Anyone who buys the story about BO's supposedly-recent death has the critical thinking skills (and IQ) of urine-soaked dog chow.
Excuse me, but I resemble that remark.
I agree that there is plenty of room to be skeptical concerning the reports of Osama's [ostensible] death, and I
certainly agree that we ought to take everything our government tells us with about a kilogram of salt; however, there is no reason to impugn someone's mental capacity just because, for the time being, they decline to argue with the broad outlines of the official story. Let's slow down a bit and examine the landscape, and then we'll see why.
For one thing, the "official story" is the only debatable story we have at the present moment. There are a thousand competing hypotheses, true; but the people who advance those hypotheses are not themselves infallible, and in most cases there is no reason to privilege their alternative point of view. The official story might very well be a distorting prism, a lens which transmits no unadulterated image; but right now it is our only source of light, our only source of mootable facts. If the full truth must needs come out, it will only do so by examining, criticizing, and correcting the official story. In the absence of such a critique (or wherever such a critique is unknown and not cited), it is much too quick to disparage the intellect of those who "buy" the official story. What else are they supposed to do? In any event, there is one important point on which they can feel confident; for, as I've argued elsewhere, the
kernel of the story, at least, must be accepted as true: Osama bin Laden is dead. With that essential matter out of the way, we can now begin to discuss the manner in which he got into that condition.
Secondly, we must remember what a complicated subject it is we're dealing with here. The human mind was not really designed to grapple with a noosphere saturated with infotainment hyperreality. There are two things that the human mind can understand rather well: Absolute truths (via its rational component), and the psychodynamics of individuals and small groups (via its animal component). When this software is asked to process incessant sensationalized news reports, and the mysterious inner workings of byzantine government bureaucracies, and military black ops occuring on the other side of the world -- well, it doesn't always arrive at unvarnished truth in those cases. However, that doesn't mean that the software was defective. The software performed as intended; it was the
data which was dubious.
Our modern methods of fighting wars and reporting on them have induced an epistemological catastrophe in the majority of mankind, who neither have access to the raw information nor possess the conceptual apparatus, required to evaluate what's really going on. In these circuмstances, a little compassion is in order. We have here on this forum an official stance concerning the crisis in the Catholic Church. We ought to adopt an identical stance,
mutatis mutandis, concerning the War on Terror,
viz. that we are living through very confusing times, and not everybody who disagrees with us is culpably defective.
Topic: Seals who killed Osama are now dead (Read 4739 times)