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It did - I'm sorry I never thanked you. Thanks. I read the introduction and several of the documents - unfortunately I'd just read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine so was a bit tortured out.
Came to the conclusion last year that I made a pretty bad judgement call on the Iraq War - as anyone who read any of my posts from or after that period might remember.
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quote:Originally posted by ben: Well worth doing, though - particularly as large parts of the media in this country explicitly support torture.
Christ that's a depressing thought.
We've done a 'better' torture book since then. Letters To My Torturer. The author is a pretty nice bloke. You get a phone call from him and he's like "How's it going?" and you're like, well my bike got a puncture on the way in, and my boss is asking me for some stuff that I've forgotten to do, and it's a pretty shitty day, but you can't really say that to someone who was tortured for seven years. But, on the flipside, if you say "yeah, I'm having a really good day" it sound like you're gloating. So I tend to just hang up.
Also, in some ways the author reminds me of Mart. An Iranian Mart. So once you make this connection, it reads like someone's forcing Mart to bark like a dog, eat his own faeces, drink bleach etc etc, which makes it even harder to stomach.
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Sounds like this guy is playing up the torture a bit.
"boohoo, they made me bark like a dog"
My daughter likes me to bark like a dog, she finds it funny. You don't find me running off to Amnesty International in the hopes of getting a bestseller.
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In other dog-related publishing news, How To Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog is doing absolute gangbusters.
It seems that the British public prefers dogs to torture. As marketing manager, it's my job to spot these kinds of trends, even if - like this one - they seem counter-intuitive.
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quote:Originally posted by Cherry In Hove: You don't find me running off to Amnesty International in the hopes of getting a bestseller.
If the sales of this book were anything to go by, your hopes would be ill-founded.
Well, from your analysis it sounds like the British public like their books a bit more playful than straight torture, so perhaps a book about a 30 something white male playing games with his daughter would be something that would become a Christmas bestseller.
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The Saw series proves that the British public have a hearty appetite for gruelling depictions of torture. If we add the thirtysome white male, his daughter, and set it in Iran... ta-daa! - mass entertainment with a social conscience. In 3D.
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quote:Originally posted by mart: What sort of games?
Building towers, knocking down towers. Hiding under a blanket then pulling it off and saying "Boo!", making a wolf and a rat puppet play the piano. All sorts of stuff that I think would be up there with the latest Dan Brown novel for excitement.
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quote:Originally posted by ben: The Saw series proves that the British public have a hearty appetite for gruelling depictions of torture. If we add the thirtysome white male, his daughter, and set it in Iran... ta-daa! - mass entertainment with a social conscience. In 3D.
Like one of them Magic Eye books from the nineties? This might save my job!
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I found Black Hawk Down quite a queasy experience - you know, heroic white dudes machine-gunning lots of nasty black men. It had a real underside-of-ballsack kind of odour to it.
Saw III was on a few weeks back and I enjoyed that a lot more then BHD. Especially the scene with the liquidised pigs, which strongly resembled the photo above.
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That pic is actually of the inside of an RSC battlecopter moments before it was shot down and crahsed near the rowing boats on the river. We spent all that night holed up at the Brass Rubbing Centre before the verger from Holy Trinity Church came to our rescue, guiding us back to the river bank. We made our getaway using the hand-cranked chain ferry to cross the river and reach the safety of the Butterfly Farm on the opposite bank, just past the visitor centre. We had to live on little dishes of syrupy water until fresh supplies of tea and jam scones were flown in.
quote:Originally posted by ben: Came to the conclusion last year that I made a pretty bad judgement call on the Iraq War - as anyone who read any of my posts from or after that period might remember.
I predicted this U-Turn back in 2008
quote:Originally posted by Thorn Davis: After the Tories win the next election Ben will turn up in an Al Queada video, trussed up to a chair begging David Cameron to pull whatever strings it takes to get him out and declaring that anyone who supported this awful war is "shit-thick cattle".