Basic summary of the news about yesterday's far-right terrorist attack so people outside Brazil are properly informed of the situation.
The culprit, Francisco Wanderley Luiz, was 59-year-old keymaker. In the most recent elections, he ran for congressman by PL (same political party as former president Jair Bolsonaro) and lost the popular vote.
A few days before the attack, he posted veiled threats on Facebook, and one very explicit message namedropping 4 public figures around Joe Biden's level of leftism, which he refers to as "the shitty commies" and telling "you icky old men have 72 hours to disarm the bomb in your houses. The game begins on November 13 17:48 and ends at the 16th" accompanied by a comical amount of bomb emojis.
After the threatening messages, the terrorist wrote the phrase "for shit statues, you use dynamite" on his house's mirror, put on a suit themed after The Joker and drove his car on a 24h10min trip from Porto Alegre to Brasilia. He arrived at the Supreme Court, made a thumbs up sign to a group of confused witnesses in a nearby bus stop, and walked toward the Supreme Court's statue.
He threw a bomb at statue, which bounced off Looney Tunes style and hit the terrorist's head, killing him instantly. No one was harmed by the terrorist attack except for the culprit.
According to acquaintances, the incident happened because the culprit was emotionally disturbed by his divorce.
Linked below is an excerpt from the culprit's TikTok, in which he uses a prophetic amount of explosion effect on his own face.
Published May 13, 2024
This company's rapid tests have proven to be far less accurate than claimed, often producing false negatives.
so matt's absolutely giving scorched earth orders behind the scenes right. Not only are publically visible transfems dropping like flies, but every third person who musters up the audacity to comment negatively on Staff or Matt about this vanishes fucking instantly
Let’s start with Oregon – what does this mean for unhoused people in Grants Pass?
It means that Grants Pass can enforce its 24/7 citywide ban on public homelessness. The question was whether cities should be able to jail or fine someone who has no other alternative but to live in public space – the unhoused folks who are considered “involuntarily homeless”. The city was already allowed to arrest people who had declined offers of shelter. Now, Grants Pass will likely be fining people who have no shelter options.
When you fine someone who can’t pay, the fine can eventually turn into a misdemeanor. Studies have shown that it doesn’t help an already poor person to be driven into debt. Fining someone makes them less likely to emerge from homelessness, including by ruining their credit score and making them unable to afford basic needs like food.
Beyond fines, the city of Grants Pass is going to eventually jail more people. This is punishing people who have done nothing more than exist in public space. This case was about whether you can punish people for the unavoidable consequences of being human. The supreme court said yes.
How do you expect the decision will impact other jurisdictions across the west?
This is quite possibly the most consequential decision in history up until this point relating to homeless rights. It’s hard to overstate how important it is.
I think more cities will attempt 24/7 citywide bans on homelessness. I think it will encourage cities to shift away from investments in evidence-based approaches like adequately investing in affordable housing, permanent supportive housing and diversion and shift toward more law-and-order, enforcement-led efforts to essentially jail and banish already marginalized people from public view.
Grants Pass argued it wasn’t criminalizing the status of homelessness, but criminalizing the act of camping in public. The supreme court majority in its ruling on Friday concurred, and said that criminalizing an act does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment.
Presumably cities could in the future go even further than Grants Pass has, as long as they frame their laws as prohibiting public camping, instead of prohibiting homelessness, although I don’t think that issue has been fully resolved by today’s decision.
Donald Trump and others have used increasingly dark rhetoric, threatening to force people into “tent cities”. Will the ruling embolden those kinds of efforts?
I think we could see the forced displacement of unhoused folks into what I would call internment camps out in the middle of nowhere – a mass migration of unhoused people from one place where their existence is banned to other places where the laws don’t ban their existence. Many cities already have authorized camps in far-out locations that are completely invisible to the general public. I learned about one that was bordered by a dump, a recycling center and railroad tracks – the quintessentially least desirable place.
The idea of rounding up unhoused folks and forcing them into camps or out of the jurisdiction entirely is obviously very concerning. And it should be of grave concern, because once something is invisible, you don’t know what’s happening to the already really vulnerable people living there. Trump has publicly contemplated using his federal authority to move people into the middle of the desert where they won’t bother anyone by existing. It’s a very dystopian vision of internment camps and the likely abuses and neglect that would come from that. It’s terrifying.
Prior to this ruling, cities already had quite a lot of latitude to restrict camping, correct?
Yes, cities could already sweep encampments as much as they like. In many cities, they’ve been sweeping tents at record rates. They could also already enforce anti-camping laws if there was something that could be shown to be an urgent public health or safety issue with respect to a particular encampment – for example, if an encampment was blocking a whole sidewalk. Cities could sweep without even giving notice in those circumstances. Under the previous standard, cities weren’t even required to provide adequate shelter. It just said if the city lacks shelter, it can’t jail or fine someone, which to me should be so straightforward, and yet somehow here we are.
How do you expect legal advocates for unhoused people will respond to this ruling?
The dehumanizing message of today’s decision is going to galvanize civil rights attorneys. It has to. Anytime somebody’s basic right to exist is threatened, civil rights activists have to regroup. And cities should not approach this too cavalierly. There will be legal consequences for cities that pursue 24/7 citywide bans on homelessness. All this decision does is remove the protections for unhoused folks under the eighth amendment of the US constitution. States across the country have analogs to the eighth amendment in their state constitutions. States can and often do interpret their state constitutional provisions to be more protective than the federal constitution. The eighth amendment at its core is really about how much we value the humanity of vulnerable people. So it’s crippling from a human standpoint to have that protection removed. But there are other avenues that homeless rights advocates and human rights lawyers can still pursue. They can make arguments under other federal constitutional provisions. There are still due process arguments under the 14th amendment. You can still argue there is selective prosecution. There are arguments that could be made under the fourth amendment [which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures]. There’s the Americans with Disabilities Act [ADA], and most chronically homeless people would likely qualify as someone with a disability who has protections from state-sanctioned abuse.
They're only war crimes if there are repercussions, and the US will burn the world down to defend these atrocities.
Israeli soldiers film themselves burning houses in Rafah as a punitive measure, which is a war crime under international law.
Hot take: If you refuse to vote for Biden over his handling of Israel-Gaza, you do not get the right to protest against Trump rounding up all the POC/LGBTQ/neurodivergents and executing them.
Because you let that happen; you doomed millions of lives because Biden isn’t perfect. The Palestinians would be ashamed of you.
And funnily enough, since Trump is 1,000 more Zionist than Biden, you probably also caused their genocide, too.