Onlookers screamed as fire engulfed the young man, who had thrown pamphlets in the air before he set himself aflame. A police officer tried to extinguish the flames before the man was taken away in an ambulance.
Not much info at time of posting what prompted the man to do so
"When we piece it all together, we understand the truth: We are in a totalitarian doomsday cult.
Why on earth would our elites do this? There are many reasons, but the simplest is because capitalism is unsustainable, and they knew it: Climate change and resource extraction would catch up eventually. So, they never intended to sustain it. They knew all along that they would gobble up all the wealth they could, and then yank the rug out from under us so they could pivot to a hellish fascist dystopia."
Christ. This guy is pretty overly conspiratorially minded in an “everyone’s a secret fascist” kind of way, rather than kind of, more incentive-structure minded, right, or systems-minded, but like, god damn. It’s a fusion of a pretty lucid assessment of some pretty common cultural undercurrents that have been slowly building in the american consciousness, and the associated despair that comes with those realizations, but characterized and attributed too much to overt malice, rather than idiocy, happenstance, or overarching incentive structures. Ironically, while I think the first part of this is the true part, it’s the latter part, the extrapolation, which lets him believe that setting himself on fire is the correct course of action, that sending out schizo pamphlets is helpful, which is something that is pretty common, unfortunately, in these types of situations, I think probably because there’s a kind of selection bias for it. It’s the second part that’s the evidence of the mental illness, there, I suppose is what I’m saying.
"When we piece it all together, we understand the truth: We are in a totalitarian doomsday cult.
Why on earth would our elites do this? There are many reasons, but the simplest is because capitalism is unsustainable, and they knew it: Climate change and resource extraction would catch up eventually. So, they never intended to sustain it. They knew all along that they would gobble up all the wealth they could, and then yank the rug out from under us so they could pivot to a hellish fascist dystopia."
Christ. This guy is pretty overly conspiratorially minded in an “everyone’s a secret fascist” kind of way, rather than kind of, more incentive-structure minded, right, or systems-minded, but like, god damn. It’s a fusion of a pretty lucid assessment of some pretty common cultural undercurrents that have been slowly building in the american consciousness, and the associated despair that comes with those realizations, but characterized and attributed too much to overt malice, rather than idiocy, happenstance, or overarching incentive structures. Ironically, while I think the first part of this is the true part, it’s the latter part, the extrapolation, which lets him believe that setting himself on fire is the correct course of action, that sending out schizo pamphlets is helpful, which is something that is pretty common, unfortunately, in these types of situations, I think probably because there’s a kind of selection bias for it. It’s the second part that’s the evidence of the mental illness, there, I suppose is what I’m saying.