I received an e-mail from my mom with the subject [Fwd: Scary Stuff]. It was a link to the following video, a snippet from a documentary called Zeitgeist. It's been viewed 2.5 million times. You can watch the entire 2 hour movie for free at www.zeitgeistmovie.com.
It was a surprising link to receive from my mom, because it's basically about how the goverment is becoming more and more controlling of its people, and how we will eventually live under a single world goverment that no one will dare to question. Not necessary what you'd expect from a woman who's in the 32% of Americans that still approve of Bush's job as President.
There's a lot of stuff in this clip that can't really be proven (e.g. another 9/11 conspiracy), so take it with a grain of salt. However, I'm still posting it because I support any movement that encourages questioning the norm and thinking critically about the power of government over its people.
Hopefully Shane will leave an in-depth analysis in the comments since he keeps up with politics more than anyone else I know.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Movies: Zeitgeist
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3 comments:
Damn you, Ryan. You baited me into watching the whole 9 minute clip.
Some quick thoughts -
1) The narrator needs speech lessons and better recording equipment. The audio quality and the flow of the narration is distractingly bad.
2) This conspiracy theory suffers from the same problems as many other conspiracy theories - never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. If you frame things in term of game theory, incentives, and such, you can explain a large bulk of emergent societal behavior - that is, social phenomenon can occur with nobody in charge. Think of ant colonies with no single ant giving orders to other ants. Sure, there's a queen, but she's not telling anyone what to do - they just do it according to a very simple set of rules, and it leads to more complex behavior as a whole.
3) That being said, RFID, the Real ID Act, and related technologies are very real threats to our privacy. Whether RFIDs are on credit cards, passports, or anything else, you're putting your privacy and security in the hands of people who have not demonstrated competence in basic security. You know how TSA doesn't make you safe at the airport? Imagine a similarly inept bureaucracy in charge of protecting you from identity theft or unauthorized privacy intrusions. Similarly, Real ID makes it easy for a single corrupt state employee to access the federal database for malicious purposes. Right now you only have to trust one state with your information - imagine if you had a 50 link chain where the weakest link is the only one that matters.
Basically, yeah - you don't need to believe in conspiracies to be worried about trends. But it's also more productive to convince people that well-meaning systems have unintended consequences than to try to convince them that said systems are a way for the military-industrial complex and the corporations to enslave all of mankind. Then you just look like a batshit-crazy Ron Paul supporter.
Quick political note: Republicans (i.e. your mom) believe in less goverment interference. Democrats on the other hand want goverment to be able to help poor people and protect us from too powerful business. Your mom sent you this link because it's anto-democratric propaganda.
Morgan, I think that used to be true, but Republicans haven't been the party of small government for over a decade now. Now they're all about expanding federal power with their wiretapping and their secret prisons and their expansion of the military and acquisition of expensive military hardware and even going as far as to arresting and prosecuting cancer patients for growing their own marijuana with a (under state law at least) legal prescription from a doctor. The war on drugs and all that is the greatest threat to liberty in this United States, and the Republicans wholeheartedly support it. The days of small government are gone. So I'll go with my second choice - voting for people who believe they can do good things with government power, instead of the people who just help their friends using their political power.
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