-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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 🫤