So supposedly Osama bin Laden is dead? And the internet is giving a demonstration on what happens when millions of people all try to find the same information all at once.
Don't take this as any kind of second guessing that this is a good outcome, but there is a part of me that feels like it's just fundamentally ghoulish to celebrate any human being's death. And a slightly more logical part of me that sees danger in the personalization of international conflicts...tomorrow morning the world will still be full of people who feel cheated by the last 300 years of history, and a few that think they see ways of making history that would somehow even the score. Killing one person has remarkably little to do with that. But then there's the less noble part of me that can't avoid thinking about the political significance of this...and is it really so un-noble to hope that maybe this will help end an era in American politics that has been pretty terrifying to watch (nationwide constituencies for torture, for indefinite detention, for invading any country that looks at us funny)? And if it's not un-noble, is it even realistic? What are the honest chances that the end result of this is going to be humility?
Anyways, I don't really have any answers. The New York Times story finally loaded, and it turns out it doesn't really have any more information either. I guess it would be good to have cable, since then I could watch Obama's speech live, but I'll have to wait. I'm not really sure I'd want to anyways.
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