SoylentNews

BK [soylentnews.org] writes:

From the Alaska Dispatch News [adn.com] [trigger warning: TFA is looong]:

Before his story made the Anchorage paper, before the first death threat arrived from across the world, before his elders began to worry and his mother cried over the things she read on Facebook, Chris Apassingok, age 16, caught a whale.
[...]A hundred years ago — even 20 years ago, when Gambell was an isolated point on the map, protected part of the year by a wall of sea ice — catching the whale would have been a dream accomplishment for a teenage hunter, a sign of Chris' passage into adulthood and a story that people would tell until he was old. But today, in a world shrunk by social media, where fragments of stories travel like light and there is no protection from anonymous outrage, his achievement has been eclipsed by an endless wave of online harassment.
[...]That is how Paul Watson, an activist and founder of Sea Shepherd, an environmental organization based in Washington, encountered Chris' story.Watson posted the story about Chris on his personal Facebook page, accompanied by a long rant. Chris' mother may have been the first in the family to see it, she said."WTF, You 16-Year Old Murdering Little Bastard!" Watson's post read. "… some 16-year old kid is a frigging 'hero' for snuffing out the life of this unique self aware, intelligent, social, sentient being, but hey, it's okay because murdering whales is a part of his culture, part of his tradition. … I don't give a damn for the bullshit politically correct attitude that certain groups of people have a 'right' to murder a whale."

Original Submission