Bill Bishop, an independent internet analyst based in Beijing, said video-sharing sites hosting foreign reality shows may receive a boost in traffic, and suggested that authorities might seek to curb this.
It's partly because of cultural curiosity, but mostly because I daren't come home and tell my friends that I spent all my time napping and watching badly dubbed foreign reality TV.
"The concept of Toy Soldiers came to me out of this cycle of thought and it just seemed to fit perfectly with the situation on the ground as well as allowing for people in the west to have an emotional, physical and nostalgic response to a completely foreign reality, triggered by a familiar symbol of their own childhood and culture".
It seems strange as well that though "there is no possibility at all of its being carried out", the programme of the pleasure principle is not also, like religion, "foreign to reality".
Sigmund Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, says of religion, "The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life".
Looking back, it is apparent that the opening days of the Iraq war marked a seminal moment in American military power and foreign policy reality, but one that we have yet to discuss, to debate and to learn from as a nation.
But he paints a similar picture of how rampant arrogance, simplistic nostrums and disdain for foreign political realities doomed globalization.
Foreign-style reality television may be plumping television channels' revenues, but it is alarming India's government, consumer groups and even organizations that support business.
Critics of the Obama administration see Mr. Kerry's focus on the Middle East as an implicit acknowledgment that the White House's widely advertised "rebalancing" to Asia is premature, and perhaps even a wishful evasion of unwelcome foreign policy realities.
Across the political spectrum the Spanish press has been crying foul, with columnists and pundits griping that foreign snapshots misconstrue reality on the ground.
"They don't get out of bed in the morning thinking, 'Gosh, how can I make America's life better?' " With health care behind him, Mr. Obama has an opportunity to focus on translating his vision for foreign policy into reality.
