Sunday, May 08, 2011

Great Minds

Noam Chomsky on the death of Osama Bin Laden:
We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders...
And the immortal Bill Hicks, from Rant in E-Minor.



As for fools who never differ, Richard Metzger hits upon an idea that I myself had almost six years ago - charity porn. What's more surprising: that it took a laggardly half-decade for Metzger to experience the same epiphany, or that apparently he & I are the only people ever to have had such beneficent inspiration?

3 comments:

JM said...

And now Saturday Night Live just recently last night satirized Osama. Do you think he should be off limits or not?

Seb said...

Off limits? What, you mean no one's allowed to make fun of him? Of course SNL can satirize him! As far as I'm concerned with regard to humour, nothing is off-limits.

What strikes me as inappropriate is a whole nation reacting to their government murdering someone as though their local team just won the Super Bowl. I wasn't bothered by Stewart taking the piss out of OBL, I was bothered by how clearly pleased he was that a CIA assassin had shot a man in the face.

Anonymous said...

This is the kind of smug, cartoon-lefty response that turned me off to Chomsky years ago. OBL and Dubs both are/were rich kids with Jerusalem syndrome and the global dick swinging competition they got into destroyed millions of lives, OBL isn't any less complicit in the guilt just because he slummed it in caves for a few years.