LukeS26 (He/They)

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.

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.

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.

https://xkcd.com/1706/