Gyrocopter pilot faces over 9 years in prison: ""I simply hope by putting my freedom on the line, others might realize how precious their freedom is and join those of us engaged in this fight to preserve and protect our government of, by and for the people"

I agree. /u/gregdbowen I do not think had much initial intent behind the word usage but when questioned, he did seem to stand behind it. In particular the idea I am pointing to is when there is "blame" to be placed do you look to the self or the "other" and similarly the collective self (we) or the collective other (they). I was trying to illuminate the discrepancy in how /u/gregdbowen was provoking his audience and how Doug was doing so. In particular Doug is trying to challenge us:

The question is where YOU individually stand.

We, the collective people of the US, are being challenged by Doug's words and this is because Doug recognizes that we have the power which was something again I tried to reflect to the redditor. By saying "they", power was surrendered to these entities which is funny to me because Doug's statements are going in the complete opposite direction.

I also never said Doug was a martyr. I said it's clear he won't be remembered as one (because this is the US and look at our faith). I then went on to try to explain why martyrdom works in the cultures it does.

I am pretty radical on what forms of protests are acceptable. Like some people consider self-immolation to be a violent protest and I don't think that's a good outlook on the social circumstance. However, how was this potentially dangerous? He was flying a gyro-copter in restricted airspace. It's perfectly legal to fly the copter anywhere around that space (within height limitations) but absolutely no one flys in the no fly zone... so in a lot of ways the flight might of been statistically one of the safer... There is nothing malicious here and the real problem at hand... was this cost money and not a small amount when your talking a "national security fiasco" like this. As far as I understand, it's not even like this was a "white hat" action in that it was attempting to expose some kind of exploit. The guy had a problem with what was going on in the US such that he considered fundamentally against his citizenship (obligations to fellow citizens) and here is how he chose to protest, it sucks in that it ate up some money but trying to blame the messenger is just asking to elevate the issue in severity without any attempt to address the social challenge at hand. It's to ignore the cause and instead prescribe something to fix a symptom (thus removing your potential to even be aware of the problem -- that's how bad it is getting here in the US).

/r/news Thread Parent Link - cnn.com