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The Price of Military Tech Assistance In Movies
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."
Skipping over the editorializing in the summary, I would like to point out that the Military using Hollywood for promotion is not a recent occurence.
It should be noted that Abbot and Costello's "Buck Privates" was used to help spur enlistment.
As was "The Green Berets".
As was "Top Gun".
As was a number of other films (these three jump out at me as being some of the best examples).
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
So, anything that doesn't kill 30,000 people is OK? That's an interesting metric.
Some other bits:
- We get have an opinion on how our tax dollars are spent. That's called being a citizen.
- Civilian deaths in Iraq are likely greater than 100K, so something is off with your math.
You may be right. However, the more important issues are how the larger audience interprets it and how it affects their perceptions of reality. Satire is a dangerous tool when used on the uncritical.
Just a suggestion, but stop fucking up peoples shit around the world and people wont have a grudge against you and you wont have to intimidate people.
Contrary to popular opinion in the US, the reason for extremists from the middle east and areas of asia isn't because "they hate freedom", its because US foreign policy over the past 70 years has been screwing over whole populations of people in order to have 'friendly governments' available to them. If these governments were not willing to do anything the US wanted, a new government was installed by any means necessary. Generally speaking, if you surpress a population for that length of time, you'll have a backlash. I don't know if your politicians are either grossly ignorant of these basic facts or they are simply misleading the population, but the US isn't known around the world for freedom and democracy, they are known for oppression and tyranny. So tell me, if you knew a country known for oppression and tyranny, what would you do? Oh yeah, we've already seen that, you'd bomb the fuck out of them, be damned how many civilians you kill until "democrats" crawl out of the rubble and promise to be good little boys and girls. I swear, how people don't see the cause and effect in all this is beyond me...
There is no -1 disagree
As a veteran myself, this needs modded up.
Our military does not just indiscriminately fire weapons into crowds (though Taliban has and does). So much planning and intel goes into every mission. Triggers are not pulled without visual confirmation and usually also require permission frm higher command first, sometimes even when ambushed on patrol.
But this is /., so the posts from people who've actually been there will be ignored and modded down, while armchair QB's instead "tell it like it 'REALLY' is"....