I think he’s just kinda an ordinary person who grew up privileged. He has fairly standard techbro style libertarian beliefs, but he also has criticisms of some of the influencers he watches, and didn’t seem to like Peterson very much. He also seems to be an environmentalist, and I think he seemed to have become more anti-corporation based on the manifesto released (obviously assuming he did it).

Him being a privileged but ordinary guy who still got radicalized reflects a lot more strongly on the plight of everyone who isn’t one of the owner class. It doesn’t matter that he was relatively wealthy, he still wasn’t one of them.

Honestly, at this point I’m not convinced that Trump will be significantly worse for Palestine than Harris would have been. Neither one is going to stop sending weapons, and the stuff Trump supports are so extreme that Israel wouldn’t want to do them anyway, like nuking Gaza. Either way in 4 years I can’t see the US being the reason anything changes there.

I’m also talking about specifically the uncommitted movement and protests at the DNC, which were meant to get Biden and then Harris to support an arms embargo. The consequence promised by those protests was losing voters, so if that didn’t happen it would mean that the Democrats could see these as empty threats and safely ignore them.

There are only so many times you can say “vote for me because the other candidate is so much worse” before people get tired of voting against their interests just to prevent someone else who is also against their interests just more so. Either way you’re voting for something you don’t support, and eventually people will give up. Blaming voters for a candidate losing and not the candidate for abandoning voters doesn’t make sense. It’s not the voters job to represent a candidate, it’s supposed to be the candidates job to represent their voters.

Oh yeah 100%, I don’t place the blame solely on the US or the USSR, it’s on both. I don’t like any state, US and USSR included, and imperialism isn’t exclusive to capitalist states. The USSR is way too demonized in the US education system though, it gets treated as some ultimate evil of history, only responsible for bad things, when it wasn’t really doing anything the US wasn’t also doing.

I mean personally I do vote every election I can, but people did change how they voted after protests were ignored. The pro-Palestinian protesters and the uncommitted movement during this 2024 election had a basic demand they wanted met, that was ignored by the Harris campaign and some number of them didn’t vote because of it. And yet a lot of people blamed the protesters for Harris’s loss (of Michigan at least), even though that is literally changing your vote because a protest didn’t get her to change her position.

And that’s also skipping over however many people didn’t show up because of other positions she changed, like healthcare, fracking, the border, etc. And I do get it, I know Trump will be so much worse, and like I said I did vote, straight Democrat down ballot like I always do. But if the point of a protest is meant to show that a group of people is unhappy and you’re losing their support, having that group turn around and vote for you anyway means that you can just ignore protests.

And again, I know I’ll probably need to keep saying this, I voted for Harris. But the fact that the lesson a lot of the DNC is seemingly taking from this is that they should go more centrist just boggles my mind, because the point of people not showing up to vote for her after they protested and were ignored is literally that going more centrist and ignoring your base will lose democrats elections.

It’s no surprise though, the DNC receives a ton of corporate donations so why would they seriously support policy that hurts those donors income. Like Josh Shapiro condemning the killer and those who supported them, and thanking the police who caught him in PA isn’t surprising when he received $10,000 dollars from UHG in 2023 (the second most of any candidate). This is what people mean when they say voting is pointless, even if you somehow voted in a senate of 100% democrats, a house of 100% democrats, and Bernie Sanders as the president, they wouldn’t support a proposal for something like single payer healthcare because most of the other democrats in the house and senate get money to not support major reforms like that.

I mean the US has been consistently aggressive against Cuba, and while I hate the idea of mutually assured destruction, when it was the accepted strategy to get a country to stop fucking with you, it makes sense that Cuba would want the ability to threaten that against the US unless it stopped trying to overthrow their government. Plus the US literally just armed 2 countries near the USSR, so it’s not like it was an unreasonable escalation by the USSR or anything, the US kinda did it first lol.

Yeah, the point of a peaceful protest is meant as a neutral option, just to show that a large group exists who has some demand, and if the demand is not met it will escalate, either via disruption to the economy with strikes or disruption to society with violence. It shouldn’t be blamed on protesters if it ends up escalating that way, because the protest was meant as the warning. Most people wouldn’t blame a country that has repeatedly warned a neighbor to stop annexing it’s land for fighting a war with them. If the country never went farther than warnings then they would all be empty threats. Somehow protests are thought of differently though, and if one turns violent it’s blamed on the protesters and not the government for basically completely ignoring every protest movement in recent memory.

Like I said in another thread too, every state (as in nation, not US states), uses violence as an answer all the time. Police violence against criminals or protesters, military violence against other states, death penalties against those deemed too dangerous to live, prisons in general. So what is it about state sanctioned violence that is considered moral by most people who would also decry individual violence as immoral? Even Brian Thompson oversaw an increase in claim denials from ~10% to ~30%. How many people did that kill, or torture, or cause suffering? Obviously a lot of people have already talked about social murder, but again, why is social murder more justified? Just because it’s legal and allowed by the state?

Laws aren’t some inherent measure of morality, and states don’t have some inherent sense of justice that is superior to that of their people. Just look at slavery, it was fully legal and rescuing slaves was a crime. That didn’t make it moral, or the abolitionists who ran the underground railroad immoral. Or look at prohibition, or the current version we have with the war on drugs. What makes someone indulging in a vice like weed, or mushrooms, or honestly even something more addictive like cocaine be guilty of a crime, when someone indulging in alcohol, or cigarettes, or caffeine, or sugar isn’t? And what makes someone doing that on their own, assuming they don’t harm others because of it, worse in the eyes of the law than someone who gambles?

In order to see the imbalance of power and violence, you only need to look at the recourse each party has for violence by the other. Look at what happened when an individual committed violence against UHC by killing the CEO. There was a national manhunt, tens of thousands of dollars offered in rewards for finding them, and once a suspect was arrested they were humiliated by the police, put in jail to be held until trial, and are likely facing life in prison if they are convicted. None of that would happen to any of those responsible for a wrongful death due to an illegally denied claim. In that case, in order to get recourse, the family would need to sue the company, which takes a crazy amount of time, money, and effort. And if by the end of it they win, what punishment would UHC face? The CEO wouldn’t be given jail time for murder or manslaughter. The company wouldn’t be broken up or shut down. At most you’d get some money, and they’d maybe have to pay a fine to the government. During the lawsuit the CEO and board would be free to continue business as normal, killing or hurting who knows how many people while doing so.

So obviously the government, corporations, politicians, and billionaires will denounce this as a “tragedy”, a “horrible act of violence”. Those celebrating in it are “advocating violence” or simply the minority, existing in “dark corners of the internet”. Because admitting that violence is an acceptable strategy means they’d accept it turned upon them, instead of being the sole group allowed to use it as they see fit.

This isn’t necessarily me advocating for violence either, as I think in general neither one should be accepted, no matter if it’s done by an individual or a state. But the legality of that violence is also not what should determine its morality, and there are exceptions to every rule. Personally I consider myself a pacifist. I’m vegan, I would go to jail before being drafted because I would never want to serve in a war, and obviously like most people I would always prefer a non violent answer to a conflict if possible. But things don’t always work out that way, and it’s nonsensical that anyone would consider Brian Thompson, or any other CEO of a major company, better or more morally acceptable than the one who killed him. State approved violence, legal violence, is not and should not be seen as any more acceptable or moral.

With Mangione’s action having the “capability to inspire a variety of extremists and grievance-driven malicious actors to violence,” the NYPD encouraged companies to increase precautions and security for executives.

Isn’t this straight up saying that Mangione is the assassin? Obviously innocent until proven guilty has always been bullshit, but where’s the bare minimum “alleged” at?

The anarchist library is pretty good if you’re interested in anarchist theory.

The FAQ is a great starting point, I’d recommend jumping around though, it’s easier to get specific answers than reading straight through imo.

The librarian picks would also probably be a good place to look, one of the recommendations there is Emma Goldman who is great.

I can definitely see why someone not as well versed in anarchist history could believe that, or if they specifically meant against the insurance industry. Either way though, I think it’s important for people to know about that history of violence that led to meaningful social reforms. So many Americans think that workers rights, civil rights, and everything short of the abolishment rebranding of slavery was won through voting or peaceful protests.

Too many people believe that somehow a state has some divine morality granted to it, and justice can only happen within the confines of said state. No moral act can be carried out without the government sanctioning it, and any miscarriage of justice by the state is an abnormality.

There may be a monopoly on violence held by states against their people, but this doesn’t give them some inherent right to be the ultimate arbiters of justice. Something being legal does not make it moral, and just because an act is illegal doesn’t make it immoral.

That one has a few things about it that make it suspect. No way to definitively say it’s fake obviously, but stuff like the drive to the Aquarium, which would presumably be from Maryland to California, so like 40 hours straight worth of driving, being done by someone who had a bad back seems at least kinda unlikely. Like I said it’s not impossible it came from him, but I’d treat it as unlikely personally.

I mean .world 100% sucks lol, and people should definitely move off it, but I’d also like people to move off .ml or any other general purpose instance since centralization on any one instance can cause issues imo. I’m considering switching off of .ee for the same reason. I think it makes more sense to have specific instances for specific things, so that the admins of one instance can have more domain specific knowledge ideally.

.world specifically does seem like they can’t go more than a few weeks without some kind of drama though lol.

I think the backpain part is true, according to people who know him it was a surfing accident. His reddit account also talks about chronic pain and complications from that, like brainfog.

I think it’s also the fact that there tends to be a ton of specific labels for different leftist subgroups too, stuff like anarcho-mutualism is similar but not the same as syndicalism, or blanket libertarian socialism, etc. That and the fact that most people will self identify as one of the moderate labels like conservative or centrist or liberal, and do so in spite of their beliefs, not because of them. People who reflect enough on their ideas and desired policies will tend to be a bit more consistent about them and the labels they use to describe them.

Definitely yeah, stuff like the political compass have been awful for nuance in discussions.

Yeah based on his goodreads and other social media he’s definitely more of US style Libertarian or conservative. He tweeted some stuff about wokeness and DEI, some of the new athiesm junk about how athiests replace Christianity with worship of social issues, and seemed to like Elon Musk. He also didn’t seem to be fully committed to the ideology though, he had real criticisms of Jordan Peterson and he seemed to be an environmentalist. He honestly just kinda seems like a normal, if privileged, person. He has a mix of political ideas, some which don’t necessarily mesh, and is willing to criticize some of the people he agrees with.

But if anything him being someone who seemed to like CEOs, who grew up pretty wealthy, being radicalized by the industry is kinda a stronger message about how unless you’re one of the corporate elite you don’t matter to them.

Yeah, I don’t actually know too much about him, this is the first I’ve seen of him afaik (though I definitely could have read his stuff and not realized), but as far as I can tell he’s pretty consistent with factual reporting. It did strike me as weird it was removed, like I get it’s technically a substack page and all, but it’s not like some random guys blog, and it’s still the only reputable source for the full manifesto I’ve seen.

That one is unconfirmed at best, it might be real, but there are several parts of it that don’t really make sense.

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/luigis-manifesto

Klippenstein is an independent journalist who has been really good at reporting on this whole story, so I trust that this is the actual manifesto the police have.

Yeah I’m split on if it’s real or not. Like the released quotes don’t match at all, but it could also be that the handwritten one was a draft he cut down before posting.

The roadtrip from presumably Maryland to California to visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium is also kinda weird, like it feels unlikely that someone who is experiencing back pain that bad would take a road trip that long, even with medicine. Even driving for a few hours straight as someone with a good back who is still young can make my back hurt, so I imagine that someone who was waking up screaming every night because of the pain wouldn’t be in a great position to drive cross country, no matter what medicine they were talking.

The fact it was posted the day of the arrest is also at least suspicious, like he could have had the paper copy on him because he posted it earlier before being arrested/spotted, but idk.

I kinda go back and forth on how much I believe it, so I’m definitely not saying it’s conclusively fake or anything. I do think waiting for confirmation is probably a good idea like you say though, but regardless of the veracity it’s definitely a heartbreaking piece of writing. So many of the stories people have shared, both in the wake of this and before, are so similar. I definitely believe this could be true.