[niki]

I am really inspired by this awesome, catalystic thread (thanks to the OP!) to create this new thread, and see what you all think about this:

Have any of you ever heard of The Zeitgeist Movement (TZM) ?
and watched the very recent widely-successful independent-thearetical worldwide release of their movie Zeitgeist: Moving Forward?
You can watch it for free. The movie/documentary is about 3 hours long, but I have to say that at the very least it's really worth it to listen to what all these group of scientists, thinkers, and many other expertises have to say about why our current world today is so bloody messed-up (ie: "there's something HUGELY terribly wrong happening now" feeling/instincts we all have), and their proposed solutions.

It does really open my eyes, and I'm now even joining the Movement (surprisingly this is a huge undergoing global, worldwide one, with many "local movements" in each part of the planet. the ball seems to start rolling!)
Seems to be a damn better solution than doing nothing at all under our current corrupted "System".

Here's the movie/documentary:

and for more detailed introductions, explanations on "what", "how-to", plans etc etc, you can just go to their official website here:
The Zeitgeist Movement

“History shows us that the people who end up changing the world – the great political, social, scientific, technological, artistic, even sports revolutionaries – are always nuts, until they are right, and then they are geniuses.” - John Eliot

 

[glisten]

I have watched the beginning before, but have never actually watched all three hours of it. It's extremely interesting, but it's just hard for me to sit still and watch something for that long. Maybe I'll break it up into segments and watch all of it eventually, because I do keep hearing how great it is.

 

[Ecky]

Thanks for the reminder, I had forgotten about the third movie coming out. I found the first two to be very thought-provoking.

 

[Seven]

I like that this part is less about conspiracy theories but focuses on the Venus project and human nature. It makes my blood boil when people say "oh it's just the way people are" to justify the crap that they do, so it was nice to see that it's really just a convenient cop out. It was a bit cheesy at times, but I mostly liked it. So much of the population is suffering, and for what, nothing.

 

[Aelthwyn]

I watched the first one, but wasn't aware of any more, so thanks! I agree this is very interesting, both sad and encouraging at the same time. I'll probably have to watch it in segments as mentioned, but I agree it's worth watching. It's encouraging to know that I'm not the only one saying there's a lot wrong with the world - and to see that people who are better about doing things are putting a lot more thought into it!

 

[sgman]

I don't know about the movie, since I haven't seen it, but the movement itself, The Zeitgeist Movement - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, I do not agree with, and to be honest, find a little nutty.

My biggest beef with it is it is too unclear about the solution. It wants to do away with capitalism, but the alternative it proposes appears to be a new take on communism. "Free access?" "Private property obsolete?" I see the same problem with it that communism encountered and failed to solve. Who's going to allocate? Who's going to keep these "allocators" in check, i.e. prevent corruption?

It says decision-making will be done away with, and instead replaced by completely rational machines. What is this - 1984? Who's going to program the machines? How would you program something to be "rational" when we ourselves are highly irrational beings?

Apparently they also have chapters in cities. Church of Scientology for the new century?

 

[gravitycantforget]

I don't know about the movie, since I haven't seen it, but the movement itself, The Zeitgeist Movement - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, I do not agree with, and to be honest, find a little nutty.

My biggest beef with it is it is too unclear about the solution. It wants to do away with capitalism, but the alternative it proposes appears to be a new take on communism. "Free access?" "Private property obsolete?" I see the same problem with it that communism encountered and failed to solve. Who's going to allocate? Who's going to keep these "allocators" in check, i.e. prevent corruption?

It says decision-making will be done away with, and instead replaced by completely rational machines. What is this - 1984? Who's going to program the machines? How would you program something to be "rational" when we ourselves are highly irrational beings?

Apparently they also have chapters in cities. Church of Scientology for the new century?

capitalism basically exists because of work...we need to disinvent work. Think that work has always been around ... think again. The move from hunter gatherers to fixed location agriculture started the modern concept of work - throw in the downscaling of bartering and the move to money you have modern life...probably with a little application and a lot of bravery NO ONE would have to work again - technology should be freeing us not making us slaves. We also need to move from economies based on scarcity to those based on abundance. Instead TPTB have us all scavenging around fighting for scraps...at the moment I would say capitalism is fucked in the head. Anything which leads people to think and consider alternatives IS a good thing

communism like many ideas CAN work in small environments

capitalism can work too...

what makes me laugh is people like Bill Gates getting all these billionaires to pledge giving away significant portions of money when they die...err...whats wrong with them doing it NOW?

 

[annabelle_lee]

I've only seen the first movie, and I really dug it. I should really take a peek at the other ones...

Some of the stuff I'm really not sure about... for instance, I don't know crap about the whole banking system thing. But religion? I definitely agreed with the movie saying how most major religions are basically all the same and how harmful they can be. And I do think 9/11 was an inside job.

Just my 2 bits.

 

[Listener]

I've seen all three movies. The most recent is the best, but they're all worth seeing.

The more I've thought about and researched the issues discussed in these movies, the more my own views have come to mirror those of the movie.

The monetary/market system essentially guarantees mass unemployment and eventual collapse. Either you can accept millions of people starving to death, or things have to change. There's no way around that.

I voted for Nader in 2004 and 2008, and briefly worked for the campaign in 2008. He's right that corporations have undue influence over the government and over people's lives. Corporations are not persons and do not have rights. But that's not enough.

Richard C Cook, and others, have developed various systems of a guaranteed income for all, regardless of employment, that does not involve taking money from others or causing inflation. This is better, but still leaves all sorts of problems.

I then began investigating anarchism, and found myself feeling most comfortable about the middle of the road with the Mutualists. Traditional concepts of ownership should not apply to some things, the most important being land. We already accept that air should not be for sale.

But I think only the Zeitgeist/Venus Project really gets to the heart of the matter. Money is the root of the problem. Governments, corporations, war, poverty, etc, to very great extent are the results of the money/market system.

There are a lot of political leaders and movements that I respect and have been important to me, but none that I've seen have really gone to the heart of the matter in the way Zeitgeist/Venus does.

 

[Ecky]

One small bone I have to pick with the movie is their implication of planned obsolescence in computer hardware. I accept that it might be practiced in other areas, but computers are more often discarded when they are no longer *wanted*, than when they break down. In areas of rapid development and improvement, I think there is little you can do about waste.

 

[sgman]

So I watched portions of the movies and from what I've seen, my initial impression of the movement has been confirmed. It is, in my view, conspiracy theory done well. Very good presentation, you've got the narrator with his gentle, unassuming tone of voice, and then the doom-doom-doom music in the background.

It selectively takes facts and uses them to support the point. For example, the bit about Roosevelt acting on behalf of the bankers in getting the US into WWII. The film says he did as much as possible to "anger Japan," such as making proclamations, cutting exports, etc. I find this to be deeply offensive. Japan was in a war of aggression against the rest of Asia, raping and killing its way toward its imperial ambitions, and here this film is boiling down Roosevelt's reaction to "provoking the Japanese" into attacking the US first, so that the US has a legitimate casus belli. Are we really that gullible? In 1941, Europe looked like it was about to fall under a fascist regime that formed a hierarchy based on race, hellbent on kicking out or wiping out the Jews simply for being Jews. Clearly, there were more pressing reasons for Roosevelt to become uncooperative with the Axis powers than "banking interests."

Another example is the Horus and Jesus comparison. I myself am agnostic and do not believe in Christianity. However, just from a preliminary google search for Horus, I cannot find the "facts" that the film gives to support its argument that Jesus is a total copy of Horus. Certainly, Christianity and Judaism were heavily influenced by other Middle Eastern religions, but this specific comparison is a simplification. No one pagan religion contributed that much to Christianity; it was influenced by a whole plethora of religions and mythologies.

capitalism basically exists because of work...we need to disinvent work. Think that work has always been around ... think again. The move from hunter gatherers to fixed location agriculture started the modern concept of work - throw in the downscaling of bartering and the move to money you have modern life...probably with a little application and a lot of bravery NO ONE would have to work again - technology should be freeing us not making us slaves. We also need to move from economies based on scarcity to those based on abundance. Instead TPTB have us all scavenging around fighting for scraps...at the moment I would say capitalism is fucked in the head. Anything which leads people to think and consider alternatives IS a good thing

I agree with you that capitalism is based on human labor. However, I don't think we have the technology yet to do away with human labor completely. I think in pointing out what's wrong with capitalism, and many of those are legitimate criticisms, we forget the benefits of it.

Agriculture has allowed for technological advancement by freeing up everybody from having to work for food. In hunter-gatherer societies, almost everyone have to be looking for food just to subsist. High-yield agriculture does away with this because it provides enough of a surplus for inventors, artists, and administrators, so that these people can do things other than growing food.

Economies of abundance cannot exist because there will always be limited resources. What we have to work with defines the systems we put into place to allocate said resources.

Capitalism, for all its faults, has allowed us to have a standard of living not experienced in pre-modern societies. TVs, internet, computers; without the system of mass production, these items would not be available to as many people.

 

[Ecky]

After a bit of thought, I feel I can grasp their beef with capitalism. In a world where the amount of human labor needed to process goods is shrinking, more and more power is put in those hands that own the raw materials. One possible extreme would be that eventually, everyone would serve the corporations, in return for providing basic material necessities, because the few in power in the corporations own the machines needed to process goods.The average worker would have little say in the distribution of wealth, leading to a sort of business aristocracy. The movie questions why raw materials and the fruits of labor of machines have to be owned by and channeled through a single point.

I can see the problem, but centralized planning and power will almost always tend to favor those who plan.

 

[LibertyPrime]

I come from a former communist country and yes it failed, it was horrid and definitely not the answer.

With that said we have capitalism now...it is failing, it is horrid and it is not the answer. People are leaving, they are starving, majority has huge bank loans and the state owes a tone of money to the IMF...we are borrowing more and more. I'm positive soon they will come for our oil and resources legally and not just illegally like now. (aka we sold energy really fucking cheap (below market price) to some unknown company last year). Obviously we have choice now and can buy mostly anything...problem is with 300 $ a month (this is awesome salary here) and prices as high as in the US...it is extremely limited existence.

If you look at it properly my country is actually being driven into debt so corporations can move in later and take the resources. The most valuable of them being cheap human labor , we will end up like the chinese...working for very little money just to survive, making goods that will be used by western Europe. Hell this is already happening, problem is we don't work cheap enough yet!

Humanity today is on it's way to self-destruction, that is what I concluded several years ago. A new idea will be needed soon....when I hear ppl talk on the bus about how things were better in communism....kinda scares me.

If you think life is awesome, come live and work a year in Romania, come see how it is. You will change your mind within months. The reality is that when you buy an IPhone... you don't consider that the phone was made by cheap Chinese labour...a person who stands on his legs for hours, working 10 hours a day or more 7 days a week for very little money just to feed his family. That person has no life...that is not living. Same is true for most things we use...

:happy: Gonna watch this and see what I understand from it. Thx Niki!

EDIT: XD ahahahah I just saw the movie say exactly what is happening in Romania right now! ^^ lol we are soo screwed here, i didn't even need to watch this to know that we are being set up to become cheap labour for corporations.

EDIT2: Ok, watched it fully. I'm just going to say that this is not some kind of fantasy conspiracy theory. I see it every day happening in Romania. We are on the verge of economical and social collapse.

At the beginning of every year they say the economy is getting better, then at the end of the year the numbers say something different and those in power apologise, then say it will be better next year. It has reached the point where they are taxing the pensions of the elderly. My grandmother got 2 pension cuts in 2010 and she needs medicine to stay alive that costs 3x or more her pension. If her kids would not support her...she would die.

The situation is clear as day in Romania, this is coming and people are already really upset. Same thing in Greece and in other countries in the region. We are poor and exploited, people will not take any more taxes, inflation and austerity measures. If things don't improve...I don't even want to think about it.

 

[Ethereal Warrior]

One small bone I have to pick with the movie is their implication of planned obsolescence in computer hardware. I accept that it might be practiced in other areas, but computers are more often discarded when they are no longer *wanted*, than when they break down. In areas of rapid development and improvement, I think there is little you can do about waste.

They did actually address that, they suggested a new method of creating hardware that would be "future-compatible" so to speak, that would be able to be upgraded easily without throwing away the original.
I've even seen examples of planned obsolescence in my own computing with video cards and motherboards. I got a video card (geforce 7600GS i think it was) and it was the last one released that was compatible with my current motherboard. I needed to buy a new motherboard to get a more powerful video card, because they changed the shape of the slot it fitted into.

Although with phones you can see that people are clearly throwing them away years before they actually stop working.

 

[gravitycantforget]

For example, the bit about Roosevelt acting on behalf of the bankers in getting the US into WWII. The film says he did as much as possible to "anger Japan," such as making proclamations, cutting exports, etc. I find this to be deeply offensive. Japan was in a war of aggression against the rest of Asia, raping and killing its way toward its imperial ambitions, and here this film is boiling down Roosevelt's reaction to "provoking the Japanese" into attacking the US first, so that the US has a legitimate casus belli. Are we really that gullible?

the truth always hurts...why should you find it offensive? in fact what has America got to do with Japan and Asia? I give you a clue...fuck all...and YES people ARE that gullible

 

[badzee28]

For example, the bit about Roosevelt acting on behalf of the bankers in getting the US into WWII. The film says he did as much as possible to "anger Japan," such as making proclamations, cutting exports, etc. I find this to be deeply offensive. Japan was in a war of aggression against the rest of Asia, raping and killing its way toward its imperial ambitions, and here this film is boiling down Roosevelt's reaction to "provoking the Japanese" into attacking the US first, so that the US has a legitimate casus belli. Are we really that gullible?

the truth always hurts...why should you find it offensive? in fact what has America got to do with Japan and Asia? I give you a clue...fuck all...and YES people ARE that gullible

So you're basically saying we should have played nice with them and gave them oil and supplies to fuel their war machine? That's a much more peaceful option. We shouldn't have fucked with them, we should have supplied them so they and the Nazi's could take over Europe and then breathe down our necks for the next decade. that makes so much more sense.

 

[Ecky]

They did actually address that, they suggested a new method of creating hardware that would be "future-compatible" so to speak, that would be able to be upgraded easily without throwing away the original.
I've even seen examples of planned obsolescence in my own computing with video cards and motherboards. I got a video card (geforce 7600GS i think it was) and it was the last one released that was compatible with my current motherboard. I needed to buy a new motherboard to get a more powerful video card, because they changed the shape of the slot it fitted into.

Although with phones you can see that people are clearly throwing them away years before they actually stop working.

You were unlucky in that your card was one of the last produced on an old, slower and less efficient interface. Not only did the shape of the slot change, but also the electrical signals. It's a serial bus rather than a parallel bus, which is faster and more efficient.

There are many good reasons for discontinuing a product. Using computers as an example, you might want to change your CPU socket so you don't have to keep updating drivers for older chipsets. At some point, the work required to keep older products compatible with newer technology outweighs the cost of a new product.

AMD dropped driver support for video cards older than the Radeon 9500 a few years back. These cards "work perfectly fine", but you can pick them up for 99 cents at a flea market, and they were costing developer hours in writing drivers for new operating systems. People threw a fit, but a replacement card could be had for <$15.

Newer products use smaller transistors which require less current to switch, saving electricity. I can think of cases where I've thrown out videocards simply because the difference in the power bill over a year was greater than the cost of a new card.

There are some cases where products lose usefulness, and you have no choice but to melt them down. But even then... sometimes the energy needed to reprocess a product is much greater than to make a new one...

Other examples:

It's more environmentally friendly AND cheaper to use paper towels instead of cloth towels, because of the water usage to clean cloth.

Recycled paper is more expensive than virgin paper, partly due to the chemical treatments needed to make it usable again.

Using an old car with a heavy frame will net lower gas mileage.


And, please let me know if you can find someone who wants my old phone, otherwise it's going in the recycle.

 

[sgman]

the truth always hurts...why should you find it offensive? in fact what has America got to do with Japan and Asia? I give you a clue...fuck all...and YES people ARE that gullible

I find it offensive to my intelligence. By "gullibility" I was referring to some of us accepting without question what the filmmaker presented as "facts" in his film. So yes, I think you proved my point beautifully.

 

[Blanco]

So I watched portions of the movies and from what I've seen, my initial impression of the movement has been confirmed. It is, in my view, conspiracy theory done well. Very good presentation, you've got the narrator with his gentle, unassuming tone of voice, and then the doom-doom-doom music in the background.

It selectively takes facts and uses them to support the point. For example, the bit about Roosevelt acting on behalf of the bankers in getting the US into WWII. The film says he did as much as possible to "anger Japan," such as making proclamations, cutting exports, etc. I find this to be deeply offensive. Japan was in a war of aggression against the rest of Asia, raping and killing its way toward its imperial ambitions, and here this film is boiling down Roosevelt's reaction to "provoking the Japanese" into attacking the US first, so that the US has a legitimate casus belli. Are we really that gullible? In 1941, Europe looked like it was about to fall under a fascist regime that formed a hierarchy based on race, hellbent on kicking out or wiping out the Jews simply for being Jews. Clearly, there were more pressing reasons for Roosevelt to become uncooperative with the Axis powers than "banking interests."

Another example is the Horus and Jesus comparison. I myself am agnostic and do not believe in Christianity. However, just from a preliminary google search for Horus, I cannot find the "facts" that the film gives to support its argument that Jesus is a total copy of Horus. Certainly, Christianity and Judaism were heavily influenced by other Middle Eastern religions, but this specific comparison is a simplification. No one pagan religion contributed that much to Christianity; it was influenced by a whole plethora of religions and mythologies.

I was just going to say just that. I haven't seen the third part but I'm generally suspicious of "documentaries" like these because they take half-truths, spin it, and present it to you as fact with snappy editing and spooky music.

And there are so many people who watch things and believe it instantly without questioning it. I don't know how many people I've encountered who've told me how Zeitgeist the movie changed their lives. But these people were the same people who followed status quo as sheep and now they follow zeitgeist as sheep.

Having said that, the movie does raise interesting points but it's to be taken with a grain of salt in my opinion.