self-immolation as a form of protest

@norla said in #49:
> There is always the suspicion that people are egoists. That they advocate a cause not out of sincere belief but rather because they stand to benefit personally. The power of self-immolation comes from the fact that the person who practices it will clearly not gain anything from their protest. Being a non-violent protest we can also tell that it is not an act of blind anger.

Burning oneself to death or hacking off one's own limbs are both violent acts. One may make an argument that an adult has the right to make that choice, but one can not argue that it is not violence.

@WassimBerbar We're getting into the messy realm of propaganda & misleading rhetoric here now-

Truth is you don't know the truth, nor do I what -exactly- happened that day - so you can find whatever to support your own ideology - of course there would be propaganda to say that they did it to themselves. And yet somehow civilians ended up in hostage, and there is substantial evidence of differing perpetrators (who claimed responsibility) from Gaza... so it clearly wasn't all just the IDF killing itself or something.

You have to accept in war, that there is rarely innocence on either side - It is likely both IDF and Hamas used underhanded tactics against one another, and it of course after the fact both sides try and manipulate the information stream to make themselves seem the victim and the other the aggressor - so there is a lot to unravel and it takes accepting you probably don't know everything so don't act like it.

A lot of what you say is very skewed on this subject - 3/4ths of the countries in the world definitely did not condone the massacre of innocent people at a music festival.

In any terms - we've digressed from rational discussion back into the realm of he said she said - disinformation, and ambiguity - I have no interest in another of these discussions

@salmon_rushdie me neither am not interested in another one of those debates. We just need to know who brought up Oct. 7th into this topic.

@ greenteakitten said in #20:
> Speaking of Bushnell, I found this, but I have not yet fact-checked it:
>
> "Bushnell [posted on Reddit]: 'Israel is a white supremacist, ethnonationalist, settler-colonial apartheid state... it has no right to exist,' Bushnell wrote on February 3, 2024. In an October 24, 2023, post, he appeared to condone Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, writing, 'Can you or I really say that Indigenous people are wrong for retaliating against colonizers who are rubbing their domination in their face?' "
>
> Regardless of what he believed in, I believe he did have a lot of dedication - it's just that I wouldn't glorify self-immolation. It's not something that we should glorify in my opinion.

Bushnell's reddit post has nothing to do with self-immolation.

Btw, it's unbelievable that people find a serious comment "laughable". lichess.org/forum/off-topic-discussion/self-immolation-as-a-form-of-protest?page=2#12

@WassimBerbar said in #54:
> Btw, it's unbelievable that people find a serious comment "laughable". lichess.org/forum/off-topic-discussion/self-immolation-as-a-form-of-protest?page=2#12
People laugh reacted that because of the paradox - like how are you going to punish someone who just lit themselves on fire or killed themselves in some other way on purpose?

@salmon_rushdie said in #55:
> People laugh reacted that because of the paradox - like how are you going to punish someone who just lit themselves on fire or killed themselves in some other way on purpose?
You stop him from harming himself and put him in prison. And if he suicided, God will either have mercy on him or not.

@WassimBerbar said in #56:
> You stop him from harming himself and put him in prison. And if he suicided, God will either have mercy on him or not.
Idk about that - I think if someone wants to end their own life they have the right. There are many reasons, and for many the pain of existence in various forms simply becomes unbearable. Idk about this person specifically - but if they felt as strongly as they did to take the actions they did, then as you say - let god deal with the rest.

Have you ever seen someone in extreme agony for weeks on end - due to a terminal disease or other reason? There are circumstances in which it is - I think - a completely reasonable response to want to end ones own life, and I do not think it is sinful to do so under those circumstances.

I watched my grandmother emit sounds of agony that would curl your spine for weeks before dying, and I knew then that if I were in her position - and if I ever am - I would happily greet the mercy of a quicker death, and probably seek it...

It really is something you have to witness to understand that depth of suffering.

@salmon_rushdie I understand that maybe in an really unbearable situation in life you might lean to end the pain quicklier, I got it. Maybe you feel extreme physical pain in your body and you want to get rid of it as soon as possible.

But when you live your life fine, you decided to do a protest about an ideology you want to promote, you do not harm yourself on purpose out of no pain. You don't self-immolate willingly in order to protest for something. It's this that I want to talk about.

@WassimBerbar
Well, for whatever reason - what that person felt had reached a point of becoming unbearable. So even if in their act - they had a political motive or message - that doesn't change the fact that whatever they were experiencing had become unbearable because there's no way someone would do something like that otherwise really.

I get what you mean and obviously its not what you want to see people doing or want to encourage it at all, but at the end of the day still think it's someones own choice. But yeah if they could've stopped him before he did it they probably should've.... it's a difficult to draw the line exactly where and what to do, and well it probably won't get "popular" in any case cause most people don't want to die like that.

what he was experiencing was his reaction to US abetted genocide in Gaza. That was unbearable to him, and he did not want to be a part of that. So he took the course that he felt would have the best chance of stopping that.