News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
I feel bad for this guy. I mean, he felt passionate enough about his cause to feel that the only way to draw attention to it was to self-immolate. But his cause is.... what, exactly? I've read a few articles and couldn't really figure it out.
It seems to me he was a bright guy who believed what he read on the Internet, and when his mother passed he lost any moderating influence in his life, so that he had no one to pull him out of the conspiracy theories. It was the lack of critical thinking that killed him in the end.
That's not how claims work, buddy.
Wait, I thought we were supposed to use that all throughout, not at the very end!?
TL;DR Yeah, the guy clearly had a screw loose. Jumping from unfounded (conspiracy) theory to another. At least he was not a Nazi, I guess - he hated everyone* equally.
* everyone being "the government", "Crypo-anything", even a few billionaires!
TL;DR: The guy is a nutter.
It should be noted that for-profit media companies will play dumb on any protest critical of the types of people that own and run for-profit media companies.
During the "occupy" protests, it was common to see reporters staring into the camera and asking "but what are these protests about?" in front signs stating exactly what the protests were about. They knew if they fairly reported on the movement, their audience might start agreeing with the protesters. So both "left wing" and "right wing" media companies held hands and united to undermine it.
But without that reporting, fuck knows. If he's posting on reddit conspiracy subs, they've become a place for extremists to recruit the stupid and the clinically paranoid.
This. It’s hard to not realize what this guy was protesting about, we all feel it but the media wants us to buy a new iphone to be happy instead.
Whatever society might look like on the other side of beating the billionaires, for-profit news surely won't be a part of it.
His Instagram tells a really sad story. He was an infrequent poster of perfectly ordinary content. No sign of any mental illness: pictures of his sisters wedding, some jokes, nothing concerning.
Then, some posts about the death of his mother and almost right after, his sharp decline in mental health becomes apparent.
He was apparently active on Reddit and posted semi-often in the /r/conspiracy subreddit
I also think he was a frequent /r/True_Anon poster, if I remember right
His manifesto is at https://theponzipapers.substack.com/p/i-have-set-myself-on-fire-outside
He was clearly mentally ill.
Yeah I too think he was likely mentally ill. But damn if this didn’t resonate.
A nutter with a good point is still a nutter.
It's always heartbreaking when people grow skeptical of neoliberalism (and the greedy, self-serving people who push it), only to be preyed upon by groups like neo-nazis, conspiracy theorists and crypto bros.
Anywhere you find people who are frustrated, depressed or paranoid, you'll find extremists using that vulnerability to groom more extremists.
I want to live in the timeline where he got the right treatment/producer to make a podcast or video series using Simpsons scenes to describe macroeconomic theories
I mean, a lot of what crypto has become is pretty Ponzi-ish. But yeah, he’s a bit deeper off the conspiracy cliff than that.
...and the two parties do seem to work together. Also, tech billionaires and their platforms do seem to promote and allow a lot of white supremacist propaganda on their websites.
So a lot of what he writes about seems to have a basis in reality.
I would think many conspiracy theories do have nuggets of truth in them, but the problem comes from interpreting them incorrectly. See "The Voyager Conspiracy" S6E9 of Voyager for an example.
Well yeah, many of them do have nuggets of truth, it becomes "conspiracy theory" when linking it all together in one big plot against humanity organised by a few people.
The "big" truth is often even scarier then any big conspiracy theory: we are ruled by things that come/happen together by accident. We are ruled by chaos. Some are powerful, but not a single few people are ever completely in control of everything.
I had a realisation today I've never seen anywhere before: Voyager would have been greatly improved had Tom Paris "grown a beard".
It becomes more crazy looking the more he tries to connect everything he is suspicious of into some grand interlinked conspiracy with some grand unified masterplan.
Yeah:
Claiming Democrats and Republicans work together on anything seems a pretty crazy suggestion these days.
You should pay closer attention. There are plenty of party-line votes on "culture war" bullshit, but there are also plenty of times in which they engage in bipartisanship to screw us. For example, they just not only renewed but also expanded FISA spying.
Aren't we all pretty sure the wealthy classes seem to have different rules applied to them? Lighter sentences, less likelihood of being arrested, better treatment when they do get arrested.t Much shorter sentences in prisons which compare holiday resorts. I mean the first time Epstein was arrested for sex crimes he was allowed to leave the prison in daylight hours.
... doesn't that start to look like elites are in a criminal conspiracy? That other elites create these conditions for them? Eg. Wealthy elite schools producing unchecked criminality, and sharing the secrets of getting these better conditions?
Like Harvard is a crime school?
Yeah, the first paragraph or so, I was like, yeah, this isn't that out there. But by the second or third paragraph the conspiracies went off the deep end pretty quick.
Yeah… this was the quote that jumped off the high dive for me.
The vibe feels to be he was individually right about most things, but people can find one thing they personally disagree with and the media said he is crazy, so he must be crazy. The Simpsons point was somewhat more of a general sense of the media thats free to consume was paid for by somebody and probably not just the goodness of their heart decided to foot that bill. Arguably Simpsons was, is, and always has been paid for one by of the worst humans alive Rupert Murdoch (A literal Monty Burns), so you really do have to ask why?
There's always a grain of truth to conspiracy theories, that's why people buy into them so easily.
Having just seen a video essay on the trouble behind the scenes getting Futurama off the ground I can answer that question: because FOX was going downhill fast and The Simpsons was a hail mary play that paid off for them. But at the cost of giving Groening complete creative control of it, which they did not want to give him for Futurama until he made an episode exactly to their spicifications and they still hated it.
I was skeptical of the mental illness angle until I clicked on the link. This guy was deeply into conspiracy theories.
It's not often well adjusted people set themselves on fire.
It does happen though. Was a form of protest during the Vietnam war. I believe the monk on the cover of a Rage Against the Machine album was friends with the famous Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh.
And unfortunately because this guy was so deep into his paranoia the world is going to dismiss it. Though the alarm that he is sounding is real. Like, we wouldn't have mentally ill people setting themselves on fire in the first place if we took better care of people right.
Thich Quang Duc is the monk you're referring to, this was during the build up to Vietnam, but to put it in context for you, John f Kennedy was still alive when this happened.
He was not protesting the war, he was protesting the Catholic Church, which was the largest land owner in South Vietnam at the time. Buddhists were being marginalized and a ban on flying the Buddhist flag had been enacted, the Vatican flag flew over most buildings.
Buddhists protesting the government has recently been victims of a massacre, government forces fired blindly in to a crowd and killed 9 people.
Duc self immolated over religious inequality.
I know some other practitioners did self immolate during the war. And religious inequality is putting it lightly considering nine people were killed. I doubt the guy killed himself over the flag in other words.