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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   30276 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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If you look at who supports/doesn't support him, it's not on clear party lines at all. It's about the legitimacy of institutions vs individuals with respect to violence.

I'm seeing professors and mainstream journalists openly supporting him and celebrating the murder. I would bet that both those specific people and their social classes generally would come down solidly on the "legitimacy of institutions" side in the last several societal conversations we've had on the issue: Donald Trump and Daniel Penny, for instance.

his actual manifesto isn't the sort of self indulgent dramatic political thesis you might expect

Do we have his actual manifesto? I read a manifesto that talked about his mother suffering chronic pain and getting screwed over by the insurance and medical system, but I thought that was the fake one.

No argument on the rest, you seem straightforwardly correct.

This seems the real manifesto (Klippenstein is a former Intercept reporter, so not confirmed by a second source yet, but he is decently trustworthy). It is super short:

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/luigis-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.”

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.

This is the part that sticks out as what's broken in this otherwise reasonable and smart-enough sounding person. "This is a complicated problem that I can't say I fully understand but the answer is obviously violence." He keeps using adverbs like "simply, frankly, clearly", to try and drag violence within the realm of reasonable answers to a problem that is resistant to any other solutions. Violence is a reasonable answer when you are absolutely certain that it is the only way to resolve an issue with more severe consequences than the damage caused by the violence itself, which is why it's such a bad answer to complicated societal problems. But by his admission it IS a complicated societal problem that he doesn't feel like he has a good enough grasp on to explain himself.

Not even a personal grievance, just terminal Reddit-brain?

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