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

      • SparBrow@lemmy.world
        23·
        7 months ago

        Sure it sounds crazy, but goddamn have I been feeling like this whole country has been conned lately. Inflation keeps going up, we keep getting poorer, and the billionaires keep making record profits. Like what the actual fuck? This guy may not have gotten everything right, but the idea that we’ve been conned out of the America Dream by a kleptocracy (the billionaires) that actually rules this country and have been taught by media that we’re helpless in making any real change absolutely rings true.

        • ristoril_zip@lemmy.zipEnglish
          9·
          7 months ago

          That’s the mission of the people who are trying to tear apart our democracy: make people think the whole system is broken and beyond repair.

          That’s where all these people arguing against voting for Biden and Democratic majorities are coming from. They don’t actually think the two parties are the same (or they wouldn’t if they were honest about them). But they sure as heck think America would be better if not everyone could participate in it’s governance.

          So it’s up to us to work on defending the democratic power we have and work on repairing and improving our democracy. That means completely redesigning the campaign finance system. That means expanding voting access. That means expanding the Article 3 courts from top to bottom. We need to fix our media. Break up monopolies and oligopolies. On and on.

          We can make our democracy better if we work together to fix it.

          • SparBrow@lemmy.world
            5·
            7 months ago

            I mean I get where you’re coming from and I like the spirit of what you’re saying, but how do you fix the campaign finance system when everyone with the power to fix that currently benefits from it? How do you expand voting access, when the people who should be doing that are actually doing the opposite? How do you fix the media, when it’s owned by the billionaires that want to control what you see and hear? And on and on and on.

            I don’t want to be the doom and gloom guy, or the both sides guy or whatever the fuck. But honestly, what part of our democracy has been working lately? Do you feel represented?

            I think all Americans can agree that we want housing that’s affordable, education that isn’t a death prison for our children, medical care that won’t turn us into indentured servants, and an economy that actually reflects the realities of the people and not the fucking stocks owned mostly by billionaires. I think it would be hard to find anyone of either side of the aisle that doesn’t agree. And yet, here we are.

            • ristoril_zip@lemmy.zipEnglish
              2·
              7 months ago

              Well just for one example, Joe Biden has been aggressively using the powers he has via the department of education to cancel outstanding student loan balances that were completely legal and very profitable for usurious loan servicing companies.

              No Republican would do that.

              He and the Democrats leveraged their control of Congress in 2021 and 2022 to pass legislation that is going to do more to reduce our contribution to climate change than ever before. Not enough, but way more than any Republican would do.

              I feel like that means our democracy is sort of working.

              In so called “blue” states, they’re expanding voting access.

              I agree that campaign contributions are a serious challenge, but for example Bernie and Elizabeth Warren have done great things without contributions from billionaires.

              We can do this, but we need to stand up in the face of fear and push as hard as we can. The only thing to fear is fear itself!

              Vote Save America can help leverage donations to the most effective campaigns possible for progressive causes.

              https://votesaveamerica.com/

          • masquenox@lemmy.world
            2·
            7 months ago

            We can make our democracy better if we work together to fix it.

            You can’t fix something you never had.

          • BakerBagel@midwest.social
            10·
            7 months ago

            Democrats haven’t really done anything to stop it. It’s a ratchet where the GOP makes things worse and the Dems prevent things from ever getting better

        • capem@startrek.website
          4·
          7 months ago

          We have been conned.

          Progressives are the solution. Libertarians are the enemy.

          Everyone else is just a useful idiot.

          • Eldritch@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            7 months ago

            Ancap? Sure. Actual libertarians and anarchist. They’re allies. Ancap love libertarian larping. But they’re just fascists with a thin layer of false neutrality and logic to disarm people who are unprepared.

      • capem@startrek.website
        7·
        7 months ago

        Cryptocurrency is our first planetary multi-trillion-dollar Ponzi scheme.

        This actually makes a lot of sense if you’ve followed crypto for over a decade and look at the markets.

        Ycombinator is where a lot of the technology that takes advantage of us begins. I think it’s a stretch to say Bitcoin started as a conspiracy, but I would definitely believe that everything that followed could be the result of bad actors pulling the strings.

        The strangest thing in crypto is how uniform the value of currencies are over time. They all go up at the same time. They all go down at the same time. And they do this with near-identical amounts.

        This can only mean that it’s the same people who are invested in multiple currencies.

        Seeing how massive companies like “Red Bull” got popular paying influential people to shill their products, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least that some investors are paying people to make and shill cryptocurrencies.

    • zaph@sh.itjust.works
      11·
      7 months ago

      To my friends and family, witnesses and first responders, I deeply apologize for inflicting this pain upon you.

      Huh.

      • capem@startrek.website
        5·
        7 months ago

        That’s weird, I was reading expecting to see some kind of simpson’s quote or reference like they predicted 9/11. Instead, he mentions how “dozens of the writers of The Simpsons went to Harvard.”

        I think Simpsons is very interesting because so many people get the wrong things from it. A lot of people don’t view Simpsons as satire (which it is); they view it as an excuse for their behavior. It’s ok to be a lazy, ignorant, alcoholic because that’s what Homer is. He still loves his family, right? And that makes it okay. (not)

        I typed this out before reading further, and I’m glad he mentioned the Monorail episode because it’s exactly what came to mind. However, that episode was clear satire. It doesn’t make sense for the audience to think giving in to a conman is the correct thing to do, but that is what has happened to a lot of cities across the US.

        It’s weird because I think Simpsons has had the effect that he’s talking about, it’s just I’m torn on whether or not it was the real intention of the artists.

        If it was, that’s absolutely mind-boggling illuminati shit. I don’t think it goes that deep, though.

    • IronpigsWizard@lemmy.world
      7·
      7 months ago

      Stuck between mental illness, stupid fucking crypto bro type of sorts or both.

      Either way, loaded with pop culture references and dumb as hell.

      • Grimy@lemmy.world
        28·
        7 months ago

        Here’s the main point of what he’s saying:

        Cryptocurrency is our first planetary multi-trillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. It was expressly created for this purpose by a laundry list of rich and powerful people out of Stanford/Silicon Valley and Harvard/Facebook.

        The March 2023 bank failures were all intentional: the banks were used to move out stolen Ponzi money. This signals that they’re no longer dumping cash in to keep the cryptocurrency Ponzi afloat, and that it will soon go insolvent, as all Ponzis must.

        When the Ponzi scheme goes insolvent, it will take down half the stock market with it: The perpetrators used their major companies to pipe into the blockchain so they could funnel money out from the crypto exchanges. This includes Google, Tesla, Apple, PayPal, Facebook, Disney, Walmart, Target, InBev, Zoom, and countless others.

        So he isn’t for cryptocurrency but saying it’s a scam to rob society. It is indeed a conspiracy but conspiracies turn out to be true all the time. Epstein’s pedo ring and America’s gun and drug running to fund despots all started as conspiracy theories.

        Settings yourself on fire doesn’t mean you’re right but it shows enough resolve that you could at least read the text before misrepresenting him. He’s clearly not a crypto bro.

        • WalnutLum@lemmy.ml
          4·
          7 months ago

          At least his idea bout Bitcoin and cryptocurrency being mostly a Ponzi scheme are on point.

          Where there’s smoke there’s fire I guess.

          • SparBrow@lemmy.world
            7·
            7 months ago

            Crazy? Probably. I mean mental health is this country has been fucked for awhile.

            But setting yourself on fire takes some goddamn resolve. He’s clearly trying to get out this message that was so important to him. The saddest part of this whole thing was believing that we wouldn’t be jaded enough to just scoff and change the channel.

            • IronpigsWizard@lemmy.world
              9·
              7 months ago

              I worked crisis intervention for a few years. I have arrived to probably a dozen or so suicides. About a half dozen left these huge manifestos.

              Every. Single. One. Got thrown away, 2 had family members toss it in front of me. Turns out your loved ones do not often want to read the crazy shit you killed yourself over, especially when it ultimately changed nothing. One individual had 1000+ pages written, the family wanted nothing to do with it.

              I’m not pro-suicide for anything. Most of these people are just depressed. It’s not resolve when you’re giving up on life.

              • SparBrow@lemmy.world
                2·
                7 months ago

                Just curious, but was any of those suicides you arrived to a case of self immolation? I get giving up on life, but I can just off the top of my head think of 5 ways to off myself that would be much less painful and take less effort.

                Setting yourself on fire kinda has a history of being the most extreme form of protest. This guy clearly did it because he believed that he needed to wake people up to the reality of the world he found himself in. But yes, he was probably also depressed. I don’t blame him. The conclusion he came to is goddamn depressing for all of us. Unless you’re a billionaire.

  • The Pantser@lemmy.world
    31·
    7 months ago

    If a Trump supporter, good, one less vote for him.

    If against Trump, fuck you guy you just lost the good guys a vote.

  • son_named_bort@lemmy.world
    13·
    7 months ago

    My wife actually knew the guy from college. They were friends and she said that he was normal then. The last time they talked was back in 2019 when he had went to a baseball game in Florida and my wife wished she was there (we actually made it down there in 2022). The last thing he posted on social media before all of his, um, research was about his mom dying and we wonder if that might have triggered something. My wife was worried about him because he wasn’t getting help and she worried that he would do something crazy, which was a worry that wasn’t unfounded.

  • venusaur@lemmy.world
    5·
    7 months ago

    Second person to set themselves on fire this year. It’s becoming the face tattoos of protesting.

    • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
      20·
      7 months ago

      It’s your face and your tattoo, so if this is how you feel you need to express yourself I support it.

      I owed Aaron Bushnell the time to listen to him and understand his message, even if I think I probably already agree with them.

      Likewise, I think I ow this person the time to listen to them and understand their message, even if I think I probably don’t agree with them.

      Unlike many people who think they are on the left, I actually do believe and am fully committed to the principle of individual liberties being inviolable. That includes gay rights, trans rights, religious rights, political views, an most importantly, that your body and mind are your own and there is no authority that can remove that agency from you.

      Look if this is a rightwing conspiracy theorist and they believe this passionately in a fiction, consider that half the time when these nut jobs go off they shoot up a school or a sporting event. This person did the most extreme form of protest imaginable. But they also decided that they didn’t need to take others with them to make their point. We should try to understand why they made the conclusions they did, even if, especially if we don’t agree with how they arrived at them.

      • venusaur@lemmy.world
        3·
        7 months ago

        yeah, it’s called mental illness. they have all the right in the world to do what they did. more power to them, but it’s definitely not healthy behavior and I would question their state of mind and beliefs to react in such an extreme manner.

          • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.worldOP
            3·
            7 months ago

            I think you have to be mentally ill to protest via self immolation. There is much more you can do alive than you can do dead. Bringing attention to a cause in this manner is very effective… But ultimately pointless if everyone is already aware of it.

            That monk did succeed in becoming a symbol of protest. But I don’t think he created a profound change that was worth his life.

            Basically – suicide is never the answer. And as protest it’s rarely effective.

            • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
              8·
              7 months ago

              You might consider that you simply have a shallow experience of what it means to believe something. It’s not that different than signing up for the military in a time of war or running into a burning building to save a life.

              It’s your decision, but it takes character to be willing to sacrifice yours self for something you truly believe in, for better or for worse.

              • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.worldOP
                3·
                7 months ago

                Those are completely different.

                What is gained by sacrificing yourself in this case? What are you accomplishing that you could not accomplish alive? Saving or protecting people is one thing. What does this do?

                I don’t have disdain or disrespect for people who’ve done this. I just have pity.

            • prole@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              3·
              7 months ago

              I don’t think desperation is necessarily mental illness. They often come hand in hand, but one doesn’t necessitate the other.

  • Match!!@pawb.socialEnglish
    4·
    7 months ago

    manifesto that crypto is a ponzi scheme and the world is run by kleptocrats

    uh yeah dude did you think we didn’t know that??

    • CeruleanRuin@lemmings.worldEnglish
      6·
      7 months ago

      It’s always sad when someone who clearly cares so much gives up or resorts to irrational methods to fight against what he perceived as an insurmountable threat.

      The world has always been run by self-interested bastards who will gladly sacrifice thousands and millions of people to enrich themselves. This is nothing new to anyone who has studied any history.

      • NOT_RICK@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        7 months ago

        This was likely the product of brain chemistry imbalances, I wouldn’t characterize it as them giving up.

    • Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      3·
      7 months ago

      It seems disconnected from the report that the pamphlets he tossed around before self-immolating were about grievances against NYU. Not saying it couldn’t be real, I’d just expect a mention of NYU in there somewhere if what he chose to take with him was NYU-related.

      Edit: if the thread is longer than that one post I can’t see it because I don’t use my twitter account anymore

      • Fecundpossum@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        7 months ago

        All of his various pamphlets, including the NYU one, can be found hyperlinked in the manifesto. It’s definitely him.

  • daltotron@lemmy.world
    4·
    7 months ago

    "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.

  • Sam_Bass@lemmy.world
    2·
    7 months ago

    Ive been noticing lots of incidents of people giving in to their dorker impulses over the last decade or so. Is it an evolutionary process, kinda like a thinning of the herd due to resource limitations?

    • icesentry@lemmy.ca
      15·
      7 months ago

      Probably a side effect of our hyper connected world. It might have happened at the same rate in the past and you didn’t know about it. It’s also a case of people copying other people they see online.

      • Ilovemyirishtemper@lemmy.world
        5·
        7 months ago

        That is an interesting theory. It might also be coupled with the size of the population. We have an ever increasing, massive number of people in the world, and the connectedness might just show us how little our individualized voices are heard without doing something as severe as lighting yourself on fire.

        • Eldritch@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          7 months ago

          It’s generally statistically proven. Are you familiar with Florida man? He’s no crazier than any other man. It’s literally a product of coverage. Fascist media is constantly covering how crime of all sorts is on the rise. Despite all actual evidence being contrary.

      • modifier@lemmy.ca
        4·
        7 months ago

        Technology has evolved far, far, faster than our emotional capacity to actually master that technology.