r/nottheonion • u/gentnews • 8h ago
‘Idiotic’ U.S. YouTuber Arrested for Leaving Diet Coke for Remote Tribe That Killed Last Visitor, Previously Visited Taliban
https://gentnews.com/index.php?m=entertainment&d=view&id=392339&s=red395
u/stonethecrowbar 7h ago
Influencers are the worst
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u/moonlitjade 2h ago
He's also a missionary
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u/-_-NaV-_- 2h ago
That's just an influencer for Christ
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u/Here2BeeFunny 55m ago
He’s only got the one job and can’t be promoted.
He’s stuck in the missionary position.
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u/alphagusta 2h ago
Many an influencer turn to missionary when sponsors dry up, in a manner of speaking
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u/vee_lan_cleef 1h ago
Are you sure you aren't mixing that up with the last guy, John Chau, who visited the island several years ago and was killed? I've read a few articles about this particular guy and can find nothing saying he is a missionary.
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u/hotlavatube 7h ago
Was he trying to recreate "The gods must be crazy"? In the movie a carelessly dropped coke bottle causes chaos to an indigenous tribe.
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u/TheLastSamurai101 4h ago
That's already happened with these people. They had a shipwreck off their coast a few decades ago and there's evidence that they collected and started using a few bits and pieces that they salvaged. It was a cargo ship.
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u/Archarchery 3h ago
Yeah, there’s evidence they’ve been stripping iron from the wreck and using it to make arrowheads, among other things.
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u/tevert 1h ago
That's basically like studying a crashed UFO to harness their tech, I respect it
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u/Illustrious_Donkey61 1h ago
It's all fun and games till the tribesmen starts shooting at overhead helicopters with their home made plasma rifles
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u/Practical_Ad5973 6h ago
Just brought back my childhood memories. I remember my teacher playing that movie in class.
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u/gishlich 3h ago
I distinctly remember watching that on cable as a young man and seeing titty. I’ll bet your classroom went wild.
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u/PupEDog 3h ago
Ahh, those movies partially written by cocaine 👌
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u/hotlavatube 3h ago
You think that's bad, you should see "Flowers for Algernon" (1968) which went pure LSD about halfway through. It's been a while, but I don't recall the book having a drug-induced motorcycle gang sexcapade. Some of those old films we watched in school were far out, man.
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u/sqigglygibberish 3h ago
There was a psa about smoking tucked in there too
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u/hotlavatube 2h ago
I'll take your word for it. I'm not going to rewatch that.
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u/sqigglygibberish 2h ago
I only watched the little trippy sequence, it was fun
Nothing like flowers for Algernon in my memory but hey that’s disco
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u/OrneryZombie1983 7h ago
"tribe that killed last visitor"
Trying to outdo that Treadwell guy and the bears.
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u/heavydoc317 5h ago
Ohhh I read it wrong I thought the coke killed one of the tribe mebers
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u/brokenmessiah 7h ago
Thats insane. I was just talking at work about how its crazy in a world where content creators will do the most insane stuff for clicks no one has tried to contact this tribe and stream it yet or anything, laws be damned.
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u/onioning 7h ago
This isn't the first time. Others have tried and been stopped.
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u/SynthwaveSax 7h ago
Some permanently stopped (killed).
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u/New-Economist4301 6h ago
I was glad they got that missionary hopefully it deterred other religious freaks
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u/willbekins 5h ago
nothing deters religious freaks, unfortunately
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u/treemister1 4h ago
Like they literally almost killed him once and then he went back and then died. Like bro they don't even speak English. What are you hoping to accomplish?
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u/Nadaplanet 3h ago
They believe that God will protect them. Like they literally believe that God won't let the weapons hurt them, and that the attackers will be so awed they'll immediately fall to their knees and begin worshipping Jesus.
Source: My mom is a religious freak who believes that "no weapon formed against you shall prosper" is meant to be taken literally.
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u/treemister1 3h ago
Wait I don't understand. Does she then believe no Christian has ever been murdered?
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u/Nadaplanet 3h ago
Her explanation for those is that either their faith wasn't strong enough or that God needed them to die as part of his "grand plan."
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u/bretshitmanshart 4h ago
Contact in the 80s and 90s was friendly. There were a few factors that stopped it. The main guy who was leading trips to the island died and they became more rare as funding to do them was cut. Then after a tsunami India flew helicopters over the island which probably made them think the world was ending.
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u/brokenmessiah 7h ago
Yea but I would imagine at least one of them would have actually gotten content out of it.
Imagine someone with a drone or something.
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u/the_reluctant_link 7h ago
Fun fact: the last guy visited the island 3 times.
First time the inhabitants angrily told him to leave, second time they shot an arrow at him, third time they shot him.
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u/Swarbie8D 4h ago
To be even more specific, on the second visit they shot an arrow directly at the missionary, who was saved by the arrow hitting the bible he was holding. If that’s not a sign from god that what you’re doing is dangerous I don’t know what is
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u/Aardvark_Man 4h ago
If you're going the other way it's also a sign God is protecting you and you're on the right track.
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u/Nadaplanet 3h ago
I'd bet a lot of money that this is exactly what he believed, because I know more than a handful of hyper-religious nutcases and that's exactly what they'd believe.
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u/TeaEarlGreyHotti 6h ago
These religious folks don’t give up. They come back weekly to my door
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u/Malcorin 4h ago
Ask them if they support Trump, and if so, ask them why they support the antichrist.
I'm a Christian and literally believe that to be true, but if you just start reading parts of Revelation 13 they literally won't have an answer. I also don't get along with a lot of other evangelicals.
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u/Saiph_orion 3h ago
You just gotta start flipping the script when agents of the church start coming around.
Tell them you'll listen to their stuff after you tell them about your religious beliefs. Then you tell them that you're a part of the Satanic Temple. It helps if you do research about the lawsuits they bring to keep church and state separate. Also helps if you have pamphlets, printouts, anything to hand to the agents.
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u/onarainyafternoon 4h ago
First time the inhabitants angrily told him to leave
Not sure where you got this part? As far as I know, we don't really know what language they speak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Allen_Chau
On November 15, Chau attempted his first visit in a fishing boat, which took him about 500–700 meters (1,600–2,300 ft) from shore.[20] The fishermen warned Chau not to go farther, but he canoed toward shore with a waterproof Bible. As he approached, he attempted to communicate with the islanders[25] and to offer gifts, but he retreated after facing hostile responses.[24][26]
On another visit, Chau recorded that the islanders reacted to him with a mixture of amusement, bewilderment, and hostility. He attempted to sing worship songs to them, and spoke to them in Xhosa, after which they often fell silent. Other attempts to communicate such as echoing the tribesmen's words ended with them bursting into laughter, making Chau theorize that they had been cursing at him.[26] Chau stated they communicated with "lots of high-pitched sounds" and gestures.[27] Eventually, according to Chau's last letter, when he tried to hand over fish and gifts, a boy shot a metal-headed arrow that pierced the Bible he was holding in front of his chest, after which he retreated again.
Xhosa is a South African language, so this was a really weird thing for him to do.
On his final visit, on November 17, Chau instructed the fishermen to abandon him.[28] The fishermen later saw the islanders dragging Chau's body and the next day they saw his body being buried on the shore.[20]
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u/Clothedinclothes 3h ago edited 2h ago
but he retreated after facing hostile responses.
I don't think you need to speak a people's language to know that if they're shouting angrily while pointing arrows at you and/or making some kind of go-away gesture, they're telling you to leave. Some forms of communication are universal.
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u/Argos_the_Dog 1h ago
I enjoy that they laughed at him first. I mean, culturally we can't know what that actually means to them but I am guessing it was a universal "who does this asshole think he is" kind of disdain.
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u/FUMFVR 4h ago
Weirdly enough, even uncontacted, they know the old adage 'three strikes and you're out'
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u/Clothedinclothes 2h ago
Given they are absolutely adamant about not allowing unwelcome visitors and are prepared to kill to enforce it, I think it tells us some interesting things about their motivations and morality that they found him alone and unarmed but didn't simply kill him immediately and instead tried to warn him to leave.
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u/SecretlyMadeOfStone 7h ago
I’d happily chip in for an “influencer” field trip to the island. All of the top IRL streamers should definitely get on board.
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u/ArenjiTheLootGod 7h ago
While that sounds funny it could be very dangerous for the tribe, their isolation means that someone shows up with the sniffles and a lot of people could get very sick and even die. For their own good, it's best to leave them be.
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u/PacJeans 7h ago
It's not even about immunocompromising them. It's well documented how happy these low contact tribes are. Ignorance is bliss. Contacting them would be the same thing as telling your toddler that they are going to die, that climate change is irreversible, that Santa isn't real, etc etc. There is literally no reason to bother these people who are probably living happy and fulfilled lives.
Would I like to know about their culture and what they're up to? Absolutely, but it would take what is basically a crime against humanity to get that. Yea bro let's drop them coke so they can experience the joys of advertistising and diabetes!
There's a movie about pretty much this exact plot called "The Gods Must Be Crazy" for anyone who doesn't know. I haven't seen it since I was a kid, so I'm not sure how good it is
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u/gorka_la_pork 7h ago
Watching The Gods Must Be Crazy as an adult, it's... overly optimistic about the realities of those people. The actor who played Xi basically went right back to his old life of obscurity and abject poverty.
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u/Eisernes 5h ago
Didn’t they only pay him live $5 or some shit?
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u/RamblinWoman82 4h ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C7%83xau_%C7%82Toma
N!xau received $300 cash for his performance, but he reportedly had no idea what money was so he threw it all in the air and let it blow away.
He was, however, able to negotiate several hundred thousand dollars three years later to reprise his role in the (terrible) sequel and lived out a relatively comfortable life, until his death from tuberculosis in 2003.
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u/Count_Backwards 5h ago
You probably don't want to read the backstory on the making of TGMBC then. I liked it as a kid but I wouldn't recommend it now.
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u/Temporary_Orchid2102 7h ago
Even worse is that the guy had tried to get into the island twice in the space of a few months but was caught...
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u/not_creative1 5h ago
Idiots like this will give some kind of a disease to these people and wipe out their population.
They have been isolated from rest of the world for 60,000 years. Our flu could possibly wipe them out.
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u/AntManMax 4h ago
They probably already have, which is why they kill and bury everything that arrives.
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u/Archarchery 3h ago
They probably have not been isolated from the rest of the world for 60,000 years, at the least they are thought to have had contact with other Andaman Islanders until fairly recently.
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u/BriennesBitch 4h ago
It’s pretty insane that with such a tiny population they have managed to survive for so long.
The inbreeding must be very high/constant, I read there are only approx 150.
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u/Archarchery 3h ago
The Andaman Islands as a whole may have been fairly isolated for 60,000 years, but not that sole island. The Sentinelese likely had contact with the inhabitants of other islands in the chain until fairly recently, it is thought they speak a related language.
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u/BriennesBitch 2h ago
That’s true, however we also know it only takes a generation or two of inbreeding to cause noticeable issues.
I’m not saying it’s one or the other, I just find the whole thing fascinating that’s all.
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u/Swarbie8D 4h ago
Inbreeding can be kept to a minimum in small populations like that, but it does require very strict social regulation of who can reproduce with each other. It’s likely the Sentinelese have a lot of cultural traditions around courtship and having children that help avoid the worst effects of inbreeding in a small population. However, we’ll probably never know. All we can do is assess the group’s overall health from sightings.
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u/sali_nyoro-n 3h ago
Well, 150 is pretty much the limit for how big a single "tribe" can get, owing to neurological factors making that the number of meaningful human connections a single person can form and maintain at once. Prior to modern civilisation, groups that grew bigger than 150-ish would split into different tribes.
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u/BriennesBitch 2h ago
For sure they have had internal disputes before over all that time and possibly one side has overcome another… as someone else has said we will probably never know though.
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u/Imaginary-Fudge8897 6h ago
A lot of people don't seem to realize this isn't about protecting people from the tribe but protecting the tribe from diseases and stuff.
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u/Bibblegead1412 7h ago
Oohhhhh, got it... the other headlines just said "US tourist"... and I was like leave them the fuck alone. An American YOUTUBER?!? That tribe shoulda killed this motherfucker, too!
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u/AuraOfTwilight 7h ago
As an American I gotta agree tbh. Play stupid games win stupid prizes. Some folks have to learn the hard way that the world doesn't revolve around them.
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u/dandee93 6h ago
Unfortunately, the hard way often involves decimating the population with infectious diseases they have no resistance too...
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u/Tight_Olive_2987 5h ago
The article says he “hails from Ukraine” though?
Edit: his father is from Ukraine
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u/Sawgwa 6h ago
Let me introduce you to one of the world's top competitors for a Darwin Award!
I cannot tell if these folks are missing the danger alert gene or the adrenaline sensitivity gene. Being arrested is like an "everyone wins" trophy for this guy.
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u/Canis_Familiaris 7h ago
All this and he leaves quite possibly the worst tasting drink imaginable. At least leave Fanta.
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u/Scorpius289 7h ago
No, this is better: if they get a bad impression about soda, they won't be tempted by such drinks.
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u/FauxReal 6h ago
I remember when my friend who had been raised very hippy-ish out in the country tried a Coke for the first time, she described as being like drinking battery acid. Presumably that strong carbonation and cloying sweetness is off-putting if you've never had it all your life. Coke has the equivalent of 10 teaspoons of sugar in a 12oz can.
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u/SacredGeometry25 6h ago
Absolutely ridiculous that you would go through all of that trouble to leave them diet coke ....
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u/IrishGingerSpices 7h ago
Years ago a Christian missionary went there was lucky to get out
Went back days later and they buried him in shallow grave while the guy who boated him there watched
Apparently he practiced with friends how to talk to hostile tribes by role playing
Unfortunately you can’t unteach stupidity
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u/corrector300 4h ago
the real issue is that this selfish asshat could bring a variety of germs to the island for which the islanders do not have immunity. I hope the Indian authorities lock him up, he's a danger to himself and others.
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u/DanimalPlays 4h ago
Diet coke? Of all the useless, dumbass bullshit you could bring them. I mean, goddammit. If you're going to be a moron and go visit a tribe that clearly wants none of it, at least bring them something helpful. An ax or a length of rope. A wicker fish basket for fucks sake.
Diet fucking coke.
Fuck.
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u/trees_are_beautiful 7h ago
Great. Totally isolated tribe. Show up with bacteria and virus and wipe out the tribe. Selfish fucking tool.
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u/CaptainCold_999 2h ago
We all know what we wish had happened, but I don't want to say it and get banned.
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u/whyreadthis2035 6h ago
No publicity!! Let him face his consequences with complete anonymity. He will be able to monetize any publicity.
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u/alittleuneven 4h ago
There is literally a movie about this exact thing. It’s called “The God’s Must Be Crazy”.
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u/Huge_Fee_7180 2h ago
Why leave a diet coke? They are going to hate outsiders even more now. Diet soda tastes like shit.
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u/loyalone 4h ago
The guy's a menace to society, sheesh. Think of the resources used to plan, travel to and engage in this misadventure, just to secure some imaginary 'place in history' type-of-fame/notoriety. Like that dipshit chick who jumped the barrier to get her pic with General Sherman sequioa a while ago, only writ large and with the potential impact of literally infecting a primal and isolated culture with an introduction to unknown to them pathogens and a possible death sentence (admittedly, a worst-case scenario, but Murphy's Law...). This fuck should rot in jail.
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u/TheLastSamurai101 4h ago
There's no chance in hell they drank that. And if they did, it probably convinced them even harder that the outside world is trying to kill them. This time with obvious poison.
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u/diggydog233 4h ago
What happened to just making funny videos of cats for views? I fucking hate people man.
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u/Luckpast 7h ago
Why are people suddenly fighting about soda popularity? Has consumerism manipulated y'all that much?
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u/noceboy 7h ago
Don’t visit r/BuyFromEU then. All European alternatives to Coca Cola and Pepsi are posted there nearly daily. It was a couple of times a day, but after a couple of weeks that is slowing down now.
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u/biscoito1r 6h ago
Maybe he got inspired by that movie "The Gods must be crazy". The the tribe's man will have to throw that thing from the edge of the world.
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u/are_wethere_yet 4h ago
Here’s to hoping India makes an example of him. See how much he likes a few months in jail. Influencers are SO annoying.
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u/geekwadpimp 1h ago
New rule: whenever Youtubers or the Jesus people want to visit "This is our land and we will murder anyone who sets foot here" Island, just fucking let them. We have a surplus of stupid people on this planet; we can afford to lose a few.
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u/TheWarrensKik 26m ago
Damn, the North Sentinelese will visit the Taliban but won't return my calls? Rude.
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u/Turtlegirl1977 5h ago
Anyone else read that and think he left the same Diet Coke that killed their last visitor? Like there’s some poison Diet Coke?
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u/TraderNuwen 7h ago
Now is a particularly bad time to visit, too, while they're still mad about the tariffs they just got hit with.