Our history with Cuba is shameful, and it's complete hypocrisy calling them a "sponsor of terrorism" when the CIA literally sponsored terrorism there and we attempted to assassinate Castro or overthrow their government countless times. All of their economic problems are blamed on "communism" despite the massive US embargo and our continued threatening of other countries that do trade with them. Then we get opinion pieces like Opinion: Mexico shamefully joins Russia, Venezuela in backing Cuba’s dictatorship when the UN almost unanimously votes against the embargo again, like they have for 30 years now.

Maybe he was on track for that or maybe he would have taken a different path, we don't actually know. But it doesn't matter because what did happen is he became radicalized against corporations (or at least corporate healthcare) and took action. What he did and what he believes now are far more important than who else he could have become.

Idk, joking around and feeling relatable are pretty good strategies for making a jury feel more sympathetic to the defense. And as other people have said with how high profile this case being calm and good on camera is important. So far I've thought he seemed great.

I mean honestly the being knee deep in blood because a revolution started after one guy was acquitted for killing a CEO sounds way more like a movie plot to me but idk.

Regardless, the point of that wasn't that "the CEO is dead, now everyone is saved!!!" Right now we literally have a situation where a dictator was removed from power in Syria. The outcome of that is still unknown, and could turn into something worse or something better, time will tell. But either way no-one is really saying "how dare they violently overthrow the government, don't you know that violence is bad", because that would be a stupid reaction to Assad being removed.

In any of these situations saying that the person using violence to respond to violence deserves to be imprisoned doesn't make sense. Luigi Mangione would not be someone I'd feel unsafe walking past in the street, so why should they be locked up? The point of a prison system should be preventing someone from committing crime again, but I wouldn't be worried about that in the case of Mangione so it makes no sense to sentence them to prison.

I also don't want a violent revolution to come from this. Some violent actions leading to a government making large reforms as a concession to avoid further violence is something that happened all throughout history, and is how we got the New Deal. Something like that coming out of actions like this would be great, but my ideal system of change is more based on mutual aid and setting up dual power to allow people alternatives to replace corporations or weak government programs. But if a violent revolution does happen, it still doesn't make sense to blame the people being oppressed and not the corporations doing the oppressing.

Imagine if someone was living in a dictatorship. The dictator was passing laws and policies leading to thousands dying yearly. They were embezzling funds from the country and stealing money from citizens, putting them in debt and leading to all the consequences that would entail. They increased the prices of essential goods like medicine in order to skim off the top. They never directly killed anyone, all of the pain and suffering and death they caused was due to policies that technically seperated them from the outcome, being enforced by courts, banks, police, hospitals, and prisons. And they also never broke any laws. Sure people died, or were forced into debt causing them to lose their homes, but all of that was allowed since they helped make the laws.

You've heard stories of other distant countries which don't have these problems, but your country spends a considerable amount of time and money to convince you that those other governments are worse or impossible. Even so, the people tried voting this dictator out, but they rigged the elections so that no matter the outcome they still kept power. Some tried leaving, but all the neighbouring countries have the same type of government, so it was futile.

If in this situation someone kills the dictator very few people would believe that the assassin should be in jail. They didn't kill someone because they were violent or dangerous, they did so out of desperation and a desire for improvement. This assassin won't be a threat to any other citizen, only to other dictators doing the same thing. Why imprison someone who was fighting for a better future?

It's crazy how many articles I've seen that just casually imply or outright say he did it.

"Candidate for elective public office in the state of Missouri" could be read either as can't be a candidate on the ballot in Missouri or can't be a candidate for a state position. It depends on if it means [candidate for public office] in Missouri or candidate for [public office in Missouri].

I don't like how laws are always written very formally like that, I feel like English (or any language tbh) is able to be misinterpreted easily enough as is, and the stilted way it's used in legal speak just leads to questions and misunderstandings like this. I'd much rather they be written as plainly as is possible and in ways that attempted to remove ambiguity instead of add it, though a lot of the time that's the point I imagine lol.

I think the biggest issues with the gilded age PotD was that a lot of them hurt innocent people, or had collateral damage which hurt everyone in the case of a lot of the bombings. Not all of them by any means, but when innocent bystanders got hurt or killed it made the deed a lot less supportable. Plus there's just something about a health insurance CEO that makes literally nobody like them lol.

But like I said, News currently has multiple recent posts from multiple different substack blogs. One of which was posted by FlyingSquid, a moderator of the WorldNews community.

If the blog is private, from a unique URL, and is run by an independent journalist or group of journalists, how is that any more effort than checking any other type of website? I could steal a HTML/CSS template for a news site right now, whip up a site where I post misinformation, and buy a domain for like 10 bucks, and you'd have to go through a lot more effort to verify it as legit than it would take to open the substack blog, click about, and copy the name into your search engine.

If an article is by something like apnews then yeah it doesn't take much effort to check, but if it's by some other random page, like a lot of the posted articles are, you'd need to check it at least once before you knew it was fine, so what specifically about substack makes it a problem?

I mean at this point it's whatever, but I did post it in News originally. It got removed for not being a "reputable news source" based on the modlog, but the current post about it in the same community is from Gizmodo, which is fine, but the only source they have for the manifesto is literally this link.

I get that it's on a substack, but just because a journalist publishes using substack and not some other web template (even though the site is their own URL, and the author is an independent journalist who worked at several fairly well known news orgs) doesn't mean it's not reputable. It just feels very arbitrary.

Also you guys clearly don't seem to ban substack, since there are multiple posts currently up that have been posted a day ago in one case, and 16 hours ago in the other, one of which is literally also from ken klippenstein. So why is it fine sometimes but not othertimes? I don't necessarily have an issue with a broad ban of any substack link (even though I personally think that would be kinda dumb), but that fact that it's so inconsistently enforced isn't good.

That one is unconfirmed at best, it might be real, but there are several parts of it that don't really make sense.

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.