I yam putting this thread here in The Pit because I am unsure where else to put it. I hope dat it is OK to post it here and if it is not OK, I sure would appreciate if some moderator would send me a PM to let me know.
Also, I yam talking dis way because it is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Didn’t 'choo know dat Matey?
Tank you.
Another Dead Pakistani - Would this one finally be too many? Could it be the one straw that breaks the camel’s back?
I don’t know. Hmmm …
At least he went out like a Pakastani hero should. Dun’t 'choo tink?
Apparently, he burned an American flag and died after breathing da fumes from da fire.
What a way to go! When I die, I tink dat burning da Pakistani flag and breathing da fumes might just be a righteous way to go.
I suppose it all depends on what Allah would tink. Or his greatest prophet Mohammed.
I’m just very disappointed dat I never chose dis fellow in the da det pool. Dag Nab It!
But, who would have ever figured. Know what I mean?
I wonder if the CIA or FBI is responsible for adding some new poisonous chemical to all American flags so that anyone who burns a flag and breathes the fumes will die. If they have done this, I think it would be one of the truly most brilliant and most effective ways to strike back at America’s enemies.
I wonder if the resulting impact would do more harm than good. I just don’t know.
For reals, you’re talking about someone who died from smoke inhalation (admittedly self-inflicted, and stupidly so) and you feel the need to do it in pirate talk?
I doubt it: breathing the smoke and fumes from pretty much any substance is not at all good for you.
Moreover, AFAICT from the photo in your link, the protesters weren’t burning just one American flag, but had a fairly big pile of rubbish and flammable chemical substances blazing there. There were probably enough nasty toxins in that mix to poison people who breathed the fumes even if no American flag had got within a mile of the conflagration.
:dubious: So you’re advocating violent harm, if not murder, as a response to what boils down to a mere exercise of free speech rights?
I don’t like it when people burn American flags as part of stupid and hateful anti-American protests. Nor do I like it when people make stupid and hateful films to promulgate ignorant religious bigotry. But in neither case do I think that the people responsible ought to be killed for it.
If this now-dead Pakistani protestor did nothing worse than burn an American flag—and there’s absolutely nothing in your linked article to suggest that he did—then while I certainly don’t consider him a hero or a martyr, I certainly don’t think he deserved to die.
My, it’s going to be fun seeing various posters who were howling in other threads about the sacredness of free speech when it takes the form of insulting Islam come trooping in here to gloat over the death of an anti-American Muslim because he burned an American flag.
And he did it a really shitty job of it, too. (The pirate talk, that is. I don’t feel qualified to rate idiotic deaths inflicted upon the self in the name of utter stupidity.)
What does the “another” in “another dead Pakistani” signify? Is the OP suggesting that deaths of human beings are to be celebrated if that person happens to be Pakistani?
OK, I’ll champion the underdog here (a little). Mostly just because I’m bored, y’understand.
Like most folks here, I’m not particularly amused when I see some furriner burning an American Flag either, and I reluctantly accept it as a free speech thing and I go on with my day. When I’m at my best, I’m pretty much a live and let live kind of guy. At worst I just don’t give a damn about anyone but me and mine.
Joining a violent protest, which by any reasonable application of imagination is bound to lead to someone’s bodily injury or property damage, however, is kind of asking for trouble. It’s an open invitation for trouble. It’s macho chest-beating at its least mature. Now yes, someone lost a son, possibly a brother or father, and that’s sad. Really. And who knows but his life may have been a desperate 3rd world day to day struggle largely because of decades of US interference with his government. And it’s all the more sad because he was exercising the very right to free speech you and I would love his own government to impose on him, and that’s got to be a sad and miserable way to live. Thankfully, most of us will never have to know.
But you have to appreciate the irony in the story. “Death to USA!” torch USA flag, breathe deeply the smell of your symbolic triumph…and die as a result.
My point is, it’s not that it’s such a fantastic thing that a random antiAmerican brownskin on the other side of the planet snuffed it. It’s that this guy let violence and hatred steer his actions, and it was his undoing. Gandhi’s death was wrong. This guy’s was poetic.
And I do wonder how many Pakistanis have to die before they realize that all this hatred is just hurting themselves.
I mean, they think that burning the Koran means you want to destroy Islam. So I think it likely they think burning the American flag is essentially a cry for “death to America.” And, no, I’m not too inclined to afford freedom of speech to death threats.
Sure. What I was specifically objecting to was the OP’s salivating over the idea that the American government might take to “adding some new poisonous chemical to all American flags so that anyone who burns a flag and breathes the fumes will die”, and calling such a policy “one of the truly most brilliant and most effective ways to strike back at America’s enemies”.
Noting the irony when somebody’s expression of hatred against somebody else ends up causing their own death? Yeah, that’s one thing. (Similarly, I wouldn’t expect widespread emotional devastation if the anti-Islam filmmaker had happened to get his head crushed by a camera during the filming, either.)
But gloating over the notion that our government might deliberately lay traps to murder people just for indulging in an expression of hatred that our own laws would protect (and have protected in the past) as an exercise of free speech?
Well, I guess there’s irony in there too, but it’s irony of a much more disgusting kind.
Oh, I see. Protected expressions of free speech should suddenly stop being protected when it seems to us “likely” that the people expressing it are thinking something we find insufficiently respectful?
News flash: Crying “Death to America” in a public demonstration is protected by the constitutional right of free speech. It doesn’t fall under the speech restrictions applying to death threats, because you can’t murder a country.
Or would you argue that American nutbags burning a Qur’an and shouting “Death to Islam” should also not be “afforded” freedom of speech?
Like I said, this thread is going to be fun. In a kind of cynical and depressing way, of course, but you take your fun where you find it.
Well yeah, that bit’s messed up. But [Devil’s advocate hat on] it would certainly be an honest and physical manifestation of our last 100 years of foreign policy. “Cross us at your own peril.” And at the end of the day, isn’t honesty the greatest virtue? [DA hat politely doffed]