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Comment by abalashov | Hacker News Reader

Not even a whimper of cheer for Osama's death from me, given the abysmal foreign policy and national security state failure of the last decade. As another commenter said, "Osama bin Laden's legacy lives on with every traveler being herded through body scanners, with every illegal search in our 120-mile-radius Constitution-free zones, and with every warrantless wiretap."

Besides that, it's simply not like me to cheer for anyone's death, in principle, especially a figure the TV adamantly asserts we're supposed to hate. It's not that I doubt the veracity of the reasons given so much as I loathe demagoguery and spectacle.

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I'm with you on that one. It seems so asymmetric. It shouldn't be "they kill us and dance in their streets, we kill them and dance in ours". This lends their "cause" far more legitimacy than it deserves. It should be more like catching a rat in a trap. The rat does as it does because that's what it is. We have to kill it as part of conducting our lives as we know them. But we don't celebrate, or even think too much about it.

This decade long spectacle has been a giant gravity well for all sorts of other unrelated (and bad) stuff to orbit. Here's hoping this provides some ending to it.

>It shouldn't be "they kill us and dance in their streets, we kill them and dance in ours".

This is an invalid equivocation. Their 'dancing in the streets' is after killing civilians, and being glad that bin Laden is dead is not even close to that.

Are you suggesting Arabs are lowly scum of the earth who dance for the death of civilians?

I'm suggesting that some of them are. Are you suggesting otherwise? My suggestion is backed up by video footage.

I'm suggesting you don't understand how these things work, and thus making bad judgements.

When Arabs see Americans celebrating the invasion of Iraq, they see that as "Americans celebrating the destruction of an Arab country and death and humiliation of its people".

Such broad generalizations are not a good way of looking at the situation.

When people celebrate these kinds of things, they're not celebrating the "death" of civilians. They're celebrating a blow to the international imperial bully. Now I'm not saying this is OK, but it's not any less evil than Americans celebrating the successful invasion of Iraq.

EDIT:

To put it in a slightly more formal way:

Event X occurs, group A views it as Y (something undesirable), group B views it as Z (something desirable).

Group B celebrates (wrongly) the occurrence of "Z". Group A sees it as: Group B is celebrating the occurrence of "Y".

Group A then wrongly makes an assumption that Group B celebrated the occurrence of Y.

Immediately after, and for at least months after, polls of Iraqi citizens showed > 50% support for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. It's dropped below that now, but that certainly demonstrates that there is no uniform Arab thought. As others, they are capable of more sophisticated moral reasoning than "our tribe versus theirs" and detecting the possibility of the toppling of a barbaric regime even by people whose cultura/nationality/skin color differs from their own.

I didn't say or even try to imply "all Arabs" or "all Americans". Plenty of Americans also marched against the war.

What I'm trying to say is, you see people hitting the metaphorical "like" button on something and you immediately assume there's only one explanation for this: these people are evil/rats. This is very wrong.

Actually, speaking of the split in Iraq, this is one of the reasons. Various groups had different outlook on the events taking place, and ended up viewing each other as evil scumbags. Next thing you know is people are killing each other.

I'm not saying that I'm not glad(1) Bin Laden is dead. I was just disheartened to see the video of Americans dancing in front of the Whitehouse waving the flag. It just seemed too much like what happened after the 9/11 attacks. Remember, to those celebrating American deaths, there really is no such thing as "civilian". If we act like they act in victory, they can feel like they have our attention and are in a "real war"(2).

It is not (I think) as demoralizing to this enemy to see Americans dancing and celebrating this event as it would be to see Americans shrug their shoulders in a "well it had to be done" kind of way and get back to business with nothing more than a blurb on page 3 in the newspaper the next day.

(1) In the same way I'm glad my pantry doesn't have rats because my traps worked, not the jubilant "I hate the bastard and everything he stood for" way we're going to see a lot of in the next few days.

(2) I fully accept that we made it one and think that we shouldn't have. Its all part of the same course of error.

If there's one thing you can learn from observing the world and reading about history, it's that people are the same all over the world. That is both heartening and frightening.

I'm pretty sure that those who have had innocent friends and loved ones killed as "collateral damage" in the US "war on terror" will feel that it's a lot closer to it than you might.

on both sides.

Although, I have always doubted the omni-tentacular, ubiquitous, far-reaching character ascribed to Al Qaeda as an all-powerful international terrorist conspiracy. It's not that I doubt its existence per se, it's just that I know damn well that every shadowy international conspiracy ever raised by any government has been vastly exaggerated into a comically gassy caricature of its real self, vide the International Communist Conspiracy of yore.

Edit: In a way, bin Laden's death is probably a net loss for the American military and foreign policy establishment (does there even need to be an 'and' there?). So much propaganda mileage was squeezed from him that I am sure there is some ambivalence as to whether he's more valuable dead as some bullshit "vindication" vs. alive as a perpetual bogeyman.

> I have always doubted the omni-tentacular, ubiquitous, far-reaching character ascribed to Al Qaeda as an all-powerful international terrorist conspiracy

In the Arab world, this image is ascribed to the Zionist-Right-Wing-American conspiracy. Some radical conspiracy theorists even claim that all current revolutions in the Arab world are plans by the Zionists to change Arab regimes without resorting to a full-scale military invasion.

Which is strange, given that most of the imperiled or 'changed' regimes are not especially anti-Israeli. I mean in reality, apart from the perfunctory rhetorical barbs for domestic consumption.

Some of these conspiracy theorists are themselves a part of the propaganda machine for the various ruling regimes, but what troubles me is that some people actually find these ideas plausible: "You know brother, the Americans are not asleep like us, they calculate things well".

I'm bracing myself for the next bogeyman. Let's hope his introduction won't be as dramatic as Ben Laden's.

Bin Laden's wasn't all that dramatic. I'm more worried about Kim Jong-Il deciding he's had enough and launching a full-scale assault.

Kim Jong-Il is the current most likely way that everyone reading this dies. More specifically, when he dies things are going to get very nasty as the various potential successors fight for what's left of the republic.

If you don't think this is a credible position, feel free to let me know why the US military is on high alert nearby?

Kim Jong-Il is the current most likely way that everyone reading this dies.

That's a bit much.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea has a lot of artillery aimed at population centers of the Republic of Korea. But most HN readers do not spend significant amounts of time in population centers of the Republic of Korea.

Kim Jong-Il leads a very good life. He has no desire to risk it. Look to Iran, if anything.

My suspicion is that Al-Qaeda is like Anonymous, organization-wise. It does both them and the media a lot of good to leave the impression that they are a vast hierarchical organization, when really they are a loose association of radicals with common goals.

Yes. As on outsider, the whole thing felt really uncivil to me. I guess I just don't understand the hate. I do understand that operations to kill people are performed, but that people celebrate this. Weird.

‎"Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thy heart be glad when he stumbleth" (Proverbs, 24, 17)

"The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked." (Psalm 58:10)

Which of course isn't actually contradictory. Provided that you can distinguish accurately between someone who is merely your "enemy" and someone who is objectively "wicked", you can decide whether or not to celebrate.

"Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes." (Proverbs 26:4-5)

I ctrl+f-ed for "Goldstein". I am very dissapoint.

Oh wah!

Haha, I love that I'm getting downvoted for this.

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