UBL is George Washington

[Howie Goodell]

OK -- some comments.

First, IMHO one confusing and perhaps confused post; I'm not sure I
get the point.

Second, to be specific, bin Laden isn't George Washington, but in at
least one respect he is LIKE others who struggled to keep their
countries from being dominated by foreigners. George Washington was
one such leader.  Vlad the Impaler was another (for the
history-challenged, this original for the legendary Count Dracula
temporarily saved Romania from being overrun by the Ottoman Turks, by
massacring hundreds of thousands of them, mostly by impaling them on
sharpened stakes.)  Mahatma Gandhi was another.  I think "Vlad the
Impaler was Gandhi" or vice-versa is about as apt a comparison as
Washington and bin Laden.

For starters, I think the use of terrorism is a moral a distinction
worth making.  Murdering thousands of civilians is not the same thing
as attacking enemy troops.  (To be consistent, the plane that hit the
Pentagon was not terrorism, but a military attack with civilian
collateral damage.)

Finally, while I (and John Kerry) agree that independence from Mideast
oil is a wiser goal than our current slavish devotion to the Saudis,
or military domination of the whole area, I think isolationism in the
age of the Internet is absurd.   The 3-mile limit was the range of
cannonballs, and ABMs are about as useful against many threats we
already face.  Like it or not, we Americans are part of one planet,
and we had better get better at it than we've been lately.

Howie Goodell

On Fri, 02 Jul 2004 21:16:32 -0700, Major Variola (ret) <mv at cdc.gov> wrote:
> 
> At 09:58 PM 7/1/04 -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote:
> >Submitted for comment :-)
> 
> >  "...justice is a duty towards those whom you love and those whom you
> do
> >  not.  And people's rights will not be harmed if the opponent speaks
> out
> >  about them."
> >
> >  Osama Bin Laden
> 
> UBL's morals, which he unfortunately gets from a book (being a smart
> guy, he could derive them himself like any half-cluefull atheist),
> are largely convergent with the pre-Judaic/Xian culture the Moslems
> forked a few hundred years ago.  (And what, Haiwatha rooted the
> tree some time ago?)  Ie, as the Gadsen flag says, "Don't tread
> on me".   However, this is contrary to the methods of colonial
> agents, eg. Romans, Brits, and Yanks.  Where yanks includes
> neocons.
> 
> At this point I will quote the reluctant general,
> Trade with all, make treaties with none, and beware of foreign
> entanglements.
> -George Washington
> Where you can replace "all" with "oil" and "none" with Israel.  Etc.
> 
> Personally I think North America can be energy sufficient (nuke & coal
> sands)
> but this is an engineering/political issue.  Morally I think our
> influence stops
> within 3 miles of our coasts, and as high as out ABMs can reach.
> 
> E3-I: This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by UML's antivirus scanning services.
> 
> 


-- 
Howie Goodell  hgoodell at cs.uml.edu  http://goodL.org
Hardware control  Info Visualization  User interface
UMass Lowell Computer Science Doctoral Candidate