What I learned from the TV show 24
Now I dunno what season 1 was like, or 2, 3, 4 or however many bloody relentless save the world efforts there have been, but the 5 episodes I watched tonight were created along the following lines:

• There are bad guys everywhere from any and all types of groups so you have to be ready to torture anyone any time
• We only know they’re bad guys via information obtained by torture, other information is unreliable
• We can only be safe through letting Jack loose on the bad guys to extract information
• Good people might object to torture, but they’re portrayed as bad or weak people or purely doing it for their own gain
• So long as “people sacrificed/tortured” is less than or equal to “possible people saved assuming worse case scenario is averted” then that’s ok, if not then so long as jack’s doing the killing/torturing then that’s ok
• The whitehouse/president of the USA/FBI have the worse security on the planet, meaning that instead of locks and security we actually need constant torture to make sure things aren’t compromised
• Warrantless wire tapping: is there any other sort? Get feeds of phones, internet usage or whatever else you like at the click of a button

Oh, and as an IT geek I was amazed at the new levels of ridiculous attempts to make computers as jargony as possible (“we’re going to need to tie the computers together with a macro uploader matrix motherboard” I think was one line in there). That and computer terminals that appear to have the green streams of the matrix running in “raw form” in the background. Must be windows 7 and some “send the user bat shit crazy” version of google maps with that mobile phone tracker thing turned on.

Jack only tortures the guilty of course

So aside from plot holes wide enough to break into the whitehouse through (one scene trying to drill underwater cuts to next scene with a metre and a half hole and a cave leading into the whitehouse.. but anyhow..) the relentless message is torture works. Torture works. Torture works!

I can't believe it's not torture!

Rest assured: Jack only ever tortures people he KNOWS are guilty though, and they without fail turn out to be. I guess he tones his psychic abilities with weekend trips to guantanamo bay in between writing the memos for fox news on how best to describe human rights violations in a positive light.

Anyone anti-torture is weak/evil/stupid or a coward

Oh and that brings me to a senator in the episodes I watched (who happens to have a chief of staff who is a bad guy and needed to be tortured) who is campaigning for human rights to be explicitly accepted and torture banned.

He’s made out to be an evil man, you know with those scheming squinty little eye close ups as he plans his next plot to force human rights down the democratic throat of the nation.. Ooooh.. Evil evil man. The whitehouse wants him to pardon Jack for his earlier 7 seasons of torture or else the president will use executive power to pardon him and this guy objects. I suspect he’ll learn a valuable lesson on how torture could have solved everything or will meet a sticky ending. All because he stopped Jack from taking electrodes to someone’s testicles to get some information out. Torture is like that magic putty stuff I posted about a little while back. It fixes EVERYTHING.

Cruel and inhumane punishment: dialup

Oh and then there’s his friend who Jack tries to get to go deliver some torture because Jack’s locked up for illegal torture. The friend refuses because he’s not a sadistic goon and it’s shown like the friend is betraying Jack by not joining the little torture cult Jack is demigod of.

Brainwashing the masses to accept the validity of torture

So after watching a handful of episodes I’m pretty sure I don’t want to watch any more of this sensationalist crap that they’ve pumped out. Evildoers everywhere who we could expose if only Jack has enough time between his busy schedule of pulling wings off butterflies and disembowelling the neighbour’s puppies.

• “We did what we had to!”
• “It was necessary”
• “It saved lives”
• “We have to get him before he lawyers up”

Terrorists: set Jack on them. Scientists: they’re just holding out the secret cure to cancer, just send ol’ Jack in there. Kids who won’t do homework: give Jack a cigarette lighter and a pair of pliers and he’ll sort ‘em out.

Feels a bit like they might as well just strap us to the chair and blast us with the CIA guide on how waterboarding is good for the skin and how sleep deprivation techniques free up so much time for reading.

Torture is good. Torture is good! Jack says so!

Remember, when in doubt: torture something. It works!

Disclosure requirements

I think this idea raises some important questions about the need for journalistic standards among bloggers. Disclosure of payment for mentions/reviews etc is very important from an ethical standpoint and to avoid destroying reader confidence in the blogger.

I remember being approached a few years back to promote an enterprise software product by the marketing firm (“we have a small budget to spend on marketing, so we’re looking at blogging to promote our product”). I politely refused because I knew nothing about it and would be polluting the things I wanted to talk about with ad postings indistinguishable from the normal content. Something akin to a technique I’ve noticed on sporting and radio broadcasts where the hosts of the program segue headlong into pimping a product.

So if someone was going to go down the path of pay per post: they’d better clearly disclose that that’s what they’re doing.  Otherwise they’re burning credibility for dollars.

The spam equivalence

People don’t want to be tricked into receiving ad content for the same reason they dislike spam. Spam is advertising trying to sneak into your brain via donning the clothing of meaningful content in your inbox for those people too silly to get a gmail address. One could argue that all advertising is this really, but the majority of advertising is forced to play by the rules: ads on tv are generally fairly easy to separate from shows, ads in magazines are forced to be different enough from content (e.g. the pretend article ones have a notice along the top) and web ads are generally any element on the page that’s macromedia flash animations of monkeys or anything poker related.

Polluting the social networking sphere is most definitely on the minds of advertisers. When the pollution is done through content creators themselves (rather than banner ads) they know very well that it becomes harder to tune out. So to be fair to readers/viewers the best idea would be to ensure that a blurring of the normal and advertising content does not occur.

The TV show in question: review

Now onto “Lie to me” the TV show. Disclaimer: I didn’t receive payment for this blog although I’d very much like to.

It’s produced by Fox to round out their offerings with a fictional show about lies. This is to go nicely with that prick Bill O’Reilly’s show (which if you haven’t seen it is pretty much non stop lies and bullshit insane bullying but thankfully occasionally cops a spanking).

I think it’s an interesting show, good set of actors and original spin on the “detective” genre. Unlike other attempts at “incredibly insightful detective” series this one doesn’t stoop immediately to “complete and utter bullshit” like say ones involving psychic powers, number crunching, talking to ghosts etc etc and appears based on something real from law enforcement.

The story is based around a lead guy (Tim Roth as Dr Cal Lightman) who is a world famous facial and body expressions/microexpression reading ninja who naturally trained deep in the jungles of Indonesia/deserts of Morocco before some sort of colossal cock up resulting in his fall from grace at a government agency (allowing him to start a very expensive consultancy firm doing more of the readings that presumably lead to the big mess in the first place). These microexpressions are involuntary movements of various muscles in the face or other body language. Think a cheese lite version of David coruso (sans sunglasses) meets House with a tiny dash of Californication (the ever so mature father daughter relationship).

Some things they do well in the series so far:

• They pour scorn on lie detectors which appear useless
• they emphasise the notion that different people have different types of cues to pick up on for lies
• they show off some technology to do voice stress analysis (from my experience: insurance companies are starting to integrate this into their call centres)
• they’ve obviously spent a lot of time getting the actors to work on their expressions
• Not too much “Pan right and pull back. Stop. Enhance 34 to 46″ video gimmickry (bonus points for anyone who knows where that is from?)

On the idea of microexpressions, try a test here to see how you go: http://www.cio.com/article/facial-expressions-test. There’s something similar that pops up in the series in the first or second episode. There’s a healthy spattering of footage of politicians and celebrities lying (according to the microexpressions anyhow). I’ve watched a documentary on these microexpressions in the past (again picking on politicians: in particular Bill Clinton) and it seemed consistant with what I remember of that.

Anyhow, it’s a series I’ll watch more of and I didn’t get paid to say anything good about it. Although if anyone wants to send me money now that I’ve plugged the show, by all means.