This strategy presumes that the authorities are concerned with the protester’s well-being in the first place.
Actually, it presumes access to media outlets/social media who will help build pressure on authorities. It’s a pressure campaign tactic whose success or failure relies on building outside, non-state civil society support. By failing to engage with why people resort to tactics like hunger striking or self-immolation and just making shit up, the piece fails to really make its case.
While I don’t support self-immolation as a tactic, the mentality this critique relies on enables the abuses that lead people to self-immolate or go on hunger strike to start with.
BTW about 98% of everything CrimethInc publishes is exactly this off-base and unhelpful.