Crow's Eye: Maintaining a commitment to Pointless Acrimony™ and Hate Filled Invective™! Also available in corvid mischief and traditional sly dog's mistrust.
Crow's Eye: Maintaining a commitment to Pointless Acrimony™ and Hate Filled Invective™! Also available in corvid mischief and traditional sly dog's mistrust.
A rational person might look at that footage of EFPs, hear "This is what our troops are up against today", and wonder why we are over there at all, and see that video as nothing more than yet another very good reason to get the hell out of Iraq.
ReplyDeleteInstead, I guess it works on most people's emotions, which is the only language that the media and the politicians speak nowadays. It's fear-mongering, with a handful of patriotism and "support the troops" thrown in for good measure, designed to make you support things that are probably not in your best interests (nor in the best interests of the troops who are currently dying in Iraq and Afghanistan).
Also, on the topic of people supporting things that are not in their best interests, there's a great editorial on Al Jazeera English today entitled "Hypocrisy and the End of Empires: Is the US media's desensitising of wars abroad leading to growing populist hypocrisy?" which you might enjoy.
ReplyDeletehttp://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/04/20104144134810956.html
A,
ReplyDeleteI agree - this could provide an object lesson for why invading and occupying people usually requires unceasing brutality, and dehumanization, and still generally ends up failing (unless, like Roman and Persian despots, you just butcher or disperse whole populations).
But, instead, it's a drum up for "scary Iran" and "oil insecurity."
That phrase "up against" makes me gag almost as much as "our troops."
ReplyDeleteWith you on that, E.
ReplyDelete