Glenn Greenwald Containment Thread - Page 10 - Politics and Economics

It’s actually necessary that America have a network reality show that pairs big, muscular soldiers with adoring D-list celebrities — hosted by a former Army General along with someone who used to be on Dancing with the Stars – as they play sanitized war games for the amusement of viewers, all in between commercials from the nation’s largest corporations. That’s way too perfect of a symbol of American culture and politics for us not to have.

http://www.salon.com/2012/08/13/nbcs...un_and_profit/

08-13-2012 , 02:28 PM

#228

Case Closed

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I think we should have a thread for that show. It is the epitome of the crazy military fetish this country has.

08-13-2012 , 03:09 PM

#229

JMa

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Quote:

Originally Posted by brad2002tj

Glenn really loving NBC's new programming.

http://www.salon.com/2012/08/13/nbcs...un_and_profit/

The speech quoted in the article can be watched here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq57k...ailpage#t=662s

08-13-2012 , 03:44 PM

#230

DVaut1

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What better way to honor the troops than to film celebrities running around pretending to be them.

08-13-2012 , 04:14 PM

#231

Turn Prophet

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Quote:

Originally Posted by brad2002tj

Glenn really loving NBC's new programming.

http://www.salon.com/2012/08/13/nbcs...un_and_profit/

Shows like that have always made me incredibly queasy. Or, as Fox News would say, I hate America and the troops. Because the two of course are equivalent in all things.

There's a world of difference between honoring actual soldiers and simply glorifying all things military, which is helpful to no one except war profiteers.

08-13-2012 , 04:15 PM

#232

Huehuecoyotl

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Quote:

Originally Posted by Case Closed

I think we should have a thread for that show. It is the epitome of the crazy military fetish this country has.

There won't be much to tell. The physical part of fear factor + Top Warrior + Top Shot with all the commercial sh**ityness of DWTS.

I'll be the first to say that military inspired obstacle courses or military inspired paintball games are fun as hell, but the sanitation and glamorization of the military and military operations combined with the rah rah commerization is blah.

Last edited by Huehuecoyotl; 08-13-2012 at 04:24 PM.

08-13-2012 , 04:41 PM

#233

suzzer99

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Watched some UFC fights this weekend. The fights segued nicely right into the constant commercials for the Marines. **** yeah! I wonder how many kids have gotten all juiced up watching UFC, signed up the next day, then a week later wondered what the **** just happened?

08-13-2012 , 04:52 PM

#234

Huehuecoyotl

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I doubt a lot have specifically because of UFC. More likely is the Marines are targeting shows with young males and a lot happen to watch UFC,football, history channel with WW II etc.

One of the more sleazy tactics was teaming up to make America's Army which envisioned "using computer game technology to provide the public a virtual Soldier experience that was engaging, informative, and entertaining" (wiki)

08-13-2012 , 05:02 PM

#235

suzzer99

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The Marines commercials are often indistinguishable from 1st-person shooter commercials.

The worst is the one where you hear screams and people running away. And then you see the Marines running toward the problem (which the narration makes sure to emphasize). Unless of course the US military is the one causing all the screams in the first place.

08-13-2012 , 06:00 PM

#236

FourFins

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Can't wait until we terraform Mars. I am on the first ship. ****ing over this place.

Or maybe I should just move to Vancouver.

08-13-2012 , 07:18 PM

#237

suzzer99

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Lol if you think anywhere in the world will be safe if the US collapses. We'll still have the biggest military in the world and need something to do with it. If another great depression hits I could see some kind of almost white-supremecist takeover of govt - like the **** Greece is doing right now. I mean a lot of the rhetoric already is along the lines of "the US has a demographic problem that is only getting worse". Meaning "white people may need to do something before they are out of power."

08-13-2012 , 08:03 PM

#238

Case Closed

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Who's watching this national embarrassment?

08-13-2012 , 11:34 PM

#239

FourFins

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I'm not sure I could watch it for long without feeling like vomiting. How bad is it?

08-14-2012 , 01:09 AM

#240

Case Closed

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Quick Drunk Write Up:

If I could sum this up in a short sentence I would say: sad display of unrealistic military reality.

They teamed up all the ****ty celebrities with real american military types. The one that stood out was a guy who sniped 160 people as he claimed. Which should have been dealt with a level of delicacy considering the death of so many people. But this show did not care about such considerations. This is the point where all the viewers need to get one the military fetish bus or get the hell out of here.

The rest of the show was standard reality fair. Celebrities went through their fake obstacle courses and went through their fake elimination trials. It was interesting and generally fun. But the heart of the show really did not sit well with my bleeding heart.

All in all this show is a joke. This is a propaganda show to help support an insane military budget. They present intellectually complex situations as simple us vs. them scenarios. I doubt they will ever talk about the innocent people who are harmed by the United State's continued war effort.

08-14-2012 , 11:52 PM

#241

JayTeeMe

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http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com...-kyle.html?m=1

Unsurprisingly the 160 confirmed kill guy is a huge douche

08-14-2012 , 11:53 PM

#242

pvn

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I wouldn't go around insulting him IYKWIM

08-15-2012 , 03:39 PM

#243

SenorMuresano

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Quote:

Originally Posted by JayTeeMe

http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com...-kyle.html?m=1

Unsurprisingly the 160 confirmed kill guy is a huge douche

I don't know, he probably is a douche, but I'm pretty confident the author of that article is a huge one as well. The message is totally lost when he starts throwing in crap like this-

Quote:

“I looked through the scope,” Kyle recalls. “The only people who were moving were [a] woman and maybe a child or two nearby. I watched the troops pull up. Ten young, proud Marines in uniform got out of their vehicles and gathered for a foot patrol. As the Americans organized, the woman took something from beneath her clothes, and yanked at it. She’d set a grenade.”

Kyle shot the woman twice.

“It was my duty to shoot, and I don’t regret it,” Kyle attests. “The woman was already dead. I was just making sure she didn’t take any Marines with her. It was clear that not only did she want to kill them, but she didn’t care about anybody else nearby who would have been blown up by the grenade or killed in the firefight. Children on the street, people in the houses, maybe her child….”

Of course, if the Marines hadn’t invaded that woman’s neighborhood, she wouldn’t have been driven to take such desperate action – but Kyle either cannot or will not understand the motives of an Iraqi patriot.

Quote:

“She was … blinded by evil,” Kyle writes of the woman he murdered from a safe distance. “She just wanted Americans dead, no matter what. My shots saved several Americans, whose lives were clearly worth more than that woman’s twisted soul.”

Srsly, bro?

Last edited by SenorMuresano; 08-15-2012 at 03:41 PM. Reason: what point were you trying to make by linking that article?

08-15-2012 , 04:07 PM

#244

JayTeeMe

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Yeah, murdered was a ridic word to use there.

08-15-2012 , 04:32 PM

#245

SenorKeeed

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The first bolded passage is completely true though.

08-15-2012 , 04:35 PM

#246

SenorMuresano

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while technically true, the guy's just trying to rustle some jimmies, and it's glaringly obvious.

08-17-2012 , 01:54 AM

#247

Huehuecoyotl

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Glenn's last substantive post at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2012/08/15/the_...pert_industry/

Quote:

But there’s a very similar and at least equally important (though far less discussed) constituency deeply vested in the perpetuation of this fear. It’s the sham industry Walt refers to, with appropriate scare quotes, as “terrorism experts,” who have built their careers on fear-mongering over Islamic Terrorism and can stay relevant only if that threat does.

These “terrorism experts” form an incredibly incestuous, mutually admiring little clique in and around Washington. They’re employed at think tanks, academic institutions, and media outlets. They can and do have mildly different political ideologies — some are more Republican, some are more Democratic — but, as usual for D.C. cliques, ostensible differences in political views are totally inconsequential when placed next to their common group identity and career interest: namely, sustaining the myth of the Grave Threat of Islamic Terror in order to justify their fear-based careers, the relevance of their circle, and their alleged “expertise.” Like all adolescent, insular cliques, they defend one another reflexively whenever a fellow member is attacked, closing ranks with astonishing speed and loyalty; they take substantive criticisms very personally as attacks on their “friends,” because a criticism of the genre and any member in good standing of this fiefdom is a threat to their collective interests.

On a more substantive level, any argument (such as Walt’s) that puts the Menace of Islamic Terror into its proper rational perspective — namely, that it pales in comparison to countless other threats (including Terrorism from non-Muslim individuals and states); that it is wildly exaggerated considering what is done in its name; and that it is sustained by ugly sentiments of Islamophobic bigotry — is one that must be harshly denounced. Such an argument not only threatens their relevance but also their central ideology: that Terror is an objective term that just happens almost always to mean Islamic Terror, but never American Terror

Quote:

Unsurprisingly, Gartenstein-Ross — like so many “terrorism experts” in similar positions — is eager to depict Islamic Terror as a serious threat: he knows where his bread his buttered and does not want the personal cash train known as the War on Terror ever to arrive at a final destination. If you were him, would you?

In 2009, he wrote a study entitled “Homegrown Terrorists in the U.S. and U.K.” which, needless to say, was only about Muslims: an “examination of 117 ‘jihadist’ terrorists in the United States and the United Kingdom” which “concludes that religious beliefs” — namely, Islam –”play a role in radicalization.” In 2011, he wrote a book entitled Bin Laden’s Legacy: Why We’re Still Losing the War on Terror, which argues that “despite the death of Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda remains a significant threat.” He has hyped the ludicrous alleged Iranian Quds Forces plot against the Saudi Ambassador (explaining that ”Holder weighing in on the plot’s connection to Iran means the administration is deadly serious about it”), and recently touted Nigeria as the “next front in the war on terror.”

To be sure, Gartenstein-Ross is more nuanced and sophisticated than the standard neocon “terror expert” cartoon — his 2011 bin Laden book argues against wasteful counter-terrorism programs that are out of proportion to the actual threat, and he has, to his credit, publicly opposed some of the more crass Islamophobic attacks — but if the War on Islamic Terror disappears, so, too, does his lucrative career as a “terrorism expert.” In that regard, he’s a highly representative figure for this industry.

Quote:

Exactly the same thing happened this week in response to Juan Cole’s superb post entitled “Top Ten differences between White Terrorists and Others,” pointing out all the revealing differences in how white perpetrators of violence are talked about versus non-white (especially Muslim) ones. Cole’s argument was every bit as threatening to the vested interests of the “terror expert” industry as Walt’s was, as it reveals the ugly truth that the hysteria over the Muslim Threat is motivated far more by Islamophobic bigotry and subservience to U.S. Government militarism than any rational policy assessments or high-minded scholarship.

This was too much to bear for J.M. Berger, a self-described “specialist on homegrown extremism” and author of “Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam,” which, in his words, “uncovers the secret history of American jihadists” — meaning Muslims, of course. “American Muslims have traveled abroad to fight in wars because of their religious beliefs,” says the book’s summary. (Symbolizing how relentlessly incestuous this clique is, Gartenstein-Ross randomly took a moment out of his attack on Walt today to pimp what he called Berger’s “valuable book”). Like Gartenstein-Ross, Berger avoids the more overt forms of anti-Muslim rhetoric, often stressing the need to distinguish between Good Muslims and the Terrorist kind, but he spends his time doing things like shrieking about the Towering Menace of Anwar al-Awlaki and generally hopping on whatever Muslim-Terrorism-is-a-Grave-Danger train that comes along.

Berger denounced Cole’s piece as “80 percent BS, 20 percent fair points” and said it was composed of “lazy generalizations.” Specifically, Berger complained that when a Muslim launches a violent attack, there are “whole stories dedicated to AQ being fringe and Islam being peaceful,” but when there’s a violent attack by a white shooter, “no one does stories about how white people are mostly peaceful and non-racist” (apparently, the true victims of unfair media coverage of Terror attacks are white people, not Muslims). He insisted, needless to say, that white perpetrators of violence are depicted as lone nuts while attacks by Muslims are depicted as part of a broader Terror threat only because it’s so true. It’s vital to Berger that Islamic Terror continue to be perceived as a vital, coordinated national security threat or else J.W. Berger and his “expertise” will cease to matter.

The rebuttals

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/article...oblem?page=0,0

Glenn Greenwald misses target, hits good guys

The comment rebuttal to the rebuttal

Quote:

I’m going to have to agree with Glenn. This conversation reminds me a little bit of the ‘Very Serious People’ syndrome affecting economic policy debate in the US right now. Media pundits give us stern warnings about the “crushing debt” and the need to immediately address it because people like Mankiw, Hubbard and Niall Ferguson says it’s important. Why is it important? Because they all went to Harvard and Yale, and as we all know, it’s really, really hard to get into these schools. Forget the fact that they have been consistently wrong about every prediction they have made. We must take their warnings very seriously. And when these Very Serious People say occasionally non-crazy stuff like agreeing to have some tax increase, we are supposed to applaud them for their “bravery.”
What does it even mean to be a terrorism expert? I, too, have read a lot about terrorism. I come from a country that harboured terrorists. I speak Dari, Pashtu, Urdu and Arabic. Does that make me a terrorist expert?
You cited Andrew Exum’s tweet. As we all know, Andrew was one of the most rigorous defenders of COIN strategy. In fact, he planned it alongside the Kagans and McChrystal. So far, the war in Afghanistan has been an absolute disaster. The government is the most corrupt government in the world and has no credibility. Forces have no control over the borders, and the local population have strong religious and political objections to the US being there. Now, even the Afghan police and soldiers are killing the troops.
In other words, what can go wrong did go wrong.
The problem, of course, is that there is no repercussions for being wrong. All of the COIN advocates still have their jobs and will still be given cushy jobs. All of these so-called experts will continue to be working in positions where they have influence and will be providing analysis that will continue to harm this country.
What we need is less “experts” and more humility

08-28-2012 , 12:56 PM

#248

SL__72

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Its so convenient when evidence of a particular point can be boiled down to a single sentence:

Quote:

the only person to suffer any repercussions from the Bush NSA eavesdropping scandal was Thomas Tamm: the mid-level DOJ lawyer who learned of the illegal program and alerted the New York Times about it.

/edit

Quote:

As I noted on Sunday, it is expected, inevitable, that those who wield political power will abuse it for corrupt and self-serving ends. That is why there are institutions designed to check and combat that abuse. The rule of law, and an independent judiciary applying it, is ostensibly one of those institutions. But – like establishment media outlets and most academics – this justice system now does the opposite: it is merely another weapon used to legitimize crimes by the powerful and crush those who oppose them.

All three of this week's travesties, in the US and in Israel, are hardly surprising. To the contrary, they are the inevitable by-products of societies that recruit every institution in service of defending even the most wanton abuses by the state.

Does anyone have that stages of ACism graph handy?

Last edited by SL__72; 08-28-2012 at 01:03 PM.