about America's Battered Wife Syndrome?
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0911-28.htmOne way an abusive asshole keeps a victim cowered is to TERRORIZE them and Re-traumatize them..
What makes the difference between healing catharsis and destructive retraumatization,Or this unleashing of “unhealthy passions”? One important point not considered in the media and violence studies, is the meaning of the violence.
http://sidran.org/anna.htmlWhat is the MEANING of these violent reports?
Does TV news give us one or is it left hanging, as an out of context tragedy,so much how like life is inside an abusive home.Daddy beats the hell out of mommy and we all pretend it never happened so daddy won't get mad and beat us all senseless,Denial and make believe keep a shit head unaccountable..Tv News another shit head on parade and the victim suffers ..Now,..Cue to commercial..Just after seeing a tragic event our context or meaning to make sense of it comes as a car commecial,or some talking head spewing fluff not dealing with what we just saw,it gets scuttled away,brought out,scuttled away,like every Friday night filled with terror,Monday morning time to go to school and study spelling....our brains have no time to process and form a meaning or context to violence when a river of abuse and distractions pours into our homes 24-7 via TV News.Blood n guts sells but WHY? What does that MEAN?
What do these horrid news stories mean to you?
They show me that somme people are so messed up they are dangerous ,Bystanders unable or unwilling or too beaten down by evil people to defend their kids,defend their friends or communities. It's a tragic battering syndrome that has infected our ENTIRE culture,It's not surprising when you realize how many people suffer a trauma in their lives..We are a society made up of many people and too many of us carry scars and our cultural violence and craziness on TV reflects it back..TV news tells me the good people,vulnerable, the sensitive people in this world are targets to be battered ,by assholes who have too much power be it a family tyrant or a squatter in the white house .That I can no longer be a bystander a perpetrator or enabler of bullies,violence and abusers.. It shows me at first take,people cannot be trusted so they have to prove they are trustworthy. Which reflects the reality I found myself stuck with when I got abused ,Right than everything changed. Complex PSTD has a way of doing that...Either way I cry over it..I cry over what has happened to us..at the hands of thoughtless brutes.The desensitization and isolation all of it..
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Softening the natural aversion to torture
by Underground Panther in the Sky, Jan. 15, 2005
Fear Factor to me looks like a show designed to paint torture as "entertainment". I myself cannot watch that show. It's too sick, sad and abusive. It makes me sick inside.
I look at all the torture in movies, in "comedy," video games. All this dehumanizing, embarrassing, shaming "secretly taped" videos, of people making fools of themselves, drunk, sick, stumbling, and a nation laughing at their misfortunes... This is abuse set up as "humor" and I myself really don't have to wonder anymore why people are numb to the horrible suffering, immorality, and blowback implications of torture at Abu Ghraib. What you find funny or 'entertaining' these days says a lot about your character and dis/ability to empathize with people in pain. Rome had "fear factor" too, it was in the Coliseum.
Fear Factor and shows like that desensitize people psychologically to seeing people being tortured. It's a step-by-step desensitization process that has gone on for decades.
First it was horror movies: look at old horror movies, they were so ... innocent, and look at Hellraiser. Can you see a difference? There are crime shows, Dragnet vs Forsenic Files on Court TV. See a difference?
Now it's becoming torture live, done to "volunteers." Shows like Scare Tactics make sophisticated psychological gas lighting into just a prank. Remember the "bum fights" tapes, where assholes bribed desperate homeless people to beat each other up on camera for food? Is Fear Factor all that different? No-one considers the bad effects on a person's emotions of seeing people dehumanized, terrified, sick, sexually abused, and in pain as we go pretending it can't change us, fascinated by it as if it was "entertainment." If you asked if people thought torture was OK in the 1960s, how many would have been as gung ho, so brazenly for it as people are today?
Look at all the jokes about pedophiles these days. Funny how the kids are always couched as if they should lay down take it, or that they were just having fun, or should be blamed for it, while the pedo is presented in almost a positive light. When did pedophilia become funny? I don't think it's funny at all. What about comedians talking about how they got the shit beat out of them as kids, as if that is funny? It's sad to me.
When did child abuse, torture, rape and trauma become grist for TV comics? When did America become so callous to suffering and abuse of others? How did it happen?
Maybe seeing hours and hours of dead bodies, news reports of tragedy and death, murder, pedophilia, rape and child abuse, blood and guts has made abuse and sadism appear "normal" in our collective unconscious. We see it every day, until eventually it ceases to shock and horrify. And when we no longer are appalled by fake torture, or disturbed by live volunteers getting tortured, real torture overseas won't seem so outrageous ... and soon torture next door will illicit a shrug and no emotion. Then what next? I guess torture in the home won't make people bat an eye (it already is a lot this way) because it is "normal" for people to abuse each other in relationships. We see it modeled every day on TV from childhood to adulthood.
Kids raised with abuse don't know there are homes where parents are not tyrants, and they have had so much trust stolen they can't believe all parents are not the same as theirs. As for rape, they will be told to get over it, get back to work. Victims will be told and they will believe that they liked it and asked for it. Already comics joke about kids seducing adults.
In an abusive home, when an abusive father beats up mom, that is seen as traumatizing to a child and it effects them for years. On TV, domestic violence is now seen as "entertainment"? How did that become "fun" to watch? Little kids, like 3 years old or so, have trouble telling what occurs on TV from what occurs in real life. And it looks like morally stupid Americans are not only emotionally not in touch, they seem to have problems distinguishing reality from fantasy, and it affects their moral character in the worst ways.
That is why the bully pundits and manipulative propagandists dominate what becomes "entertainment" and news. By making torture into a prank it diminishes the victims humanity, it discounts their voices, and it makes their need for human rights and the right to not be abused look unnecessary or even whiny.
When we can stomach the pain and humiliation done to "volunteers" on Fear Factor, it is so much easier for a desensitized moral and ethical idiot with no ethics or emotional intelligence beyond himself to rationalize and stomach the torture at Abu Ghraib, like a person with conduct disorders, authoritarian disorders, a bully or narcissist can. They are being trained to not relate to the traumatized as equal human beings like himself.
It is a desire of millions of bully minded people who want to abuse people and get away with it, manifesting their cruel desires. In life the bullies among us form gangs and terrorize others. That is their pattern -- they seek positions of power so they can be corrupt and untouchable. They have hurt whole nations in their pursuit of control.
This sociopath's desire to harm has worked into the general populace, producing a disconnected wavelength in a hive mind way.
TV is a tool to desensitize otherwise ethical Americans. It teaches them to accept torture, rape, pedophilia, and abuse as something other than what it is, removes their sense of ethics, and shuts up their empathy for victims. They either become bullies or bystander moral relativists who will not be able to articulate the revulsion they feel, the righteous indignation and outrage. They won't have the confidence or courage to stand up and say to a bully that torture is wrong, and say why it is wrong. They won't be able to stand up for the hurt and against the suffering with any backbone.
There need not be a evil secret cabal to do this to a nation. All it takes is a lot of self-serving sadistic sick assholes who can twist people's ethics and twist the very definitions of what is right and wrong. Bullies with entitlement attitudes who steal trust, narcissists who are of like minds with similar conduct disorders, overweening ambitions, control issues, narcissism, emotional retardation, and authoritarian personalities.
The sheer numbers who are enabled to get away with it by a nation of passive, sold-out, cowardly, self-serving, dishonest, empathy-stunted, traumatized, unprincipled, ignorant, willing-to-delude-themselves bystanders.
All it takes for evil to flourish is for good people to do NOTHING.
And we do a lot of nothing when atrocity is committed against human rights by sociopaths in positions of power.
The Democrat cowards just mimic the couch potato cowards, because none are bold enough to stand up and lead us away from bystanding and compromise with torture. We as a nation have lost our heart and soul, and we have consented to it.
And it was so "entertaining" to drink that funny poison in on TV, wasn't it? It will be loads of fun, I bet, when torturers get around to singling you out, or you are desperate enough to be bribed into "volunteering," and you get your 15 minutes of fame by suffering for "fun" on the TV coliseum.
You got what you wanted, a "good time" at others' expense. We all will have to pay eventually, when we lose touch with our humanity...
http://mjroseblog.typepad.com/buzz_balls_hype/2006/02/the_doctor_is_i_3.html
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