Gilozard: I also don't think dying/being harmed is the worst thing that can happen, and that living through something because I compromised my core principles isn't worth it. I'm aware that my perspective is not the typical one.
No, the worst thing that can happen is your family or loved ones dying/being harmed because of something you did. We had a situation like that in my country during World War II. Resistence fighters ambushed a car containing some German military officers. One of the officers got killed. The Nazi's organized a retaliation action against the nearby village, executing a handful of villagers immediately and sending a large part of the male population off to the camps. Very few of them returned.
You could say the resistence fighters followed their core principles and at least there was one less nazi in the world afterwards. But nearly half the village population was now missing a father, brother or husband and that one nazi didn't make a massive difference in the grand spiel of things. If you were one of those resistence fighters, you could say "It was worth it, at least I followed my principles". Not many people would agree.
War and occupation have this tendency of blurring those comfortable boundaries Hollywood movies and videogames teach us about. In a country that has never suffered occupation or invasion by a foreign power and where people use the word "tyranny" to describe moderate taxes and background checks for assault rifles, this tends to be easily forgotten.
I'm kind of convinced you're a troll, but here's a little counternarrative based on bits of info that have bubbled up over the last two days.
First of all, here's some additional info about the guy:
http://www.vox.com/2016/6/14/11933142/omar-mateen-pulse/in/11676003 Some tidbits:
- The nightclub wasn't picked randomly or because it was a gun-free zone or because it had a high potential for carnage. It was picked because the shooter had been a customer for over 3 years. He knew the place. It symbolized his own sexual fucked-up-ness to him.
- The guy hadn't just been visiting the nightclub, he had a long history of trying to pick up men and used multiple dating apps for gays.
- Oh, and his dad had a low opinion of gays and immediately denied that his son could be gay. This won't end well, will it?
So...the guy's probably gay, but in the closet. His dad feels homosexuality is an abomination, which must have caused intense pressure in the guy. If his dad hates gays, he probably hates him. The guy secretly hangs out in gay clubs and dates men, but nevertheless eventually marries a female like a good son. It goes as well as you'd expect. She divorced him later, because he was unstable and abusive. That was in 2009, long before IS was even around. This guy's been messed up in the head for years, which is not surprising. Some of the worst homophobes are closeted gays who project their own self-loathing outwards.
An interesting detail is the fact that people from the club mentioned he liked to get shit-faced. This is interesting because muslims aren't allowed to drink alcohol and even many of the more casual practitioners of the religion tend to stick with this one. A real religious islamic fanatic wouldn't get himself plastered.
You and your orange God like to pretend this guy was an average muslim who simply carried out his religious duties. I call bull-shit. This isn't a guy who got so much into islamic fanatism that he picked up a lethal loathing of gays as a result. This was a guy whose lethal loathing of gays was already there and was fueled by self-loathing , picking up islamic fanatism to give himself a justification for his inner rage.
Before the massacre, he made several calls to 911 and claimed he was representing ISIS. Why'd you think that is? Because the feeling of being remembered as a holy warrior made him feel good about himself. If those criminals of ISIS praised him, despite the fact that he himself was a lousy muslim, at least SOMEONE would respect and praise him. Without the ISIS cover, he was just a closeted gay who couldn't accept his own orientation and everybody would remember him as a pitiful excuse of a human being.
Holy warrior: brave martyr.
Confused gay who went nuts inside the closet: loser.
How to be remembered...choices, choices.
No doubt I already lost you, but the truth seems to be quite a bit more and at the same time less complicated than Trump's tasteless tweets would like people to believe. But heck, the way people described him: a loner, socially awkward, unable to fit in pretty much make him sound exactly like all those other nuts who unloaded his too-easily-obtained weaponry into innocent bystanders and whose WASPiness immediately made the right-wing go: "Oh, he was just a mentally messed up loner".