- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
Feels like everyone’s using the same event to push totally different narratives 😬
the only real narrative that matters is the consensus you and your neighborhood reach. all politics are local first
Luigi Day Parade on December 4th float/balloon ideas:
- Handsome Sweater Guy Balloon
- Burning Warehouse float
- Face and name wall of billionaires with addresses
- Netanyahu killing Charlie Kirk
- Killdozer
It is the time of the wooden shoes.
Amazon’s burning approach to unsold and returned products
While it’s fun to believe this is some kind of underground protest by the workers, it is far more likely that the Amazon policy of incinerating unsold goods to sidestep the cost of returns has created enormous fire hazards within their warehouses. This, combined with a chronic short-staffing of facilities, poor maintenance of infrastructure, and excess volume of returned goods due to the increasingly shoddy nature of their 3rd party vendors, puts all the pieces in place for routine self-inflicted arson.
Why not both?
Outside the Toiletry Fire Bandit, I haven’t seen any evidence of the former. But as someone who has worked in a warehouse, I’ve seen ample opportunities for the latter.
Or, the fun approach! These new policies give incendiary devices to those who may want to do more than burn returned product.
I once worked in a real piece of shit warehouse for a real piece of shit company who treated their workers like complete shit, and I regret not setting it on fire. (Briggs and Stratton)

How exciting!
Aurora Borealis? At this time of year? At this time of day? In this part of the country? Localized entirely within a warehouse?
Yes 🙂
May I see it?
No
Can I see it?
no
Yes. It’s been happening for 30 years now.
Okay maybe there is a left in los angeles.
Maybe unionize and strike instead of poisoning the people in the surrounding area, who are mostly working poor.
Oh yeah, of course, how foolish of them. Everyone knows that you can just unionize ezpz. If you knew your labour history, you’d know that individual acts of disruption are a crucial element in negotiation. We didnt get unions just because one day all the workers realized they didn’t like getting paid poorly, liberals responded with violence and necessitated acts like these to make unionization a more preferable alternative to capital.
We have environmental protections that (purportedly) avoid harmful pollution near residential communities for similar reasons.
They responded with violence because there were no legal protections for labor unions. Those protections exist in California.
Burning a warehouse is the least effective way to help people. The arsonist ends up in jail, the surrounding community suffers health problems, and the warehouse owners put more security and restrictions on employees instead of paying them more. Unionizing forces the warehouse owner to meet the demands of the workers.
Reality: the burning down warehouses redirects security from union busting to looking for arsonists. And the calculus is sometimes: pay more for security, or just pay workers more.
There is no money spent on security for union busting in California. California has strict laws against violent union busting.
Nobody would do something iLlEgAl
Not if they get penalized for it more than they benefit from breaking the law, and California is strict about enforcing labor laws.
Look man, in addition to being counterproductive, the actions you’re defending have a lot of collateral damage. It’s similar to Israel saying that they should be able to bomb Gaza to get terrorists even though the bombings also affect children, which is another example of an action that is both counterproductive and has a lot of collateral damage.
“Guys the system WORKS just USE it and don’t break its rules!!” You don’t sound like someone who has ever had to form a union, maybe even never grew up in a union town. Legal protections are designed to redirect challenge into a controlled environment that is designed in accordance with the interests of capitalism. Legal parameters for strikes has, go figure, resulted in a consistent and gradual erosion of union power that has only began to change post-COVID.
Unionists didn’t use violence because they didn’t have “legal protection,” they did it because capitalists and police would break their bodies either if they worked or resisted. They’d call in militias to bash unionist skulls, they’d pay them in scrip and prevent them or their children from ever freeing themselves.
I don’t buy your concern for these communities at all, have you tried to check if there was any harm? Have you heard how they’ve responded? Would any of them accept that cost if it meant that the visibility of these acts produced a larger movement of labour rights that their kids could benefit from? So fucking disrespectful.
Unionists didn’t use violence because they didn’t have “legal protection,” they did it because capitalists and police would break their bodies either if they worked or resisted. They’d call in militias to bash unionist skulls, they’d pay them in scrip and prevent them or their children from ever freeing themselves.
Those are all illegal now. That’s why unionizing works now where it didn’t before.
I don’t buy your concern for these communities at all, have you tried to check if there was any harm?
I live in California. Air quality is always an issue, whether it’s from wildfires or avgas from local airports. These cause real health issues, and the latter causes measurable IQ drops in the poor communities surrounding those airports. Industrial fires are something we need to worry about just like Tehranis have to worry about oil refinery fires.
Those are all illegal now. That’s why unionizing works now where it didn’t before.
Unionbusting, like racism, totally not a problem anymore… izzat what you’re saying?
Not in California. Air pollution causing health problems is a real problem though.
Dude caused half a billion in damage. Insurance companies are going to be forced to evaluate the risk of underpaying workers going forward.
I’m pro union but you really need to look up the history of unions friend.
Whether they pay workers more or not, they need to worry about arson, so they’ll solve that problem first by imposing draconian security measures. Once they solve that problem, underpaying workers is no longer a problem for them.
I’m a history buff. The NLRA is why unions work now where before there was a lot of labor-related violence.
The only way to solve that problem is to eliminate workers entirely or pay them such that they aren’t incentivized to use their access to sabotage operations.
Everyone is politely explaining this to you. Try listening. You clearly have not done the homework we assigned you.
As I’ve already explained, the only way to solve that problem is security measures. Even if they pay people well, that doesn’t stop a disgruntled or temporarily insane employee from destroying the warehouse.
Collective bargaining extracts as much value out of the employer as the employer gets from placing the warehouse in that location.
Why aren’t the sprinker systems working in these warehouses? This is a huge osha violation
Supposedly the guy who filmed it did it tactically. He set small fires and let the fire suppression system run out of water then set larger fires. Not sure about all the other ones.
I’ve been wondering about this the entire goddamn time. What a liability lol
Why would they be working?
That’s the truly heinous crime being committed here - putting workers at risk of direct death by lack of fire safety (on top of regular worker abuse).
I think you’re missing the point, think of the profits.
It’s probably not very profitable to lose the entire warehouse and its contents to an easily preventable fire, either.
wait is this really the seventh warehouse fire not known to be accidental in a week? and I’m only just finding out about this now?
It’s the media cycle.
They basically see “warehouse on fire” getting a lot of views, so they start reporting on other fires too, disregarding the actual cause of the fire".
Same happens with other stuff too. Statistically this isn’t occuring more than normally, but because one occurrence got a lot of views, we see it reported more.
Statistically this isn’t occuring more than normally
I mean, it’s hard to say without doing some kind of actual statistical analysis.
If the reporting is purely stochastic, driven by arbitrary changes in click-through habits, then it is very possible that fires are more common and people are more interested because they’ve been seeing more of them in their neighborhoods. It’s also possible that fires are less common and people are curious about them because they’re such a novelty.
Idfk. But I wouldn’t be quite so blase about an uptick in stories absent any actual baseline of the event.
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There have been a number of warehouse fires, but not all of them are purposeful acts of arson by disgruntled proles.
One of them definitely is, that’s the one at a paper warehouse, where the arsonist filmed himself saying “You should’ve paid your employees enough to live” while filming the blaze.
A couple others seem like they might be copycats but currently remain unconfirmed, and the rest were clearly accidents.
So, there isn’t exactly a huge wave of Stochastic, proletarian arsons going on across America. But there clearly is a hunger for a kind of revenge against the wealthy, and this overhyped news cycle is a part of that.
Actual instances of Stochastic terrorism, like the killing of healthcare CEO Brian Thomson, or the recent attacks on the home of Sam Altman, in addition to the one confirmed warehouse arson, are also a part of that hunger for revenge.
That said, instead of doing an individual act of terrorism… Go organize your workplace, join an org, help out your neighbors, and do something more productive. Its not as sexy, but it is more useful.
“Organize your workplace and get collectively laid off”
Don’t wanna be pessimistic but it never would’ve gotten this far is this was as easy as you said.
So, that’s not a foregone conclusion, and even if it was, that’s not an excuse to not try.
People used to get killed in the United States (and still do in the global south) for trying to unionize. I think you can take on some lighter risks than that
I know this is not exactly the same because I’m talking about a different country, but its still a Warren Buffet business: Honduran textile factories, “maquilas” as we call them, very generally close down entirely and move elsewhere if a union even starts bubbling up. They’ll fire entire floors or departments if they suspect someone is trying to start a union, and they specifically keep profiles on people who have been known to get involved in unions and either don’t give them jobs or fire then as soon as they realize the history that person has.
I understand it was worse before (well, I don’t follow local news that much but I’m pretty sure there was a textile unionists massacre a few years ago, unknown causes, so maybe it’s still that bad), but that’s enough currently to have absolutely everyone hating unionists in these environments. Pro-union stances can get you in real trouble because of how much that endangers everyone around you and their livelihoods. I… Don’t know how you deal with that, I don’t think anyone around here knows either or something would’ve been done about it by now.
Thank you for your perspective!
I think countries with strong labor movements overcame that in a few different ways:
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in The United States the labor movement was so violent (e.g. The Coal Wars) that the capitalist class found it beneficial to allow limited unionization to prevent further violence and thus harm to their profits.
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In Cuba, China, etc. They had a Socialist Revolution and either liquidated or subordinated their capitalist class to the rule of the workers
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European countries developed strong domestic labor movements and welfare states so neighboring Socialist Countries didn’t look like an appealing alternative.
The global south struggles to overcome what you’re describing because They’re developed enough to have a class consciousness proletariat, so you can’t as easily stoke a precarious peasantry to Revolution. And they’re under the thumb, but only of domestic capital, but also international capital, so resistingbecomes much more difficult. Surveillance tech and weapons used on people in the imperial core are essentially tested on hyper exploited workers in the global south
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That’s okay, we’ll take credit for them anyway, and most people won’t know the difference, they’ll think that all the warehouses are going to burn down. People will will stop coming to work, and warehouse owners will all be worried. Maybe they’ll even have to spend a bunch of their precious profits on extra security.
thomson and altman are the stochastic terrorists you fuckin moron
Jesus Christ, you’re really coming out swinging with the insults.
Sam Altman and co suck shit. I’m not denying that, or defending them, so idk why you’re crawling up my ass about it.
But you’re not the first person in this thread to have some real piss on the poor reading comprehension around the phrase “Stochastic Terrorism”. All that phrase means, is that acts of terror are statistically more likely to occur due to the circumstances of a social, political, or media environment that encourages it. So someone who finds themselves in an environment where people say “Mass shootings are cool” isn’t garunteed to go do one, but they are more likely to. We just can’t predict who or when exactly someone will do a mass shooting about it.
Stochastic terrorism is in contrast to traditional terrorism, where actors engage in acts of terrorism which are organized, planned, and carried out, under orders from a political organization with an explicit structure. So someone in a cell gets orders from his superiors to blow up a guy’s car next Sunday, wouldn’t be Stochastic terrorism, because it’s not a random individual carrying it out.
So, someone burning down a warehouse and saying “They should pay us more” is Stochastic.
A cell of a Basque nationalist organization carrying out an assassination of fascist Spain’s Second in Command by blowing his car up, is not Stochastic.
Some workers in 1910 doing a propaganda of the deed where they randomly kill their boss? Stochastic.
The IRA setting off carbombs? Not Stochastic.
Rich people like Sam Altman using organs of the state to terrorize the working class? Also not Stochastic.
maybe you should have looked it up before talking down to people.
Stochastic terrorism is an analytic description used in scholarship and counterterrorism to describe a mass-mediated process in which hostile public rhetoric, repeated and amplified across communication platforms, elevates the statistical risk of ideologically motivated violence by unknown individuals, even without direct coordination or explicit orders.
how can you insist that the public dissemination of bigotry against minorities through social media and AI is NOT stochastic when it is in the literal definition? people are losing the rights to their bodies and safety due to these platforms that altman has invaded. zuckerberg has also made billions off of blatant dissemination of propaganda on his platform that literally led to Trump being elected, which (surprise!!) has led to destruction of human rights on a global scale.
Rich people like Sam Altman using organs of the state to terrorize the working class? Also not Stochastic.
it literally is, i shouldnt have to spell it out for you. also thomson ran one of the largest networks created to siphon money from the population, leading to thousands of preventable deaths a year in order to line his pockets?
Stochastic terrorism is an analytic description used in scholarship and counterterrorism to describe a mass-mediated process in which hostile public rhetoric, repeated and amplified across communication platforms, elevates the statistical risk of ideologically motivated violence by unknown individuals, even without direct coordination or explicit orders.
That’s just a fancier version of the thing that I said. I know full well what it means, and it’s what I described, and what your definition here states:
That Stochastic terrorism is when acts of terroristic violence, carried out by individuals, become more likely in certain social or media environments.
Racists egging each other on in an 8chan thread might or might not lead to a specific individual shooting up a Walmart, but that environment produces an elevated risk of someone doing that, when they otherwise wouldn’t have.
how can you insist that the public dissemination of bigotry against minorities through social media and AI is NOT stochastic when it is in the literal definition?
Because that’s not what Stochastic means.
In statistics, Stochastic is a word which describes a kind of randomness. There’s a slight technical distinction between something being Stochastic vs random, in stats. But the way that it’s used in Political Science and Terrorism Studies, they’re synonymous.
The thing in Stochastic Terrorism which is Stochastic, or random, is the acts of terrorism themselves, not the media environment which produces them. You seem to be confusing the casual mechanism (media environment) as the thing that’s Stochastic, when it’s actually the effect (the terrorism), which is what’s random.
Is dissemination of bigotry via social media Stochastic? I mean… Maybe? These things are often carried out in a very intentional way. A lot of online and IRL transphobia, for example, is carried out by people who are a part of distinct groups, with goals, hierarchies, and people who hand down orders. Which isn’t Stochastic. So that’s not inherently the case.
Now, if someone on Lemmy calls me a tr*nny unprompted, then yeah, that would be an example of stochastic behavior. Maybe that guy comes from an instance which doesn’t moderate transphobia, Incentivizing transphobes to gather there, that can lead to a higher statistical likelihood of slur throwing on Lemmy.
But that’s Stochastic behavior, not Stochastic terrorism. Terrorism is a morally neutral description of something very specific: acts of violence carried out with the intent to spark fear or panic in a population.
Sam Altman or Elon Musk making yes-man robots that sometimes talk people into acts of violence is bad, and morally reprehensible …but it’s not terrorism.
If the robot talks a guy into killing his family in the name of Donald Trump, that’s not terrorism.
If the robot talks someone into blowing up a bank because it fed him antisemitic conspiracies, then that would be terrorism, because he’s trying to terrorize the cabal of Jewish bankers that he believes exists.
But the act of making the robot, or profiting off of it, or whatever, isn’t itself terrorism. You’ve just made a petri dish more efficient than 8chan.
Rich people like Sam Altman using organs of the state to terrorize the working class? Also not Stochastic.
it literally is, i shouldnt have to spell it out for you. also thomson ran one of the largest networks created to siphon money from the population, leading to thousands of preventable deaths a year in order to line his pockets?
No Patrick, Those things aren’t stochastic terrorism either. Yes, that guy did bad things and should be punished for them. Yes it resulted in deaths. But he didn’t do it specifically to kill people, or terrorize them for a political purpose. Those are externalities. He did it to make more money. And he did it with, as you said, a giant network… Which even if it somehow counted as terrorism (which it doesn’t), would make it traditional terrorism, not Stochastic.
zuckerberg has also made billions off of blatant dissemination of propaganda on his platform that literally led to Trump being elected, which (surprise!!) has led to destruction of human rights on a global scale.
I agree that this is also bad, but it’s neither Stochastic, nor Terrorism. Outside of Burgerland, in the decade preceding Trump, Facebook helped create a media environment in Myanmar, which spurred on a mix of Stochastic and traditional terrorism, in addition to state violence, against the Rohingya people. That’s awful and I think Zuckerberg should be tried for his role in the facilitation of genocide. But the act of poorly and irresponsibly moderating Facebook is not Terrorism.
seems i’m not the one with reading comprehension issues
Look, you’re the one who called me a “fucking moron” unprompted. If you had a question or disagreement with the way I used the term, we could have a nice conversation about it, but you seem content being a smug cunt about shit you clearly don’t understand.
You gave a lot of examples of bad things, but none of them were examples of Terrorism. Terrorism Is a very specific category of violent behavior carried out with specific Intent. Words mean things.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Thompson is an stochastic murderer, not terrorist. Trump and Altman are both, Murdoch is a terrorist. There are differences.
There is nothing stochastic about either the CEO, Sam Altman or the warehouse cases. Pretty deterministic those.
Also wouldn’t call it “terrorism”. It is revolutionary action.
It’s a perfectly normal Free Market Correction. When your policies are so reprehensible, that they spawn a customer so angry that they kill the CEO, that’s the Free Market at work. Perfectly normal, and the way the Free Market is supposed to work.
That Free Market extends to the government, too. Eventually the citizens will get pushed around a little too much, and they will issue a Free Market Correction, which will be very unpleasant for those being corrected.
And the free market need a LOT of correction.
Yep. They put all their hopes into the Free Market, and have collected heavily on its benefits. Now they will have to experience the Free Market as it corrects, and finds its balance.
Sorry, MAGA, that’s YOUR system. Remember that as you hear the blade shwish.
No, it’s terrorism. The media has just turned that into a bad word for anything they don’t like. The government using violence to make you follow the law? Also terrorism. Just read the definition. It’s just been made to be that the word terrorism is only used for non-state violence. It’s been turned into this purely evil force (typically done by brown people), rather than using the tools of violence to change behavior.
One man’s revolutionary activist is anothers terrorist.
Take a walk through Detroit to see how well this works out for the people who live there
Hey guys whatever you do, don’t read Burning Rage of A Dying Planet by Craig Rosebraugh, or Earth Liberation Front by Leslie James Pickering, don’t watch Battle in Seattle, or If A Tree Falls or How To Blow Up A Pipeline or Battle of Algiers or The Baader-Meinhoff Complex, and definitely don’t search for “Abu Khabbab al Misri filetype:pdf”
Sounds like a jolly roger of a good time :)
Old school Monkey Wrench Gang checking in. Edward Abbey is showing me the way.
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Hell yes. Power to the people … so long as my Amazon delivery doesn’t get delayed (/s)
so i know you added /s but as a firefighter I am totally fine if folks want to torch these buildings but do not want ffs, emts, and working class people to get hurt. as for cops, i don’t fucking care, they’re not going in anyway as they are pussies.
Why would cops go in? I don’t like to repeat old stereotypes, but black people hardly ever hang out in roaring fires; so to whom would they deliver their bullets?
plus buildings have doors so cops in texas are extra safe.
Are you calling me out because I’m from Texas, or calling out Texas cops because they’re cowards who watched children get slaughtered and then cried to the courts for the right to not do their job?
a little from column A and a lot from column B. :p ❤️
Some police try to save people and run into burning buildings. Especially if fire fighters are delayed or they think that it’s not so bad.
Rare, but possible
i once went to rescue a woman who had admitted to me she set her bldg on fire. a three apartment 2 story house. she was on the porch. an old lady. she said she wouldnt leave, rambled a bit, reached back and punched me in the jaw. then ran into the burning house upstairs.
i donned my mask. grabbed my hook. went in to get her. found her atop the stairs. in a defensive manner, ready to fight me but also could tell she was scared. i put my hand on the small of her back and yeeted her down the stairs. the cop who was waiting at the door, had one foot in, grabbed her by the hands and dragged her out.
i finished my search. she got arrested for arson and got mental help services she needed.
the cop got a fucking life saving medal.
Of course! That cop was a freaking hero! They just saved some poor old woman, in a transient housing situation, from some hook-wielding maniac who pushed her down a flight of stairs after she tried fighting them off! Without that officer, who bravely jumped off your shoulders and across the finish line, who knows what could have happened!!!
You know what? I heard that the lady was mentally unstable, but that her assailant was wearing a mask and possibly even had an axe!
~Oh hey! What’s this little package? I think there’s something for you inside!~
📦
/s
This is gold. Appreciate the good laugh. +1
ha! solid story. that works for me.
I’m sorry that happened to you. You probably have more experience in this than I do, but your experience is anecdotal.
While ACAB, somewhere I am certain a cop has actually saved someone from a fire. Like I said, very rare, but not impossible
What exactly is your point here? You’re telling a firefighter how sure you are that at some point in history a cop has helped someone in a fire because… ?
Conversely, I’ve had cops actively prevent me from helping stop a very small house fire, literally on scene just to prevent friends and neighbors from doing anything about it. Got to argue with four gun-toting meatheads while a home burned out from an everyday kitchen accident, place was uninhabitable before the fire dept showed up. Of all the dumbass places to wave your “thin blue line” flag, why here?
oh i have also totally seen them save people before we get there too. not at all denying that.
It pisses me off that my in-laws have been all “elbows up” anti USA and order fucking everything on Amazon.
Yeah, elbows up, wait, hold on, gotta send our money to the country threatening us, okay done, elbows back up! Fuck our local businesses!
Fuck man, how god damn hard is it to not buy on Amazon?
90% of the shit on Amazon is just Aliexpress dropshippers at 20% markup, whom are mostly taobao resellers at 300% markup.
And about half of ebay is dropshippers from amazon.
I haven’t ordered anything from amazon in years. But recently I got into a new hobby, read about it, found out what kind of tools and materials I need, and ordered a few things from ebay. About half of it showed up in amazon packages…
And most of Jeff Bozos wealth isn’t even from Amazon, but from AWS. So if you wonna hurt his pockets, stop using the internet :/
The very second I saw 51st state merch I deleted my account and have been ordering straight from China, happy enough to cut out the American middle man fat.
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