WoodScientist
@WoodScientist@lemmy.world
- Comment on Performative Perp Walk 14 hours ago:
Yeah there would be a lot of opportunity for interpretation. Realistically you would raise funds and accept proposals from artists. But I do love the over the top classical imagery.
- Comment on Performative Perp Walk 1 day ago:
You know what? If they want to turn him into a martyr, I want to turn him into a saint. St. Luigi of Baltimore. In fact, I want to erect a big statue of him, something deliberately over the top and in bad taste. Like how Dante wrote his political enemies into Hell.
Think of the classical paintings and statues of St. Michael casting Satan into Hell. Image
I want to crowd fund a big bronze statue like this. Except Luigi is St. Michael and Thompson is Satan. Thompson can be holding a scroll that reads “delay deny depose.”
I say we put a gaudy statue like this somewhere near United Healthcare’s headquarters in Minnesota. Just this classical bronze of their former CEO as the Devil himself, being thrown into literal Hell by St. Luigi of Boston. Make them drive past the damn thing every day on the way to the office.
The dedication on the plinth can read “In Memory of St. Luigi of Boston. Tear down this monument when Americans no longer die from lack of healthcare.”
The bastards want to make him a martyr? I say we make him a SAINT.
- Comment on Performative Perp Walk 1 day ago:
Saint Luigi of Baltimore.
- Submitted 1 day ago to [deleted] | 8 comments
- Comment on mama mia!! 3 days ago:
Remember. When Brian Robert Thompson hit the pavement, he did not stop falling. He fell, and fell, and fell. Right into the open maw of the Pit of Hell itself.
He died on his way to a conference where he was going to openly celebrate the record profits he made killing thousands of people. If that doesn’t Damn your soul for all eternity, I don’t know what does.
- Comment on Single-bladed razors are superior! 3 days ago:
I prefer electrolysis.
- Comment on Pretty interesting when you really think about it. 3 days ago:
Wait til you learn that the reason you hate immigrants and immigration is that the wealthy conditioned you to hate them. Notice how capital can cross borders, but people can’t? This allows the wealthy to profit off of international arbitrage, while regular citizens can’t. A CEO can move a factory to a low cost country to save on labor, but you in a wealthy country can’t move there to save on cost of living. And the citizens in a poor country can’t move to a wealthy country to earn better wages. The corporations get to take advantage of international arbitrage, but you don’t.
- Comment on Looking for answers 5 days ago:
Sure, that may be possible. But again, that would just serve to radicalize people further. If people are being labeled terrorists and put in camps just for venting on social media, expect the level of violence to multiply a hundred fold. People will avoid posting on social media out of fear, but people will be so enraged that the number of people actually willing to resort to violence will increase a hundred fold. Currently Luigi is the rare exception. Put someone’s brother in a camp for posting a picture of Nintendo’s Luigi, and they may pick up a gun.
And yet, there still wouldn’t be a civil war. There won’t be armies fighting each other on a field of combat. There won’t be an ISIS to wage war on. There would be multiple Luigis per day, each one acting independently, utterly unpredictable and utterly unpreventable. This would make Trump look completely weak and powerless. And even if everyone was too afraid to say it, most of the population would be supporting the Luigis.
In a nation with widespread access to highly lethal firearms, the government simply cannot prevent single individuals from going on killing sprees. Sure, if a group of people plan an elaborate plot, that creates an opportunity to intervene. But in a case like Luigi’s, it was planned entirely in one man’s head. There’s nothing the government can do to prevent such random lone gunman attacks.
And this is why I wouldn’t expect Trump to start arresting people just for social media comments. Ultimately it would multiply violence a hundred fold, and it would make Trump look weak and ineffective. And that’s the last thing someone like Trump wants. I would instead expect pressure to be applied to social media companies to wield the ban hammer more vigorously, but actually arresting people for venting on social media seems very unlikely.
- Comment on Looking for answers 5 days ago:
Exactly. It’s the combination of peaceful movements and violent movements that make change possible.
- Comment on Looking for answers 5 days ago:
This is a long term struggle that will take far longer than the next Trump term. And what can Trump really do? I’m expecting what violence to occur to be more acts like Luigi’s. I’m not expecting some rebel army to form up and lay siege to Congress or to United Healthcare’s corporate headquarters. Instead, the path will be similar to other periods of political violence that were contemporaneous with nonviolent social movements in US history.
There were people killed in the name of worker’s rights. There were people killed in the name of women’s suffrage. John Brown killed in the name of abolition. Black civil rights had acts of violence done its name, as did the women’s and queers rights movements. Mostly these took the form of random small-scale acts of violence by individuals and small groups.
We’re not talking about a civil war here. These are isolated acts of stochastic violence. We’re talking one or two individuals occasionally taking out a CEO, assassinating a politician, setting a building on fire, planting a bomb, etc. That’s the kind of violence we’ve had in similar historical settings. We’re not going to have some American ISIS that you can wage a bombing campaign against.
Remember, America is absolutely awash in firearms. Someone doesn’t need to join a formal terrorist group to commit an act of terror. They can just go buy a perfectly legal AR-15 and commit an act of terrorism with it. Giant acts of mass murder probably require a more organized group, but no one is going to try and commit a 9/11 scale attack in the name of health insurance reform. Giant attacks with huge collateral damage aren’t really the kind of thing that appeals to people who are ultimately motivated by a desire to save lives. Expect more Luigis, not more Bin Ladins.
There is no organization for the US government to wage war on. Imagine every school shooting being substituted for a shooting against the health insurance or other industry. That’s the kind of scenario that could happen if this anti-corporate violence became widespread. Sure, Trump can lock up a Luigi and throw away the key, but that was going to happen anyway. It’s not like anyone commits one of these attacks thinking they’re just going to be able to go back to their lives afterwards.
What can Trump really do? Is he going to start arresting people for posting pro-Luigi comments on social media? You going to try to prosecute half the country? There aren’t enough jails to hold everyone. And any such crackdown would only create a bunch of sympathetic figures that would serve to radicalize the populace and swing public opinion even more in the direction of meaningful reform.
Look at what has already happened. One act of violence, and the national conversation has entirely changed. Each act of violence turns up the national temperature just a little bit, and makes peaceful reform that much more palatable. We’ve already seen several new reform bills introduced into Congress in the wake of the shooting. As things continue to degrade, as health insurance becomes ever crueler, as wealth inequality grows ever higher, the national temperature will continue to slowly rise, one act of random unpredictable and unpreventable violence at a time. Eventually some critical threshold will be reached, and the political center, which desires stability above all else, will be moved to finally embrace meaningful reform. This is the pattern that has happened with every major social movement in American history, and it is likely what we will see eventually in this case.
- Comment on Looking for answers 5 days ago:
Exactly. No group has ever won rights by asking nicely. The truth is that it doesn’t actually take too large a portion of a population, acting together, to cause a society to come screeching to a halt. Law, order, and the right to private property can only be maintained if the vast, vast majority of the populace is willing to peacefully go along with the status quo. If tomorrow 10% of the population wakes up crazy and decides to just start setting everything they can on fire, we’ll be back in the Stone Age within a month. Most meaningful reform has come down to forcing those with power to choose between modest, but potentially painful reform on one hand and “watch as we burn it all down” on the other.
The black population would not have been able to credibly win against the white population if an all-out eliminationist race war had been sparked in 1950s America. But ultimately, they didn’t have to be able to win such a war to create a credible threat of intolerable violence. The black population alone couldn’t win a total war against the white population, but any kind of wide-scale race war would have completely collapsed the American economy and society. And such a war likely would have had factions receiving military support from US adversaries such as the Soviet Union. The threat of the Black Panthers was essentially, “we may not be able to win an all out war against our oppressors, but if push comes to shove, we can turn the US into another Vietnam.” Compared to that potential nightmare, the modest and quite understandable reforms that MLK demanded seemed quite reasonable.
Same thing with workers’ rights. “Give us an 8 hour workday” seemed extreme in isolation. But if the choice was, “give us an 8 hour workday, or we burn this factory to ashes” or “give us the right to unionize, or we can start listening to those literal Communists over there promising to bring out the guillotines…” well suddenly an 8 hour workday or a right to unionize doesn’t seem so extreme.
It is very much a good cop bad cop dynamic. It’s no coincidence that unionization, workers rights, and redistributive economic programs peaked when the Soviet Union was at the height of its power. Literal Communism is a philosophy that can appeal to downtrodden groups anywhere. And when the Soviet Union was ascendant and actively fomenting socialist revolutions and violent uprisings across the globe, they were able to serve as the “bad cop” that allowed modest reformers in the US to be the “good cop” pushing for various reforms and social programs.
- Comment on Looking for answers 5 days ago:
Lives are already being lost. Today, approximately 186 people will be murdered by their insurance companies through the wrongful denial of life-saving, medically necessary care. By raw body count, Brian Robert Thompson killed far, far more people than Osama Bin Ladin ever did. The health insurance industry racks up a 9/11 worth of deaths every 16 days or so. That is how many people are currently being murdered by the private health insurance industry.
- Comment on Looking for answers 5 days ago:
And it’s true!
- Comment on Looking for answers 5 days ago:
And yet, Brian Robert Thompson will never kill again.
- Comment on Looking for answers 5 days ago:
Violence ends when non-violent reforms are able to succeed. The real value of violence is that it makes the non-violent option palatable to the political center.
- Comment on Looking for answers 5 days ago:
The Native Americans would have been much better off if they had simply strangled Columbus and all his crew the moment they made landfall…
- Comment on Looking for answers 5 days ago:
The problem with the fetishization of non-violence is that it ignores that most transformative non-violent social movements have occurred concurrently with violent co-movements. Ghandi preached non-violence, but at the same time, violent Hindu radicals were running around slitting the throats of every British official they could get their hands on. MLK preached non-violence, but the Black Panthers were waiting in the wings, offering a much more unpleasant option if MLK failed.
Violent social movements have very real tangible value, but their value isn’t in the violence itself. We’re not going to change the health insurance system through pure violence, no matter how many CEOs lay dead on the streets of Manhattan.
On the other hand, non-violent social movements rarely succeed either. Even the most modest, centrist, and conciliatory of reforms are derided as extreme or “Communist.” Look at Obamacare, a reform designed from the ground up to NOT disrupt the profits of the insurance or healthcare industries. This was a modest market-based reform that was originally a Republican reform plan. The right spent a decade going nuts calling it the second coming of Mao. And they still oppose it to this day. In the end it tinkered around the edges, but it was hardly transformative change.
The real value of violence is that it makes modest peaceful reforms much more palatable. The civil rights amendments and acts passed in the 1960s and 1970s would have never passed if there were only peaceful movements behind them. They amended the damn constitution! That took people on both sides of the aisle saying, “damn, we really need to change some things. This is getting out of hand.”
And that kind of broad bipartisan consensus that reform was needed was only possible because of the threat of violence. Violent radicals like the Black Panthers made MLK palatable to middle America. Without them, MLK would have just been another radical socialist to be demonized. And even then, they still killed him anyway.
The real value of violent social movements is that they make non-violent social movements possible. In fact, without violence, non-violent social movements rarely succeed. You need BOTH violence and non-violence if you want to make substantial change to the system. The violence puts the fear of God into the placid middle classes and wealthy corporate interests. This allows the non-violent reformers to show up with a solution to the problem that allows these centrist factions to feel that they’re not giving in to the violent radicals. Violence and non-violence are two sides of the same coin. And they are both essential.
- Comment on Hey is Sharing Luigi’s Manifesto on Social Media Actually "Glorifying Violence"? Because Reddit Said So 😭 5 days ago:
We used to make fun of Chinese social media censorship. Soon sharing images of Nintendo’s Luigi will be as censored as sharing images of Winnie the Pooh in China.
- Comment on Or Polio. Guess we should invest in iron lungs. 6 days ago:
You mention the Gulf of Mexico. A friend of ours recently has his whole family catch cholera from swimming on the beach in Galveston. They’re fine and all made full recoveries, as it isn’t lethal if properly treated. But yes, in the Year of Our Lord 2024, you can catch literal cholera just by going to the beach in Texas.
- Comment on Or Polio. Guess we should invest in iron lungs. 6 days ago:
I hope reincarnation turns out to be real, just so RFK can end up as a child with polio.
- Comment on Or Polio. Guess we should invest in iron lungs. 6 days ago:
We have a friend whose family recently all got cholera. Not joking, this literally happened this year. They caught it from swimming on the beach in Galveston.
- Comment on oh man 6 days ago:
The governor of NY should give him a full pardon, and the mayor of NYC should throw him a parade. What he did was an act of justice, bringing righteous vengeance upon the wicked. He did nothing wrong.
- Comment on Wait, my body's own heat is enough? Always has been. 3 weeks ago:
Unethical life pro tip: get an apartment that isn’t at the end of a hallway and has floors above and below. In some cases, you can turn off your heat completely and simply steal heat from your neighbors, leeching off of them like some sort of thermal mosquito. It won’t be as warm as is comfortable without bundling up, but it may be warm enough to get by just by bundling up. Watch out for freezing pipes though!
For an added techno bonus: install a smart thermostat connected to a camera pointed at the door with facial recognition tech built in. If anyone other than the residents walk in, the thermostat is automatically reset to 72F/22C. That way if you DO burst a pipe, and the landlord walks in, they won’t have any proof you did it!
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
In terms of yourself, it already effectively is legal. When was the last time someone was prosecuted for attempting suicide?
- Comment on 8 yr old me after my parents did my woodworking assignment 3 weeks ago:
Shame. Shame upon you!
- Comment on It's insidious 4 weeks ago:
I mean, canonically, isn’t Wesley basically a Q at this point, doesn’t he have Phenomenal Cosmic Powers™? Wesley disguising himself as Nog shouldn’t be too hard to do. Hell, it was in a holosuite, and if anyone can rig one of those, it’s Wesley.
So, what I’m saying is…canonically, there is no reason that it couldn’t have been Wesley hanging out with Jake…
- Comment on This world is cruel… 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on This world is cruel… 4 weeks ago:
But I only got into woodworking after I met my husband!
- Comment on Why do the majority of women still take their partner's last name? 4 weeks ago:
I also took my husband’s name when I got married. I personally am not a big fan of hyphenated names. For those that like them, fair enough, but they’re not for me. To me, the problem with hyphenated names is that while they seem a way to avoid the “whose name do we give the kids” problem, they just kick the problem down the road a generation. If you have a hyphenated name, and you marry someone who also has one, are you both going to start using a 4-part surname? How about the generations after that, are they going to use an 8, 16, or 32-part name?
Of course not. At some point, now or in the future, someone is going to have their surname dropped. It either happens when you get married, or it happens when your children or grandchildren themselves get married and have to decide which names to drop. Rather than putting that burden on your kids or grandkids, I think it’s better to make those hard decisions yourself. Better to just come up with a shared name for both partners and move forward together.
- Comment on Do the ultra-rich consume popular media? 4 weeks ago:
Ah don’t be such a pessimist.
They’ve also seen the fires of Hell!
