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

[thornsilver]

Yeah, I feel sorry for his family's loss, but the guy got exactly what he asked for, and here is to hope that he managed to not expose them to something they have no immunity for.

I feel that he should have been in jail after his first attempt.

[siderea]

The son-of-a-bitch worked very hard to evade capture by local law authorities. It was illegal, and if he had been caught, he would have been jailed.

A Hindu Indian commenter made a very interesting, elliptical comment over on Metafilter, from which I gather that American conservative Christian response to this incident is... not going over well there. That is it being seen in light of being brown people "with perfectly good religions" who were conquered and subjugated by white Christian English-speaking invaders, and are still not too pleased about it.

The thought brings warmth to the heart, does it not? That all those Hindus and Muslims and Buddhists and Sikhs and whomever all else who have been busy killing one another in sectarian violence are willing to drop their weapons and stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity to protect a little unknown population of their fellow brown people who worship who knows what against the depredations of white Christian colonists, because fuck those guys.