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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31250 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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I recently came across this little quillette article. https://quillette.com/2022/10/14/sundance-succumbs-to-social-panic/ where a film of jihadist rehabilitation is cancelled for being "islamophobic". Part of it as I read in the situation is that is a "white woman" is trying to sell the idea that one can be deprogrammed from ideological capture. I suspect that there is a deeper reason (which I can't prove) that we shouldn't go around believing that extremists can be redeemed or deprogrammed. This includes of course that there is no redemption arc for right-wing white nationalist extremists.

As an outsider to US politics I was fascinated by the apparatus of US media to "manufacturing of consent" to fighting terrorism of the evil jihadists with things like "enhanced interrogation techniques" a.k.a. torture. There is a whole TV-series produced to skew the narrative that torture is effective way to combat terror, despite that there being ample evidence that people being tortured will eventually make shit up to avoid being tortured. Also properly motivated persons can withstand extraordinary amounts of pain and delay the divulging of useful intel to the interrogator. So it is not an effective way of gathering information about impending attacks, because motivated and trained people can delay, lie or do anything in between to fulfill their goals and innocent people will probably just make something up to make the torture stop by guessing what the interrogator wants to hear. Yet we have multiple seasons of 24 to implant the idea that torture is effective. The critique of that show is that it was "islamophobic" because it painted the jihadist as an unredemptive terrorists.

I find it fascinating that less than a couple of decades ago the right thought that extremists where irredeemable from their idealogical capturing, but now the left is touting similar reasoning with white supremacists and throws jihadist redemption under the bus, in the same breath.

There is a whole TV-series produced to skew the narrative that torture is effective way to combat terror, despite that there being ample evidence that people being tortured will eventually make shit up to avoid being tortured. Also properly motivated persons can withstand extraordinary amounts of pain and delay the divulging of useful intel to the interrogator. So it is not an effective way of gathering information about impending attacks, because motivated and trained people can delay, lie or do anything in between to fulfill their goals and innocent people will probably just make something up to make the torture stop by guessing what the interrogator wants to hear. Yet we have multiple seasons of 24 to implant the idea that torture is effective.

I think you're missing the simple fact that torture scenes are incredibly dramatic. High stakes, sky-high emotions all around, desperate time tables, etc. And there were still plenty of times in 24 where it didn't work, where the revelation that the torturee held a critical detail back was the dramatic segue into the next phase of the ridiculously circuitous plan of the season.

I think you're missing the simple fact that torture scenes are incredibly dramatic.

No, I'm positing that torture was included to "manufacture consent" in a similar way that the series contained rationalizations of mass surveillance to not get upset at the politicians when they continued to vote through continuation of "war on terror" policy that was eroding their liberties. I'm a total outsider of US-politics and culture in many ways. It is schadenfreude when the Jan 6 republicans got their names in the no fly list that was rammed through by republican politicians in the "war on terror".

OK, but where's the evidence that this inclusion in 24 was at the behest of the CIA or something? Isn't it a lot more straightforward to posit that people just like the drama and the show writers wrote accordingly?

There is a long history of e.g. the US Navy lending "production assistance" to TV series like JAG and NCIS . I have no proof of a such link but is it not a possibility that such a link exist given that the military-industrial complex has supported movies and TV series with the "correct" message in the past?

Yes, it's a possibility. I don't even think it's a weird or remote possibility. But it certainly is an extra step and I'm disinclined to add extra steps without any explicit evidence (or a good reason to have a very high Bayesian prior).

Yes, but still you might not want to assume that the message of adding that to the script comes straight from the CIA. It might have been inserted for political reasons by politicians. It is not even unheard of today that media is changed for political reasons.

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