This story just dropped. No one throws away a perfectly good life to make a grand gesture. It is pointless and silly, this is a person who decided to end his life and then thought of a neat way to make it a gesture or it was a murder. But AP jumped to the distraught about the election theme, what turds.
quote: Veal's mother said her son was upset about the result of the presidential election and had driven to New York, Gus Danese, president of the Port Authority Police Benevolent Association, told The New York Times in Sunday's editions.
Friends said Veal worked in a computer lab at the University of Georgia and was planning to marry.
"I'm absolutely sure it's a protest," Mary Anne Mauney, Veal's supervisor at the lab, told The Daily News. "I don't know what made him commit suicide, but where he did it was symbolic."
Police were investigating how Veal entered the former World Trade Center site, which is protected by high fences and owned by the Port Authority.
BC
Posted by St. Yogi (Member # 5974) on :
Link please.
Posted by Bean Counter (Member # 6001) on :
Yahoo has it up right now, I have to go drywall a friends house before we get too drunk...
Hard to cut straight!
Later all
BC
[ November 07, 2004, 10:31 AM: Message edited by: Bean Counter ]
Posted by St. Yogi (Member # 5974) on :
quote:No one throws away a perfectly good life to make a grand gesture.
Then what would you claim those hijackers did on 9/11?
Posted by Teshi (Member # 5024) on :
People throw away their lives to make a grand gesture all the time. The armed forces, suicide bombers, other suicide terrorists, all make grand gestures with their deaths.
Posted by katharina (Member # 827) on :
Obviously there were other things going on in his life.
Posted by Bean Counter (Member # 6001) on :
They were not making a gesture they were attacking their enemy. As we are now attacking them.
Funny that given all the moral growth in the Civilized world Trial by combat is still the final arbiter.
BC
Posted by Wussy Actor (Member # 5937) on :
quote: They were not making a gesture they were attacking their enemy. As we are now attacking them.
Isn't this a little contrary to the whole, "Terrorists are not soldiers, they are murderers" argument? They were making a gesture. They committed suicide to destroy something very symbolic (more symbolic to them than to us, probably).
Posted by Bean Counter (Member # 6001) on :
That is a distinction that has no military meaning, it is spin. They were soldiers striking at their enemy, we are soldiers striking back.
Perhaps the lack of a flag state, that they have no National identity makes them mercinaries rather then soldiers. It may be that I have just not absorbed the distinction yet. They look like an enemy engaged in a war with us. Using infiltration and irregular tactics, perhaps there is someone that can split that hair for me.
BC
Posted by FlyingCow (Member # 2150) on :
Wow, BC. No one gives away their lives as a grand gesture?
Isn't that practically the definition of the word martyr? Or do you disagree that martyrs exist in the world, or have existed?
Just because you value a "perfectly good" life above a cause doesn't mean everyone does.
::shocked he actually agrees with Tres on something, sort of::
Posted by Bean Counter (Member # 6001) on :
Like burning monks, and such? I think I could make a good argument that most have some source of great pain that makes it is a relief to choose death over continued life. I doubt that this person found the election of Bush to be such a pain.
Our Tibet is not overrun... I have a knee jerk reaction to Martyrs, go ahead and die for your cause, I will live for mine.
I always get a laugh when the crowds shout that they will die for 'Allah'...
not a problem, we can help with that...
An obscure sect of foreigners with an enclave in Jerusalem called "Trids" went to Jesus before the crucification to ask that he intervene with the popular sport of knocking them down and kicking them.
When he offered himself to a mob in place of a Triddling as a gesture, the mob merely laughed and mocked him shouting ....
"Silly Rabi... Kicks are for Trids!"
BC
Posted by Wussy Actor (Member # 5937) on :
quote: I always get a laugh when the crowds shout that they will die for 'Allah'...
not a problem, we can help with that...
Do you honestly find this situation funny?
Posted by FlyingCow (Member # 2150) on :
See, the problem with meeting martyrs with bullets is that you only make more martyrs.
Martyrs do nothing for their own lives, they simply solidify opposition against a common enemy.
Muslims aren't the originators of this concept, seeing as the Christians had been doing it for centuries before Islam even took root.
Increased violence against the Christians by the Romans only served to increase their faith and resolve. Despite all the Christians thrown to the lions, there weren't mass conversions for self preservation - only hatred toward the oppressors.
Tres made a good point in another thread:
quote: In this battle, our goal is not to destroy the resistance in Fallujah - it is to bring peace, stability, and democracy to Iraq. And destroying Fallujah will not help that if it brings the Iraqi clerics to condemn the upcoming elections or to call a nationwide jihad against us.
The goal here is nation building, not nation destroying. We went in to tear down a regime and build up a new nation of tolerance, peace and democracy. Go, build. Try to destroy as little as possible in the process. Educate the would-be martyrs and show them a world where they see the value in their own lives and the worth of a new cause.
Posted by Bean Counter (Member # 6001) on :
Show me any piece of humor that does not have an element of the tragic in it, then I will feel compelled to make a distinction.
Good Luck.
BC
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
Your logic again underwhelms.
Even were humor to imply tragedy (as you suggest), this does not mean tragedy would imply humor.
I rather suspect most parents here would be able to give you very specific examples of tragic things they would never, ever find any humor in and would be deeply insulted did you do so (just as an example).
As for the humorous thing without the element of tragedy, perhaps you have heard of puns? While the word tragic might be stretched to include the manglement of a language, it is surely but a cousin of the concept which you ascribe all elements of humor contain.
Posted by Wussy Actor (Member # 5937) on :
There's a difference between humor that has an element of the tragic and finding killing people funny. I asked because I really wanted to know. Do you honestly find it humorous that our troops are going to kill people who would willingly die for their religious beliefs?
Posted by Bean Counter (Member # 6001) on :
"We laugh when it hurts..."
-Valentine Michael Smith
BC
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
Ah, perhaps you are incapable of the amount of reasoning it would require to answer these questions, and thus must answer with glib quotes.
Posted by Wussy Actor (Member # 5937) on :
Quit dodging the damn question with vague, cryptic quotes. Either that or just out and out say that you're not going to answer it.
Posted by Bean Counter (Member # 6001) on :
Yes.. that is it.
BC
Posted by Wussy Actor (Member # 5937) on :
Thank you for being honest. I will keep my opinion of you to myself.
Posted by FlyingCow (Member # 2150) on :
You know, I saw Stranger in a Strange Land in a lot of what you had been writing about tragedy and comedy.
Do you take all your cues from Heinlein? Going to run through a community house with a doll-shaped time bomb and blow them all up next?
Posted by Kwea (Member # 2199) on :
Or do you see yourself as the next Farmham?
quote: I always get a laugh when the crowds shout that they will die for 'Allah'..
Well, I hope you disguise it well, or your tenure over there will be short and painful.
I bet you read Starship Troopers and didn't even notice the social commentary or the sarcasm, right?
Kwea
Posted by Ralphie (Member # 1565) on :
Unfortunately, you can't reason with someone who has a general feeling of superiority. They're just always going to be right.
The goal should not be, however, to give these people guns.
Posted by Kwea (Member # 2199) on :
You just tell them that the way to shoot them is to look down the barrell and pull the trigger.
They will of course say "I KNEW that!" and then....
Suddenly it isn't a problem anymore...
Or you can just let the go laugh at Allah in the middle east...the results will be about the same.
quote:Andrew Veal, 25, was engaged to be married to an Iowa college student, whom he was supposed to see at her sister's wedding in Seattle this weekend. But Veal also had a girlfriend in Athens, where he lived, sources said.
When police found his body Saturday morning, they found a note to his girlfriend saying she was "too good" for him, a source said. The note also included a reference to Bush's victory, the source said.
Friends and co-workers said they had no idea Veal was suicidal.
"I think he wanted it to be dramatic," said one Athens friend, 23. "The election was just a catalyst."
Veal was a peaceful, liberal vegetarian who hated guns, never got worked up about politics or the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and seemed content, friends said.
"He doesn't even have friends who have guns," said Mary Anne Mauney, Veal's boss at a University of Georgia survey research lab. "We're all trying to understand, and nobody does."
Veal and his roommates held an election night party in their clapboard house near the University of Georgia campus, where they expected to celebrate a John F. Kerry victory.
But the day after Bush won, Veal bought a shotgun in an Athens store and drove to New York, a source said, where he went on a spending spree with his girlfriend's credit card.
Posted by Bean Counter (Member # 6001) on :
I am glad to know that I was right, not that I did not expect to be...
If you read Admiral Bob there is hope for you, even if you think he was being sarcastic in Starship Troopers, you may learn that he was being in deadly earnest... I suggest the compilation of his essays called: Expanded Universe. It is a Twainian 'Grumbles from the Grave' type book.
If you are going by the slant from the movie, do not.
BC
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
Ah. You're a Heindhead. I was wondering. Just let me know before you start dipping into Ayn Rand so I can put on a mac first.
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