Not much info at time of posting what prompted the man to do so
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.
That’s really tragic :/
He posted online to explain his reasoning for this action: https://open.substack.com/pub/theponzipapers/p/i-have-set-myself-on-fire-outside?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Tl;dr nutso crypto conspiracy bro
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.
Most braindead take.
Learn to read into a metaphor ffs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We can make our democracy better if we work together to fix it.
You can’t fix something you never had.
Stuck between mental illness, stupid fucking crypto bro type of sorts or both.
Either way, loaded with pop culture references and dumb as hell.
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.
Nobody bothered to look at the pamphlets I suppose.
CNN reporters on the scene observed one of the flyers, which said “NYU is a mob front” and “had various allegations of wrongdoings against the school.”
Here’s an image of one of the pamphlets.
deleted by creator
"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.
