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What documentary are you watching?
Shoshin1
Sentient BeingOceania Veteran
WARNING GRAPHIC SCENES
The War You Don't See: Secrets and Lies in the Mainstream Media (2010)
The War You Don't See is a powerful and timely investigation into the media's role in war, tracing the history of embedded; and independent reporting from the carnage of World War One to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the current war in Afghanistan and disaster in Iraq.
As weapons and propaganda become even more sophisticated, the nature of war is developing into an electronic battlefield in which journalists play a key role, and civilians are the victims.
But who is the real enemy?
"Never believe anything until it is officially denied"
~Francis Claud Cockburn~
What documentary have you been watching ?
1
Comments
I particularly enjoyed this short docu about sunrise at Varanasi, the holiest city of the Hindus. It gives a short portrait of a sadhu who bathes in the early morning, Baba Shiva Das.
I visited Varanasi back in the early 80s when travelling overland to Europe from Australia...I remember seeing bodies floating in the Ganges, India's a real fascinating place to travel around....
Cool! I’ve been to India a few times, as a child and later as an adult, but I’ve never been to Varanasi. I agree with you, India is fascinating, but I’m not sure if I’d go back, I have gotten too used to tiled western bathrooms and toilet paper…
When travelling around India on a shoestring(staying in cheap budget accommodation eg $1 or $2 a night, guest houses ) when we wanted a bit of luxury, we would just walk into a posh hotel and use their bathrooms, we were never challenged.
I must admit, the posh hotels in India are very nice. I remember going to the Blue Diamond in Poona once to partake of their all-you-can-eat buffet lunch, I don’t remember how much it cost but it was very fancy and delicious Indian food.
India's an interesting place..
After travelling around for two and half months, Bangladesh, Nepal and India, (spending most of the time in India) we were happy to be leaving , but then after a while we started to miss the unique Indian experience. India seems to have that effect on you...
and now back to the documentaries...
This is just a short piece that I loved… since we seem to be on Extreme Sports in the Word Association Game… sometimes I feel I’m missing out by not participating, but honestly I don’t think I have the body fitness to do it at age 52.
Wow what an adrenaline rush...At first the apprehension of what if, and then the rush of adrenaline at take off... It reminds me a bit of when I have lucid dreams of flying..
And I’ve got to put in the obligatory mention to my favourite docu, Crazywise. It’s a wonderful tale of wisdom about mental health, tracking the lives of two young people, and showing how this relates to shamanic traditions and psychiatric traditions.
Watch it here: https://centrumpuur.nl/crazy-wise/ (English with Dutch subtitles, scroll to the bottom)
The password: CWDUTCH (in all caps)
Here is the trailer, if you want to watch that first…
And a TEDx talk by the creator, Phil Borges
I came across this, a half-hour documentary on the life of Thich Nhat Hanh with a lot of historical context. The end I found particularly touching. Hope you will enjoy it!
And I will be watching this, when it comes out Oct 16.
I had heard about the Liberty attack, but never in such detail... until now...
All I can say is wow..
Sacrificing Liberty
However the last part which (I'm now watching) starts to sound a bit conspiracy theoryish, which I feel spoils it a bit...
I enjoyed this short film… beautiful, and very meditative
In fact this whole channel seems to be films like that! Great find.
Another one from the same series… what beautiful people.
Well theoretically I watched this...
Kurzegesagt has such an skillful way of presenting existential problems in such a positive and hopeful way.
Just the intro to this sends shivers up my spine… the launch of a Saturn V rocket on the way to the Moon, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa… heroic figures opening the interview series called Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. Wonderful that it’s on YouTube. This is the first of six hour-long parts. Well worth watching!
Yes indeed, and here he is saying something that I worked out as well, that most people carry in their heads a time horizon for the human race of just a generation or so before “it all goes bang”, but that that in fact isn’t likely. What is more likely is that the human race will exist in some form for many thousands more years as we continue to solve the problems of an Earth co-created by Nature and by human beings.
There's an idea in ethics that I hear the "founder" of effective altruism Will MacAskill talk about. That we should take the well being of future humans into account when we make our ethical and policy decisions.
https://www.williammacaskill.com/longtermism#:~:text=Second, there could be very,on its very first page.
Funny that you should post about this docu, @lobster, because I was going to as well. Some friends in the UK had alerted me after it was shown on ITV last night, and I have read about it in The Guardian because it is a film about my childhood. I was in some of those communes when I was a young teen, between the ages of 11 and 13, and while I wasn’t abused, my heart goes out to those who were and were there with me.
I’m pretty sure Osho knew nothing about it, he spoke out on a number of occasions against the child abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. It turns out he wasn’t far-sighted enough to see what kind of people would be attracted to a commune featuring ‘free sex’, or to take account of that when he said “all the adults together will take responsibility for raising the kids”.
My own experience was that there were some adults at the Ranch who were “too friendly”, I found it suspicious and steered clear of them. But I’ve heard from friends about others who were less smart or cautious, and got taken advantage of, boys as well as girls.
I am certain you are wrong.
Pedophiles, predators, self entitled parents, enablers, El Papa Popes, Dali lama's etc are adults AND choose their ‘priorities’ and blind eyes.
Do we protect:
…who do not always have the capacity to choose their abusers?
We are all hypocrites when it comes to our capacities, predilections and choices.
No one is an exception. Apart from?
This is a post by a lobster hypocrite
You are of course free to supply proof, if you have any. Due to Sheela’s bugging of Osho’s rooms on the Ranch, many thousands of hours of audio tapes are with the FBI, and they were never able to link him with any of the crimes committed. That is a matter of record.
Yep @Jeroen, Sheela did it.
His closest disciple. Blame someone else. Preferably a woman.
Watch the documentary and find any proof a normal person needs.
Do you feel people who support Bhagwan and his continuing communes are incapable of lying, exposure and criminality?
I am not your deprogrammer incidentally. Here you go though...
https://www.oregonlive.com/rajneesh/2011/04/part_one_it_was_worse_than_we.html
I’m not in need of a deprogrammer, but thanks for thinking of me. From all the hours of discourses I’ve listened to, I have a pretty sound idea of who Bhagwan was, and he wasn’t a pedophile. And yes, a lot of the crimes on the Ranch did originate with Sheela and her gang of cronies. A lot of the worst abuse stories seem to originate from the English commune Medina, far away from the Ranch.
As far as the current commune leadership is concerned, I don’t really know that much about them, although I have heard they are not impeccable in their conduct, mostly around financial matters.
I was just reading this…
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/12/abuse-rajneesh-cult-children-communes
I never said Rajneesh was a pedophile.
He was aware and enabled a situation.
Rape, beating people up, armed resistance and … poisoning of local American townsfolk, sexualisation of children, child labour, hidden surveillance… The list goes on and on of non spiritual behaviour at the Oregon ranch AND worldwide, including UK.
'Not impeccable' is very much an understatement.
Investigation and witness after witness have been traumatised and tell that at the head of this snake was 'the self proclaimed Buddha' Rajneesh/Osho and his inner circle.
If you continue to be blind to these peoples testimony, then what do you call such deep complicity and enablement? I might call it being programmed. That you survived reasonably unscathed is no thanks to Bhagwan. No matter your feelings towards them.
You had a wonderful time. That's all OK then.
Lobster, you sound as if you’re getting caught up in the stories…
The evidence just doesn’t support it. I don’t know who you have been listening to, but I’ve never come across someone who was present at the time saying that Osho himself was “involved” in these things or even knew about them. His ideas of free love had some unfortunate consequences which he didn’t foresee, that’s not the same as being involved. His secretary and inner circle, yes, that I can see.
Jeroen said “ My own experience was that there were some adults at the Ranch who were “too friendly”, I found it suspicious and steered clear of them. But I’ve heard from friends about others who were less smart or cautious, and got taken advantage of, boys as well as girls.“
Damn. There’s a lot wrong with that paragraph…..Children being taken advantage of by adults were less smart or less cautious ..????. …... WOW, 💀
It’s true though. I was never abused mainly because whenever my internal alarm bell rang, I didn’t allow these people to approach. That’s not to say it was a universal experience but it did happen a few times.
As opposed to those who “allowed” them to approach?. You really don’t see anything wrong with what you’re saying? You’re victim blaming.
“Victim blaming can be defined as someone saying, implying, or treating a person who has experienced harmful or abusive behaviour (such as a survivor of sexual violence) like it was a result of something they did or said, instead of placing the responsibility where it belongs: on the person who harmed them
These responses often stem from a belief that there are specific things people can do to avoid being harmed, a comforting belief that increases the bias holder’s feeling of safety….”
https://www.sace.ca/learn/victim-blaming/#:~:text=Victim blaming can be defined,the person who harmed them.
I’m not blaming them, in the slightest. What I’m saying is that I got lucky, by being more cautious than they were. You are reading something into my statement that is not there.
You got lucky….By being more cautious than they were.
Cautious means being careful and avoiding risk or danger or problems. It can also mean being prudent and watchful, or exercising forethought.
Lucky means meeting with unforeseen success. Favorable chance.
I guess some kids have it and some don’t, huh?
I’m reading exactly what you’re writing. In fact, trying to get it down to minimum wordage to try to get you to understand how it’s landing. The words you’re choosing are your responsibility, not mine.
“Free love lead to unforeseen consequences “…and “ too friendly” annd “not impeccable “ are interesting choices for unethical, unfair and some horrific acts. Cmon now. Your use of soft and flowery language is for a reason. Think about it.
It’s fine, you can interpret it any way you like, you have my blessing.
I don’t need or want your blessing. That’s not what this exchange is about.
We can part ways here.
Meanwhile, back in documentary-land…
This has been released, will start watching it today!
For those who want to see the docu, it appears to be up on YouTube at the moment…
I've only started watching it. But I'm wondering what are your thoughts on the doc and the behaviors outlined in it?
I thought it was honest, not afraid of confrontation and a piece of the history that deserves to be told. There isn’t much sensationalism in it. Overall Osho’s books and discourses and Osho International Foundation tell a lot about the positive side of sannyas, let ‘Children of the Cult’ stand alongside ‘Wild, Wild Country’ in telling the other, darker side. And really brave by the women to come forward and tell their stories.
From my experience everything told in the docu is the straight-up truth. I knew that pretty much all the teenage girls had older men as boyfriends. That’s why they weren’t around to socialise with the boys, much to our chagrin. But there were very few social occasions where we came together. Still it was like being rejected by all your natural sexual partners, I found it really difficult and that still reverberates.
In a way, you could say that Osho built his commune on free sex, and the children paid the price. Osho encouraged the adults to free themselves, and the result of that was thirty-year-old men chasing thirteen-year-old girls who were deprived of the support of their family, with predictable results. The age of consent exists for a reason, it was ignored, and a lot of kids got hurt.
I thought the docu was well-structured, in that it introduces and talks about the way the communes operated, as well as the people. The longer I think about it, the worse it looks. I’ve been discussing it with friends and close family, my father can’t bear to look at the film, he had to stop after ten minutes he told me.
Personally, I’m beginning to realise that this whole abusive situation was deeply damaging for me as well, there was more stuff that I picked up than I at first thought. It led to long standing, as yet unresolved problems for me. There are things that I had thought I had made my peace with, which I’m now beginning to see originated from my life situation when I was 13.
For those people watching Ancient Apocalypse Season 2 on Netflix, this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience with Graham Hancock was filmed after it and provides an interesting discussion.
I'm a fairly regular listener to Michael Shermer, the founder and editor of Skeptic magazine. Quite a few years ago he appeared with Graham Hancock on Joe Rogan. I haven't watched or listened to his appearance but he talks about it from time to time. My take away from his comments is that Graham is by and large a conspiracist and a fabulist. To take one quote, "Do you know what you call alternative archaeology with evidence? Archaeology."
You can scroll down past the comments on the JRE appearance to get to his fleshed out 6 points in refutation of Hancock.
This sort of life is in me. Whenever I watch these climbing docs the feelings I had climbing things in a much smaller way when I was young rises in me. I feel the adrenaline in a good way. I feel like in an alternate timeline this could have been a life path for me, though not at such an elite level.
The thing is, I used to be very much in the mainstream science, but I find Graham quite interesting, because he presents evidence. In the Joe Rogan podcast that I quoted he says something along the lines of “archaeology is an interpretative discipline, and most mainstream archaeologists underestimate the intelligence of the general public and their ability to reason for themselves.” I think that’s absolutely right.
Take something like the Clovis First doctrine, which is the idea among mainstream archaeologists that humans first came to the America’s across the Bering Strait land bridge after the most recent Ice Age. In Ancient Apocalypse Season 2 Graham showed the White Sands footprints, which are convincingly dated to be 22,000 years old. That means there was an earlier presence of humans in the Americas, very simple.
Graham lets the evidence speak for itself, and it only takes one compelling site or artifact to upend the common narrative. That approach appeals to me.
I don't have the knowledge base to get into this and I don't really know what Graham's claims are. From what I understand mainstream archaeologists know about the White Sands footprints, but aren't as convinced about what that means as Graham is. In particular I'd say it takes way more than one compelling site to upend the common narrative. Lots of science gets overturned and starts with an initial surprising anomaly. It takes more than that though, its common, and I expect what Graham is largely doing, to start with a premise and only pick out the anomalies that fit that premise and question the established view.
I guess I used to eat this kind of stuff up too, I was big into crop circles for a while. I've got a good one about aliens being here and subtly guiding us using their advanced AI, with a couple "solid" lived experiences to back it up. Too many things have been shown to not be true that I believed in to not take a more skeptical approach. Speculation is fine and good, I'm just saying don't mistake with knowledge. There's an infinite list of things that are possible, how we go about sorting all that out is important.
I at least hope you take a few minutes and read Shermer's issues with him.
https://michaelshermer.com/sciam-columns/did-an-advanced-civilization-disappear-more-than-12000-years-ago/
But what Graham does is not speculation. He shows evidence, things that do not fit the mainstream view but are conveniently ignored. And I don’t agree that it needs a preponderance of evidence to change the narrative, if you have structures like Machu Pichu where the stonework is so precise it would be a challenge to match it with modern techniques, that’s all you need to provide solid proof that those ancient workmen had techniques we don’t know about.
I’m not actually into conspiracy theories, crop circles, the moon landings were fake, flat earther stuff. But I can think for myself, and discern where current mainstream thinking is missing a few tricks.
Happily the mainstream is now giving up on Clovis First, based on White Sands and other evidence. Change is possible!
I read the article, he seems to be quite impressed with his status as a skeptic and a critic. I quite resonated with the second comment which criticised the critic!
I do agree that Graham’s conclusions about an ancient civilisation may be a little premature, there may be other explanations as well.
It being sound proof that they had techniques we don't know about is mainstream, I've seen plenty of efforts to try to figure out how these ancient civilizations accomplished what they did. To then take it as evidence for a lost advanced civilization is where I think it looses ground.
Mainly I'm arguing against hubris. These fields have vast amounts of knowledge, watching a few documentaries and reading a few articles you miss mounds of foundational and contrary knowledge. Its a well known vulnerability of autodidacticissm
https://www.popmatters.com/the-dangers-of-autodidacticism-2495732019.html
Since we've started this discussion I've read a couple articles on White Sands. Its hardly the case that the mainstream is giving up on Clovis first. All I've seen is an openness to new possibilities, no one seemed to be jumping to conclusions.
Just an ad hominem. Also, I've looked back to see what you're referring to and I'm not seeing a criticism of a critic in a second comment. Which comment specifically?
That's it. Its an hypothesis, it isn't fact. There are lots of other explanations that unclear evidence can be tied to. Its about sorting out what's real and provable from what's speculative.
What I think is that what Hancock is doing is closer to the creationist than the scientist.
I think you’re mis-casting him, he is due some credit for gathering evidence that doesn’t fit mainstream theories. He has a theory about an ancient civilisation but he doesn’t harp endlessly about it, for the most part he just says, here are these artifacts and sites which seem to prove something else, not just currently accepted theory.
The thing is, mainstream theories can be wrong. They are often inherited from earlier thinkers, and when new evidence comes to light about the past, we sometimes have to re-evaluate those ideas. It’s a good process, and Graham is part of that, he prods the establishment into movement.
Could be, I'm not especially familiar with him in particular. Its more by reputation and this sort of thing in particular, in my mind I associate with things like Ancient Aliens or The Curse of Oak Island.
Also, admittedly I do have a bit of a bug up my butt about this way of thinking. I think culturally the world right now is having something of a knowledge problem (epistemic issue). There is a lot of conspiratorial and group thinking, as well as a loss of trust in expertise.
Yuval Noah Harari's latest book is on this problem. That information isn't the same as knowledge and with the advent of the internet and algorithms our sense making structures have been weakened. I have yet to read the book, but have listened to a few interviews/speeches of his. But its been an issue I've had an affinity towards for a while.
Not exactly a documentary but here is one of his interviews.
Popular science people like Neil DeGrasse Tyson get 100s of people who write to them every year saying they've figured out a flaw in physics or some science and ask them to review their work. This is way more common these days than the amateur astronomer who discovers a new comet, let alone upends the world of astrophysics. Movement isn't a good in and of itself, things can move in an incorrect or harmful direction. Discovery and creation are messy processes, lots of things get produced that don't end up sticking. The processes we've developed help reign in and harness the undertaking to limit unproductive and incorrect efforts.
Take an example I care about, the nature of consciousness. The philosopher David Chalmers coined the idea of the Hard Problem of Consciousness. That we don't have the first idea of how the physical matter of our brain produces something like conscious experience, they seem like two very different things. People like him are proposing a revolutionary idea about the nature of consciousness, he speculates that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe like gravity rather than something created through complexity. Julio Tononi is attempting to develop workable theories explaining how complexity might explain the difference between the consciousness present in a human vs the complexity present in a rock for example. They're proposing an explanation for the anomalous evidence of our conscious experience. I draw a distinction of them with someone like Deepak Chopra who doesn't speculate or wonder, he knows what consciousness and the universe are like. He has a set of beliefs about the way things are and all the "evidence" he sees fits into that model.