Since the Los Angeles wildfires broke out on January 7, a strain of online panic has painted the city as functioning a lot like The Purge, the horror movie about a 24-hour period where all crime is legal.

Take a purported conversation that former Tinder executive Brian Norgard relayed in a Twitter/X post that’s been seen over 2.5 million times. “My famous actor neighbor came by today after the looting gangs freaked him out,” he posted, “and whispered in my ear, ‘I guess I am a conservative now.’”

In sharp contrast to the doom and gloom pronouncements, the city has actually been smothered, sometimes even a little overwhelmed, in such acts of goodwill. When I went to drop off other donations at the Snail Farm and Bike Oven—an artists studio and community-run bike workshop, respectively—both were so thoroughly stocked there was hardly room to put anything down. “Please, no more children’s books,” begged a local bookstore, calling off a previous request for donations of reading material for evacuated kids. “Once again having to put a stop to Angelenos bottomless generosity at this time!!!” (As such messages attest, at this point, it is far more useful to send money to affected people; most places have stopped accepting physical donations.)

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    The funny thing is that the actual sin the people of those cities were supposedly punished for was being unkind to strangers from a foreign land (in that case, angels).

    How many foreigners do you think Adam Carolla would let in his house- other than his domestic staff, obviously.

    • futatorius@lemm.ee
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      15 hours ago

      Well, the two cities were destroyed for not having a single just man in either of them besides Lot. God sent the angels to have a look around, to give them the benefit of the doubt, after Lot begged God to do so, but the locals didn’t exactly rise to the occasion, instead sending a mob to Lot’s house who demanded Lot hand over the strangers so they could ass-rape them. Which made me wonder, do angels even have assholes? And Lot distinguished himself by offering the mob his daughters instead, but those angels must have been some really fine-looking twinks, because the mob was not at all into the daughters idea.

      But yeah, the ancient Semitic tradition of providing hospitality was really deep in those cultures. You can still see it in their modern successors.