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

[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.