These guys have watched way too much Mary Poppins. American or British slave women are a terrible idea, they’d just sit on their fat asses eating bonbons and belittling their captors for not having as nice a sofa as the guy they used to belong to.
No, what these guys need to aim for are Southeast Asian slave children. I mean, have you seen the stitching on Nikes? That is quality work right there. And those kids are used to twenty hour work days and starvation.
:: rolling up sleeves, donning hipboots, adjusting helmet and goggles ::
Because “bashing” carries a subtle connotation of unfairness, of an assault out of proportion to the provocation. It insinuates that the basher is a brutal bully. Civilized opponents offer constructive criticism; partisan attack dogs bash.
“Attack” isn’t quite so freighted with negativity as “bash”, for one thing. Mind you, these are subtle distinctions, but then, English is a language rampantly rich with subtle shades of meaning. For another, headline writers have to compress a great deal into a very few words, and those words need to outshout every distraction to grab the reader’s attention. “Kerry Bashes Bush on Abuse” may well have been written that way simply for the punchy alliterative rhythm of it – quite catchy. Say it out loud, and you’ll hear what I mean.
You mean, besides the fact that it works? 
Heck, the best way to make your opponent look bad is to fling all the mud you can at him, hoping that a fair amount will stick, while simultaneously trumpeting your outrage at how that cur has launched a smear campaign against you.
Seriously, just about every political campaign, sooner or later, launches attacks on the other side. Witness how the Bush ads have been denigrating Kerry as a flip-flopper who’s against spending on defense, for example. The idea is to shape the undecided voters’ view of your opponent before s/he can persuade the voters of his/her merits. Thus, voters inundated with such ads are left with the impression that Kerry is weak on defense, even though his actual record of votes belies that.
Actually, this liberal sees the media as a mightily diverse collection of voices and viewpoints, for those willing to look outside their comfortable rut.
Or, the ratio of complaint could simply reflect:
a. That the conservatives have become skilled practitioners of the Big Lie – a powerfully effective tool for dominating the public discourse. The “media” you’re thinking of – TV and radio networks and major newspapers – are owned by megacorporations; in fact, the sources of news in this country are becoming ever more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The people who run and set policy for those corporations are not exactly liberal firebrands.
b. The outshouting effect. If enough conservatives scream loudly enough, often enough, about the “liberal media”, they can drown out the voices saying it isn’t so.
c. Cognitive dissonance. How many radio talk show hosts are liberal? How many are conservative? Right – the right wing owns the airways. And yet they’re always whining about the liberal bias of the very stations that pay them big bucks to denigrate the left.
I’m sorry, EddyTeddyFreddy, but I seem to be experiencing a big case of “That does not compute!” It seems that the entire first half of your last post is in effect agreeing with me that to “bash” someone is effective in causing people to look negatively upon the bashee. It may be the tactic of a bully and less civilized, but by your own description it can be effective. This is what I’ve been saying: that stating a certain candidate is bashing another tends to make the bashor appear to be on a higher plane than the bashee. Please explain it to me if I’m wrong, but you appear to be making my own points for me. It’s as though you say I’m wrong and then use the very types of points I’m making in order to prove me wrong.
Well, speaking as a “compassionate conservative,” I can see and sometimes agree with some of those voices and viewpoints. But I think the fact that liberals are as uniformly anti-conservative in their opinions as conservatives are uniformly anti-liberal, it suggests to me that each is quite monolithic in their opposition to each other.
Perhaps they aren’t, but I see and hear of no attempt by them to influence their companies’ reportage toward a more conservative slant. Don’t you think Rather, Koppel, Jennings, et al., would be screaming it to the rooftops if someone tried to “conservatise” their coverage?
It’s funny, I’ve always felt the opposite. If enough liberals (and those in the media themselves) denied it strongly enough and long enough they could drown out those of us who complain about liberal bias in the media.
I’m sure you’ve heard this asked before, but it is very, very apparent to me that conservative radio, which is a fairly recent phenomenon, was born and has become successful due to the overwhelming preponderance of liberal thought and influence in the other types of media. Liberals for decades have had ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN and most of the country’s major newspapers on their side, slanting stories and coverage and making omissions in such a way as to further influence public opinion toward their way of thinking. I think the simple fact that the overwhelming number of accusations of bias come from the right while there is virtually none coming from the left clearly demonstrates that this is so.
hahaha, you don’t get out much, do you?
But those kids don’t have that sexy, sexy British accent that reduces men to a puddle.
I would be speaking of the “main stream” media. Certainly there is plenty of left-wing bitching about conservative radio.
And the most effective tactic of all is to bash your opponent by accusing vicious, underhanded him of bashing noble, above-the-fray you. Bashing doesn’t always work, but it’s a useful tactic. Being called and perceived as a basher is a Bad Thing. Sample: Rush Limbaugh doesn’t bash liberals; he simply tells the truth about their nefarious ways. Any liberals who complain that he’s misrepresenting them are bashing Rush. Substitute Al Franken and conservatives, if you prefer. Capische?
Oh, my. The mainstream media don’t appear liberal-tilted to me; heck, they’re solidly middle-of-the-road. This is where most of their audience and therefore advertising income can be found, and therefore the safest place for them to be. If you perceive them as monolithically liberal-biased, it says more about where you stand to view them. Corporations follow profits; mass-market entertainment* endeavors must attract the widest possible audience; they’re not going to diminish their audience in any way if they can avoid it.
And if a hundred persons were to accuse you of killing a puppy, and only one said you were innocent, should we conclude that, yes, of course you are a puppy-killer? And who says there aren’t lots of accusations of bias coming from the left? The fact that you don’t hear them merely means you’re not being exposed to them in the media you follow, which suggests to me that it’s tilted toward the conservative view. I see on preview you prove my point:
So, which is it? Are the mainstream media liberal, as you say? Then why aren’t they carrying all this left-wing bitching? 
*Never forget, the news media of our time are basically entertainment, not pure-hearted public services, no matter what they say. They’re the ultimate “reality show”, and what gets shown to the consuming public is chosen as much for its power to draw viewers/readers as for its actual importance. Doubt it? Then why is Michael Jackson headline news? What the flying Wallenda does his sordid little story have to do with the public commonweal? But it’s titillating, it’s bizarre, it’s attention-grabbing, and it leads the news, while boring stories about, say, economic events which will have lasting impacts upon all our lives get buried in the back pages of the business section, if they’re reported at all.
Never forget, the news media of our time are basically entertainment, not pure-hearted public services, no matter what they say. They’re the ultimate “reality show”, and what gets shown to the consuming public is chosen as much for its power to draw viewers/readers as for its actual importance. Doubt it? Then why is Michael Jackson headline news? What the flying Wallenda does his sordid little story have to do with the public commonweal? But it’s titillating, it’s bizarre, it’s attention-grabbing, and it leads the news, while boring stories about, say, economic events which will have lasting impacts upon all our lives get buried in the back pages of the business section, if they’re reported at all.
Amen to that.
While re-perusing this thread, another idea occurred to me: these people keep slaves.
I mean, here we have a religious leader, a guy with a following, a guy who’s shaping up as a major player, even if he isn’t there yet, right? And he advocates the keeping of slaves. This isn’t new. Islam does not prohibit slavery, although it does include guidelines as to how you’re supposed to treat them.
But we are dealing with people who keep slaves, who think slavery is a peachy-keen idea.
And we went over there to LIBERATE these people?
No you did not!
The liberation from Saddam was at most a happy side effect. If you believe that any government puts it’s men and it’s money on the line for the good of other people you’re being very naive indeed.
Well, yeah, I would be, if I believed it. After all, our Fearless Leader told us originally that it had to do with WMDs, not liberation. THEN it became liberation. Now our rationale is unclear, except “not letting the entire shooting match fall into the hands of crazy fundamentalist loonies who want to kill and enslave the foreigners who took out their dictator.”
No, I’m just thinking in terms of the fact that we apparently sent soldiers over there with the expectation that they’d be welcomed with rose petals strewn in their path. No apparent thought whatsoever to concepts like:
*These people think keeping slaves is okay.
*These people have been taught to hate us practically from birth.
*These people have no concept whatsoever of “democracy.”
*These people’s culture is so different from ours that they might as well be from Mars.
*These people have so many freakin’ guns it makes any sane person wonder how Saddam lasted more than five minutes.
*These people were so terrified of Saddam that they let him keep screwing them even though they had more guns than half of Texas.
*These people figured out very quickly that we didn’t play anywhere near as rough as Saddam did, and quickly pegged us as wimps.
No, our government seemed to feel that this was all irrelevant, and that once Saddam and the Republican Guard was out of the way, we’d just clean up their screwed-up government, tweak their culture a little, and be on our merry way, having set up a shiny new Middle East U.S. Ally in place of a corrupt hellhole.
Now tell me again about “naive?”
That’s because it isn’t a loonie-lefty think tank. They do long range military analysis and a little comparative politics (inasmuch as it applies to defense funding and technology exchange and so on) but the CSIS is no more biased to either side than, say, Jane’s Defense Weekly.
I used Cordesman’s analyses of the Arab states to write a 29,000 word thesis on possible scenarios for a fourth (or fifth or sixth depending on how you define such things) Arab-Israeli war; I probably read several dozen volumes’ worth of CSIS material and it all reads with a pretty neutral slant.
That said, I think they’re wrong about this one. Of course, I haven’t had much time to read the report because I’m busy picking a leash for Kiera Knightley.
Back to the OP… one thing that struck me about this … back around the turn of the century (early 1900s) there was this white slavery craze that started in the U.S. and Europe that Chinese and Arab slavers and other “swarthy” types were kidnapping white women to serve as sex slaves in the harems and opium dens of the mysterious Orient.
Both Scotland Yard and the FBI both thoroughly investigated the phenomenon, and even in those relatively racist times, were unable to find any evidence that it ever occurred. Not just that there were no organized kidnapping rings, but that any American or English woman had been kidnapped even once to serve as a love slave by an Arabic or Chinese person.
This hardly put a dent in the sails of the popular fiction writers of the day, and you can still find plenty of romances about sheiks kidnapping Jersey housewives to be thier harem girls.
So NOW we’ve got a mad mullah publicly proclaiming that it’s OK to enslave female British soldiers if you can catch one.
I can see the publishers and bad TV movie producers gearing up even now …
Yes! A made-for TV movie of love, lust, and adventure, set in the blazing turmoil of a world gone mad:
The English Rose and the Evil Captor!!
Oh, wait…
I’m sure it’s been done. Frex, there are about a dozen books by title Captive Bride listed at Amazon. Here’s the description for Johanna Lindsey’s: