I guess it's always sad when people die....

[conuly]

but there is a reason North Sentinel Island is off-limits. “I have been so nice to them. Why are they so angry and so aggressive?” I don't know, maybe because you were trespassing? They've made it abundantly clear that they don't want visitors.

According to The Washington Post, he did at least get to holler at them (his words, not mine) that Jesus loves them, so I guess his trip wasn't a total waste. (He presumably yelled at them in English. He certainly could not have been speaking their language, because none of us knows what that sounds like.)

With any luck, he didn't get a chance to pass any novel pathogens to these people and the deaths will stop with him.

Edit: Friends are calling him a martyr. I'm not going to say what I think, out of respect for his grieving family, but he's not a damn martyr. He didn't even have a freaking plan.

Comments

[swingandswirl]

As someone from India... fuck this guy with a rusty chainsaw, and I hope (if there is an afterlife) God gives him an earful before sending him straight to Hell where he belongs, the racist, imperialist, utterly asinine piece of shit.

I think the thing that makes the most furious is that the Sentinelese TRIED being nice (for them.) And yet this asshole is so convinced of his delusion that he goes back a third time. Ugh.

As for his friends and family... sorry, no sympathy here. Some people are just too fucking stupid to continue to exist. I just hope he doesn't take any of the Sentinelese with him.

[nodrog]

Americapox: The Missing Plague

https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk

Europeans were an extinction-level event to every native culture they encountered.  (When American missionaries showed up to “civilize them,” 90% of Hawaiians went to Jesus the hard way.  Every Hawaiian today is descended from the one in ten who accidentally survived.)

Why weren’t just deserts served?

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

He wasn't a martyr. He was another in the long, long line of Christian conquistadors, who come in with their presents and their preaching to soften up the natives for exploitation colonization. Those of his grieving family and friends who encouraged him in this criminal folly are indirectly responsible for his death.

If this dude wanted to bring the word of Christ to people, he could have stayed right here in America and tried to bring it to the allegedly-Christian followers of Trump. They, too, might have killed him for it, but at least he probably wouldn't have given them any viruses they don't already have.

[conuly]

Or he could've done what Jesus actually commanded and focused on feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and so on. I've seen no evidence that the Sentinelese are particularly lacking in material goods.

[cellio]

Martyr? No, martyrs are people who give up their lives doing something that was necessary and non-provocative. Martin Luther King Jr was a martyr. Innocent people in churches, synagogues, schools, nightclubs, etc who get murdered just for being Christian, Jewish, black, gay, ordinary people doing ordinary things -- might be martyrs. People who storm into a place to spread their ideals, whether they do it with bullets (jihadists) or words (pushy missionaries), are aggressors, sometimes murderers, but not martyrs.

I'm sorry for his family that this guy was being a provocative idiot, but I'm not going to help them pave over that part. And I sure hope he didn't get close enough to do damage to those people. This asshole could have wiped out a bunch of them, and we'll never know.