- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
-Fred Hampton was a black activist from Chicago – an extraordinary speaker, youth organizer for the NAACP.
-He joined the Black Panthers and shone so brightly that he was made chair of the Chicago chapter when he was only 20.
-He founded the Rainbow Coalition, which brought together Black and Latino activists and radical anti-poverty Catholics. He forged an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them make peace and work for social change.
-In 1967, when he was just 19, Hampton was identified by the FBI as a “radical threat.” The FBI tried to subvert his activities in Chicago, sowing disinformation to get the groups he’d drawn together to distrust each other, and getting an FBI plant next to him as a bodyguard.
-(This is part of an illegal FBI program called COINTELPRO, which aimed to paint black civil rights activists (among others) as violent and threatening. If you’ve only seen pictures of the Black Panthers as armed and dangerous revolutionaries, and never heard of their children’s breakfast program, their community health clinics, or their “copwatch” patrols, this is why. It’s because COINTELPRO was a highly successful work of political propaganda.)
-On December 3, 1969, Hampton taught a political education course at a local church, and then several Panthers gathered at his apartment for a late dinner. One of them was the FBI plant bodyguard, who drugged Hampton.
-At 4:45 AM on December 4, a squad of Chicago Police officers and FBI agents with a warrant to search for weapons stormed the apartment. Investigations later showed they fired between 90 and 99 times. The Panther on security detail, Mark Clark, was holding a shotgun. He was shot, and the gun went off into the ceiling. This was the only shot fired by the Panthers.
-Fred Hampton, in another room, didn’t awaken. He was shot in his bed. Twice, in the head, at point-blank range. He was 21.
-Four weeks after witnessing Hampton’s death, his finance Deborah Johnson gave birth to their son, Fred Hampton Jr. That’s him in the photograph, visiting the grave of a father who died before he was born. A resting place riddled with bullets.
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Jesus. This story needs to come with a stiff drink. RIP.
Should make the headstone out of metal so it risks ricocheting onto the shooter.
Tungsten gravestone!
Wouldn’t it shatter?
It would not! In fact, if we use a tungsten alloy, it’ll be both cheaper and less likely to chip. Here’s a quick estimate:
Estimate: Tungsten Heavy Alloy Gravestone (83,415 cm³)
Gravestone Dimensions:
- Height: 3 feet (91 cm)
- Width: 2 feet (61 cm)
- Depth: 0.5 feet (15 cm)
- Volume: ~83,415 cm³
- Estimated Weight: ~1,500 kg (using 18.0 g/cm³ tungsten heavy alloy)
Item Estimated Cost (USD) Raw Materials (Tungsten Heavy Alloy) $48,000 Machining & Shaping $11,000 Engraving (laser or CNC) $750 Freight Transport (special handling) $2,000 Installation (crane + labor) $3,000 Total Estimated Cost $64,750
This cost reflects a bullet-resistant, nearly indestructible gravestone crafted from dense tungsten alloy—designed to last centuries with virtually no erosion or damage under normal conditions.
have some respect and delete this shit.
Respect for… the hardworking people who list prices of tungsten alloy in dollars per gram? I’m just screwing around with a silly idea on the internet, man. Would it make you feel better if I had just invented a number off the top of my head?
A hundred and fifty thousand dollars. That’s how much it would cost. I know that because my cousin works in tungsten alloy, and my brother makes headstones. No, wait, we can get it second hand, so actually it’ll only cost five hundred dollars. There, now I’ve created an original thought, and that’s much better than ballparking it with GPT.
But honestly, man, I’m just trying to hang out and have a pretty low-stakes conversation, and you come out here and you type out seven words without capitalization or punctuation, and what you said, and the way you said it… it bummed me out.
You don’t like that LLMs exist. I get it. You’re pissed off that they’re creating an endless cascade of slop, and that they’re already being used to unemploy people, and it’s just going to get worse. Hell, man, I was a theatre major in college. I wanted to do Shakespeare and Ionesco and shit. But you know, it turns out that it’s virtually impossible to do theatre and make enough money to live, seeing as how anyone can turn on their TV and see Olivier doing Hamlet, and if they don’t like that they can turn on YouTube and rewatch the sneezing panda video for the umpteenth time, so the demand for live theatre isn’t really what I thought it was when I was seventeen and I took out all those loans.
So I got a series of jobs, and now I’m getting older, and I don’t do as much theatre as I wish that I could, but I’m trying. I’m trying to make the best of the hand that life dealt me. I’m trying to be a good person, and yeah, sometimes that means taking a shortcut, because I thought it would be fun to throw out some plausible numbers about the cost of tungsten. So I’m sorry. I’m sorry I upset you with that.
But, man, maybe you could just take a moment to think about the fact that there’s a human being on the other side of this conversation. I’m not asking for permission to just burn the entirety of human creativity down. Fuck, the idea of how technology can devalue the arts is terrifying and enraging to me, too. But if you’re going to come at me over it, maybe you could try to treat me like a person, and not like an NPC that you can just lay into, you know?
So anyway, I wrote all that myself. I hope that makes you happy.
This is going to be harsh at first but bear with me. The reason you’re being treated like an NPC is because you’re acting like one. You copied that answer directly from ChatGPT, and from what I can tell didn’t put any original thought into it.
You didn’t make that post, ChatGPT did and you let it use your name. I want to hear from YOU, the person who poured their effort into a post explaining themself and sharing their life experiences with us. It makes me happy that there’s other people I can connect and relate to about the struggles in life. That’s what I want from Lemmy. If I wanted pure information, I’d get an RSS reader. I want to hear how people’s thoughts and insights relate to their experiences.
I don’t know what the role of AI should be. I recognize that AI often gets things right, but it also hallucinates with great confidence. I also have no way to prove if you or anybody else truly has a cousin that works in tungsten alloy. I do think there’s an inherent value in human anecdotes. They tell you about the person and can spark followup discussion. I could ask you about the tungsten alloy second hand market, and you might have an interesting story about how rich people love to flaunt giant blocks of tungsten, but then get bored and sell them. Those stories have value to me.
I also recognize that AI can be a ton of fun to spit ideas with, but it’s not good on its own. Your ideas are what drives it. If you asked it for a estimate for if it was made of a titanium alloy as well, now you’ve added a bit of your own ideas to the discussion. We can build on that and discuss the merits of tungsten vs titanium. The questions you choose to ask is at least one way to express your individuality.
The Lemmy community will gradually decide over time what the role of AI is. Right now, a lot of us fiercely attack any signs of AI in hopes of defending the human element. I’m sorry you were yelled at, and you don’t deserve to be treated like that. I respect your openness and the fact that you took time to write your reply.
I hope you’ve found some value in my response and it connects to you on some level. I hope you continue to practice theater and it brings you joy.
Mate, my father was a hardworking person who listed prices of tungsten alloy in dollars per gram and if he were here today he would say, “Son, if you don’t get out there and list prices of tungsten alloy like me and my father before me then I will be sorely disappointed”.
And, lo, because of your post demonstrating the effectiveness of AI in listing prices of tungsten alloy in dollars per gram I have recently been laid off at the listing prices of tungsten alloy in dollars per gram factory.
I, my father and his father before him are very disappointed at your single-handed destruction of our entire industry and way of life. 🫤
At least disclose when you use it from here on out. When I see llm-speak without acknowledgement that that section of text is from an llm, frankly, I’m going to write you off as a bot.
You asked ChatGPT to do your homework, didn’t you, kid?
I did, I admit it. I haven’t the faintest idea how much a tungsten alloy gravestone would actually cost to craft and install. I’m sorry.
Neither does ChatGPT really.
We can recycle Confederate relics and property to pay for it. Trump’s golden toilet? Turn it into gold bricks, and finance the building of lasting monuments to genuine freedom like Fred Hampton’s tombstone.
Ballistics High Speed did that. It was like a 10" cube (25 cm). It took a shape charge to break it. They shot it with a lot of different bullet sizes. Up to and including a 50BMG.
I’m a firearms expert with over 10 hours of experience in Call of Duty and I say it would ricochet exactly back at the person who shot it (who would die and drop a grenade, as is tradition).
Fuckin danger close users, probably noob toob too, ACAB for sure
RIP Fred Hampton
Oh, how high he would have flown
The only time republicans were for gun control. When black people took up arms in self defense.
Pretty much sums up the right wing perfectly. Zero ideology, just reactionary stupidity.
True story! This is the exact reason that California has such strict gun control laws
The first time I heard about the Tulsa race riots it blew my mind that it wasn’t common teaching in schools.
White folk told black people to gtfo and go build their own town, so they did and it prospered while the white towns went to shit. So of course the racists are like “we gotta kill all the black folk and burn their town, cause they’re doing better than us!”
And this is still the underlying cancer in America. We’re here today because Obama broke their brain.
Popular, two -term, erudite, black man as president with no scandals.
Pretty bold of you to say obama had no scandals.
No non-mustard/tan suit related scandals you mean!
*Tulsa race massacre.
It was not a riot. It was a targeted organized attack to kill black people.
The kids on XHS would love this post
Is the Black Panther party still around? Seems like it could be worth a revival.
While I agree, with the current administration, it would immediately be marked as a terrorist organization and members would be arrested. I believe we need something new that they can’t immediately spin-off as a threat.
the US admin is accusing far right MAGA republicans of being radical leftists if they so much as hesitate on a vote. there’s no tasteful rebrand that will satisfy without becoming an ineffectual fascist yourself
I bet he would have been proud of this :)
We should crowd-source a new one every year and an ever-growing donation to an appropriate charity every time it needs replacing
He was born with the wrong name - Fred Hampton sounds like a door to door vacuum cleaner salesman.
Fight fire with water
We can only hope to live lives that leave fascists seething for generations after we die. Rest in power.
I’d rather lead a life that leaves fascists dead after I die. But I’ll take seething as a consolation prize.
There’s a great movie that goes over all this called Judas and The Black Messiah. It’s definitely worth a watch
It’s a little too dramatized to call it a documentary, but it’s a fairly accurate retelling of an important American story. Better than half of the movies I ever watched in history class as a kid.
This is a movie that US citizens should watch. Not because it’s a good film (it is, though), but because it’s an important story in our (very recent) history.
After watching this movie, and researching Fred Hampton afterwards, I became a member of the peaceful off-shoot of the Black Panther Party, now called The Collective Black People Movement. They do good work with local unions and political activism. Consider supporting them.
Can you join if you’re not black?
Absolutely! Fred Hampton was all about building a rainbow coalition
Hell yeah!
How petty do you have to be to vandalize a tombstone…
Law and order, but only if the white cops are above everyone else 🤡
I would absolutely vandalise a nazi tombstone tho
Vandalizing tombstones is fine. For example shitting on Reagan’s grave is a wholesome family activity.
The issue is the people doing it are racist murderers who are vandalizing the grave of a freedom fighter to celebrate their racist murder.
Shitting on fascist’s headstones needs to be enshrined as a right in the Constitution.
I have been personally invited by two brits and an Irishman to piss on Margaret Thatcher’s grave, and in turn I invited them to so the same to Reagan and any confederate they can find.
If unlimited corporate corruption of the political process is speech, so is planting some corn at the demagogue receptacle.
Jfc that’s dark. Fred Hampton was a badass who was murdered by the state. But that’s not enough and they shoot his fucking tombstone? Get the fuck over it! You already killed our guy to suppress a movement. You don’t have to be aggrieved any longer, you fucking pussies.
He was murdered by cops who have since retired, this is being done by newer pigs who want to show their loyalty to the boot.
The rest of the story from Wikipedia:
During the raid, Panther Mark Clark was also killed and several others were seriously wounded. In January 1970, the Cook County Coroner held an inquest; the coroner’s jury concluded that Hampton’s and Clark’s deaths were justifiable homicides.[14][15][16][17]
A civil lawsuit for wrongful death was later filed on behalf of the survivors and the relatives of Hampton and Clark.[18] It was resolved in 1982 by a settlement of $1.85 million (equivalent to $6.03 million in 2024); the U.S. federal government, Cook County, and the City of Chicago each paid one-third to a group of nine plaintiffs. Given revelations about the illegal COINTELPRO program and documents associated with the killings, many scholars now consider Hampton’s death, at age 21, a deliberate assassination at the FBI’s initiative. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton
Funny I just read that a bit ago, some of their sources cited appear to no longer work.
Link decay is actually a pretty serious problem that no one seems to have an answer to and it will only get worse.
I remember growing up people saying “Once, it’s on the internet. It’s there forever”. Turns out, the Internet is subjected the power of entropy like everything else.
Huge swathes of the internet being shut down via overzealous copyright enforcement isn’t entropy.
Like everything else that’s killing or at the very least making worse all the best qualities of the internet, it’s enshittification to maximize profits and corporate ownership of every aspect of life they can possibly get their greedily grasping hands on.
its very easily solvable from a technical standpoint. the reason we cant is entirely because of copyright laws.
archive.org page mirrors could be used instead of direct links, the problem is that archive.org is in danger of being sued for hosting those mirrors.
that would still leave a single point of failure, but if you implemented a bittorrent style version of archive.org you could easily archive any webpage and media forever.
everything structurally bad about the internet is bad because of copyright laws.
It’s also part of the rewriting of history. AI is going to make the mutation of facts even easier as more people feel comfortable asking AI questions. They can program it to vomit out whatever misinformation they want.
The FBI assassination part seems to be corroborated by this National Archive page https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/individuals/fred-hampton. I guess NARA being an official USA agency, they would not make a claim against the FBI without being certain.
Yes thats 100% true, Fred was drugged, moved to a different room, and killed while unconscious.
However all other aspects of the raid are inconsistent among various witnesses: who shot first, where the gunman in the first room was killed, how the police presented themselves, etc. The agents responsible deserved to face time for the wrongful killing of Fred, but the raid on the compound in itself is an expected outcome of the Black Panther’s actions. Their ideology created this outcome, using them as some sort of icon now 60 years later is disingenuous and pointless.
