Unnecessary Exercise in Crowdsourcing

The Death of a Terrorist: A Turning Point?

I found this NYTimes page through Twitter: "Is Bin Laden's death a turning point in the war on terror? Place your opinion on our interactive graph."

Is this exercise in crowdsourcing necessary? Why in the world should I, or really any of us regular citizens, have an opinion about this? For example, there's a comment that says "a necessary death, but one that will lead to more terrorism..." HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT?! What kind of information could any of us have that would make us capable of having an answer to this. All it seems to do is feed into how obsessed a lot of us are with making snap-judgement opinions about everything, despite the fact that the question is asking something that's impossible for most of us to know. Whether or not an event will be a turning point in the war is something that only the future can tell us.

Is the future really so scary that we can't leave things like this alone, in it's rightful place as "uncertain"? Or maybe we're really just obsessed with having opinions about things. I'm not sure. The kind of person I'm talking about here was me not too long ago (and is still me sometimes)...I'm still conducting internal research.