I had a similar situation happen years ago. A pre-teen girl, apparently unaccompanied, accosted me in a supermarket and asked me for 50¢. I did not sneer, but calmly told her, “No.” “Why?” “Because I don’t know you.” “But I need it.” “I don’t care. I work for my money and don’t give it away.”
No drama, no tantrum, but immature self-entitled kids do accost perfect strangers and ask for stuff. The difference is I did not attempt to spin the encounter into what I hoped would be an entertaining story.
Well, fuck the N.Y. times and the Middle East monitor for trivializing the term. The fourth link describes people on top of a Hamas building, “shielding it from attack” so arguably at least in the galactic neighborhood of the original meaning of the term, though it seems to involve volunteers, I guess you can volunteer to be a human shield.
“Lost, frightened and denied the fifty cents she needed to make a pay phone call to her parents, out of desperation the little girl accepted a ride from a stranger. He drove her to an isolated field, raped and strangled her, and then left her body to be eaten by coyotes.”
I guess my point is that what you are trying to point out, it seems to me, is behavior similar to “but my black friend says it’s ok”. But yet we don’t call that “human shield”, because we shouldn’t.
I guess my point is that when one human uses another human to shield themselves from something, describing that as using a human shield is not incorrect.
The idea that human shield can only be used to describe war crimes appears to be unique to you.
You seem to present this as a good (or at least normal) thing. It would just make him a liar. It wouldn’t be filling in unimportant details or simplifying, but actually changing the entire point of the story.
If I appreciated it as “an amusing anecdote” that is made up, then I’d just think of him as pathetic, more so than any other Doper (other than a poster with a troll persona). Why the fuck try to make yourself look cool here of all places?
Also, it’s one thing to acknowledge that you’re not good with kids and that out of irritation and stress you might act kind of mean towards them if they’re gratuitously bugging you. It’s another thing to treat your mean impulses as something to brag about as a “justified” response.
The whole thing is so just stylistically belabored that it’s hard to appreciate one way or the other. If it’s not true, then it’s just annoying for no reason.
I think a lot of people are being very harsh on **Scylla **here. I read the original story as a cry for help.
Clearly, it didn’t happen as written. There may well have been a minor incident that acted as the trigger. But something else drove Scylla to create this tale. And what is it a tale of, exactly?
Consider the dramatis personae. We have the child: emotionally undeveloped, entirely egotistical, unable to moderate his own behaviour, making unreasonable demands of all and sundry without any regard as to basic propriety. We have the mother: ostensibly the grown up who should be checking this behaviour, she has all but given up on her responsibilities - allowing the child to make demands of passers-by, and only rousing herself to get involved when she sees the need to defend her baling offspring from criticism by others. And finally we have Scylla. An innocent passer-by, drawn into having to deal with this child by the mother’s negligence. In this fantasy, Scylla is capable of doing what needs to be done to put the child in his place. He has the power. But he is, clearly, conflicted about it. He views it as unpleasant, and worries it might expose him. He fears the judgement of his peers, hence the hasty exit. But he consoles himself that he did what needed to be done. However poor and socially unacceptable his behaviour, it put the brat in his place.
Do we need, given that this OP was written in the same week that Donald Trump accosted the Danes with the delusional demand that they sell him fucking Greenland, to spell out the metaphor here? To point out that this out of control emotionally incontinent brat represents (indeed, embodies) Trump at his entitled worst? That the mother who has checked out of dealing with her kid in public but will still defend him against others’ attempts to control him clearly stands for the Republican party, who so many moderate Republican voters (like Scylla) trusted to curb Trump’s worst excesses? That Scylla knows that, as a voter, it has been left to him to put Trump in his place, but he struggles with the social consequences of doing so?
I think we need not. This tale speaks for itself.
Scylla, it’s OK. You’re OK. And it’s OK to vote against Trump.
My eyes are open now! The bratty kid is Trump! The clueless mother is Mitch McConnell! Scylla himself is Nancy Pelosi! The Target is Denmark, and the lunchbox is Greenland!
I saw on a TV show years ago that a celebration dish in Greenland is made from whole birds stuffed into a seal skin, sewn up inside, the whole thing greased up with whale blubber and buried in the ground to ferment for 6 months. It gets dug up to be eaten for weddings and other festivals. I guess those are the Big Macs Trump served to the football team?