On this day in 1898, the Battle of Virden began when armed members of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) surrounded a train full of strikebreakers and exchanged fire with company guards. 13 people were killed, dozens more wounded.
After a local chapter of the UMW began striking at a mine in Virden, Illinois, the Chicago-Virden Coal Company hired black strikebreakers from Birmingham, Alabama and shipped them to Virden by train.
The company hired armed detectives or security guards to accompany the strikebreakers, and an armed conflict broke out when armed miners surrounded the train as it arrived in town. A total of four detectives and seven striking mine workers were killed, with five guards, thirty miners, and an unrecorded number of strikebreakers wounded.
After this incident, Illinois Governor John Tanner ordered the National Guard to prevent any more strikebreakers from coming into the state by force. The next month, the Chicago-Virden Coal Company relented and allowed the unionization of its workers.
"When the last call comes for me to take my final rest, will the miners see that I get a resting place in the same clay that shelters the miners who gave up their lives on the hills of Virden, Illinois...They are responsible for Illinois being the best organized labor state in America."
Mother Jones
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I was gonna give my phone a cool sindarin name but then I went to some sindarin translation forums and remembered that people who can speak sindarin make people who are fluent in Klingon look grounded and illiterate.
I also "Asked" google Gemini for assistance with the translation (well, a friend did and forwarded to me, I jihad bulters) and it worked! It did exactly what an LLM is supposed to do! It assembled a plausible sounding string of words with no semantic content that superficially resembled an expert's answer to the question I asked!
AI is so fucking useless and I am ever more frightened of what happens as it is used to take over more and more critical tasks. Because it's structured to sound plausible non-experts have no way to assess whether the LLM's output actually contains useful information, as well as what information is useful and what is statistically excreted garbage.