Gitmotainment

How did I miss this before? Apparently Fox has a reality-tv show called Solitary. Contestants endure dehumanizing, Gitmo-style confinement and stress. The last one to cry Uncle wins.

And the rest of us are supposed to consider this entertainment.

I’ll occasionally entertain conspiracy-theory thinking, but I try to keep it in check. A show like this makes it hard to avoid. One can imagine the current administration saying to its buddy Rupert Murdoch something like “We need to find a way to make torture seem more palatable to the American people. Can you help us out with that?”

Familiarity breeds contempt. What better way to trivialize institutionalized torture than by turning it into a game show? A child growing up watching this show might look at sleep deprivation, etc, as something they do on game shows, and be inured to it.

I can’t think about this without feeling like the whole human species has gone off the rails.

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