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And yes, I think our TV shows are one of the reasons we are so disliked in much of the world. They give a very distorted view of our values – far more promiscuous sex and violence than we have in reality, US government, big corporations and religion almost always shown as evil, and other distortions.

And yes, it is also a powerful tool for altering attitudes, which is one reason that I wrote about that show. When you watch American TV fiction, you see shows that are designed to attract big audiences (first goal) and to alter American attitudes to be in line with that of the left wing, hedonistic attitudes of Hollywood (with a few exceptions). If you see American news, unless you watch Fox News, you see a medium intent on imposing their ideas (almost identical to those of Hollywood) on Americans. Hence the New York Times, at last count, had the Abu Ghraib massacre on its front page for 28 days in a row. A balanced news view of it would have it there a day or two – the incident wasn’t that newsworthy in the sense that in all wars, there are occasions where soldiers get sadistic or otherwise out of control. In this war, these soldiers up to a Brigadier General were being investigated by a Major General, and they were going to be punished and new checks put in place to try to prevent similar situations. Furthermore, as a Vietnam Veteran, I went through more humiliation and real torture in my training. So the rleal story that a balanced news would report would say cover the following points:

A few members of a unit treated prisoners in the terrorist wing of Abu Ghraib more badly than was appropriate, and in some cases went way too far. Furthermore, they had a sex party in front of the prisoners with other people not assigned to the jail. The unit is being investigated for military punishment. Furthermore, somebody associated with the defense leaked SECRET/NOFORM classified pictures to the press in order to make it more difficult to prosecute some of the individuals, because the public release of the pictures prevents the defense from legally suppressing irrelevant but emotionally biasing pictures, giving room for appeals of a tainted jury (in military terms, “command influence”). Some of the techniques shown are used normally against prisoners with high value information, specifically humiliation. None of these techniques were used or are supposed to be used against common criminals. American military personnel themselves go through greater humiliation as part of their training, and many, iSurvival Evastion Resistance and Escape (SERE) schools go through physical torture. No cover-up was attempted except possibly by members in that unit.

By the way, if you are interested, there is a blog at http://www.rogerlsimon.com/ that you might find interesting (geopolitics, US politics, and especially the War on Terror). The comments section has a diverse group of people and thus good discussions. Roger is a novelist and screen writer, which is relevant to this discussion.

The Bonfire of the Vanities returns from a denial of service attack long enough to invite further fury upon it’s hosting company. The motto this week is “Deny This!.” This weeks entries prove that some posts deserve to be the…

The Bonfire of the Vanities returns from a denial of service attack long enough to invite further fury upon it’s hosting company. The motto this week is “Deny This!.” This weeks entries prove that some posts deserve to be the…

Kevin notes that the new movie Runaway Jury has changed from the book version. In the book version, the lawsuit was against a tobacco company….