at least a nominal amount — say, 5 percent of the recommended total — was approved.
Established arts organizations usually know better than to overly rely on nonrecurring state dollars subject to the discretion of politicians, said Michael Tomor, executive director of the Tampa Museum of Art. But to cut funding at a time when arts organizations are still struggling to recover from the coronavirus pandemic sends a concerning message “that taxpayer dollars should not be used in support of arts and culture,” he added.
…
Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, gave no explanation for zeroing out the arts grants. His office said in a statement that he made veto decisions “that are in the best interests of the State of Florida.”
In all, Mr. DeSantis vetoed nearly $950 million in proposed spending and proclaimed that the remaining $116.5 billion came in under the previous year’s budget.
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Yeah, I get it. When has the world ever become a better place when nations fund artworks?
Look at this Florentine shit:
That is what you get when a nation’s leader becomes a patron of the arts. Is that sort of smut what you want our kids seeing?
Next thing theyll do it paint porn on the roof of the Cistine chapel, however you spell it
You’re saying a cis teen painted this chapel? Woke agenda!
And it took him like 30 years.
That’s okay, that’s the church paying for it. DeSantis is fine with church smut.
The true horror is that this is some Greek smut. We need good, clean Christian nudity for our money.
Fucking Aristophanes… getting famous just because the Athenian government wasted money on dramatic competitions.
Those patrons of the arts the medicis were the oligarchs of their time.
And they used part of their considerable wealth to fund the arts.
“Would you censor the Venus de Venus just because you can see her spewers?”
Yeah what an absolute waste of money!
Because arts uplift, and misery is a huge part of the engine of fascism
Well adjusted societies have less temptation for it on the pro side, and a lot stronger and more inspired resistance to it from the anti side. It needs to breed sickness in order to really take hold and thrive.
I doubt DeSantis has that much of an organized plan for it, of course; I think it’s simple mean spirited ness on his part that he happened to see some vulnerable people that he can punish.
Art is also political, and more popular with open minded people than regressives. Fascists have historically hated art.
Not entirely true, they can’t get enough of art that is exactly like the things they already like. A boring landscape that could have been painted a century earlier? They love that shit.
But if you dare try to get creative (with message or medium) they will demand your head.
Id say that is exactly why they hate art. Art is inherently an extension of oneself, everything from a beserk warrior creating poetry as they fight to a master craftsman working for a week straight on a statue are expressions of art. Hell even things not generally considered art could still be classified as being from the same expression, like a person restoring and touching up an old axe.
Fascistshate personhood, they wish to strip away all that is unique if not in a literal sense then by a cultural sense. They hat the broad capacity of mankind thusly they hate art. Reminder Hitler threw a bitch fit when German archeologistswere digging up actual ancient Germanic and pre Germanic villages because it broke his narrative.
Republicans need people to stop making art because they want everyone to be dependent on low wage jobs at chain stores.
If you can support yourself in a way that isn’t lining the pockets of the ultra wealthy you’re “hurting america” or some bullshit like that.
True. And art brings people together who might then talk to each other and find allies and form a base of communication centered around something other than “do what I say or I’ll punish you.” There’s lots not to like about it if you’re trying to destroy a country’s democratic institutions.
This is the better answer. People don’t want a bleak, colorless world, they want art that makes them feel good.
But art isn’t something that makes you feel good necessarily. It can but it also can make you feel other things, it’s a tool for conveying feelings and ideas to someone else, it’s a type of communication. We were supposed to have been taught this as children, that art is communication and we have to be able to hear and see things that make us uncomfortable or we will never, ever succeed in life at the things we want.
Fascists don’t want people empowered, they want people’s imagination squashed so people don’t imagine an alternative narrative to the propaganda that keeps people propping up their dear leader. All channels of communication will be controlled.
This is some toddler-level conceptual understanding. When we start banning forms of communication then everyone should stand up and point at someone trying to undo society. This is a real threat to everything we’ve accomplished as a species.
This high heeled tough guy wannabe is the living embodiment of poor and spiteful decision making. Nothing he does helps anybody. It’s fascinating really. Everyday I wake up I count my blessings I escaped that shit hole state
Fascist 101:
Blame minorities
Get to Power
Make things worse for everyone
Blame minorities harder
Manifest more power
…
run on “government bad”
get elected
govern poorly
“told you so”
I think he does help some people, primarily his rich donors and the rest of the do nothing class.
Nothing he does helps anybody.
He’s been a real boon for the state’s money laundering, human trafficking, landlord profiteering, and fossil fuel industries.
You can’t defund social welfare programmes without defunding the arts first. To defund healthcare you have to defund the arts. To defund schools, you first have to defund the arts.
You know where this is going.
The arts are the canary and it is lying dead at the bottom of the cage.
To defund healthcare you have to defund the arts.
To defund schools, you first have to defund the arts.Why are the arts required to be done first, or at all? I’m not seeing it. They seem separate, and doable in any order.
That’s a fair question.
The arts are seen as a luxury and a frippery. They are also seen as elitist.
If you want to defund public services and remain popular, the playbook is to remove the arts first. That way you are demonstrating the order of needs.
to me having a funded arts curriculum is a sign of an fully developed/advanced education system. Of course you need the mandatory subjects for function like reading, math, science, etc. But to complete the full human experience you need subjects like history, music, art, philosophy, etc. You take those things away, it’s like removing a part of what makes being alive enjoyable, and also in parallel, the ability to express struggle in an an almost universal way. The education is no longer for thriving, but for surviving
Desantis hates culture.
Republicans hate culture
“When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun”
Seems that’s a slight mangling of the line, but it’s a common Nazi trope
Was it Goering?
Edit: it was not, see below.
The first paragraph on the wikipedia page linked says
"The statement “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun”, variously misattributed to Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring, was in fact a corrupted version of a line in his play Schlageter. "
So no, I don’t think so.
Culture cuts through their slimey veneer
Whoa there pal.
What part of driving pickup trucks with giant tires through the mud while drinking cases of ~~bud light ~~ Modelo and wearing jorts and a tank top with a picture of Rambo Trump firing footballs from a grenade launcher isn’t culture?
He doesn’t know what culture is.
Sure he does. It’s drinking a warm can of Bud at a Lee Greenwood concert.
It’s Bud woke or something? Or did they move on from that already?
They offered an apology for daring to do a small barely publicized promotion with a queer person and then did a partnership with UFC, so they love the all-American company owned by the Belgians again.
HORSES!
The horses woke up now? I’m so out of the loop.
you mean the patriarchy?
Culture hates meatbal ron
Florida and her meatball will be textbook evidence of a failed state swallowed by the Ocean and drowned by social conservatism terrorism.
failed state swallowed by the Ocean
Not for another 40-150 years. By then local politics will have shifted substantially in the state, and future external fascists can claim Florida was destroyed for being too brown, woke, and gay.
Florida woke and brown? Half the state literally needs to take a nap, and the only brown is in their Depends.
Florida has one of the highest Latin and African American populations in the country. They just aren’t allowed to vote.
And over half of the under 18 population of Florida is non-white. In another twenty years it will be majority minority.
By the time to state is fully fucked by climate change, you’re going to see reactionaries in the Midwest having a field day saying the state failed because it turned into “Detroit” wink wink nudge nudge
Detroit failed because of automation and off-shoring. Things that could have been repaired or prevented politically, sure. But not directly caused by policies based in bigotry and ignorance.
If any correlation can be made, it’s from white-flight. Which would be caused by Detroit’s massive loss of jobs and Florida’s massive loss of land. But white flight, imo, is the reaction, not the catalyst, of its downfall.
Detroit failed because of automation and off-shoring.
That’s the mechanism behind why it failed, but not the reason for the policy. Automation and off-shoring were tools intended to re-segregate and depress the wealth of the working class. Once the city sufficiently shocked into collapse, financial investment came flooding back into the city in the form of foreclosure sale purchases and low-wage service sector expansion. The modern city is seeing the first population expansion it’s enjoyed in decades, but with an enormous new disparity in income and political organization between the richest and poorest residents. Dan Gilbert, the co-founder of the largest private mortgage lender in the US - Quicken Loans (now Rocket Mortgage) - owns enormous swaths of the downtown district and has his talons in a host of municipal and state political figures.
He’s revitalized the city with enormous amounts of public money, laundered into private profits, through the private lending racket. And he’s used the depressed wages and real estate values in the town to reap huge margins on the cost of labor, relative to more traditional finance centers like New York or Dallas.
Might be that they will, but for now they are doing very well on an objective scale, beeing placed on #1 for education and economy compared to the other states and beeing on #9 overall.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/florida
If this is able to hold will remain to be seen.
#1 for education
This is the same Florida where the governor has already gotten rid of some AP courses and has suggested getting rid of them completely, right?
This is also the same Florida that now teaches children that black people learned useful skills when they were slaves, right?
Sounds like pretty low bar.
That is one sketchy ranking if I ever saw one.
OP is being dishonest about it too. It’s #1 for higher education in Florida, #10 for K-12. And I’m not sure where they get #10 from because it looks like it’s marginally above average based on their own numbers.
In fact, as far as I can tell, their whole metric for #1 is because Florida college students end up in less debt than in other states. And that is great, don’t get me wrong, but not exactly the best education metric.
It’s a bit silly that Florida ranks above states like Massachusetts and California when it comes to higher education. I don’t know that any Florida university comes close to Harvard or CalTech. Cheaper, sure. A better quality education? I doubt it.
Same for economics. Their metrics are slightly above average, how is that #1?
I hadn’t even looked into it after seeing how bogus the education numbers were, but that also doesn’t shock me.
It also occurred to me that their main metric for K-12 education was high school graduation rate and since there’s no national education standards, that can mean different things for different states. The other metric was a math score based on something I’ve never heard of, but it was not a test my 14-year-old here in Indiana has taken yet and it’s not the SATs.
And part of their education score is “citizens holding degrees” which… That’s not education, that’s attainment rate.
And a lot of those citizens are retirees from other states who can afford to retire in Florida. So of course they’re more likely to hold degrees.
Their whole methodology is not well outlined, and it’s unclear how they calculated anything. For example, they ranked Florida as having cheaper college than Wyoming, but on average college in Florida costs 3 times as much as in Wyoming?
I’m sort of wondering if the ranking is based on how much money the state has given U.S. News to rank them where they’re ranked.
Because DeSantis using money that could have otherwise been used as arts funding to pay off organizations to give Florida high education rankings would be pretty on brand for him.
It’s a bit silly that Florida ranks above states like Massachusetts and California when it comes to higher education
The quality of education in these states varies radically by zip code and regional average income.
In California, the local school board superintendent Joseph Komrosky lost a recall election for trying to ban critical race theory (a thing his district wasn’t formally teaching) on campuses, among other shady bullshit. But his ilk isn’t unusual in the right wing fruit basket of SoCal or the Techbro patriarchy infesting the Stanford campus.
Education in these states can be better. But it can also be right in line with the Florida reactionary crowd, and for the same reasons. This is a national project by American plutocrats to brainwash the next generation of young people.
A short boost from tax breaks to convince rich people to move there doesn’t make the place financially successful or livable. It just looks better for a bit.
The category is a bit wider than that, but yes, low taxes seem to contribute.
https://www.richstatespoorstates.org/states/FL/
Edit:
Did a little digging after some flaws have been pointed out by @Silentia below. This source is not neutral.
https://ballotpedia.org/ALEC_Rich_States,_Poor_States_Report
The American Legislative Exchange Council, a nonpartisan organization of state legislators, releases an annual report entitled Rich States, Poor States: ALEC-Laffer State Economic Competitiveness Index, which analyzes economic competitiveness in each state. The report is authored by Arthur Laffer, Stephen Moore (chief economist at the Heritage Foundation), and Jonathan Williams, the director of the Tax and Fiscal Policy Task Force at the American Legislative Exchange Council
The Heritage Foundation is a conservative 501©(3) nonprofit think tank founded in 1973 and based in Washington, D.C.[1] In 2013, The Atlantic described the organization as “the de facto policy arm of the congressional conservative caucus.”[
It’s more than half though. It really is very heavily implied here that taxes are the main way you can tell an economy is doing well.
How the state taxes you:
Vs how the money is spent:
Also, the higher the minimum wage, the lower the ranking.
Did some digging, you are spot on. Please see my edit of the original post.
deleted by creator
I’m assuming that’s the Laffer behind “the Laffer curve,” AKA the unscientific bullshit “graph” he drew on a cocktail napkin that would essentially become the basis for supply-side economics AKA “trickle down.”
That Laffer?
Because ruining the US economy and setting us on a 3+ decade ride towards record (and frankly inhumane) income inequality once just wasn’t enough I guess.
Fucking ghouls.
If billionaire real estate magnets say your education system is good, who are we to argue?
magnates, I hope you meant.
“magnets: how do they work?” - ICP
I took a look at the first ranking I saw. You a free to have a look for studys or other objective sources that come to a different conclusion.
I don’t wish to invest that time right now, but I’ll be happy to be proven wrong by a better source if you want to look for one.
I don’t wish to invest that time right now
Maybe don’t cite something if you have no idea how it reached its conclusions.
Fair point I guess.
This sounds like social regressivism rather than terrorism.
What a fucking shithead
How much you wanna bet that somebody tied to the arts recently emasculated Ron in public? Pulling funding from a huge swath of people over a petty personal embarrassment is a very on-brand move for DeSantis.
Is there a perception that arts are more likely to have gay and lesbian people? Dumbass would do anything to hurt them.
Does a bear shit in the woods?
Not even that the arts have more gay people, but people involved in the arts are much more likely to be accepting and fair to gay people. So they want to hurt these people too. This is maybe overused but I think it’s appropriate and I think about it a lot:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
—Martin Niemöller
This guy originally supported Hitler. He said this after the war.
If the goal is to destroy art culture in Florida, I guess the Russian psyops have done their work.
Enjoy brutalist, colorless Florida in a couple of generations.
Is that what happens to architecture when fully submerged in salt water ?
Brutalism? You wish. Corporate style.
I think at that point you wander into whatever the architectural equivalent of Zombie Formalism is.
When does his tenure as governor end? He can’t run again so guess he tries for congress.
When does his tenure as governor end?
He’s obligated to take a two year hiatus from his current position at the end of eight years. But he’s free to run for another office during the downtime.
That’s why Rick Scott became a Senator after his gubernatorial tenure.
And people elected him after that tenure. That’s the crazy part.
Florida has a long history of bombarding the North Atlantic ex-pat contingent with reactionary propaganda and disenfranchising everyone else.
Why? As in why would you waste your time even vetoing this? What does this guy do all day, stand in the shower and daydream about making the dumbest fucking decisions possible?
Well he needed to veto something yesterday, and it certainly wasn’t going to be the bill that now fundamentally prevents Floridians from holding their elected officials accountable when they suspect ethics violations: https://flaglerlive.com/integrity-florida-veto/#gsc.tab=0
This man has not felt joy a single time in his life.
What a shit hole
Fascism.
The Nazis punished intellectuals and artists.
I hope some of the “artists” that make those photos of “trump” with shirt off and a fake chiseled, glistening physique get unintentionally caught up in this grant cancellation - you know these images, the ones they stare at for hours while locked in the bathroom thinking about how straight they are.
Ha! The last line!
At least he’s not on a bear. And bear is not on him.
God this twerp needs a wedgie, like full on cartoonish over the head flailing about in the halls wedgie
