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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.
His manifesto is at https://theponzipapers.substack.com/p/i-have-set-myself-on-fire-outside
He was clearly mentally ill.
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.
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
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 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.
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:
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.
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?
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.
There's always a grain of truth to conspiracy theories, that's why people buy into them so easily.
Yeah… this was the quote that jumped off the high dive for me.
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?
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.
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.
I had a realisation today I've never seen anywhere before: Voyager would have been greatly improved had Tom Paris "grown a beard".
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.
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.