Osama Bin Laden is Dead

[Gambit]

new news about the assault.

Sigh. Apparently we need to wait for the government to get its story straight before we continue discussing this. xD

[Mountain_King]

What does that have to do with anything?

He meant to put an "S", rather than a "B." After all, their names are quite close in terms of the letters that make them up.
God bless,
Crushmaster.

what's this?

[Hulavuta]

Um, I WAS talking about Obama. Obama wasn't armed.

Oh by the way Osama Bin Laden wasn't armed either. Not really important but just thought I'd share it.

[Crushmaster]

He meant to put an "S", rather than a "B." After all, their names are quite close in terms of the letters that make them up.
God bless,
Crushmaster.

what's this?

Ouch. Poor guy.
God bless,
Crushmaster.

[boru]

An AP reporter once asked Barack Obama to his face what he would do with "The Taliban and Obama Bin Laden still at large."

I think that one wins.

[Moribund]

he was a ruthless murderer, totally depraved like the rest of the unredeemed sons of Adam

Wait hold up how has no one talked about this? WHAT THE [censored] DOES THIS MEAN?

Are you saying that everyone who has not been batpised to wash away original sin is "totally depraved"?

thems fighting words

[artisticdude]

My opinion: OBL deserved to die, many times over. Not that I think people should rejoice over anyone's death, but I take satisfaction (not joy) in knowing that he was killed. Murderers who have done far, far lesser crimes here in the US have received the death penalty, so I strongly disagree that such an extremely depraved mass murderer like OBL should have been allowed to live in exile. Furthermore, he long ago surrendered his right to any sort of trial, in my opinion. The man was evil, period.

I heard the body was buried at sea, although I haven't confirmed that. Seems rather suspicious to me...

The amount of Obama/Osama mixups ( http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/05/a_ ... p_oba.html ) is really astounding, although understandable.

Edit: Blast auto-correct.

[Gambit]

Just ignore religious fundamentalism (of any religion). It will go away. We certainly don't want to start a fight over it. Then I'd have to lock this lovely thread.

[Mountain_King]

actually he's saying that anyone who has not accepted Jesus as their savior is totally depraved. Yeah, so? Moving on...

The amount of Obama/Osama mixups ( http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/05/a_ ... p_oba.html ) is really astounding, although understandable.

I'll have to favorite this page.

[Sgt. Groovy]

Oh by the way Osama Bin Laden wasn't armed either.

But he knew Kung Fu, that's why they were forced to shoot him.

[johndh]

Why is it so wrong to be happy that Osama bin Laden is dead? The man was a complete monster and the world is better off without having people like him living in it. Maybe we could have captured him and jailed him, but this man's very existence was a threat. Even having a trial would have been merely a formality, as we all know the verdict. When you're in a firefight with an armed enemy force, you don't stop to try to cuff them. You shoot until the other guys stop shooting back. My only two points of contention about killing him are that we didn't get to interrogate him, so we missed out on a lot of potential information, and that his followers have the chance to glorify his death since he apparently went down fighting.

With that said, I don't think this was that big of a victory. It was something that needed to be done, but another leader will soon take his place as long as long as others share his hatred. It's not possible to fight ideas by killing individuals. -isms and -ists are not the same, and killing the -ists doesn't stop the -isms. If we want to really fight terrorism, we have to change the mindset that prompts so many people to hate and murder. Attack the root of the problem, because covering up the symptoms does nothing to cure the disease. In fact, it only makes it worse.

[Crushmaster]

he was a ruthless murderer, totally depraved like the rest of the unredeemed sons of Adam

Wait hold up how has no one talked about this? WHAT THE [censored] DOES THIS MEAN?

Are you saying that everyone who has not been batpised to wash away original sin is "totally depraved"?

thems fighting words

No, I'm saying that ALL humans are totally depraved, and that unless they repent of their sins and trust Christ alone (hence, two of the three verses below in my signature) for salvation, they will have to personally pay for their sins, and thus will be, at the end of time, cast into the lake of fire for all eternity.

If you wish to discuss it in-depth, please, PM me. I would be glad to talk with you.
God bless,
Crushmaster.

[Frogger5]

Slightly off topic:

Spoiler:

Just thought i'd mention this, in case anyone finds it interesting. But here in Australia, the death penalty is considered very immoral, and i think most of our population are somewhat disgusted or freaked out about the fact that people get killed as a punishment for crimes (yes even big ones like terrorism) in other countries. It is a general belief, that no one deserves to be killed no matter what they have done in life. If our police kill someone, then there is almost always a massive outcry with several enquiries and months at court. Even if its a serial killer, or a mentally disabled person running at them with a knife.
Now I don't want anyone to think that I'm attacking anyone, but thats definitely saying something. And I have always been disgusted by the way that murder and execution seems to be an accepted part of other societies. Notice how I say seems. I have never left Australia, I am judging this by everything I have read in the newspaper, seen on the news, read on the internet, and heard from relatives who have travelled overseas. The fact that people seem surprised at our disgust at people celebrating someones death, is a very odd and discomforting experience for me.
(In case people aren't familiar with our law, Australia does not have the death penalty. And also note that I have not specifically mentioned OBL in this post.)

[Velensk]

Personally, I regard the alternatives to the death penelty as being a ton worse.

Spoiler:

There are some people who are simply not safe to have around and who will almost certainly misuse whatever power you allow them.

You can keep them locked up for life. This seems incredibly cruel to me (as I have mentioned before) as it is merely a very slow death. True they are not entirely powerless, but of the three cruicial aspects of life (learning, having power and using it, and feeling) I would think they will run out of material from the experiance provided relatively quickly. After they have then what? They've already been exiled from society, they cannot do anything, what they can feel and experiance essentially amounts to a slow desent to maddness for most people (if they wern't mad already). On top of that, in order to maintain this state other people (including if you believe in tax theory this persons victems) have to support the cost of keeping this person alive and contained for the rest of his lifetime.

You could keep them locked up for so long that they no longer remember how they were. Slightly better in my eyes but still very problematical and torturous to the convict. Most prisoners who stay in that long don't reintergrate into society at all well and there is always that potential that they'll go back to their own games.

In theory you can keep them in prison and re-educate them. Try forcibly to change the way their mind thinks so that they are not a danger. I don't have any kind of data/facts on how well this works but in any case it seems very intrusive and risky. When it comes to it, they have a right to their own mind and can choose (as much as one chooses anything about oneself) to be muderous maniacs; they should have plenty of oppertunity to learn what our policy for responding to such is. Also, it seems to me like the easiest way through these programs would be to reflect back at the instructors what they want to hear (like far too many education systems), and if there are not an excess of safeguards (which have their own problems) you could end up freeing people who havn't changed at all. If more victems die because of the judges verdict how can he possibly justify it to the kin?

Alternatively, and this is the worst alternative, you can simply forgive them. Slap them with a fine or something and release them right back onto the streets to find more victems to cry for vengence, more destruction, and the memory that they can get away with it. An inexcusable decision for those charged for safeguarding the general public.

Killing the convict does prevent them from causing any harm (what others do in responce is their own responsibility). It is also quicker and easier (and should be cheaper) for everyone involved except possibly the convicts family but they wern't getting out of this one without a scar anyway.

Considering just how many people die to sheer accident and mistakes they never made. I really don't see why mass murderers and the like should special and be kept alive for mistakes they deliberately made. If knowing full well how we deal with people who do as they do, they still did, then for whatever reason they must not have cared enough about the consequences or felt their cause was greater. At that point the only thing we can do is follow through with the promise of the law which probably is not 'justice' but it is order and a kind of order that benefits society. Now we could have set up our system so that the law promises a different punishment but does it really matter all that much? All this does is change the price they must be willing to overlook (and with prices's as high as death or life imprisonment that takes either quite of not thinking it through, or quite a bit of thinking it through). At this point you merely must decide on what balance between justice, mercy and praticality you take. Some nations may pick to not kill them and somehow regard themselves as favoring mercy. Others may think of vengence and declare killing them justice but I think that killing them is merely most practical and merciful as I don't feel qualified to measure the scale of justice.

The belief that killing people is always inherantly wrong indicates to me a fear of death overwhelming reason. I suspect that there is a balance to this as perhaps most convicts are so scared of death that they'd somehow prefer life imprisonment. My uncle choose this route via a plea bargain though I'm not sure why he was given the choice. Having him still alive grates on me somewhat as I should not allow myself to ignore or forget him while he is alive yet he was criminally foolish to the point of being monsterous and I won't even get to see him for the vast majority of my life assumeing he's even still alive at that point. I get the impression from what sparse communication my father gets from him that he's realised just how dumb he was but it's not going to do him a lot of good now and from what I know of him he was very much the sort who couldn't resist making trouble whenever he thought nobody was looking and would then feel foolish for all of a few minues whenver it turned out someone was. I don't like to imagine a situation where one is sitting around in a prison cell thinking 'because of this one stupid thing I did when I was young and stupid I'm going to be sitting here for the next fifty years'. At the same time it's my own uncle and I would not trust him at all to be out in society, not even after twenty years of sitting around realising how dumb he was. I can hardly call for him to be killed, and it was his choice to plea bargain but it has never felt like a satisfactory way of resolving things to me whereas my other relative who was killed by her own stupidity may be a tragedy but at least she was a tragedy that closed herself and her daughter was entrusted to her very experianced grandparents solving the major problem she was causing. Perhaps I shouldn't burden myself with him and his predicament but he is family and I believe that it is important that familes do look out for their own even if there is nothing they can do for them.

In any case, I think many people who shudder at the thought of the death penelty don't have the same perspective on it that I do.

[Sgt. Groovy]

Why is it so wrong to be happy that Osama bin Laden is dead?

Are you equally happy about the way it was conducted? The operation was not authorised by the Pakistani government, it had no mandate by the UN, it was entirely illegal. If Cuba would fly some of their special forces into Miami and kill some of the Cuban terrorists US is harbouring there (though considered freedom fighters by the US since the civilians they murdered were evil commies), it would be considered an act of war. Cuba would be wiped off the map in a matter of days and the world would applaud.

If bin Laden had been captured instead, his identity verified by DNA and then shot in the head without a trial, it would not have been any less legal or moral than what was done now, but then at least the Americans would have known for sure who they were killing.