You Tube Trash and Treasure
Hi, folks. This video is not rated PG 13 or higher, but some of you may find it offensive all the same. I have been intrigued about how technology has affected our war in Iraq and Afghanistan. In some ways it has been great. Soldiers can send videos to loved ones and vice versa. E-mail records everyday life consisely. Photos can be transmitted in an instant. No longer does a soldier have to wonder what her child looks like.
The advent of video phones and digital cameras allowed the Abu Ghraib scandal to be discovered almost immediately. However, as in the taser case in UCLA, that does not mean footage always carries context. With every claim of atrocities comes a lot of cross accusations and finger pointing. What exactly did the student for Iran do to attract the police in the first place? When footage of the Rodney King video made it to every news station in America the LA police officers were tried and found guilty before they were charged. So indelible were those images that there were riots in many areas of LA when the police were found not guilty of excessive force several months later. Jurors maintained that the events leading up to Kings beating warranted the force, but the public who saw the footage couldn't buy it.
Context, context, context. However, with Abu Ghraib there seems to be a dearth of rationalizations, just an abdication of responsibility--why are the lower level soldiers being tried first--I guess that is how hierarchies work. In an earlier time, we probably would not have heard of these conditions and this abuse. Is that a good thing? Can we have too much information about a sensitive subject? During WWII, John Huston (I think!) made a docmentary commissioned by the War Dept. that ended up never being shown as it was considered too 'dark' and 'anti-war' for American audiences. If that is happening now to some extent, is that all righ? For example one does not want to see an exploded carcass on the cover of the newspaper every day, however we do hear about it.
There is an argument that Congress should not be attempting to direct foreign policy, in part because the process of government tips our hand to the enemy.
Lonelygirl seems to go a lot deeper that I originally gave it credit for. It almost looks like an occult version of '24.' Maybe hindsight is 20/20, but didn't the sophistication of mulitple narrators kind of give the story away? Also, she was a little too hip to be considered a nerd. Finally, if one were in the suffocating grasp of a cult, would your parents really let you buy a web cam?