So, I found Aaron Bushnell's (dude who set himself on fire) reddit account. No, I won't post it. Not gonna dox him, even if dead, but....I do have some things to say about it.
This dude was....a radical. He was a leftist, an SJW, an anarchist, and he had crazy takes even by those guys standards. And I cant say Im surprised, given the dude was so extreme he would set himself on fire, but I just can't help but think if this dude was just a little different, that he would take people out with him. Ya know, like a suicide bomber or something.
Radicalism is bad. It's fine to have strong convictions, but when it gets to the point you're a danger to yourself and/or others, that goes too far. This dude was fully brainwashed into the far left's cult. And let me be blunt, Im not saying this to sound like a right winger. As I said, the far left has a lot in common with fundamentalist right wing christianity. Marxism and critical theory act almost like a secular religion for these people. And this dude just decided to die on the hill of Palestine, literally, in the most horrible way possible just about.
It's fine to entertain ideas. It's fine to look at the left's ideas, to look at their strengths and weaknesses, to entertain them, and maybe even accept them to some degree, WHILE STILL REMAINING CRITICAL OF THEM. I mean, I lean left myself. Im significantly more moderate than he was, but I cant say leftist ideas have had NO impact on my views, I just rein that stuff in by also being pragmatic and countering it with other ideas.
What causes radicalism is the adoption of one set of ideas to the exclusion of all else. It's not just leftism, the right has the same problem with the christian nationalism nonsense. And I could go on about anarcho capitalists, and marxisms, and religious nuts, blah blah blah, they're all different flavors of the same root problem of extreme, dogmatic views in an ideology that go well beyond the realm of reality. When you adopt a set of ideas, with no counterbalancing moderating ideas to offset them, you run the risk of taking that set of ideas to the furthest possible extremes. And eventually, setting yourself on fire, or committing terrorism, suddenly sounds like a good idea. And that's what happened here. Now, let's be frank, Bushnell is NOT a terrorist, he did NOT engage in violent action toward others. Thankfully, he only set HIMSELF on fire. But others like him could behave differently. And that kind of self sacrifice is still adjacent to terrorism. It's better, dont get me wrong, at least he aint taking people out with him, but ya know, one extra small step and he could have. Heck, some people have gone down that route. The psycho who shot up Joel Osteen's church had "free palestine" on her gun. And as we know, in the opening weeks of the conflict a lot of people both ways have committed horrible acts toward each other. I even had to write an article about THAT.
So yeah, try not to radicalize. Try to counter your most extreme ideas with some pragmatism once in a while. Try to understand that 99.9%+ of the time that these ideas arent worth dying over, much less killing each other over. To see a guy, this normal guy in a military uniform just go to a spot, light himself on fire, and boom 20 seconds later hes either dead or unconscious, is just....insane to me. Like one minute he's there, the next he isn't. And for what? A conflict half the world away that doesn't even concern him directly? Again, to me this is insane. This crap aint worth it. What a horrible waste.
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