Derek has got it right (IMHO) with his determination about CNN and how it is The New Watered Down Reality TV Show 24×7. Absolutely right, their constant stream of “experts” and what not is annoying and stupid. Kieran had a bit on CNN getting a dose of itself. It’s all BS and propaganda, and hopefully soon people will realize that. The ratings are up ever sine the 9/11/01 24×7 coverage and they found that people will be glued to their TVs watching the same images over and over and listening to the same shit regurgitated by slightly different people over and over, with varying degrees of believability or accuracy. Salon had a good article on the real face of war and how people react to the the fact that suddenly they get to see people dying and not the video game images through gun and missle cameras like they did the “Gulf War 1” (or as I like to think of it, The Other Bush’s Try). Hey, this is a war, not a video game. People are going to die, and not in the nice way either. Soldiers are trained to kill people and soldiers are trained to survive, if you send them somewhere do not expect them to fight “fair”.
I heard a really good show on CBC with an interview with a former soldier/general/someone (an “expert” no doubt) who said that basically when you unlease a soldier he will do his best to survive, and soldiers don’t like playing fair, because that means they have less of a chance of surviving. If you have a run and your opponent has a knife you don’t throw your gun away and fight “fairly”, you shoot him and then you cut his throat to make sure he doesn’t get up. Once a soldier is unleashed he will do nasty things, and if you don’t want those nasty things to happen, don’t unlease him was the gist of what this guy was saying. This makes sense of course, and this is why the US is lobbing missles from hundreds of miles away, and why they are scared of going into the urban warfare in Baghdad, because that will be more of a “fair fight”.
Off track here. End result, don’t watch CNN, they’re knobs 🙂