Zeitgeist: The Movie Thread

Zeitgeistmovie.com

I'm curious what you guys think about this.

This goes along with many of my previous beliefs. Being a long time septic of governmental interests and somewhat of a socialist. Not to mention a dabbler in the psychedelic world. This isn't just some crazy anarchist plot I latched on to after watching a indie documentary on the internet (I'd rather the discussion stayed more philosophical rather than political please).

My take on the films:

First film:

• Part one:

I don't feel like comparing Jesus to other pagan gods proves much of anything about, quite frankly, anything at all. I do agree with their opinions of people exploiting religion to pray on the weak and make profits, but there conclusions go a little to far with it. I think we need to look at religion from a much more spiritual stand point and make declarations of love instead of constant condemnations at the whim of loose bible interpretations. I don't have much of an option on this part. Thus far I was not very impressed.

• Part two:

No one person knows exactly what happened on 9/11. People took advantage of a confusing, awkward, and contempt ridden situation for personal gain. Those people cannot and never will be identified fully. Those people were not one collective group working together. There were no bombs in the building (you can't tell me we know enough about physics to know beforehand exactly what would happen when a massive airplane flew into a large building). There are a number of point by point debunking of that theory around as well.

• Part three:

This is where it gets hairy. I've been looking into the hidden agenda's behind corporate America for quite sometime and I don't like them one bit. CEO's hate you. All of them. They want your money and that's it. The "American dream" is absolute bullshit. To make make money you must exploit someone else. The system is broken.

Film two:

This one felt like and extension to the third part of the first one. My feelings on the issue can be summed with one simple concept. Open-source society. No money ever again. Wage slavery and greed are holding people back from what postmodernists, transhumanists, and the like have been dreaming of for years. I don't know how the new humanity should be structured beyond that point and people far smarter than you or I would hopefully handle that. All I know is that money is a fake worthless commodity and is making people good people turn into assholes who's only goal in life is to buy more than the guy across the street. Fuck that. That's not real. That's not natural. We need to throw away the capitalist agenda that has shamelessly raped the conman man since the beginning of recorded history.

How do you feel fellow cyberpunks?

well...

Part One

Felt it kinda cleared up a lot, and made a lot of sense. I dont really have much of a say considering im aetheist and have never liked religions, especially when someone tried to get me to convert to christianity. flipped to a random page in this "starter" bible, and the first thing i see is something about jews being evil. nuff said.

Part Two

The part about JFK really stuck. Makes me wonder just how stupid a government can thinks its citizens are. After hearing on the news in recent years about how bush wanted Canada to join the U.S. in a one country deal, I dont doubt that all the theories "could" be true.

Part Three

Agreed. The problem with that statement is that you can make a lot of money just working, not exploiting someone else. Those in a well paying trade can make a lot of money and put them selves in a well off position. How well off do you need to be? Anyways, that's the way of life in most jobs. If you dont have a trade skill of some sort, your screwed. I, being an industrial mechanic, get to do many different jobs each day with the one or two routine jobs. I get paid more than the production guys on our line even though I'm a first year apprentice, i get legal hours, no bullshit contract like the production guys get. Better yet, each year is a couple dollar raise till my fourth year. With my full ticket i can make 25 - 45 bucks an hour if i wish to move to a better paying job. Get sponsered by a company, go to school, and get into a trade cause it is well worth it. At least your getting good pay for being exploited.

Second Movie

Never bothered watching.

I thought the first part of the first movie did a good job explaining why and where the ideas and belief structure of modern (western) religion. Though it seemed a little out of place at first, I found many of the relations between faiths interesting along with the origins of some of the mythic tales of the bible.

As for part two, movie one, indeed we do know enough about physics to determine something like that. These towers were designed to absorb the impact of such a collision, infact I do believe multiple impacts, not that I imagine all designs to be perfect but the engineers do know the kinds of forces that are or could be incurred. Even if the tower had collapsed from just the impact and fires, where did the columns go? There seems to be no legitimate way to explain their destruction (the shot of the seemingly "cut" beam from the tower wreckage seems pretty damning). There are many other good points listed in the movie but the last one I will metion is the rate at which the floors collapsed seems unimaginable if the top floors are collapsing into each preceeding floor the time factor does not seem right, how many floors per second collapsed (like ten)? I think it goes a long way, and does a good job, of pointing out the many flaws of the proposed story.

Part three is almost unbelievable, a global multi-generational conspiracy to unite and micro chip the worlds population to steal all wealth and to gain total control. The amount of trickery that has whisped by the eyes of the average american is astounding. I had never even heard of this North American Union until this movie and though I imagine that a world united is probably what will happen in any event, point being who is in control is the matter at hand. The concept of the central bank was also new to me and also unbelievable, how can a monetary system be in debt from the first dollar it puts out? How could americans let the federal reserve be created in the first place. Some of the quotes from this section are awesome, it seems from some quotes that early prominent americans knew quite well what corruption and power could do and what would happen if decent, responsible men were cut from places of high authority.

The thing I liked about movie two was the Venus project, I would love to see this in my lifetime. A fully automated life with all your needs taken care of by machine so you could live your life, travel, learn, recreate - whatever you want. The amount that could be achieved in a lifetime is enormous, and the human race could advance at unprescedented rates. The saddest part is that we could be there already, if not for the greed of some and the inaction of others. I can imagine a day when every house has solar panals and every city has some wind turbines and excess household electricity can be funneled into industry.

Ultimately I believe the point of both movies is to make you aware of all these crazy things that are going on around us and to hopefully provide a spark of "NO, I won't take it anymore!!". They are quite well done and people who would traditionally scoff at such ideas in passing have remarked how compelling the purported evidence is as taken from the films. It would be interesting to find out if all of this information is accurate. It's hard for people to believe that people would do things of this nature to one another, a government wouldn't let a few thousand people die horrific deaths to promote corporate profits for a few deacades, would they?

chris80502 wrote: The concept of the central bank was also new to me and also unbelievable, how can a monetary system be in debt from the first dollar it puts out? How could americans let the federal reserve be created in the first place.

Read 'Rule By Secrecy', a book by Jim Marrs, it covers the origins of all thist sort of stuff in an extremely accessible format, explaining how they were able to evolve in the ways they have.

chris80502 wrote: How could americans let the federal reserve be created in the first place.

you make it sound like the general public have a choice

Edited by: Koroshiya_Ichi

Ok, now I finally got to watch Zeitgeist. I didn't ever want to watch it, because a friend keeps telling me about it and it sounds wild as my own theories. If you ask me, religion is just a fiction ancient medicine-men invented, trying to explain their experiments with fungi and whatnot. After all, the early humans had to put anything up their snooze to see, if it passed as norishment. Alcohol doesn't make you hallucinate, but there are hell lot of herbs out there, which do. And a lot of them were always used in religious ceremonies, including incense used in Catholic Churches. We are a drug culture and god is a drug.

As for the corporate spirit - yeah - I have experienced some of this myself. While my boss is in India now, trying to find his spiritual self the majority of his workers is either ill, or in agony from their working conditions. We have tripled our output in five years without getting more money or assistance. 'The company is making huge profits on the back of their employees and every day is like a Marathon.
We can't take it any more and I complained about the boss, as I resigned my job at the end of the year. Incredibly enough he pointed out that he is following the governments' guidelines on the case. To him we are all just "general workforce" which can be replaced anytime, anyday. Even I , with my specialist department of product development didn't qualify for anything but "general". Which also meant I had to help out in production, when it became necessary.
There is no rule saying at what pace you have to keep you workers. Your just told when they should have a break. We are always running that's why we call it the Marathon. You have a bad conscience when you stop to say hello to someone, because there is always someone else and some work waiting for you. On the long run this system is catastrophic, because it sucks up fresh people from the employment market and spits out frustrated individuals, who got a bad impression of working for someone else and ultimately for nothing.
This kind of menace is typical development of misguided capitalism. A boss, who is never at work and if he's around shouts at everyone. And if he doesn't shout that's maybe because of his guru's wise words from India. The thing is that this man actually thinks he is a good person. He thinks it must be fun to work in his factory, because he likes his factory so much. He only likes sitting in the office and giving guided tours, though. It's like a back-development into a bad little kid, saying: "this is mine, I won't give you anything!"
So yes, work can turn you into a mean old man and you may still think of yourself in high regards. The problem with capitalism and American forged Puritanism is that success is everthing to how well respected a person is in real-life. I have seen only the bad, the evil or the ugly drive expensive cars and wear ridiculous status symbols. Yet I don't believe there was ever a time when the better ideals of humanity ruled the world. You can try to make a change for yourself, but the world will not easily let you.

Edited by: SinKing

Jiffy_No0b wrote: ... People took advantage of a confusing, awkward, and contempt ridden situation for personal gain. Those people cannot and never will be identified fully...

I can name a few ... micheal moore, lee greenwood, the people who made the "never forget" stuff and the politicians who used the country's blind anger as an excuse to invade iraq.

The Federal bank system is a complete failure ... if i was president, i would probably take back the reserve one night and then the next morning id have a presidential address explaining what happened ...

the more control you give to a person the more they will abuse it ... thats just the way it is really ... and the centralized banking system is just a group of people that were given the power to munipulate the economy ...

Edited by: Assaultman67

SinKing wrote: If you ask me, religion is just a fiction ancient medicine-men invented, trying to explain their experiments with fungi and whatnot. After all, the early humans had to put anything up their snooze to see, if it passed as norishment. Alcohol doesn't make you hallucinate, but there are hell lot of herbs out there, which do. And a lot of them were always used in religious ceremonies, including incense used in Catholic Churches. We are a drug culture and god is a drug.

That certainly is not a bad thing.

Suggested research on that topic:

• Terence McKenna - Some people think he's a wacko, because of the timewave zero theory mostly, but I think he's one of the most important people of the 20th century.
• Timothy Leary - His reputation speaks for itself.
• Albert Hofmann - The late, the great, father of LSD.
• Bill Hicks - An amazing comedian and social critic. He's quoted a number of times in Zeitgeist.
• Aldous Huxley - A huge influence of the beat and hippie movements. Great commentator on society.

Erowid.org All of those people are pretty awesome in my book.

That whole website is quite wonderful actually.

With that let's stray away from the drug topic.

Edited by: Jyffeh

There was a review of this.
Where they checked up on his "facts" most of which where wrong mainly about Jesus

TKAzA wrote: There was a review of this.
Where they checked up on his "facts" most of which where wrong mainly about Jesus

Like I said. That section wasn't important to me anyway.

Jiffy_No0b wrote:

TKAzA wrote: There was a review of this.
Where they checked up on his "facts" most of which where wrong mainly about Jesus

Like I said. That section wasn't important to me anyway.

Oh sorry... wasnt are you didn't care.

The one thing the second Zeitgeist film made me understand is that money doesn't exist as we understand it. Its value is made out of thin air and there is nothing to back up the capital we have. The combination of interest and loan is always greater than the loans given out by the government, thus forcing us to create more money out of thin air, more interest ensues, more debt and inflation are the consequences.
There is no end to this paradoxical situation, except a re-evaluation of money, which eventually happens after some ultimate kind of catastrophe. So instead of working towards peace and for a world in balance, the only purpose of our existence in the system is to fire-start its self-destruct mechanism. There is no way we can break free from a set of terminally ill rules, which govern the creation and diversion of money, everywhere. Out of every dollar we posess 90 cents can be produced on top of that out of thin air. Every coin you own is owned by someone else, who owes it to someone else.
Everything we own belongs to the banks, who force us to trade work for money, which is effectively produced from the bank's reserves, where the 90% of thin air are stored. The bank doesn't give us anything but the impression of an existing 'something', which - in reality - doesn't exist and therefor has no value. We are dealing with a 90% fictional currency, which is constantly loosing value...

EDIT>> ...actually it's a 100% fictional currency, since even the first order to create the original deposit is arbitrary.

Edited by: SinKing

TKAzA wrote: Oh sorry... wasnt are you didn't care.

wat.

Basically what sinking said is what sucks about the system ...

but, there is a way out ... if a second currency was established ... it couldn't be legally called a currency since it is actually illegal to make competing currencies in the united states ... but there is nothing against "coupons" or "stocks" in the US

a second currency could be established if some company like kitco whom has large reserves of gold were to print out coupons redeemable for physical gold ... this way there is an actual backing to the coupon ... a backing that isn't as sensitive to economic situations ... these coupons could be exchanged back into gold or the current value of gold ...

Then they need to go and contact large stores like walmart to accept these coupons in exchange for items ...

since the economy is taking a turn for the worse, backing your money with gold or some other precious material causes an edge against inflation ... so people and stores will buy into it ...

its basically like making a stock system for gold tradeable for items ...

Hah, you are talking about the "Gold Standard", which has never been 100% real, since all governments at any time had their "Credit Money". The thing governments realised soon enough was that never enough people would come together and trade in their Credit Money for real value, e.g. gold. So governments always printed a great lot of those, or coined worthless metal into some monetary value.
First of all - there is not enough gold (or too much money to back up that system). Secondly, economic expansion would much depend on the gold reserves and you could easily manipulate the currencys value (on cost of the citizens), by causing a shortcoming of gold; this is all theoretically, of course, because gold is not a valuta for more than hundred years. People you'd go to, trying to pay with a gold coin, would probably laugh at you. However - there are more than enough materials, like Platinum, which could also be coined into money of the same value its material posesses.
This doesn't beat the problemin any way, though. The problem I had with the entire system is that it consequently produces more interest than it can cover by existing bonds, forcing (us) the government to print new money all the time. If ever there is a safeway into doom and inflation that's the way to go! We are working for nothing, worse - we work against a system, which wants to fail in it's ultimate ending. I'm angry about our monetary system, not because money has no worth, but because we keep declining the worth of everything - worldwide - the longer we keep this system up. Right now we only diminish the values of goods, but if you look closesly you see that we have already de-valued the only currency humans can pay with: workpower. Our workpower is worth less every day, due to a system, which forces us to strip off our very last ethical objections, and to compete with one another for truly worthless money.
Up to now I only thought money was worthless in a idealistic, or romantic understanding. After reading more about banking and money-transfers I came to understand that money truly has no value and is nothing more than a jurisdictative Predicament, an agreement of states and lawyers and banks to keep the world in movment, but without giving it any purpose or longevity. It's such a ridiculously simple and misguided system behind all of this that you can't believe anyone installed it without exactly knowing that it would serve no purpose, except making banks more powerful than states...for a while.

Edited by: SinKing

SinKing wrote: Hah, you are talking about the "Gold Standard" ...

Maybe ... but it would be illegal to call it a currency ...

You just said that money has no worth, the only way i could think of fixing that problem is if money was backed by a/an resource(s) ... something constant, like gold, platinum, silver, copper, etc ...

Although as you said it would be easy to manipulate the market by causing a shortcoming or excess amount of gold, its still a hell of a lot harder than just entering a number into a computer somewhere ... I used gold as an example because it is a material that has no other value assigned to it other than its purity and weight, it is fairly condensed for its value, and even though it devalueates gradually in value (due to mining more gold etc) it will still have some value ...

We may one day wake up and find out that everyone has nothing but the objects they own ...

Spain can vouch for the problem with the gold standard. Upon finding the new world they stole so much gold that their inflation sky rocketed.

It makes more sense IMO to dump "money" all together.

Jiffy_No0b wrote: ... It makes more sense IMO to dump "money" all together.

For what? a trading system?

Assaultman67 wrote:

Jiffy_No0b wrote: ... It makes more sense IMO to dump "money" all together.

For what? a trading system?

No. Open source everything.

I have often been told that we live in post-industrial times...in the Age of Information. Instead, I find, we live in the Age of Banking. I don't have a problem with money and trading goods for it, but backbone to our monetary system is an inherent devaluation of money; and as long as the majority thinks, money is a worthy goal to live and work for, they/we are basically fighting each other on a social level, competing about ressources, which are worth less any year. This forces each individual to do more and more and more, for always getting less. There is an inbuild lack of capital, which forces us to do the dirtwork, no matter, if we like it or not.
Sooner or later this system affects everyone and where there is no real value, how should a society develop a sense for a value system? The natural outcome of our understanding of money is a less humane society than the one I was raised to believe in. Virtues will be lost and ideals will be perverted just to keep a one-sided system running, which forces its own breakdown.
Humanity isn't bad at all, otherwise we would be fighting each other over nothing in the streets, each morning and everyday. I believe no one raises their child to have murderous thoughts or to become a criminal. Yet, we are raised to believe in a currency, which devaluates itself every minute and which forces us to further push that devaluation into nothingness, with no goal at hand at all.

Edited by: SinKing

Jiffy_No0b wrote:

Assaultman67 wrote:

Jiffy_No0b wrote: ... It makes more sense IMO to dump "money" all together.

For what? a trading system?

No. Open source everything.

Too idealistic ... It may work for the uncorrupted internet and its files (no real companies doing business on the net), but for a limited number of actual items?

(i really want to ramble on about why the internet could be the most important social invention mankind has ever created and why it will most likely be the key to global peace and prosperity but thats off topic )

I can only imagine a system like that would work if the status symbol of "the more you own and the less work you have to do to earn it, the more important you are in society" ideal was inverted somehow into ... "The less you own, and the more you produce"

But then the real problem is how do you topple the current system of currency and ideals and successfully replace them? ...

Revolutionary War lol.... Well how you think we ended up in this mess in the first place?

well ... talking about a revolutionary war is treason O_O ...

... even though Thomas Jefferson himself, one of the founding forefathers stated:

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

I wonder, if I could become debt free by printing my own money

Might even start my own army and become a pretty good tyrant on the long run. Better than those we have today and who claim to be democratic in fashion. The state is our true enemy and when the state becomes corrupt and misguided it is the duty of any citizen and patriot to fight those forces protecting it and rip out the decay.

I have knowledge of a secret underground army called "Chaos Knights", who plan to take out Germany's main banks by overflooding the Towns of Hamburg and Frankfurt. It's pretty much doable and they would be uninhabitble for a while, leaving ample time to destroy these banks and plunder their vaults.
If I don't report back here and you hear reports of terroristic incidents in germany, that would be about us. For I have joined the group and live in a cavern under the city today. I had to leave the tunnels and seek shelter in a warmer place. Waiting for the winter to leave, so we can blow up the dams and let the water in...
SinKing - out -

pfft lol.. needs moar TinFoil Sin.

I was merely fictionalising the Zeitgeist "facts" into action.
Didn't they do that in Fight Club? Blow up all the banks ?