Chris, I agree fully with your last statement, that it’s a function of grabbing ratings as opposed to worthwhile reporting. Your friends are technically correct in that they are showing life and death situations. The problem though is what’s already been addressed; they don’t show the consequences of the action. They had an almost 30 minute segment on the other day from a firefight outside Baghdad; guys running and shooting, a wounded guy popping off rounds from a stretcher, ammo supply vehicles blowing up. But again, they fail to show you what would separate it from watching a movie. There was a video from a checkpoint where they opened up on a car that failed to stop, and the first thing through my mind was that it was straight out the movie Heat. Then you add the commentary, as you mentioned, where they claim the absurd or mumble about the inane, such as that the guy in the stretcher actually hit anything with his two rounds. They not only edit the video it so that it’s visibly disassociated from the real violence of the activity, they supplement it with voice over crap that asserts things that you do ONLY find in movie.

What’s absolutely fucking absurd is that it looks like Saving Private Ryan might be more effective in persuading people that war is not something to be desired than real footage from current events. But is the solution to show what happens to people when they are shot or blown apart, or to turn off the camera completely and send dispatches at the end of activity?

As for the bit about our dead, you’re absolutely on point. We’re a microwave society and need our fix in 30 seconds or less, even if means it’s going to be a rubbery fucking mess.

One last gem; if you’re lucky, you can catch the weather reports for the Gulf on MSNBC. That way you at home can more acurately determine how far your 4th Armored Cav piece can move on that turn, er, day…

The other reality of the day is that I need to go full time at something. I have way too much time for this blog thing eh?

You guys dropped some science after I vented about MLB. But now, I’m going to vent some more: today is opening day in Boston, and it took my bus 45 minutes to travel about 8 blocks. That sucks a duck. It’s drizzling outside, but the Fenway faithful are on their way out to challenge pneumonia together, or even better, find a nice big place to exchange SARS….

Brandon, I fully agree with you about the media coverage. In fact, you put it better than I could have when I challenged half my volleyball team to convince me that the war coverage was actually beneficial. I found the first day or two of coverage embarassing:

“Wolf, I’m hearing sirens outside my hotel room again… I heard these sirens earlier today, and I can’t say exactly what they are for…. WAIT! The sirens seem to have stopped, Wolf…. I can’t tell you why they have stopped, but it is silent in Qatar right now. No, the sirens are starting up again….. and they seem to have stopped, again. Wolf, I think the sirens were just turned on for a moment there, I can’t tell you why. These seem to be the same sirens I heard earlier today. I’m going to turn around and look off my balcony here….. I hear another siren, and it seems to be coming from a police car or ambulance, but I can’t see it. I can’t tell you what this could mean, Wolf. What’s that? Ummm, I can put my gas mask on in about 30 seconds.”

After that, it didn’t get much better with the minute-by-minute accounts from several “embedded” journalists. This added very little to me. My friends were trying to convince me that it was “so real” or “you’re watching life and death when you watch their coverage.” Really? I felt like I was watching a movie or some journalist try to catch a bullet to make a name for himself. The sheer number and amount of front-line reports made it impossible to stop for a minute and talk about WHY we were at war. After 9 days of reading “Troops approach Baghdad,” I felt like the media was trying to distract me from something.

I hadn’t even heard a thing about the “United Nations” until today. Did they go on recess during the war? What did the European governments have to say? What about the extent of war protests? The “phantom ship” that left Iraq just before we invaded? Nope, too busy hearing about friendly fire, or the guy that shot himself in his sleep, or making a mockery of the Iraqi information officer. My friends are laughing at this guy, and it sounds ridiculous, but how do you KNOW what’s really happening there? By looking at the pictures Geraldo draws in the sand? Geraldo could have done that from Palm Beach, and we’d never know…

And so much for privacy and respect for the dead. The camera crews are at the family’s home within an hour of publicizing their names. Who wants to watch these people try to reconcile their loss with some asshole reporter trying to get some tears on tape.

It’s not life and death that they are showing us. It’s bonus sweeps week in a special ratings battle. (Which, by the way I hear NBC is winning. Who needs Seinfeld, right?)

OK. End rant. I need to do some work.

I not only looked forwad to Grand Theft Auto Vice City, but promptly bought it. Running random people over got boring, couldn’t hold my attention. I feel a nervous laugh comming on…

That link to the news about India and Pakistan is kinda frightening, in an “i told you so” sort of way….chickens coming home to roost, anyone?

Mark, that whole debate about the links between video games and violence is an interesting one to me. I mean, it’s almost a visceral response for me to immediately laugh at the idea and say that if a video game is enough to make someone devalue human life to the point where it ends in tragedy (as is always the case when the proponents of this argument rear their ugly heads), then there’s something much deeper and more troubling involved. At the same time, I run into all too many people (and I am sure Brandon is with me here, probably the rest of you) who I give almost no credit to in terms of their ability to reason or understand real-life issues. So then I have to make the decision: do I have faith in humanity (meaning that video games should’nt be able to negatively affect people so profoundly) or do I not (be honest, on the highway, you hate everyone and wish they would die)?

I mean, in some sense, we all know that a slight majority of Americans support the war. Now, to be a smug liberal and assume that I am right and they are wrong, we have one of three choices: 1) Americans understand the issues and are capable of intelligently making a decision on the matter, and hence they just believe it is the moral thing to do, and that getting rid of / disarming Saddam really is worth all the potential problems. 2) Americans understand the issues and are capable of intelligently making a decision, but the way the war is presented by the government and media skews the issue so that Americans are on the wrong team. Or, 3) Americans are presented the issue in a balanced manner but are unable to adequately understand the situation and therefore arrive at the wrong conclusion.

So, from that point of view, I am forced to choose between our citizens being immoral (or at least morally so different from myself that they seem alien), duped, or stupid. I guess I’d have to lean towards a combination of (2) and (3)…but it’s hard to tell. I guess if I chose immoral, that would suggest that video games aren’t responsible for violence, it’s just an inborn American trait. Whereas if I chose (3), video games could be responsible for making people violent. But I just don’t believe it…so it’s kind of a quandry.

As for not enjoying yourself running over civvies…I have to say that’s a totally understandable and probably healthy reaction. From my personal point of view, I never had the chance or much yearning to play grand theft auto, but if I did, I’d probably enjoy running over the civilians a great deal. Why? I guess it’s like Q-Tip says: “I really can’t tell/I guess I laugh to keep from cryin/so much goin’ on,/people killin, people dyin'”

Chris, fully agree with the baseball thing. Tim Robbins was at Brown last week speaking about the war; people said he was pretty good. I would have to say that the fact that the whole thing went down like that lends credence to hypothesis (3) above…

Well put Mark. I agree that the ends/means debate is worth mentioning, and I fear the many have already found the answer. I had a much longer post in mind at that time, but opted to go the short route of the instigator as I was, and am still, not sure of how to bring up my thoughts.

As for the laughing at people being killed; that’s also do to the voyeristic and desensitizing nature of modern media coverage of war. They are happy to show you things blowing up where people are hardly visible, but they shield the american populace from the devastation to bodies. I would wonder if the same people that laugh at those images of destruction were incredibly indignant at the sight of our dead on TV? I wouldn’t be surprised. There’s a book called ‘On Killing’ that addresses the issue of the perception of violence here in the US. I can bring that too if my brain works properly. Interesting read. Actaully talks more about military programs to overcome the unwillingness to kill that most of us have (almost said ‘suffer from,’ heh). Ultimately, there is a suggestion that the practices and effects have spilled over, like the widespread adoption of euphamisms for killing. A fuel air bomb kills at close range with an intense heat and pressure wave. Those unfortunate enough to be farther away get to be lit on fire or otherwise severly burned, and hit with high speed debris. But the best effect is the rupturing or otherwise turning inside out of your organs by the negative pressure of the vaccum that must be filled after the fireball. They don’t talk about that. The MOAB is just cool eh? I love explosions as much as the next man, and as I mentioned before, I identify with my team, but I’m not a cheerleader of pointless killing.

My opposition to the war is multifold; obviously that the rest of the world doesn’t agree is of concern, as is the lack of Iraqi threats to the US, as the lying to the american populace, as is the ominous precedent… But yet another thing that I find dubious is the supossed humanitarian angle. I am aware that thousands of people in Iraq have been living what must be an unimaginably shitty life, but therin lies the key. I, and I’d have to say that most of the US, actually don’t care about he plight the average Iraqi and hence we haven’t spent time trying to be informed enough imagine it. Practically speaking, since nobody here really knew jack shit about what was going on over there, why the hell are we going to kill and be killed for something that isn’t even worthwhile enough for people to have been informed about 3 years ago? Humanitarian sympathies? Come on. So now, we have these people extolling the virtues of liberating the Iraqi people, but if we all jump on the ‘feel good’ bandwagon, we’re going to be invading a good portion of the world, if we take the time to read about any of it.

Would I support the ‘liberation’ of the Iraqi people if a quality of life was an assured outcome? No. Would you? Kinda a random jumble of half thoughts, but anyway…

As for the weekend. I can do something later on Sunday, that would be best. I’ll call you tomorrow late afternoon/ evening when I get down there.

One of my co-workers I work with last year showed me some videos of US troops blowing up a jeep full of Afghan soldiers. He said something like, “Mark, you gotta check this out! It’s pretty funny!”

The guy who showed me is one of the people I used to play WW2 Online with every once in a while (it’s a MMOFPS). I can only guess that killing “Frogs” virtually with him makes him think I’m all for war and that killing people in real life is funny.

And this isn’t just limited to my testosterone heavy friends. One of my other co-workers who is a middle-aged woman and into things like “Survivor” and “American Idol” showed me a Flash movie about the war on Afghanistan, a song about how great it was to take down the terrorists and how they caused thousands of Americans to suffer. Is it just ignorance of how much *we* cause other people to suffer that makes us feel like we are in the right so much so that we can laugh at other’s misfortunes? “Sure, we’re killing and displacing some civilians, but they attacked us first!” Uh, first in what sense? Also, is it so hard to separate individuals from a whole group/nation/ethnic race? I find it hard to believe that that little 6 yr old girl blew up the towers…

I get the GameDAILY newsletter right now (it’s mostly crap). In it is a section for classifieds, and recently, one of them has been an ad for the AttackSaddam.com domain name. I find this neither appropriate in this newsletter nor do I find it amusing, and I imagine the people who registered the domain name, and are now selling it, to be very much like my co-workers in mentality.

The argument exists that games don’t cause people to be violent, and I know that this is definitely true for at least some people (I only have to look in a mirror for proof of that), but I wonder how a professional publication with supposedly tons of professionals in the gaming industry can not be hypocritical by allowing stuff like this in their classifieds. Actually, I don’t have so much a problem with their classifieds being non-censored, but I do have a problem with the appearance of complacency–no that is too weak a word–the finding humor in an ad like this.

Am I wrong here? Is this stuff funny?

Anyway, Brandon. The question is very often “Do the ends justify the means?” The problem with this question is that knowing what the “ends” will be isn’t always guaranteed. It puts too much emphasis on pre-cognition. In real life, we can’t always know what the cause-effect will be of a decision and we may not know the effects for years to come. This is why in a democracy, we talk about things and decide on the best course of action together through reasoning. And I think this is why most people who were or are against the war have that opinion, that we did not decide with our UN peers to go to war. In the end, maybe what we’ve done is for the better, but the way we’ve done it exposes our irrational, short-sighted nature.

PS. Is it weird that I don’t find running over civvies in Grand Theft Auto 3 funny, more of an annoyance that the game practically forces you to do so?

Here’s some good news.

A question. Does the knowledge that there are thousands of people that have an opportunity for a better life now (if only for lack of fear of their families and whanot being exterminated), because of this action, lessen or invalidate your opposition to it? This is for those that didn’t agree with it, or still don’t, such as myself. Not to pigeon hole you all as unpatriotic, my bad.

For a while there my life was pretty exciting. I thought I was getting a free ticket to China. I hear the Asian food is pretty authentic there. I guess I’ll just have to be content with sampling every single bowl of changs that passes through my hands. It’s for your own good Chris. You gotta keep slim to entice Benny.

Bummer about the HLSD job Brandon. Pretty ridiculous that your half sister’s nationality had such an effect. I wonder if this kind of discrimination is prevalent in other areas besides government related jobs. An enrollment drop in middle school French classes for instance.

Onto other bad news, I just found out that my brother broke his leg in a motorcycle accident while on vacation in Mexico. Made me a bit queasy to hear about it. I wonder if motorcycles are more dangerous than bicycling…on a per mile basis?

Well, I’m biking back to the Ski Cabin tomorrow morning. I came down to sign a settlement with OHP (Oregon Health Plan). They jacked me a few years back by dropping all my coverage because I had Reed health insurance. I did some research, asked some questions and found some really stupid and shady policies used by OHP. If you have Health insurance, OHP will not give you dental…even if you are dirt poor. If you were insured in the last 6 months, no dice. Since a reed student must have insurance to be at reed, no Reed student can get on the OHP unless they take a semester off and live without insurance. I found that other poor Reed students have had unsuccessful dealings with OHP. The rules are shady because when OHP applied for federal funding, some of their rules were not in the charter. I won’t bore you with the details but I somehow ended up with a federally funded lawyer for the poor, who tried but could not get me back on the OHP. As a result of my intervention, OHP has made these stupid rules legit by reapplying for federal funding with these new regulations added. They are going to reimburse me my health care cost for the last two years when I should have been on OHP. I feel like they owe every person who was rejected on the basis of those shady rules but that’s probably not going to happen.

Looking at the bigger picture, I can see that OHP did this to cut down the number of people on the OHP. The problem is that OHP does not have enough funds….which leads one to ask…where’s all the freakin’ money going? Not to health care for the poor and not to public schools.

Mark, I can see the attraction of looking beyond our borders. Are you serious about moving to Canada? What about all the prep work you did? I guess one shouldn’t worry about sunk costs. Going to UW to justify the prep work is a pretty dumb argument.

Gotta get some sleep or Le Mon Hood will eat me up.

Looks like the job won’t be going through; my half sister isn’t half at all, she’s French. Needless to say, they’re not good for recommendations right now, so, I’m once again with an abundance of time. Mark, you’re welcome to get a ride with me whenever. I might not slow down when you get out, but I’ll get you there…

I almost linked to the exact same site… Small net eh?

It doesn’t matter if I can’t stay since Robin and I decided last night that we would move to Canada. I’ve cancelled my plans for graduate school at UW and am now applying for the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. I hear Vancouver is the most culturally diverse city in the world.

Let me know when you guys get hitched Chris and Ben; I’m honored to be the best man and look forward to Brandon driving me around like a good black boy.

Oh, and be sure to check this site out: http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/top100.html