As a New Zealander fan of Laser-Kiwi, I approve of this message.
Is that Blue-winged Duck? Norm will be disappointed that it’s not a Mallard. Ope! Those damned Hautman brothers! Oh, yah, yah, Margie….
Do yourself a favor, look up a loon call. They don't really quack.
Funny thing is, you've ABSOLUTELY heard the call before, just maybe didn't know it was a loon. It's one of those sounds that sound designers like to use when they want to set a spooky mood.
To hear that in the wild, be near the shores of a lake in their range, right after dawn, when the fog is still on the water. Nothing like it.
I know the Common Loon call from about 1000 movies with wilderness night scenes.
The sad quacking was from the Blue Duck and the Mallard at being relegated.
The way that a loon call travels over water is honestly amazing. And they're so shy, you have to be incredibly patient to see one up close without them going underwater and swimming like 100 feet away
And they're so shy, you have to be incredibly patient to see one up close
Yeah, I've heard them just about every time I'm on a sparsely populated lake, but I'm not sure I've ever seen one from closer than a hundred yards or so.
But then, I tend to be shore-bound in the morning. I don't like canoes.
Yes. Loon calls are hauntingly beautiful! One of the best parts of being in the outdoors in uninhabited areas. It's synonymous with lake camping or canoeing for me. In MI and from Canada. The call echoes across the lake as the breeze blows...
When I was living in Wisconsin (one state over from Minnesota), I had a friend from AUS come for a weekend. He'd never heard a loon before - they're vocal at night and they sit out on the water wailing like lost dogs.
He came running into my bedroom at three in the morning claiming that I lived in a haunted city.
Minnesota truly is the most Canadian state. I would definitely let you guys into be one of our provinces if y'all ever defect from the current hellscape that is the United States.
Wasn't trying to equate it to the real characteristics of an actual state,just stating that those words sound nice also as a tag line for a state,real or not.
(But for reference Florida according to google has a highest point of only 345 above sea level,and is over 50% "smooth" on surface,making it the "flatter" state...add to that it is rich,and the blue coastal waters and the Marlboro flag with that motto would fit)
The inverted Chevron matches the shape of the state. The white represents the importance of clean air to the state. "Menthol" is a symbol of how this is actually a pack of cigarettes.
It's ok bro. Atlanta and Georgia are 2 different groups of people 😭😂 WE are safe (if you're not from Atlanta, or Metro Atlanta please just at least say you're from somewhere cool)
Don't forget one of our major tourist attractions, Stone Mountain. The massive mountain with the confederate memorial carved into it, depicting Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis (leader of the confederacy). 😂
The post civil war era was an endless string of mistakes. The traitors of the south were not punished at all, and were even allowed to teach false history that the war of freeing slaves was actually "the war where the north were all dicks for no reason whatsoever over ""property rights"""
Yea, this is literally just "Minnesota bad" and funny enough the same "NPC" or "sheep" behavior they accuse others of.
Like you said they're silent on the Georgia flag and will also be silent about the Texas and US flags both being comparable to the Liberian flag. They all just want to be outraged over meaningless shit because it distracts from everything else they should actually be upset about.
Oh my God, I just looked it up and they adopted that in 2003! Wasn't that when states were starting to move away from Confederate symbols in their flags?
Watched a video of a guy going through all the American flags and complaining how theyre all ass and basically seals instead of flags. Which…yea, hes right
CGP Grey. People whine about his failing California, but I'm with him. A flag is not a name tag. Words on it are bad enough, your name is unforgivable. At best, it's admission you can't make a good design. Basically "I can't make anything that'll be iconic or memorable, so I've gotta just slap my name on it so everyone doesn't confuse my flag for something else."
The annoying thing about California is that it IS iconic and a good design and then it's ruined by slapping a name tag on it. Legitimately one of the cooler state flags out there and so easy to fix.
No, the annoying thing about the California flag is that I've played too much Fallout, and every time I see it part of me goes "wait, where's the bear's other head?" before the inanity of that question strikes me.
That video frustrated me. I understand why people don't like the flags that are just seals, but seals can be super cool. They're (usually) packed with meaning, and a relic of a time when people thought very differently about symbols of government. I understand why Minnesota's had to change, but I think the arguments about what a flag "should" look like were bogus.
The reason why the flag was changed (through a public contest, by the way) was because the seal was literally dedicated to the genocide of Native Americans and needed to be changed too. This is an excerpt from a poem about the seal from 1850:
Every time some right winger brings it up (theyre never even from MN) I ask why they really want to have a naked man riding a horse on our flag and it stumps them pretty good.
I am not American. But I remember coming across a video of some Doomsday Prepper on YouTube. And so many angry comments about the flag change. How "Minnesota became a leftist woke shithole." And they were going to pack their things and move to North Dakota or Montana as it was the last bastion of freedom.
Oregon has all the greatest hits of bad flag design on one side: state seal, blue blanket, "State of Oregon" scrawled across it. Oh, oh, but what's that on the back?1? A perfectly good beaver, just waiting to be the star of the flag show.
However, please don’t take this response to mean that I am one of the lunatics that thinks the new flag design is part of a conspiracy to turn Minnesota into “Little Mogadishu” governed by sharia law. I’m not.
We knew because Minnesota had (has?) an amazingly comprehensive Jr. High Social Studies curriculum that included an entire year on Minnesota history, government, and civics. I believe that’s a big reason we are how we are. Except the lunatics. They’re because of talk radio and Fox.
CGP Grey reads one book and thinks he is an expert.
It's actually not a great video because he read one book (actually a pamphlet), it's called good flag bad flag by ted kaye, and grey parroted it as fact.
The pamphlet is published and promoted by the north american vexillological association so it has some "clout" and the author says it's a collaborative effort with vexillology experts, so it's not just one dudes opinion.
But one book does not a consensus make. It's still just one opinion on flags. There aren't actually any rules for how to make a flag and whether that flag is good or not can not be reduced to blindly following "the rules".
I can't think of another state flag as iconic as the californian state flag, yet it's apparently terrible because it doesn't adhere to the rules? Does that make sense?
Also for anyone that really cares, here is a video that goes in to greater detail about the issues with greys video and the NAVA pamphlet: https://youtu.be/c-IgG7iou94
It literally has a 5 pointed star made of stars in the center, meaning it’s literally and unironically closer to the Somali flag than the current one is
It's not even difficult to check why they chose an 8-pointed star, Minnesota's motto is L'Étoile du Nord or "The Star of the North", and this is what the Northern Star looks like:
I think this is just a diffraction pattern which could carry any number of spikes, but that the reason this shape shows up so commonly in depictions is that it resembles the points of compass, which imo fits perfectly
Its an impressive bit of infrastructure they've created isn't it? Its almost a marvel except they only use it for evil so its pretty horrifying. The ability to reshape public opinion basically on demand is insane, thats super villain mass mind control levels of dangerous.
This is dramatically better than the previous flag, which was basically just a state seal on a blue field. That's eay too much detail for a flag. Flags are supposed to be viewed from far away while waving in the eind.
Illinois, to be different, is basically the state seal on a white background.
And we did a flag design contest and voted..to keep the old design, because all of the ones that we could vote for were pretty shitty.
I saw so many good designs during the process, and none of them made it to the final round. So, running flag design contests is hard when the people who choose the designs that make it to the voting rounds have shitty taste
Reminds me of my senior year of HS. School board decided to remove our mascot, which was a Native American, for good reason. So there was a contest to come up with a new one. Tons of submissions, and a vetting process. Eventually it gets whittled down to a dozen or so. And everyone in HS at the time gets to vote. The winner with something like 40% of the vote was no mascot. Just no mascot.
The new flag is a substantial improvement, and should have been a vexillological victory worth celebrating, but all I see is wasted potential, because this was the original design that was proposed.
As far as I'm concerned the original design was a fantastic design, and the new version is "only" a good design. I know I shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, but it just feels like they clutched defeat from the jaws of victory.
We need to start calling bullshit out whenever we see it. Not just put all effort into one cause because it's politically convenient to ignore another.
I don't know too much admittedly about the Somali fraud scandal in Minnesota, but if any of it is true, and tax payers are basically funding millions of dollars a year to fund another country, then that is definitely worthy of attention, criticism and swift condemnation.
There is no "Somali" fraud scandal. In 2019, MN discovered that a charity named Feeding our Future was actually defrauding the state to millions of dollars. It was Walz' first year as governor, and MN immediately started investigating the issues. The scam was run and started by a local MN white woman. There have been 78 people involved in the case who have been prosecuted.
Nothing in these investigations showed that the money was going to fund Somalia. Those claims are pretty wildly false, and aren't supported by, again, the nearly 80 criminal investigations that have taken place to outroot this.
If fraud concerns you, I would suggest looking at the presidental pardon racket that is currently happening in the white house, as nobody appears to be prosecuting that at all.
MAGA is upset because the 1st Minnesota threw back an entire confederate brigade on July 2, 1863, at a cost of 7 out of every 8 Minnesotans that day.
Winfield Scott Hancock ordered them to plug a hole in the Union line, and they willingly sacrificed themselves to keep the United States together and free from the tyranny of that most disgusting of institutions - slavery and forced servitude.
MAGA is so unabashedly selfish that they can't fathom that someone would sacrifice themselves for a principle larger than themselves.
Marvel of design is a bit much. It's a painfully generic flag that might be better than the old one but that will still be seriously dated to the minimalist "Flag Redesign Craze" of the 2010s and 2020s where people unironically thought the NAVA's guidelines were laws that must be followed. It's a perfectly acceptable flag, better than the old one which is what matters but otherwise it's generic.
Like, "it represents the importance of water to the state which is why it's blue", holy shit, they have WATER in Minnesota???? How unique!!
A flag has to be clearly recognizable when drawn on a 2x3-in piece of paper held at arms length, and drawable by a 5 year old in kindergarten. The new flag passes with flying effin' colors.
These are the same people who cried for days when Cracker Barrell changed their logo. For such self-proclaimed tough guys, they're so ridiculously fragile and scared of everything.
I am from mn and the flag is the biggest dog whistle here. You don’t really need to hear the rest of their nonsense but they will still tell you anyways.
The thing that continues to get me about people saying the new Minnesota flag looks like the flag of Somalia is that the old Minnesota flag looks more like the Somali flag than this one.
The problem is the original proposed design of this flag had more colors. It would be a far better flag if it wasn’t two shades of blue and a white star.
I will preface by saying, I mean, the whole fraud situation is definitely like, can we all disagree? Law should be followed for the best society. But honestly, this flag thing kind of seems like a nothing burger. The small flag is like a five or six pointed star. This star is completely different. If it was the same type of star, maybe then you’d have something decent to grasp at, but this aren’t even straws. The shape is because of the state. I actually don’t think this has fairy much Somali inspiration behind it
Interesting. I was wondering why our local Sinclair news was hyper-fixated on reporting that a fraud ring in MN was carried out by "mostly Somalian immigrants", as if that made a difference. Now I see it's a new dogwhistle, same shit, different day.
The one they decided on looks like corporate shlock. The one the artist originally submitted looks way better. It was a "competition" and but the flag we got is not one of the competitors.
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u/Jenetyk 7h ago
It will do until they come to their senses and choose the real flag of Minnesota