posted
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.
posted
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.
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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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).
Posts: 288 | Registered: Nov 2003
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posted
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.
posted
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 ....
posted
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.
Posts: 3960 | Registered: Jul 2001
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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.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
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?
Posts: 288 | Registered: Nov 2003
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posted
Ah, perhaps you are incapable of the amount of reasoning it would require to answer these questions, and thus must answer with glib quotes.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
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.
Posts: 288 | Registered: Nov 2003
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posted
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?
Posts: 3960 | Registered: Jul 2001
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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
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.
posted
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.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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