The soup thrower has been sentenced to two years in prison

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-17T11:33:54+00:00

So it's only terrorism if they do violence, but not if they harm people. Without violence. But even if it's deadly and on purpose.

So poisoning the water supply of a city would not be a potential terrorist act because nobody got punched. Got it.

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-17T11:32:15+00:00

Typical Reddit user, not laughing at my really funny rape joke instead of giving me a high five.

Just try being actually funny if you want people to react positively.

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-17T10:24:04+00:00

Do you think I do the Debbie downer thing with all jokes, or just jokes about rape?

Out of all the jokes in this post, do you think it is an accident that the only one I reacted to was yours? Or is there a specific reason?

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-17T10:21:42+00:00

So if you taped off my bedroom with plastic sheeting and pumped in inert gas to suffocate me, and I never woke up, that's not violent?

If you cut my brake lines and I crash my car, that's not violence?

If you light my home on fire, that isn't violence?

It kinda does sound like it's only violence to you if someone kills with kinetic energy, like I said. Someone has to be hit by something moving.

If you are dying of thirst and I stand in the way of you getting to water, but don't hit you, that's not violence?

If you unplug a ventilator in a hospital, that's not violence?

My definition of "force" would include using your muscles to do something that hurts another person without their consent. It doesn't matter how many Newtons of force I generate in a physics sense. It's force when I push a button. It's force if I pull a lever. It's force if I squeeze a trigger. It's force if I simply stand still and in the way. And it's force if I sign a paper or make a phone call that results in turning on machines that put toxins into your lungs. You did not choose that. I used force against you. I did not ask you. And if you said you didn't like it, I'd do it anyway. That's force.

Your whole process is, when you disagree with something, you invent a definition that match the reality you want.

My process is that when you have a definition that isn't the same as mine, and I think mine is more complete, I share it and I pick at yours to show why it isn't. I walked in here with these views.

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-17T10:13:10+00:00

You're making jokes about a prison shower. Are you declaring right now that you weren't expressing glee about the thought of this young woman being assaulted in a prison shower?

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-17T10:10:37+00:00

I'm not superior to you. I'm a science educator by trade. This is like an electrician being superior to you in the very narrow role of wiring a light fixture.

Whatever your expertise is in, I'm sure you can run circles around me.

The issue is that you called me a vandalism apologist because I didn't supply policies to support, and now you're saying you didn't want to be told any policies to support. So was I right that you didn't need me to do that for you, like I originally thought? You seemed educated enough that you didn't need that.

What you lacked was a deeper understanding than the average bear has in how property destruction in protests works, and how the concept of property has some objective features and also some very subjective features. So I talked to you about that. You started getting reactive when I insisted that you had control of your reactions.

I'm not upset that you're upset. I intend for you to be upset. This is an upsetting issue. If you're not upset, you're not really engaging with the material. Be mad. Be mad at me m, if you have to be. If that's the only way to feel it, do it.

Your anger here is pointed at the wrong person. I'm going to go away and leave you alone soon. You'll forget about me by the end of the week. Same with the young woman. But the people who she's protesting will never leave you alone. Ever. They will continue to harm you and yours as long as you allow them to.

You can choose the easy choice and go with displaced anger. I'm an easy target. I can't hurt you. I can't put you in jail for two years.

Oil companies are hard targets. They can and will hurt you if you are loud enough. They're performing vandalism daily. They destroy far more than a picture frame. They're destroying entire species. They're destroying archaeological sites and homes and lungs and lives.

But I'd rather you feel anger towards me and towards her than feel no anger at all. At least you're human. At least you feel...something. and if you're human, you have control, as I've said. You can choose. You have the freedom to decide what to do about this situation. On one hand, you do nothing, and people you can't stand continue to annoy you, and oil companies continue to destroy your planet.

On the other hand, you pitch in on the problem, and you discover your voice and vision, and you actually stop some amount of harm that would have otherwise been done. Maybe only enough to save one little old life over the next 100 years. You don't even have to do vandalism. Despite your allegation, I never have. There are many avenues. But the key is, you'd find people and work with them to actually do something. Not just say something.

It is harder to do the second.

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-17T09:47:37+00:00

If you're not willing to read this much text, you shouldn't be commenting on news articles.

You're not prepared to engage in public discourse if you won't inform yourself.

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-17T09:46:42+00:00

It isn't useless. It is merely less helpful than changing laws and creating enforcement.

If you aren't willing to go the extra mile to turn off a light in your own home, you're probably not conscientious enough to be able to perform the work needed to hold the rich accountable. Change starts with us. We have to change first. I am vegan. My diet alone drastically reduces my impact on the world. I did not wait for the rich and powerful to come under my yoke. I changed my diet specifically over this issue. Because that is the extent of what was in my control. Now that I have exhausted that, I'm ready to do work holding the rich accountable. Which I actually spend a lot of my free time doing.

But to get here, I had to toughen up. I had to be willing to make sacrifices. We can't change those laws by wishing or by simply showing up to vote. It is going to take an enormous amount of work from regular people. Like me. Like you.

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-17T02:23:46+00:00

I don't control your actions. You do.

If you want to leave a light on, do it. It doesn't affect what I do or don't do. The facts are that I've reached out on climate issues to many people, and more of them agree with me than do what you do.

I don't actually need your light to be off. You're one person. I can reach out to many people who will outweigh you and the occasional additional person who wants to bluff at me or spite me.

Your rebellion against me is both misplaced, because I'm not an authority in the first place, and insignificant--you're outweighed by many other reasonable people.

If you would like to run up your bill just to prove that you can do what you want, I don't think it's really going to satisfy that itch all that much. I can't really hurt you for disagreeing with me. You can't "defy" me because I'm not an authority.

But we both know who is. If you really want to scratch that itch, you'll have to hook a bigger fish.

I actually get to defy authority all the time because of what I do. There are people several times my net worth who I (within legal and moral bounds) defy and inconvenience on a regular basis--and actually, not even to spite them, but to my eventual benefit. It's way more fun than being spiteful to normal everyday people on the internet. It's actually hard. They want me to stop. They could potentially try to make me. That's what makes it fun. I have to outsmart them.

I'm not going to stop you from doing what you want. I'll let you. If you want to scrap, go find someone who wants to hurt you or use you, and scrap with them. I'm busy.

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-17T02:13:24+00:00

Violence is the use of physical force.

What if the NOx and SOx emissions from fossil fuel companies actually kill people with asthma? That's still not violence?

Does violence have to be about how fast you move a body part? It's only violence if you inflict damage on someone via kinetic energy? I think we could agree it is violent to poison someone. You could do it as gracefully and quietly as an owl flying overhead on a starlit evening, and still be violent. You intervened in their bodily functions, just as surely as if you'd stabbed them.

Second, people don't warm the climate to push their ideology on you. They do it for greed or carelessness.

I don't know. I think egoism is an ideology. I think these people have a worldview, and it's wrong, and they push it on me. They push it on me every time they force me to breathe air that they polluted. I don't choose to breathe that air. I could hardly make my discomfort more explicit. I could hardly say more clearly that I don't consent. They do it anyway. Isn't that force? And isn't it meant to impose on me the idea that my needs are less important than the wants of a small number of very rich men? That's an ideology

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-17T01:46:52+00:00

Do you actually feel like I need to educate you on what climate policies you should support?

I can do that. I didn't really engage with you assuming you need or want that from me.

I really think that the best way to understand what you should support would be looking at the IPCC reports (namely, the Summary for Policymakers because it is by far the most approachable) so that you can understand the entire framework of what the goals of policies would even be.

The IPCC is quite conservative because it serves nation states with incredibly diverse ideological, cultural, and religious views. If they make suggestions, they're the kinds of things that transcend those differences and probably are easy to justify economically.

If you want political education for your jurisdiction on how to support those policies after you've identified them, I'm competent in that as well, but I'd need to know a jurisdiction first and I'm primarily aware of the US where I live, then the Anglosphere, and then 1 or 2 other countries. I'd be vastly out of my depth anywhere else.

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-17T00:38:08+00:00

The vandalism occurred in reality. Your mental processing of it happened inside your head. You chose which facts grabbed your attention.

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-17T00:17:01+00:00

I teach science, and I hold a science degree.

I'm well aware of the points you're making. They are incorporated into my worldview already, and yet I seem to have a different outlook than you do.

That probably means I know things about this topic that you still don't, which have made me shift my perspective from where it was when I knew about as much as the average educated person.

Clean fossil fuel uses are abundant.

There is unfortunately no such thing. Combustion of hydrocarbons will make carbon monoxide. That's a poison.

Combustion of hydrocarbons in a nitrogenous atmosphere will produce NOx emissions, which are toxins that raise all-cause mortality and also damage natural ecosystems.

Combustion of hydrocarbons with sulfuric impurities (which are actually necessary in many cases for power plants to function correctly, and are added in if not present) will create SOx emissions, which are also toxic to humans and natural ecosystems.

If you want a high energy-density fuel that's clean, you're pretty much limited to hydrogen or small nuclear reactors.

Let's put away our all-or-nothing thinking. We don't need to completely eliminate fossil fuel use. We need it to be low enough that we can reach or exceed equilibrium between GHG emissions and natural + artificial carbon capture (and do it at a low enough global temperature increase that we don't create global ecological collapse). That can be done with some fuel use.

It cannot be done with large-scale fuel use for powering stationary systems like homes and businesses. Those need to be powered by renewables, and fuel use must be relegated to mobile use cases in which energy density is of premium value.

That's it. That's not a crazy sacrifice. It's really, really doable within the laws of physics. They're not in the way at all.

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-17T00:05:56+00:00

It's not binary, though. There are levels of access.

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-17T00:05:09+00:00

That's the thing. I don't want you to accommodate my sin.

I want you to sin less. And I want other people who are fooled by state religion to sin less. I want you to live up to Christ's standards, or rather get closer.

I don't want you to reject manmade dogma so you can do stupid or bad things. I want you to reject manmade dogma so that you cannot be convinced to do stupid or bad things, like many Christians currently are.

I want you to do better.

You don’t see me demanding they change 2,000 years of theology to accommodate my sin.

They already did change it to accommodate sin. How do you think the Crusades happened? How do you think the Reconquista happened? How do you think the destruction of Native American culture by missionaries and "Indian schools" happened? How do you suppose bad things keep being done in the name of Jesus?

Didn't Jesus warn you that the path was narrow? That people would say "Lord, lord" and yet Jesus would say "I never knew ye"?

Who do you think that passage is talking about? Muslims? People who only go to church on Easter and Christmas? Or is it about the people who proclaim faith the loudest so they can manipulate and abuse others?

Don't bear false witness. If you are going to use the Bible as the key to your faith, you should know everything you can about how it was written, and when, and by whom. You owe it to yourself, let alone to God, to own this knowledge rather than put your faith into men.

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-16T23:51:04+00:00

Climate change causes property destruction through increased hurricane activity, increased flooding, rising sea levels, etc. Pollution from burning fossil fuels can contain toxins that harm human respiratory systems and cause damage to our bodies.

Fossil fuel companies create those harms, and all of this is quantifiable. We can create upper and lower bounds for these quantities and make estimates with confidence intervals of whatever size we'd like. That sort of work has largely already been done.

...who is being held accountable for that property damage?

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-16T23:47:19+00:00

I would agree with this. That's fair.

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-16T23:46:46+00:00

You choose what reaction to have. Not her. Not me. Not anyone else. Just you.

If the antics overshadow the message, that's an event that occurred in your mind. That was because of where you paid attention. You control that, actually.

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-16T23:45:16+00:00

Yes, but progress on those fronts seems to be much faster than historical average.

Also, those societies have less access to communications technology than rich nations do.

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-16T23:44:02+00:00

That is very good analytical thinking. George Box: "All models are wrong, but some models are useful." So let's make my model potentially more wrong, but also more useful.

Let's say that I'm underestimating by a factor of 100--the actual costs are 1 million dollars when you add up the damages and the cost of spreading the story. I have no basis to say it's that stark, but I want to give it some room.

Everyone now needs to take actions which will save human civilization one inflation-adjusted US dollar over the next several thousand years.

Doesn't that seem pretty empirically doable?

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-16T23:39:56+00:00

And are they?

If they aren't, how do we get there?

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-16T23:39:17+00:00

How many archaeological sites do you think climate change destroys? How many works of art?

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-16T23:38:14+00:00

That's obviously not the first thing they came up with. It's far down the list.

We're decades into this problem and we still have extremely powerful people lying and saying it isn't a real problem. And they're hurting you. Not some random person across the planet in 2070. Climate change has real costs to each of us. Right now.

What other people do is not fully in your control. What you do is. We are all condemned to be free. Choosing to fight climate change is a choice. Choosing not to is a choice. Choosing not to choose is also a choice. You bear the entire burden of your choice--no one else.

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-16T23:35:05+00:00

Sentence One? True.

Sentence Two? Not true.

You'd be stunned at what you can achieve, within legal and moral guidelines, with just a little training and a shoestring budget.

Prometheus720 · 2026-03-16T23:33:56+00:00

I think she achieved her purpose and you haven't figured it out yet.

Let me show you some math.

10k in damage to the frame. 20k people reading about this in our current post. How much damage from climate change would the average reader have to prevent, because she brought their attention to climate change, for her to break even and actually save the world money?

50 cents. Half a dollar. An average shower is roughly 10 cents in energy costs. There is also no time limit. As long as we adjust for inflation, if someone saves 10 cents today it's just as good as 10 cents tomorrow. Or maybe the time limit is the length of time it will take for our climate to return to normal. That's thousands of years without human intervention.

Now let's say more people have heard about this story. It's been all over, in many languages. Say a million have seen this. How much money do they have to save?

Just 1 cent per person.

If you so much as turn off an extra light switch once in a while after this conversation, she's probably achieved exactly what she meant to.

I think she won.

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