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The Guardian Deletes Osama Bin Laden's 'Letter to America'

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Re: The Guardian Deletes Osama Bin Laden's 'Letter to America'

#61

Post by black_thoughts »

kiba wrote: post #31
jameslk wrote: post #21

> The Guardian has removed a letter written by Osama Bin Laden, explaining his war against the United States is partly because of its support of Israel, after it had gone viral on TikTok. If I recall correctly, the terrorists attacked the US because they "don't like freedom". That was the narrative on TV nonstop and any wavering from full support of the wars or "supporting the troops" was tantamount to supporting ter…

The terrorists don't like the US for many reasons, some of them seem legitimate. Either way, they're still folks who hijacked planes and crashed them into the towers. The irony being "terrorists" are just viewed as "martyrs" and "freedom fighters" on the other side of the coin, and every bomb dropped fighting them resulting in civilian deaths creates new terrorists/freedom fighters, who then go on to attack again kil…

[flagged]

Re: The Guardian Deletes Osama Bin Laden's 'Letter to America'

#62

Post by esafak »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #30
xwdv wrote: post #14

[flagged]

So here is the thing, Terrorist and terrorism is orthogonal to all that. It is a description of action. It says nothing about goals, which can be right, wrong, noble, or despicable. Someone can spread terror for a good cause or bad cause. Terrorism fully compatible and justifiable with utilitarian ethics. As utilitarian ethics become increasingly popular, you should expect terrorism to become less repugnant.

I don't see any trend towards utilitarianism.

Re: The Guardian Deletes Osama Bin Laden's 'Letter to America'

#63

Post by talldatethrow »

kyruzic wrote: post #41
kiba wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The terrorists don't like the US for many reasons, some of them seem legitimate. Either way, they're still folks who hijacked planes and crashed them into the towers. The irony being "terrorists" are just viewed as "martyrs" and "freedom fighters" on the other side of the coin, and every bomb dropped fighting them resulting in civilian deaths creates new terrorists/freedom fighters, who then go on to attack again kil…

Dropping bombs on innocent civilians in a third world country doesn't make you a hero either, but that doesn't stop our media from calling all members of the military involved in the wars in the middle East heroes. Also read more carefully they never said the "terrorists" were heroes they explained the point of view of the "terrorists"

Dropping a bomb technically doesn't make you a hero, and that's why Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump are not considered heros.

Signing up at 18 years old to go fight in a foreign country after just a couple hundred hours of training, does make you a hero compared to those that sit at home their whole lives and do nothing to help maintain society. If heros that go into the military didn't exist, I'd be speaking German or would have never come into existence because my relatives would be dead.

Re: The Guardian Deletes Osama Bin Laden's 'Letter to America'

#64

Post by xyzzy123 »

arp242 wrote: post #36
jameslk wrote: post #21

> The Guardian has removed a letter written by Osama Bin Laden, explaining his war against the United States is partly because of its support of Israel, after it had gone viral on TikTok. If I recall correctly, the terrorists attacked the US because they "don't like freedom". That was the narrative on TV nonstop and any wavering from full support of the wars or "supporting the troops" was tantamount to supporting ter…

The Bush era rhetoric was stupid, but it wasn't completely wrong in the sense that some of these people really are evil. "One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist" is just as simplistic and wrong as "terrorists hate our freedom". Some people consider Anders Breivik, Timothy McVeigh, Brendan Tarrant, etc. "freedom fighters". Some of these "freedom fighters" literally strap bombs to small children and send…

Powers will tend to declare their means of war legitimate and the means of war available to their enemies to be illegitimate.

I think it's simplistic to declare our enemies "evil" because they're denied access (fortunately) to the kinds of expensive weapons systems that our own propaganda views with approval.

Re: The Guardian Deletes Osama Bin Laden's 'Letter to America'

#65

Post by rootusrootus »

Natsu wrote: post #15
takoid wrote: post #5

For those interested in reading the letter for themselves: https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ubl2016/english/To%20the...

Wrong letter, try this: http://web.archive.org/web/20231102065031/https://www.thegua... More reporting here: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/osama-...

Huh. I had never read that. Thanks for sharing.

He almost sounds like he's trying to be reasonable, and then proceeds to go completely batshit insane. It's hard to feel much sympathy for people who hate us so much and want to subjugate us to their own belief system.

Re: The Guardian Deletes Osama Bin Laden's 'Letter to America'

#66

Post by mvdtnz »

black_thoughts wrote: post #61
kiba wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The terrorists don't like the US for many reasons, some of them seem legitimate. Either way, they're still folks who hijacked planes and crashed them into the towers. The irony being "terrorists" are just viewed as "martyrs" and "freedom fighters" on the other side of the coin, and every bomb dropped fighting them resulting in civilian deaths creates new terrorists/freedom fighters, who then go on to attack again kil…

[flagged]

What on earth makes you think this is an appropriate place to post 4chan links, or that anyone interested in sane discussion would click that? If you have an argument to make, make it here. I still can't tell if you're insane because you think it's an inside job, or you're insane because you think some anonymous 4chan user is the top source to prove the alternative.

Re: The Guardian Deletes Osama Bin Laden's 'Letter to America'

#67

Post by arp242 »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #64
arp242 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Bush era rhetoric was stupid, but it wasn't completely wrong in the sense that some of these people really are evil. "One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist" is just as simplistic and wrong as "terrorists hate our freedom". Some people consider Anders Breivik, Timothy McVeigh, Brendan Tarrant, etc. "freedom fighters". Some of these "freedom fighters" literally strap bombs to small children and send…

Powers will tend to declare their means of war legitimate and the means of war available to their enemies to be illegitimate. I think it's simplistic to declare our enemies "evil" because they're denied access (fortunately) to the kinds of expensive weapons systems that our own propaganda views with approval.

Are you seriously saying that going to a Labour party youth camp to kill teenagers one by one to "eliminate the next generation of leftist" is somehow not evil?

Or that strapping a bomb to a random kidnapped 9-year old girl is not evil?

It is Evil. Full stop. No discussion.

Whether someone else is also evil or not doesn't even come in to play.

Re: The Guardian Deletes Osama Bin Laden's 'Letter to America'

#68

Post by kiba »

kyruzic wrote: post #41
kiba wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The terrorists don't like the US for many reasons, some of them seem legitimate. Either way, they're still folks who hijacked planes and crashed them into the towers. The irony being "terrorists" are just viewed as "martyrs" and "freedom fighters" on the other side of the coin, and every bomb dropped fighting them resulting in civilian deaths creates new terrorists/freedom fighters, who then go on to attack again kil…

Dropping bombs on innocent civilians in a third world country doesn't make you a hero either, but that doesn't stop our media from calling all members of the military involved in the wars in the middle East heroes. Also read more carefully they never said the "terrorists" were heroes they explained the point of view of the "terrorists"

You do realize that war is ugly? It doesn't matter how justified a war is or isn't. Dropping bombs on an enemy are going to involves the risk of hitting civilians, especially if they are in a war zone, especially if insurgents or partisans are hiding among non-combatant.

If they don't die due to bombs being dropped, they are going to die due to stray bullets.

The only way to prevent that is not to go to war in the first place. However, sometime war is your only choice.

Re: The Guardian Deletes Osama Bin Laden's 'Letter to America'

#69

Post by rootusrootus »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #64
arp242 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Bush era rhetoric was stupid, but it wasn't completely wrong in the sense that some of these people really are evil. "One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist" is just as simplistic and wrong as "terrorists hate our freedom". Some people consider Anders Breivik, Timothy McVeigh, Brendan Tarrant, etc. "freedom fighters". Some of these "freedom fighters" literally strap bombs to small children and send…

Powers will tend to declare their means of war legitimate and the means of war available to their enemies to be illegitimate. I think it's simplistic to declare our enemies "evil" because they're denied access (fortunately) to the kinds of expensive weapons systems that our own propaganda views with approval.

In this case our enemies deliberately targeted civilians and then justified that choice by saying that since the US is a free country, by definition all of our citizens are just as guilty as our gov't and military are. I'm pretty comfortable calling that evil.

Re: The Guardian Deletes Osama Bin Laden's 'Letter to America'

#70

Post by oefrha »

arp242 wrote: post #50
oefrha wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, then I highly doubt a few TikTok videos with merely x100k views (according to TFA) are driving all those Guardian views. How many people search for the source material after watching a TikTok? 5%? But maybe I overestimate typical Guardian traffic.

I would imagine that traffic is highly distributed over many articles, but I don't know. Does it matter? "Intelligence agencies monitoring the Internet picked up the blip" is certainly nonsense and that's the bit I wanted to address. And even if The Guardian didn't have that public list, of course they have some insight on which pages are doing well on any given day, because that's how they make money.

> they have some insight on which pages are doing well on any given day

Obviously. I didn’t know it was on the most viewed list when I wrote my original comment, so I was just going by the numbers in TFA: a few videos with >100k views (plus a dozen or two with >10k) multiplied by a quite generous 5% source material lookup rate gives you maybe 50k views on the Guardian side, which seemed entirely too low to trigger a panic at Guardian.

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