The Price of Military Tech Assistance In Movies 212
derekmead writes "Last week at Camp David, President Obama met up with fellow NATO leaders to discuss the road ahead in Afghanistan. Although no one there used the language of defeat, the implicit message was clear: the war has gone nowhere in the past few years and it's time to start packing up. Meanwhile, what raked in $25.5 million at the box office? Battleship. And who provided director Peter Berg with the war technology that beats the aliens? The U.S. military. He's not the only one: the past few years have seen an explosion of high-profile cooperation between the armed forces and the movie industry. If the most powerful armed force in history isn't winning in reality, it certainly is on the big screen. And like so many problematic aspects of late capitalism, the military-Hollywood complex has a grimly understandable logic."
Re:Illegal???? (Score:5, Insightful)
Matthew Alford, film researcher and author of Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy, is even harsher in his critique. âoeThe Pentagon has a manual. Basically, it will only provide full cooperation to propaganda pieces,â he said in an interview.
Is this against the law?
Against the law? If anything it should be the law. Why should the military spend its time and money on projects which aren't relevant to recruitment or combat/training?
What An Awful Summary (Score:4, Insightful)
Do editors here do any proofreading at all, whatsoever? Irrelevant statements, useless commentary, and almost no coherant point of the headline.
No wonder people are leaving this site in droves. Slashdot = the myspace of tech sites.
The war went fine...it was the peace that got us (Score:4, Insightful)
The poster is trolling on a lot of levels. Late capitalism?
Anyway, as usual, the war itself went great - it was the peace that was the problem.
Re:Illegal???? (Score:3, Insightful)
The idea is that it (anything generating enthusiasm, sympathy, etc., for the US military) IS relevant to recruitment. The movie is a feature-length recruiting ad, afterall...
Re:Illegal???? (Score:5, Insightful)
It IS relevant to recruitment. It basically started with Top Gun in the 80's years ago when they realised the idealised portrayal of going to war led to a sharp increase in recruitment.
It was so successful that recruiters even had booths set up outside the cinema to catch these people.
http://articles.latimes.com/1986-07-05/entertainment/ca-20403_1_top-gun [latimes.com]
The US way of doing things (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm typing this right now, and sending to a web server on the Internet, a computer network which only exists because the US taxpayer financed the Pentagon, who in turn gave the money to military contractors like BBN, SRI and so forth.
That's what it is, and that's how it had to be. It's how Magnitogorsk was built in the USSR, how Volkswagen and the Autobahn were created in Germany, and how things like this happen here in the US and how they had to happen. There's some kind of emperor's new clothes things where people can't say the decades long creation of Internet was financed by the taxpayer via the government. I have heard so many US politicians talk about how the Internet was created by the "free market" (whatever that means), capitalism, private enterprise and so forth and how it shows the innovation that can come from that. Of course, we all know better, or at least those of us old enough to have owned 300 baud modems back in the early 1980s know that.
While we hear from the news commissars and politicians of how broke the US is, with a huge deficit, and how we have to cut back, notice how a massive military bill just sailed through Congress. Americans have to tighten their belt, and go with less garbage pickups, or shorter library hours, and that sort of thing, but there's plenty of money for military bases in Djibouti and Bulgaria and Kyrgyzstan. The US is spending a ton of money to ramp up the US military presence in the Pacific (shades of the late 1930s), on a new class of aircraft carriers and so forth. Meanwhile, all of this heavy duty equipment is completely useless against small cells of anti-imperial Arab nationalists that are willing to go on suicide missions.
Re:What An Awful Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Do editors here do any proofreading at all, whatsoever? Irrelevant statements, useless commentary, and almost no coherant point of the headline.
No wonder people are leaving this site in droves. Slashdot = the myspace of tech sites.
Oh I do agree with you and I've been here for years, long since before registering my account (I had another account prior to it, and prior to that I lurked).
I come here because I can directly contact individuals who can reason and think critically. I can also directly contact petty spiteful people who are easily revealed to be what they are. Both are good when handled correctly. I also come here because I can listen, read, and learn from people who have knowledge that I do not. I find that if I am at least slightly thoughtful and write well, I am modded up; if I am not, someone will speak up and tell me precisely where I failed. Both are good when handled correctly.
It is the users who make this site what it is. It is not the editors. They are not worthy to be called "editors" because they cannot even handle automated spell-checkers, let alone true proofreading. They would not last one day working for a tabloid -- they would be fired for incompetence and underwhelming performance. This site succeeds in spite of their stumbling, comic, pathetic attempt to master their native language.
I could personally do a much, MUCH better job than a dozen of them. I could do that with no serious effort. In this job market, I am hardly alone in that sense. I wonder if they appreciate the cushy job they can so thoroughly fail to do day after day with no serious consequence? I mean their idea of a "job consequence" is using their infinite mod points to down-mod posts that criticize them too heavily. It's a coin toss whether or not this one gets their attention, for they may be asleep at the wheel.
If they think I speak falsely, I hereby invite them to post with their own accounts and confront me, like men. I will have a multitude of previous examples to justify my position. They aren't going to say a damned thing against me because they know this is easy to find.
Re:Illegal???? (Score:3, Insightful)
How, then, do you rationally have a problem with the military industrial complex having a light propaganda apparatus? Don't give me any crap about air raiding villages and killing civilians. Iraq and Afghanistan are brush fires compared to Vietnam, Korea, and WW2 in terms of casualties on both sides. More people die on the highways in the US each year than have died or been injured in combat in both wars, and the "collateral damage" isn't too far beyond that number either.
Re:Illegal???? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Illegal???? (Score:0, Insightful)
Have more Iraqis died on the roads? I think not. But they aren't Americans so they don't count as human right?
People who have a problem with the military-industrial complex typically don't think like you. The don't call it collateral damage. They call it killing of civilians. And they don't make bullshit comparisons to traffic statistics.
Scratch (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Illegal???? (Score:5, Insightful)
More people die on the highways in the US each year than have died or been injured in combat in both wars, and the "collateral damage" isn't too far beyond that number either.
So the more people die in accidents in a country the more murders that country is allowed to commit? In other words what you're saying is that if the roads in Nazi Germany were more dangerous that'd make the Holocaust ok. That is not how it works. If I kicked you in the balls and explained it's fine because that happens to people everyday would you accept the excuse or try to beat me up for kicking you in the balls?
(Accidental) Road deaths in the US: ~30k/year
Civilians murdered in Iraq: >100k (total)
So you're wrong. More people died in the Iraq war (which, by the way, would be very easy to prevent by not invading it) than die per year in road accidents in the US (road accidents are only preventable to a degree (unless you don't use roads, obviously)).
Re:jump: Afghanistan - Battleship? (Score:4, Insightful)
In the first Iron Man film, Tony Stark is in a village in the Middle East and he kills a bunch of "bad guys" who are mixed in with a bunch of innocent civilians. He trivially distinguishes between his targets and the rest of the population.
This is bullshit. In real drone strikes, there is no guarantee that only "terrorists" are the victims. All the press reporting in the US takes the military at their word, and casualties are never identified as "collateral damage", i.e. innocent bystanders.
It's a real war, and there are always non-combatants who are killed and injured. Pretending this never happens may be good to keep support up at home, but it is a damned lie. Honesty is a better policy in the long run.
One of the reasons that Pakistan is not letting NATO resupply convoys go through it's territory is because of the toll taken by drone strikes. It is a huge issue with the Pakistan population. By not admitting to any civilian casualties in the US press, there can be no meaningful debate about how our policy is effecting US standing in the Middle East.
Personally, I think that the Pakistan government is not worth spit as an ally, and they are directly supporting our enemies. We would be better off if we cut most military aid because of their backstabbing behavior. Even so, the practical, ethical and political effects of our use of drones should be much more publicly debated, rather then being swept under the rub by what is effectively military propaganda.
In a real war soldiers of both sides are wearing uniforms.
Re:Illegal???? (Score:5, Insightful)
- Civilian deaths in Iraq are likely greater than 100K, so something is off with your math.
The vast majority of which were killed by terrorists and insurgents who did things like explode car bombs in busy markets, and use truck bombs to level entire villages.
If Saddam had stayed in power and killed at his long term average, there would probably have been 50-100% more dead than there were. Saddam is out of power now, and the terrorist and insurgent violence is down by something like 90%. US combat forces are out of Iraq. Iraq is a functioning, if troubled, democracy. And now the Iraqis are rebuilding, putting up schools and libraries instead of another batch of enormous palaces for Saddam [telegraph.co.uk].
Re:jump: Afghanistan - Battleship? (Score:0, Insightful)
Indeed. That was a bunch of radical terrorists launching a civil insurgency against the legitimate government, and using the larger civilian population to shield them from reprisals. Eventually the Brits could no longer be arsed putting massive resources into fighting overseas over a worthless wasteland, so they pulled out.
Turnabout is fair play.
Re:jump: Afghanistan - Battleship? (Score:5, Insightful)
All the press reporting in the US takes the military at their word, and casualties are never identified as "collateral damage", i.e. innocent bystanders.
I don't believe that to be true, I've head of many admissions from the pentagon that they have caused collateral damage. Sure they sometimes seem to hem and haw a little, but claiming what you do is just another form of propaganda.
Re:jump: Afghanistan - Battleship? (Score:4, Insightful)
Superheroes inherently do things which if performed in the real world would get a lot of innocent people caught in the crossfire as well. That scene may not have been an example but even if it had been, it has nothing to do with the involvement of the military--just consider that superheroes tend to do warrantless searches, use gratuitous violence against suspects (and maybe even threaten them with physical harm to get information), gratuitously destroy property, etc. which would be really disastrous if performed by real-life law enforcement officials (and sometimes are when they are).
Re:jump: Afghanistan - Battleship? (Score:3, Insightful)
You're making the fallacy of applying Western Christian morality to a foreign culture. The "Pakistan population" protesting the drone strikes cares more about the accurate hits on intended targets than about the innocent victims. The diplomatic breakdowns between Washington and Islamobad occurred when big shots with ISI connections were hit. The Pakistani response has not been to call for more accuracy in US airstrikes but to call for an end to the collection of intelligence that identifies al-Qaeda positions.
The airstrikes were occurring in al-Qaeda territory, in the so-called "Islamic Emirate", not in Pakistan proper. Pakistan's previous government had tried to reclaim the land but its army was routed by al-Qaeda every time. This stopped when the Pakistani people elected a new government that supports al-Qaeda and is ignoring al-Qaeda's attacks on politically independent Pakistani forces such as the Frontier Corps.
The protesters are the same people who rallied in support of the assassination of Benazhir Bhutto, a woman politician who did not cover her face, and of Governor Salman Tasseer, who had called for a revision to a blasphemy law that is commonly misused to oppress minorities by bringing them to Shari'a court (where the word of a minority is legally given less weight than that of their Muslim accuser) and making false accusations of blasphemy (which carries the death penalty) which can be dropped if the minority surrenders their property and daughters to the accuser. Their concept of morality is different from yours.
The teachable moment came after CIA agents in Pakistan killed two al-Qaeda agents who attempted to assassinate them and a third guy who was in the way of their car. The "Pakistan population" held large rallies condemning the United States for the loss of the two al-Qaeda agents, who were hailed as heroes. Nobody cared about the innocent guy that the Americans ran over. This should tell you what these protesters stand for.