You're right, Pete. One could exchange certain words with 'opposite' words, and I could have said the same thing right back to the illustrious UG. Only I'm not so clever. :)

So subtly clever that its quiet brilliance was missed by him, who knows clever. ;)

No you and Pete clearly missed his brilliance and cleverness. I mean, I have never ever seen such awesome satire. His diction, and delivery are so well thought out and perfect it makes you truly think he believes the dribble he's spouting. It is also the deadpan serious way he writes, its hard to even catch on to the fact that he's spoofing a right wing extremist nut job. To add a cherry on top, he personalizes it by actually addressing a poster and attacking them all they while pretending he's taking the moral high ground! I roll on the floor laughing every time.

UG, please look up the word satire, then have another look at both posts. I had hoped that you might see that your non-sequitors are easy to copy (and mock). The reason that most of us do not resort to such stupidity is that we prefer reasoned discourse. A skill you have yet to display.

Have you had any effect during your time here? Have you convinced even one person of the reasonableness of the right? I ask anyone who has been swayed to the right by UGs 'arguments' to step forth.

And still I wonder if you aren't really an AstroTurf shill for the Dems - your arguments are so awful.

in honor of his death, i jumped on our "desert storm" car with our American flag and took a victory lap...

I know people aren't going to like this post, but here goes.

Bin Laden, although he was a terrorist and caused so much grief to so many people, also had a family who presumably loved him no matter what his beliefs were.

I don't think killing him is going to stop terrorism or al quaida (sp?) and may in fact have the opposite effect.

I know he has become a symbol for terror across the world, but really, I don't think cheering in the street is an appropriate response. He was no doubt a cold blooded killer, but he was still a person.

Now that he's dead, what don't we show our humanity instead of becoming what we hate?

Let's see no direct attacks on Australia by Al Qaeda yah I see your point where you as an Australian can tell Americans that have been directly affected how to behave


not fucking really

You don't think any Australians have been directly affected? You don't think the support our troops have given to your gives us a right to comment?

Our soldiers have spilled blood just the same colour as yours. So have our civilians. See the attacks in Bali for instance. A pub blown up which was THE place for Australians to drink when on holidays.

No, I don't accept your statement Nirvana. Not for one second. Especially since i have familiy members in the armed forces who've had to serve in Afghanistan and risk their lives.

How fucking rude to suggest that only Americans have a right to comment. Fuck that.

Oh, and in case you didn't notice, nowhere did I mention my post was about US reactions. There are similar reactions around the world. Get out of your bubble and take a look around.

terrorists are terrorists. they don't give a flying turd about humanity. no matter what country, color or type of person you are. they care about their extremist views and killing people to try and get their ideals across. they are cowards. they even blow up or attack their own. just because their own don't believe (in most cases) their beliefs of the koran. i'm not dishing out here anything that anyone doesn't know here, just trying to shed light on it is all or bring it back up to the surface. martyr my ass. i'm 40, i'm hemorrhagic apparently, need a walker, haven't ridden a go kart in 15 years, fly whenever the hell i can, even grounded (with a pilot that is current), being trained to run a biz by myself, and found out today that i just might buy someones successful biz (no not the track but has something to do with it) what do i know. point here is this: terrorism affects everyone no matter where they are in the world. even seeing something like a car bomb from my living room to kabul is disheartening. kids killed. parents killed. people killed. it's not right. they know it. everyone knows it. i love my job. i get to see kids smile, laugh, have a super moist time at the track. it kills me to see them in anguish. it kills me to see anyone in anguish. i love my fellow man. i, unlike terrorists, have a heart that will keep on feeling the way it does about them and my fellow man as most of us here do too. terrorists need to be dealt with in whatever manner necessary. fuck'em.

[/soapbox]

You're right plth. I don't disagree that he had to be dealt with one way or another. I just don't like to see normally nice people so joyful about someone else's death. The same reaction is happening everywhere and I just don't get it. I can't be joyful about death that's all. Yes he needed to be brought down and if his death was the result then so be it, but fuck, you don't pop a cork over it.

I kind of agree Ali. To me there is something slightly distasteful about celebrating a death with such joy. I'm pleased that particular chapter has been concluded. I am glad he hasn't 'got away with it' in the end. But outpourings of joy seem strange.

That said, I think we also have to consider that some of the 'joy' is because of the sense of closure that his death brings. Lots of us have been affected by the War on terror. Lots of countries have been targeted by Al Quaeda and lost people and peace of mind to suicide bombers and the like. For you guys the big one was Bali, and for us the London train bombings.

But the World Trade Center was a slightly different beast. Partly because of the sheer scale of it, but also partly because it broke an age old paradigm of America as an uninvadeable country. To be attacked by a foreign enemy on their own soil must have been a shocking thing for Americans to face. That kind of thing cuts deep in the national psyche.

Just reading back my last post, and I realise it sounds a little patronising. But, I meant what i said about that sort of thing cutting into the national psyche. Attacks at home are not something that had hitherto featured heavily in the American experience, not until 9/11.

My own experience as a Brit is a little different. The threat of terrorist attack does not feel like a new thing for me, it just feels like a different (albeit more frightening) brand of something that already formed a part of my British experience. Watching news reports at the age of 12, that showed leading government ministers and the Prime Minister of the country exiting the shattered remains of their hotel after a terrorist bomb attack doesn't inspire any feelings of national invulnerability.

Apart from a smattering of years between the Good Friday agreement in '98 and the War on Terror after 9/11, bomb threats, and terror alerts have been a fairly normal undercurrent to life in Britain, for as long as I can remember. The tone of that undercurrent has changed. Many of the IRA attacks were intended to be damaging but not fatal, including the Warrington bombings in which several people were killed but which had apparently gone terribly wrong. The current crop of terrorists seem to go for maximum death toll and that makes them more frightening overall. But the idea that a bomb might go off in the shopping centre when you are doing your Christmas shopping was never far away whilst I was growing up, and has now merely been replaced with the fear that the train or bus will blow up on the way home.

Warrington, by the way, is a nondescript and unimportant northern town, not far from the nondescript and unimportant northern town in which I grew up. That was one of the terrifying things about the bomb scares: they really could happen anywhere.

When i was working as a shop assistant in a clothes store in Bolton, the shopping centre was evacuated several times due to bomb threats/scares, all of which fortunately proved false alarms. But that sort of thing etches itself into your sense of the world around you. As did travelling to work through the devasted remains of the main shopping centre in Manchester in the New Year after it had been hit - (the largest bomb attack in Britain since WW2, and caused over £400 million worth of damage).

None of these attacks had anywhere near the scale of Al Quaeda's attack on America, and I can only guess how such a large scale assault might impact on Britain's national psyche, but what it would not do is shatter a sense of national invulnerability, because we just don't have one to start with :p

I am a little disconcerted at the "celebration." To me, it's a sad ending to a horrible thing. I'm not rejoicing, but there must be some relief at the end of something evil.

I wonder how people felt when they got word of Hitler's suicide? I guess it wasn't a death heard 'round the world' for some time, the interwebz just being new and all. ;)

But more evil will take the place of the old evil. Always has and always will.

I thought his family had disowned him long before September 11th?

That must be the part of the family Bush was still friends with? The ones he flew out of the country though they MIGHT have some idea where we could have found him...then?