is profit. They welcome our deaths

"May I become able to end all suffering" Dalai Lama

in too many ways

We would need to have a new perception to be able to break free from the bondage and begin living a new way.

"Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds" Bob Marley

We have to break free or they win

Let the poor decrease the surplus population.

Plus 50% homelesses and nobody cares. The poors are unusefull. Let them kill themselves. ...

Last time I checked France it wasn't at all like that. Closer to 2%, perhaps?

The rate of homelesses has grown of 50% in 10 years.

propaganda. And what is really pathetic are those that somehow think they are friends of the 1% or even the top 20%. They are delusional.

the 1% want you to hear it.

IOW, we don't. Not even worth a mention. In the hallowed halls of Teapublican-infested governments around this country, no mention is made of the middle class or poor (except perhaps to use as a prop for social cuts to same as if that would help).

Remember who owns the media. The same corporate shadow government which owns and controls Congress, the Senate and the President. Of course they won't mention or report on those whose valueless lives they've destroyed - millions of us.

They're too busy codifying their ownership of our government with instruments like the TPP to be bothered with some quaint idea like "social justice" from a dying host the parasites feed on.

K&R

Suicide Rate Climbs For Middle-Aged Americans
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022790062#op

More Americans Committing Suicide than During the Great Depression
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023836565

Economic Recession Linked to 10,000 Suicides
http://www.democraticunderground.com/101695474


Suicide is becoming a retirement plan.

Damn the corporate thieves in both parties and their complicit, purchased corporate media.

as the retirement age goes up

and as 'assisted suicide' gets easier, thanks to the kindness of the masters

because they don't want any of us to *suffer* by god

only from lack of food, shelter, money, and respect

easy to remedy with death though

that I watched Kobayashi's HARA KIRI last night...for maybe the 5th time.

How a propo.

and this managed to slip by me. You would think this kind of event would at least deserve a little notice.

with a lot of help from "the authorities" & the press-so-called.

All that really matters is self.

And his was a protest against it.
(you asked what is wrong with us)

We just don't have the written laws. After all, the 1% of the 1% are gods.

simply asking why minorities should have control of our "democracy"
seems to be untenable here. Of course, some simpler minds may have fewer notions of the term.
reactionary censorship.

and the like.

but say that rich folk made some of their money off slavery or anything else dubious, and some posters call out the hellhounds.

rich people fart perfume and live on air. all their ideas are genius and they are all kind, generous and wise.

they would never make money by sweating and murdering labor. and if they do -- well, once the money's made, it all smells sweet again.

Celebrities having always been an exception.

Well said

"I'm better than you", "I deserve and you don't" is the most damaging thought concept to this world.

The Golden Rule "Do to others as you would have others do to you" is the remedy for "specialness".

that is a dime a dozen these days, it is about...actual outcome and result.

It is about a political system that has become insulted and immune to the will of it's own citizens.

The usual tactics are yesterday's tactics, when the system was responsive.

is that both men had established mental issues (per their families), with the younger man having an autism-related malady. That, IMHO, is different from someone making an ultimate sacrifice for a principle, with a clear conscience and mental faculty.

To give you an example - the postal worker who recently landed his gyrocopter at the Capitol to deliver "mail" to Congress about the need for campaign finance reform (another issue that relates to this OP's topic). It's obvious that this guy just sacrificed his postal career, pension, etc. And the sad part is that he also cited his son (who apparently committed suicide using a car a few years ago) as an impetus to pick an "important" issue to protest and call attention to the need for change.

Of course one could argue that this guy is probably suffering some depression as a result of what happened to his son, but in his case, he (the guy in the gyrocopter) didnt kill himself but essentially did almost all but with this act, particularly since he expected to be shot out of the air before reaching his target.

The other protestors who paid with their lives also had important messages to deliver, messages the mass media obviously wants to ignore....why should we?

We do a disservice to the messengers and their messages by ignoring them and dismissing them as "mental"....liberal, democratic, secular messages vital to be delivered in these times of creeping fascism.

you have 2 choices - you either get the electorate to make the change in the legislative/executive offices (and that means at ALL levels of government - local, state, federal, not just ignore the state representative who could easily enact ALEC agenda bullshit for example)

-or-

You do a coup d'etat.

The "protests" can galvanize the electorate to turn off "America's Got Talent" and get out and vote or even consider running for office, not just "every 4 years", but EVERY YEAR (and at least twice a year, to account for primaries, not counting additional special elections). But in our media-saturated world, a single "sacrifice" here or there is not going to penetrate. Passing the word to as many people as possible through other means is about the only way to go - and certainly "social media" is one way the young protestors are getting the message out beyond the "M$M". Those young folks don't watch "TV". They interact with others via Instagram and Twitter as "citizen journalists" and then may "binge watch" shows via streaming media all in one weekend.

The beneficiaries of the current system don't care whether people kill themselves to make a political point because they are either off enjoying life or are plotting how to make more money than their colleagues so they can be acknowledged at certain events that they attend. And unless you do a French Revolution in front of their mansions, yachts, or planes, then nothing will change... And historically, over thousands of years, there has always been and always will be "the elite" (whether by birth, war, or designation as such by those who were born into it or took it by force).

It must be dark, cobwebby and stuff.

I see now you're saying he killed himself in protest at the 1% not paying enough in taxes. Picking the Capitol as a location somewhat supports that. And he didn't kill anyone else, making him different from a Palestinian type bombing terrorist in that way.

of pseudo intellectualism.

Another Hero. Your arguments ring false.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/buddhist-immolates-himself-in-protest

Additionally, you don't seem to understand that what makes the Buddhist monk protest more significant and influential among Vietnamese than some random guy offing himself in DC.

conflating protestors with violent terrorists.
seems like a right turn that hard would put you in the wall.

"Save the unborn children...Stop the slaughter of innocent babies", the press would have had this story on every news outlet in the country within 10 minutes.
Fox News would have the headline ..."Brave Man Dies so that others may live"

they are anti-choice.

..sometime, about the other Altar boy and I bringing jam and some milk one Sunday early morning and enjoying the Church's wafers
and jam. (Sister Anne Noreen just about had a heart attack)
I'm still doing Hail Marys on that one....

But the hypothetical one with the sign anti-choice - I made the leap to assume they would have been, or likely would have been Catholic. Though not necessarily. I suppose some non-Catholic fundies are rabidly against choice. Still fundies wouldn't kill themselves, because it's not God's will or something.

Damn, They're good.

Is that possible? Edited to say, yeah I guess so

if they enlisted and deployed @ 17 right before we exited in April 1975. Geez... it's the 40th anniversary of that this month...

Starting in January and ending in March. April 1975 was the fall of Saigon-- but no US troops were fighting by then.

The youngest group to be drafted and sent to fight were men born in 1952. It's possible that someone born as late as 1954 could have enlisted and been sent to fight at the very tail end of US involvement.

in 1975 was not civilians evacuating remaining Americans in Vietnam. They were military.

http://www.navalhistory.org/2010/04/29/operation-frequent-wind-april-29-30-1975

And am not limiting this to Army "combat" troops or draftees. Logistics tend to be the last to go as they break down a base too. So if someone is not a "combat" unit, they don't count as a veteran? My father was WWII but not in a "combat" unit (few if any blacks were - most were assigned to transport/trucking or longshoremen), but was in the South Pacific and was considered a veteran.

My impression of "Vietnam vet" had always been of someone who was in the military and actually in Vietnam during the period of US involvement in the fighting, but looking at some web sites, I see that that extends to 1975.

where the Japanese surrender didn't necessarily "end" all the war-related activities/campaigns in 1945, as signing on the dotted lines continued through all the theaters, and finally concluded at the end of 1946 and into 1947.

refer to themselves as "World War II vets", or even "Pacific Theater vets"?

Mainly because there rarely is "an end to hostilities" in real life in those areas. So much of the various war zones were mined and required units to dismantle that. There were people still working their way through the concentration camps and securing/dismantling bases.

And if you define "hostilities" & "combat" as the criteria for being a veteran, then none of the WAVES or WACs or other women serving (e.g, as nurses, etc), would be considered vets.

More specifically, the VA defines it and this impacts the pension eligibility -

Any protest about the 1% or the media that owns them is met with either violence or silence.

...should there be the daily report of "reasons why the several thousand people committed suicide today"?

Suicide is a leading cause of death in the U.S.. It happens every day, for a whole spectrum of reasons. Just because this deranged individual had a reason with which you agree, does not make this suicide any more "special" than lots of other suicides.

So if some white supremacist offs himself because "an illegal Kenyan is running the country" and he can't bear it, then what does that mean to you? Is it going to change your mind about anything? Are you going to tell us about his "political courage" for being a racist asshole?

No. You'd just say "someone with a political opinion killed himself".

...wait, seems that the media in Tunisia was more free than in the United States, and the people less "blame the victim" than here...

Maybe the fact that I don't ever watch mainstream news is the reason. I do watch Rachel Maddow most nights, and I'm not entirely sure if she counts as MSM.

...THAT stupid war. Of course THAT photo was picked up b every news outlet around the World.
I would post the photo, but it is gruesome....horrifying,
but it is easy to find because it is so ubiquitous.

The WAR had been raging for a decade under the French before the USA stepped in.
DO you think the Vietnamese People care whether it was a French soldier who killed them,
or an American?

That is one of the handful of iconic images of he Viet-Nam War.
Those photos went around the World.

Man burns himself to death in front of the White House...
and nobody notices.

suicide brought about the end of the war.

When someone tries to pull little pieces out of history,
they soon learn that that little piece was connected to everything else.

That monk was a part of the whole.
He was one of those who started the movement against the War.
The photos of his death are an icon for those who resisted that war.
I know.
I was one of them.

Second, he was protesting Diem's anti-Buddhist policies. Đức was in fact one of several Buddhist monks and nuns who performed this act.

Third, the only impact it had on the outcome of the situation in Vietnam, was helping hasten the US' abandonment (and coordinated assassination) of Diem that same year.

The Vietnam War would continue for another decade - right up until the North Vietnamese won it.

I've been there. This is a tragedy like every other suicide.

The media is a whole other issue here as well. A couple of pieces on the disconnect between police and the working class:

http://socialistworker.org/2014/12/10/police-are-different-from-us

http://socialistworker.org/2015/01/06/the-problem-is-the-barrel

It is stigmatized.

http://www.news-medical.net/news/20131220/Study-explains-why-suicide-is-stigmatized.aspx

The USSR used to use mental illness as a way to stash political prisoners away in institutions.

The US simply labels people as mentally ill and some invisible switch goes off so people stop listening or "taking them seriously".

If you check a post I just made last night in the California section, I saw a room full of people pile on a woman who had been predetermined to be "mentally" ill. She was asking about political corruption and starting to ramble because no one on the panel was answering her question, and she mentioned how she felt threatened by the police. A "more important" member of the community shouted, "That's enough of that!" and suddenly everyone swarmed on this woman - who, being actively attacked, continued to talk about police and brought up her heart condition.

I can't make any call about her mental status (and it irks me that others in that room thought they could), but the bottom line was the speakers we were listening to had brought up a topic that suggested political corruption. I was wanted to ask similar questions myself. What right did the community have to mob that woman except some bigwig had signaled that she was "mentally ill" and her question not worth answering? By rendering her as someone who can't be listened to, the community also seriously limited her options as to what she can do to make herself heard next. I hope her options aren't limited to the point of this protester in Washington, DC.

and that's what he's thinking about? Suppose his sign had said something right wing?

I would wager he was living under a great deal of economic stress. A lot of Democrats today seem to be indifferent to this plight that is affecting so many millions of Americans. Your post is a classic example of that.

Why would you draw that from that? What's the need for the false accusation of lack of compassion?

You can wager, but depression kills people this way, not poverty. A lot of poor people go on living. Most, in fact. And rich people kill themselves - money doesn't mean you won't be depressed. That's a disease.

... but not the sign, that they had to lock down the visitor's center. Had a friend on the mall for the cherry blossom festival that heard the shot .

When I was a wee lad, I heard the GodOffalParty mantra..."I've got mine, piss on you!"...Mantra still going strong...

American democracy tm

and equality are concerned. They're afraid protest, of any kind, might catch on.

the peoples airwaves are under control. just not by the people.

so it only counts if you wound or kill someone else??????

use rosary beads as shrapnel?
or fox will say you are part of isis......

debate is i should use the sarcasm thingy.....
maybe not