Oppressively, restricted licensed works of art and culture are bad. There's more freely offered and widely available music now than ever before. Broaden your horizons.

You're wrong. As I said to someone else above, there's more readily available, freely offered works of art and culture in the commons today than at any other point in history, and it's exploding. Free culture is happening, and it's happening more every day, and it's just getting rolling. One day history will see our generation as living at the beginning of a renaissance.

Please. There's more readily available, freely licensed media now than at any time in the history of man. Literature, film, music, visual art, drama. The rules have changed, our culture and our art are truly in our own hands, now more than ever, and all you can do is bitch about the mean corporations? Fuck that, move on. The choice is yours to make. Quit your bitching and find a better way. We're living at the beginning of a renaissance.

...

Huh?

Endless war! Hooray!

I agree completely, and obviously my hipshot post was grossly oversimplified. My point was that it didn't take ten years of war to kill bin Laden.

How many? And at what cost?

Oh, you mean the government we deposed in two weeks ten years ago? That Taliban? I've heard of them.

The fuck are you on about? We live in a society where you can be arrested for drunk driving while sitting on the hood of your parked car in your driveway with your keys in your pocket, and we "don't really do anything about it?"

"The terrorists" isn't an army, or a country which can be defeated.

The terrorists wanted to strike US foreign policy and globalization.

Yes, and their stated strategy in this, which they announced years in advance, was to draw us into an endless, unwinnable war.

History fail.

Religion? Don't be ridiculous. We occupied their countries, didn't let them import medicine, bombed their factories, and killed their children for decades. Then they came and blew our buildings up, like they told us they were gonna if we didn't leave. And you want to talk about religion?

Stupid fucking militant atheists. It's always religion with you, just like it's always race with the racists. Shut the fuck up.

To paraphrase you, showing weakness (by misguided action) has in fact been interpreted as a sign of weakness by the world.

Ten years of war didn't kill bin Laden. Two helicopters full of Special Forces did it in half an hour, in Pakistan no less.

It's that USA went from being a respected member of the world community to a nation hated even among its allies. A nation that things it owns the whole world, can torture other country's ppls, can force them to act in ways it wants, and that is in everyone else's face.

Are you fucking daft? That has been the normal state of affairs for decades.