Our culture has truly become perverse. We are desensitized to the horrors of war thanks to our gov't, "news" media, and entertainment media. This includes video games. The soldiers really sound like what you would hear playing COD4/5/6/any FPS on XBox Live/PSN. But, isn't this what is needed in to maintain a highly militarized society? One that supports invasions, occupations, covert interventions, death squads/terrorists (El Salvador, Nicaragua, etc), drone bombings, fomenting civil wars in Africa and elsewhere, is the #1 arms supplier to the world, and I could go on and on.
Well, rant over. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts for and against mine or whatever is on your mind. Although, the machine has conditioned us to steer clear of important issues that concern our society and go... play video games?
Here are some sources on this topic:
N.Y. Times, Weekly Standard join in a falsehood By Glenn Greenwald
http://www.salon.com...yths/index.html
Coverage and interview with Wikileaks founder:
http://www.democracy...ape_us_military
Full video:
Brief article:
http://www.thenation...rel=emailNation
US gov't is attempting to shut down Wikileaks
http://www.huffingto...a_b_512050.html
From the Democracy Now interview, I thought this really sums up this incident and our military apparatus in general:
"These are not bad apples. This is standard practice. You can hear it from the tones of the voices of the pilots that this is in fact another day at the office. These pilots have evidently and gunners have evidently become so corrupted, morally corrupted, by the war that they are looking for excuses to kill. That is why you hear this segment, “Come on, buddy! Just pick up a weapon,” when Saeed, one of the Reuters employees, is crawling on the curb. They don’t want him for intelligence value to understand the situation. The man is clearly of no threat whatsoever. He’s prostate on the ground. Everyone else has been killed. They just want an excuse to kill. And it’s some kind of—appears to me to be some kind of video game mentality where they just want to get a high score, get their kill count up. And later on you’ll hear them proudly proclaiming how they killed twelve to fifteen people."
Our culture has truly become perverse. We are desensitized to the horrors of war thanks to our gov't, "news" media, and entertainment media. This includes video games. The soldiers really sound like what you would hear playing COD4/5/6/any FPS on XBox Live/PSN. But, isn't this what is needed in to maintain a highly militarized society? One that supports invasions, occupations, covert interventions, death squads/terrorists (El Salvador, Nicaragua, etc), drone bombings, fomenting civil wars in Africa and elsewhere, is the #1 arms supplier to the world, and I could go on and on.
Well, rant over. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts for and against mine or whatever is on your mind. Although, the machine has conditioned us to steer clear of important issues that concern our society and go... play video games?
Here are some sources on this topic:
N.Y. Times, Weekly Standard join in a falsehood By Glenn Greenwald
http://www.salon.com...yths/index.html
Coverage and interview with Wikileaks founder:
http://www.democracy...ape_us_military
Full video:
Brief article:
http://www.thenation...rel=emailNation
US gov't is attempting to shut down Wikileaks
http://www.huffingto...a_b_512050.html
From the Democracy Now interview, I thought this really sums up this incident and our military apparatus in general:
"These are not bad apples. This is standard practice. You can hear it from the tones of the voices of the pilots that this is in fact another day at the office. These pilots have evidently and gunners have evidently become so corrupted, morally corrupted, by the war that they are looking for excuses to kill. That is why you hear this segment, “Come on, buddy! Just pick up a weapon,” when Saeed, one of the Reuters employees, is crawling on the curb. They don’t want him for intelligence value to understand the situation. The man is clearly of no threat whatsoever. He’s prostate on the ground. Everyone else has been killed. They just want an excuse to kill. And it’s some kind of—appears to me to be some kind of video game mentality where they just want to get a high score, get their kill count up. And later on you’ll hear them proudly proclaiming how they killed twelve to fifteen people."