323 school shootings at K-12 this year
this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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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.
9/11 killed "only" 3000 people, didn't it? These figures are orders or magnitude higher.
I was just quoting the article.
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.
Yeah I'm of two minds. Half the time I'm feeling what Tolkien taught - "many that live deserve death, and many that die deserve life. Will you give it to them?" As I cannot bring the dead back to life, I should not be so quick to endorse the taking of life.
The other half of the time I'm ready to start a crowd funding campaign to erect a giant bronze statue of Luigi.
The latter attitude I tend to reserve for flippant comments and posts. I've been on a kick lately about suggesting we chain CEOs to boulders and throw them into the Sea. But when I actually sit down and write something more long form, I tend to take the former approach. Also, I wanted to have something that people could reference as an actual calculation for the real magnitude of Thompson's crimes. I felt not openly condoning murder was better for that purpose. But I still wanted to have a strong moral component, so I took the approach of "all y'all are goin' to Hell for this."