COME ON! you'll hurt Vendor's feelings! Count me beside you in the shield wall at least...:Kaleun_Salute:

Can someone let me know when enough time has passed and I can make a joke* about this please. TIA

*Don't worry, it's not a very good one.

That's long enough for me. Hit us with it and decency be damned.

(If not, PM me with it!:salute:)

Seems two were making a statement this week and both at the heart of the American Government. :hmmm:

Well, that's more than the American Government has managed for the past four days...

Past six years sir.

Touché

The suicide note burned with him.:88)

I'll be over here on the couch.:cool:

Self immolation (and hunger strikes) has never impressed me. Its like biting off your tongue in an attempt to win a verbal debate.

Desperate or not, angry or not - it's a choice people make, and often they try it in an attempt to blackmail institutions, organisations or governments.

My reaction to such things is total passivity, and refusal to react in any way at all. I just don't feel that I want to. Blackmailing is something I react very negatively to in general. To be honest, it raises my hostility.

In Germany, a Syrian migrant has tried to blackmail the government to bring his family to Germany, by climbing on a crane and threatening to jump to death. Clever. He was surprised and overwhelmed by police in darkness and bad weather. Some days ago I read that after he was released from police custody, he then has climbed again on a crane and again threatened to jump to death to force Germany to bring his family to Germany.

Months ago, a huge group of migrants wanted to blackmail Germany to shortcut their asylum procedures and grant them asylum for sure by starting a hunger strike in public. I would have thrown them out immediately.

Such blackmailing cannot be accepted or made a deal over. Staatsräson. Threatening to use violence against oneself is no argument, nor a moral obligation the other has to obey to. So let them jump, burn, starve, whatever. I refuse to give it attention or the wanted reaction.

OK, but I'm willing to pull it if ANYONE wants me to.




The price of gas.


See, told you it wasn't a very good one.

And there was me thinking it was a method of giving voice to those who are not heard.
So glad that Skybird put me right on that one.
Someone had better tell women that they had better not go on hungerstrike to try and a get vote as that is blackmail.:yep:

What would Ghandi think? :hmmm:

I don't care what Gandhi thinks. He does not rank high on my list of adorable celebs.

And mind you: if Nehru wouldn't have stopped his suicidal romanticism about agricultural policy and the rewards of simple village life (yeah, wonderful it is) as he fantasized it to be, 4.5 million and maybe even more Indians would have been killed in famines due to Gandhi's disconnected fantasies, and his name would be mentioned in one breath with the name of Stalin, whose agricultural experiments and mismanagement alone killed between 3.5 and 14.5 million Russians, depending on the historian you ask about Stalin's farming genius.

Save me from Gandhi and the likes. He was lucky a guy that he dealt with the civilized Brits. If needing to confront Saddam or Hitler or Tamerlan or Rome for most of its reign, he would not have survived even the first day of his protest, and we would not even know his name nowadays. His luck lies in that the British already had a bad conscience, one way or the other, and already had a feeling of that they were somewhat out of place in India.

Or do you recall the face of the last Tibetan monk burning himself in "protest" against the Chinese?

Too much romanticism and transfiguration in these things. Gandhi. Theresa. Che. Save me.

The time has passed, joke away.....{no dog jokes}

Four or five posts too late :hmmm: