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pahunkboy -> RE: A "Fast Reply" to all the Osama topics out there. (5/6/2011 8:51:53 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: kalikshama
quote:
I've been reading the Osama topics going on, and I'm struck by how many Americans are celebrating Osama being shot without trial.
I haven't read the last few pages so apologize if someone has already posted this on-point New York Times piece:
Celebrating a Death: Ugly, Maybe, but Only Human
Some Americans celebrated the killing of Osama bin Laden loudly, with chanting and frat-party revelry in the streets. Others were appalled — not by the killing, but by the celebrations.
...In blogs and online forums, some people asked: Doesn’t taking revenge and glorying in it make us look just like the terrorists?
The answer is no, social scientists say: it makes us look like human beings. In an array of research, both inside laboratories and out in the world, psychologists have shown that the appetite for revenge is a sensitive measure of how a society perceives both the seriousness of a crime and any larger threat that its perpetrator may pose.
Revenge is most satisfying when there are strong reasons for exacting it, both practical and emotional.
“Revenge evolved as a deterrent, to impose a cost on people who threaten a community and to reach into the heads of others who may be contemplating similar behavior,” said Michael McCullough, a psychologist at the University of Miami and author of “Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct” (Jossey-Bass, 2008). “In that sense it is a very natural response.”
Many of the sources of the joyous outburst were obvious: A clear victory after so many drawn-out conflicts. A demonstration of American competence, and of consequences delivered. The public relations value of delivering a public blow to a worldwide terror network. And, it needs to be said, the timing: The news hit just as many bars were starting to clear out for the night.
But this was much more than a simple excuse to party.
“Pure existential release,” said Tom Pyszczynski, a social psychologist at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, who has studied reactions to 9/11. “Whether or not the killing makes any difference in the effectiveness of Al Qaeda hardly matters; defeating an enemy who threatens your worldview, the very values you believe are most protective, is the quickest way to calm existential anxiety.”
After almost 10 years, the end was nothing if not final. “The emotions were so strong, I think, because the event was compacted: Bin Laden was found and killed, and it was done — done and over, just like that,” said Kevin Carlsmith, a social psychologist at Colgate University and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. “We’re so used to people being brought in, held at Guantánamo, the trials, the appeals; it feels like justice is never done.”
...the urge for payback — especially for a crime like the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which killed almost 3,000 civilians — never goes to zero. “There is a stubborn part of the memory that hangs on to the urge, to a little piece of it,” and the pain is refreshed every time the memory is recalled, Dr. McCullough said.
...Thus the natural urge for revenge — satisfied so suddenly, releasing a decade of background anxiety, stoked by peers — feeds on itself. Delight turns to chanting turns to climbing on lamp posts.
I sure don't need a social scientist to figure this out for me.
I agree with the OP.
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