I could really give a shiny rat’s ass about this guy, other than in the sense that I feel sorry for anybody whose mental train has gone off the rails. I do feel sorry for his family. But mentally he was only a step or two removed from your average moonbat (not to be confused with the few remaining sane liberals), except that most of them don’t have the guts to do anything that would put their soft asses at risk. People like that spend so much time in the fever swamps like Kos and DU that they want to be crazy, and the rest of the nutroot echo chamber just eggs them on.

Or was Ritscher a martyr driven by rage over what he saw as an unjust war?

Will someone please explain to AP what a martyr is. A martyr is someone who is killed by others for their beliefs, not someone who kills themselves for their beliefs. Where in the world would AP get the idea that a martyr is someone who kills themselves. Ohhhh, right, forgot about them.

Oh, come on, Ritscher. Rumsfeld would have tore you a new a-hole, buddy, and you knew it. You may have been ready to die in 2006, but you clearly weren’t ready in 2002.

Just curious if the AP put that kind of emphasis on the Bishop in Germany (?) who set himself on fire to protest the spread of Islam?

“Without fear I go now to God,” Ritscher wrote in the last sentence of his suicide note.

Yeah, you’re going to God now. Just like all the suicide bombers. Suuuure.

RightWinged on November 26, 2006 at 5:57 PM

Well he’s RIGHT and you, ignorant of your own religious theology, are wrong. He most certainly is going to God…for the Bible says,

2 Corinthians 5:8
We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.

Now, in the life of a SAVED and FILLED believer, this is not a sad occasion, as one goes to “sleep” one wakes in the bosom of the Lord free from judgement, however, I dare say that it will not go well with the suicide guy once he IS present with the Lord because,…

Heb 9:27
And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment:

See, not knowing what the scriptures say about such pressing issues as LIFE AND DEATH, is insane, and it leads to silly things like Catholics praying to Mary, who is dead and buried in her grave awaiting that voice that will wake HER to the judgement .

John 5:28
Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice,

NEWSFLASH: judgement day hasn’t happened yet so Mary, the suicide guy and everybody else that sleepeth, is awaiting that voice……period.

“Here is the statement I want to make: if I am required to pay for your barbaric war, I choose not to live in your world. I refuse to finance the mass murder of innocent civilians, who did nothing to threaten our country,” he wrote in his suicide note. “… If one death can atone for anything, in any small way, to say to the world: I apologize for what we have done to you, I am ashamed for the mayhem and turmoil caused by my country.”

There was only one problem: No one was listening.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAAH! Now THAT’S comedy!

“This man killed himself in such a painful way, specifically to get our attention on these things,” said Jennifer Diaz, a 28-year-old graduate student who never met him but has been researching his life. Now, she is organizing protests and vigils in his name. “I’m not going to sit by and I can’t sit by and let this go unheard.”

Well only a stupid liberal would sit around “researching” a nutbag who offs himself because of some war he’s not even a part of. Sounds like WE GOT US ANOTHER SHRIMP FOR THE BARBIE FELLAS!

Now if we can only get the rest of them to think like this, he said, wryly.

AP frets that more people haven’t noticed war protester’s self-immolation;

And yet, AP has no ‘frets’ about the fact that most people don’t really pay that much serious attention to AP news stories anymore. Maybe this will help clue them in.

This guy actually thinks that killing the Secretary of Defense will prevent a war with Islamists seeking to establish a global caliphate.

Subsunk

Turn a peacenik inside out and you’ll always find a whackjob. Can we assume he did not object to the use of napalm in wartime?

Get used to that burning flesh aroma. Idiot.

F*** the Associated Press for its bathetic tribute to him!

Amen

I didn’t want to de-couple your Train of Thought, Ali-B, but you did sorta jump from individual behaviour to group behaviour ( the behaviour of social classes ).

….not that there’s anything wrong with that, and I’m still with you. Using logic to comprehend the behaviour of the mentally ill is a rough road to travel, though

If protesting war is a noble and praiseworthy endeavor — no matter what a crackpot the pacifist is otherwise — then at the opposite end of that status scale are those who fight wars. In the value system held out to society by the Associated Press, the best we can say about soliders is what John Kerry and Charlie Rangel says about them: They are poor, dumb shlubs with no civilian prospects who are only in the service because they can’t make it in the domestic economy.

This is where the lie of the liberal’s claim to “patriotism” is exposed: One cannot venerate pacifism, on the one hand, and expect that young men will volunteer to fight for their country, on the other. If a nation is worth fighting for, one must have fighters, and this celebration of pacifism — with its attendant, and purposeful, insult to the profession of arms — can only discourage the sort of patriotism that leads men to fight for their country.

F*** that self-immolating S.O.B., and F*** the Associated Press for its bathetic tribute to him!

Social status is a “fixed-pie,” zero-sum game. All people cannot have equal status. Therefore, to enhance the status of one group of people is necessarily to diminish the status of others. A nation that celebrates beauty, wealth and athletic prowess, for instance, necessarily holds in low esteem the ugly, the poor and the awkward.

Now, let us apply this to The Case of the Self-Immolating Peacenik.

By celebrating the suicidal pacifist, the Associated Press tells us that pacifism is a laudable thing — that those who protest against wars are admirable and worthy of emulation. This strikes us as bizarre, but …

What does the celebration of the suicidal pacifist tell us about the AP’s view of those who support the war? And what about those who actually fight the war?

(Still with me?)

What gives stability and purpose to society, and dignity to the individual, is a hierarchy of status: People who do the right thing are respected and admired, and therefore — since desire for respect and admiration is a major motive force in human affairs — people have an inducement to engage in socially beneficial behavior.

We strive to do well in school, work hard in our careers, obey the law, provide for the welfare of our families — these are socially beneficial behaviors, and anything that would detract from the status associated with these behaviors will tend to undermine the health of society.

(With me so far?)