The thing is that there are undoubtedly people throughout history who are far more than just another person, they are symbols and they are also evil and they have perpetrated anc commanded atrocity to be committed. Hitler (at the risk of Godwinizing myself) is certainly one, to the peole of Romania Nicolae Ceausescu was one, Stalin, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, etc. It is hard to judge these lives and their deaths using commong metrics. Logically you can lay it out, but it is lacking, IMO. So cheering the death of someon, as general principal is at best tacky, but the world is not so clean and the lines we draw are not so bright.
I only saw a few images of that “Arab street” & realized they were a very small minority. Still, more than 3000 people died that day. I thought the louder celebrations in DC were in poor taste, but they were only celebrating the death of one particular criminal.
Alas, I wish the response to 9/11 had been a manhunt–rather than starting one war that was sort of a manhunt & another war that had nothing to do with the great crime.
Boy, Obama is really looking good right now. No wonder the Pubbies are dragging out their old, tired arguments…
WOW… you just blew my mind.
But if I can engage in a little nationalistic Ipeening, The SAS is to SADSOG what the Commodore 64 is to WATSON. It was great in its time and really laid a lot of groundwork but we’ve moved past it now.
Wait. What side are you on? Are you Al quaida or something?
First off, let me state that I voted for Obama, and I have no dislike for the man, that said…
<pedant> technically, Obama did not kill OBL, yes he authorized the mission, but unless he was using his Super-Secret-Ninja-Powers, he wasn’t actually the triggerman, the real credit for OBL’s death should be given to the Navy SEAL team that gave OBL a terminal case of lead poisoning
Obama does deserve credit for authorizing the mission, but he didn’t kill OBL
and yes, I am celebrating that scumbag’s death, may the fish eat well!
I think that when someone like that dies, its more appropriate to reflect on the loss they brought to the world than to celebrate their death. I think that is worthier of our humanity. Our feelings may be widely different - and we may WANT to celebrate, but as human beings, we restrict our baser impulses to rejoice in the face of someone else’s death. Even when that person was - to our eyes - without redeeming qualities. YMMV.
I just responded:
Gotta keep it simple for those people.
Most of what we do is just and right, but until 20 years ago we were perfectly happy to be evil and wrong as long as it suited our interests. The world is not black and white.
How do you figure three wars with literally hundreds of thousands dead, an economy on the verge of collapse and an incredible erosion of civil liberties in the past ten years is “just and right”?
So, you’re saying that cheering the slaughter of 3000 innocent civilians is the exact same thing as cheering the execution of a fiendish, unrepentant mass murderer and the leader* of one of the deadliest terrorist organizations in recent history?
Oh-kaaaaay…
*Former leader, perhaps, but why should that excuse him?
You are aware that crime bosses have maintained control of their enterprises from prison without internet or cellular connections, yes?
Forget it, Wheelz. There’s no getting through to people like him. Because, like, hey man, it’s all subjective. We can’t possibly know if the US or al-Qaeda (no /u/, Capitaine) is the evil one. I mean, sure, we say it’s them, but what if, like, it’s really us! There’s just no way to know! ::toke toke::
“I quit whiskey for weed in 1975. May be the only really smart thing I ever did.”
- Willy Nelson
I find this in my facebook feed yesterday afternoon (spoilered for longness):
Head, meet desk.
The new controversy that seems to be rearing its head: Bin Laden was unarmed when those American thugs burst in and shot him in the face! Oh noes!
I’ll bet that almost every passenger in those airplanes and in WTC on 9/11 were unarmed too.
I confess to not diligently keeping up with the conspiracy theorist Twitter feeds, but is it possible the “controversy” is that we were initially told he was armed, cowering behind his shrieking wife #4, and jabbering “you’ll never take me alive, coppers!” and it turns out that at least a couple of those details may not have been, shall we say, factual statements?
Were we initially told that? I honestly don’t know. I remember it coming up in places, but I don’t know whether it was an official statement, a rumor distilled from elements of the original statement, an assumption made up out of whole cloth and spread via the web, or what. In any case, it doesn’t bother me that he was unarmed, nor does it bother me that we might have been initially told that he was armed, and then the statement was modified. Shit happens when you’re trying to get the news out. It could have been that some staff member, thinking that the videos would never have been released, decided to sanitize the news a bit.
Frankly, even if we were told initially that he was unarmed, I find it refreshing that the administration is willing to actually own up to how ruthless the operation actually was.
That doesn’t say anything about whether he was unarmed or not.
…American propaganda claims a GROUP of soliders, under direct orders from Obama, stormed a fortified compound and murdered Osama Bin Laden, then promptly discarded the body into the sea, “in accordance with Islamic tradition” s…o there is no evidence the man is even dead. This is NOT an American victory, but another lie propagated by YOUR government, so, instead reposting utter bullshit on Facebook, what proactive solution do you have to make sure the soldier you are routing for works for a government that is worth fighting for???
My son wrote that, but in truth he and I both think Bin Laden died years ago. That is, of course, just a guess.