CTs in TV Shows?

I despise Fringe.
Aside from the terrible terrible science in the show (like it's Armageddon levels of bad) I think the writing is horribly cliched. The mad scientist's son just annoys the hell out of me.

There was Korean film, Old Boy that had a great reveal of a conspiracy.

There's a 911 conspiracy built around an X Files episode

6th wrote: »

I'd have to ban myself if I responded to that.

No...you wouldn't have to. You could let me do it

24, I find interesting in terms of the question asked.

If you remove the Deus Ex Machina that is Jack Bauer, it shows a corrupt government which is mostly good at one thing only....covering its own ass after screwing up monumentally. It also shows various factions itching to exploit anything they can - regardless of whether they engineered it or not.

Cause a terrorist event....exploit it and cover your ass.
Get hit by a "real" terrorist event....exploit it and cover your ass.

The ultimate sources of "the threat(s) of the series" are generally within credibility, if not always the threats themselves.

I think the X-Files probably handled conspiracies best out of all TV shows. The creator admitted to not believing in any of them, but for the most part the topics covered were done reasonably respectfully.

Granted, I'm not a huge fan of 24 (I always missed the odd episode and was left without a clue as to what was going on), so I can only speak for what I've seen, but it always gave me the impression of a show that is trying to justify criminal activities if they're for the "greater good". A government(s) that wanted to remove peoples freedoms could use just this type of show to get the idea into peoples heads that bad things have to happen to bad people in order to protect the good people. This way the governments could slowly become increasingly brutal in their handling of the people and the people will simply believe that their best interests are at heart. Granted, it's not the best way to go about it, but it's a start.

I was actually going to start a thread the other day about computer games and their possible use in influencing peoples perceptions. The idea for the thread came to me when I was reading about Polybius. Polybius was an arcade machine that appeared in arcades in Portland, Oregon in the early 80's. The game was incredibly popular an people lined up to play it. The arcades were then visited by mysterious men in black (why is it always black. It's a dead giveaway!), who collected some sort of data from the machines.

Those who played the game reportedly started suffering from insomnia, nightmares and in some cases committed suicide.

Sadly, it's all just an urban legend (you can read about it here on wikipedia), but it did get em thinking about games and their use by "Them". On basic idea is, as I said with 24 above, getting people used to the idea of governments doing bad things to protect the citizens. Take for example something like the Call of Duty games who's multi-player sections are incredibly popular. In them, people are tasked to team up and kill their enemies. They don't question who their enemy is, or why they should kill them, they just want to kill as many as they can and get the highest score.

This sort of thing could be a way to desensitise the youth to make them more malleable for future brainwashing sessions (when they move onto watching 24!). Of course, this would all seem fantastical, but the US military has released a game called America's Army, which is another first person shooter game that pits the US against terrorists. And again it's a multi-player game, but in order to get to the multi-player sections, you have to pass some tests. You're tested in several areas and the information is fairly realistic(One user reportedly used what he learned in the medic training in the game to save two peoples lives after a car crash).

I know it's a long an fairly meandering post (I probably should of thought it out first), but I just thought I'd put it out their that if the powers that be wanted, there's many subtle ways to manipulate the people.

We've moved fromTV showing CTs to TV asCT.
That is actually an interesting point about 24 though, get people to mentally accept the concept of their government endorsing torture andthe like.

I've always wanted to get into X-Files, I was a bit young to appreciate it when it was first released.

Mahatma coat wrote: »

I was watchin NCIS last night, the premis was that sopme Genetic scientist were workin on a secret project to target diseases at specific genomes, sound familiar??

also the bit that really worries me about NCIS (besides all the Ra Ra Yanks are great become a marine Semprte Fi Sh1te) is the presence of thje character Xeva David, a Mossad agent with no links to any US Law enforcement agency is one of the principal investigators, this is a bit odd to me, I never fully understood how the character came to bew in NCIS, considerin her Mosad double agent brother is the one who killed the bird she replaced.

Xeva is also a huge fan of the Jack Bauer method of interogation.

whats the angle??

It's the Zionists. It's just a PR campain for Mossad. So when we hear that they are taking over the world we will just expect some hot Mossad agents to come knocking.
It is a strange one, in the story line she ended up killing her brother. Thus proving that she is one of the good guys, killing her own brother/fellow agent/country man for the good ol' USA.

At the end of the day it's just a TV show, doesn't have to stick to reality.

In a resent episode of Law and Order, a husband was using a RFID tag injected in his wife to keep track of her comings and goings. He hid sensors/gates in three locations to see what time she entered and left, then uploaded the info to his PDA.

Nothing mentioned about the Mark of the Beast though

bonkey wrote: »

This reminds me of a quote which I came across in something I'm reading at the moment...


"Personally, I believe that most people are influenced far more than they would care to admit by novels, serial stories, films and so forth...It is probable that many people who would consider themselves extremely sophisticated and 'advanced' are actually carrying through life an imaginative background which they acquired in childhood from (for instance) Sapper and Ian Hay"


As the quote refers to most people, it indirectly implies that life will - to a certain extent - mimic art, regardless of whether or not the art in question mimics life.

Somewhat relevantly, the quote comes from none other than George Orwell - some of who's works would make an excellent subject for analysis of the very question that MC put forward.

Thats interesting, I was thinking about the imaginary value of money and society. None of its real yet we treat these things as such. We must be the only species, although its not certain, which negotiates between an abstracted reality and a tangible one, bridging interactions between two. Makes one think about re-defining what real is.

coopersgreen wrote: »

Fringe is total rubbish. How convenient it is that the very week they have to deal with an invisible, two-headed, part-man, part-beast, succubus that Walter happens to have done research into that very thing in the past.

"Now, if only I can find my old notebooks".

Well... it'd be in the past any week after he did the research. So the week it happens in is nothing to do with the convenience

But yeah, that sounds like silly writing. I haven't watched it though, I will wait and see before I judge.