323 school shootings at K-12 this year
Remember all that critical theory stuff people were freaking out about a few years ago?
It’s basically about how society arranges itself to benefit the people who have the power in a society.
Like how crimes against business and capital are serious crimes, but crimes against workers are usually treated as paperwork errors.
Compare the number of people arrested for shoplifting as opposed to the number arrested for wage theft.
Or about how the murder of one CEO gets weeks of media attention and a potential development of new systems by the police to keep it from happening again, but we’ve already moved on from the last school shooting, and our official policy is “yeah, that’ll happen from time to time”
Cyberpunk dystopia, but without the cool ass shit, just a lot of ways to die horribly.
You are totally right but the problem is that the people who could do a revolution are all in front of their cellphone or laptop and they only write, they do nothing. They write on X, they write on Facebook but they don’t do anything else. It’s a mute revolution and the corporate knows that nothing will come of this, since the US have elected Trump.
All they have to do is enforce law so no other CEO will get killed and learn from all thid and get better at making the people don’t do anything except write on the internet.
If writing on the internet does nothing, then why did we have to come here to do it freely?
Luigi Mangione manifesto
To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.
Don’t they make enough money that they can pay their own security or set up their own hotline? Why does the citizens have to pay for it? Maybe their insurance can pay for it since it’s a high risk job.
Watch Congress turn bodyguards into something you can get a tax break for, like they did for private jets under Trump’s tax reform. In the end they’ll find a way to make sure we pay for it, not them.
We don’t pay for it with a tax break. They still pay for it they just get some money back for doing it come tax time.
Which is money that doesn’t go into the budget to be used for health care, housing or any of the other things ordinary people need.
Deny Delay DEFUND.
This is like the Trauma Team in Cyberpunk. Rich people who can afford the highest tier get a private militarized swat team to go to them any time they’re in trouble.
Trauma team charges 100 Eddies per minute from when you call them until they deliver you to the hospital, plus spend ammunition and medical supplies. They waive the charge if they need 7 minutes or more to get to you, though. (Not relevant in gameplay, as their response time is 1d6 minutes). And they have heavy weapons to fight their way through to you. So, their services are sort of reasonably priced for what they offer. And even if you don’t earn the big bucks, if you live in a Arasaka living facility and eat kibble, you should have enough saved up to pay for their services if you end up needing them. (Of course, living in an Arasaka living facility may lead to you needing their services)
Point being, “Cyberpunk 2020”'s healthcare system is better than America’s.
Well you haven’t changed that much then. That killed me. British comedy really is better about social and government stuff.
America needs to play this on every channel at least once a week for the next four years. So we can reference it every time Trump brings up selling off the FBI to the Pinkertons.
A Bit of Fry and Laurie is criminally underrated in the US, but a lot of it is very topical to the UK.
Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin - An Accounting of the Victims of Brian Robert Thompson
If you want to actually look at things quantitatively. I ran the numbers, and by my math, Brian Robert Thompson was responsible for the deaths of 40,000 innocent American souls.
Even by a conservative estimate, he was responsible for more deaths than the 9/11 terrorist attacks. And this figure includes only deaths, not the injuries, pain, suffering, and bankruptcies that resulted from his actions. When these are included, his victims likely number over a million.
9/11 killed “only” 3000 people, didn’t it? These figures are orders or magnitude higher.
Author is… Not great. Content is good but repeats themselves for paragraphs at a time, weird religious shift at the end, generally very high ratio of words to words that convey a new thought.
Repetition is often necessary in this kind of thing. You have to repeat yourself, lest you be accused of supporting vigilante murder. The intention was to thoroughly explain the methods and assumptions. As far as the religious bent, that’s deliberate. I’m agnostic myself, but I decided to take a very religious “fire and brimstone” framing to the piece. I’ve read so many pieces condemning Luigi as a monster and irredeemably evil. And maybe it’s just my own religious upbringing, but I know of no way to more thoroughly condemn someone than to state that they are literally burning in the fires of Hell itself. That’s not the kind of language one is to use lightly.
I think we could use more fire and brimstone rhetoric against the oligarchs. That’s always been one of the core traditions of Christianity. It’s the money changers in the Temple. The belief that even if the powerful escape accountability in this life, they are still to be shamed, as they will burn in the Pit forever. In today’s world, it’s primarily only the right that uses this language of Damnation, almost exclusively against LGBT people. But I think the left really needs to reclaim this rhetoric. It is a powerful thing to look an evil man in the eyes and to calmly say, “you are going to burn for what you have done in this world.”
Also, this issue is something that appeals to people on all sides of the aisle. I could have written the article from some sort of Marxist class analysis, but that really doesn’t seem appropriate for the moment. I mention a policy solution, Medicare for All, that is usually considered left wing. And I wanted to balance it out with some very traditional religious condemnation.
Fair, I suppose I’m just far more ok with supporting vigilante murder and don’t see the loss of every life as a real loss. But if that’s what you’re going for, fair.
