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  • EADD Moderators: Pissed_and_messed | Shinji Ikari

Good Documentaries v. is that a doc?

^All good points - i am generally sceptical (or agnostic); but i'm also a bit sceptical of professional sceptics (like Randi), as they seem to have a big dollop of their own agenda. A bit like me not trusting dawkins to analyse religion for me for similar reasons (a topic i think we've discussed before).

I suppose it comes down to whether you believe there's anything to answer for 'conventional science' regarding psychic stuff/telepathy in general: any single example of any of that stuff not being explained by 'conventional' science would mean an awful lot of rethinking of theories, which is a big motivation to dismiss or not see it (consciously or otherwise). It's also a difficult subject because it's inherently not very susceptible to usual experimental methods (because there's often feelings involved, which overly reductionist/materialist science isn't very good at). Eg the phenomena of death apparitions (loved ones appearing to someone at the moment of death when they were miles away and the person couldn't have known about it by usual means) - there is a massive amount of 'anecdotal' evidence of this phenomena (especially from the time of WWI) - enough imo that science should have to deal with it; but because the evidence is anectdotal, science doesn't like it (i simplify...). I get their point about the nature of the evidence, but how much of this type of evidence does it need before it at least needs consideration.

i know i've moved the goalposts from mr flaky now, but once you entertain accpetance of one 'psychic' phenomena (i do personally know a couple of people who've had death apparitions), it makes you look at others in a different light (even mr flaky-bellend). Don't get me wrong, i would want to be in the 'science camp' in general, but think the reductionist approach could be blinded to certain things if it's not careful.

....

Anyway sorry for the off topic bollocks; Some excellent documentaries i've seen are scott noble's stuff on metanoia films. Excellent political/historical documentaries, sort of in the superficial style of zeitgeisty youtube doc, but actually coming from a more intelligent and coherent (imo) political angle (eg lots of interviews with chomsky and michael parenti among others) - bit long and 'boring' for some, but actually worth learning from imo (unlike the usual zeitegist style fare)
http://metanoia-films.org/films/

Another excellent one (though quite sad) i saw recently about palestine was Five Broken Cameras ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3K-mGWy9iUg here on youtube, but probably the sort of thing worth paying for) - all filmed by a resident of a palestinian border village (on five cameras) showing their harrasment by the IDF and settlers. Surprisingly it was shown on the usually staunchly israel-friendly BBC (BBC4 storyville).

Also, not really a doc, but for a daily dose of political left wing ranting about the british establishment, you can't go wrong with a bit of The Artist Taxi Driver (or Chunky Mark). Loads of 10 minute rants by him on youtube on various current topics (he does one everyday called the sucks o'cock news on the daily news). It's mainly just nice to hear someone else shouting what i do at the screen when i watch the news (one of my favourite is him talking about the queen: "she's got a fucking million pound hat mate", but he also has pretty interesting interviews with loads of people too. (he's a 'performance artist' and his famous stunts include eating a swan, a corgi and a fox (already dead) in protest at the queen/establishment; and he also rolled a plastic pig with his nose from parliament to downing street in protest at privatisation of the NHS)

Also, completely not a documentary: http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/en/ - these are some online 'comics' about different science/sociology/environmental subjects and are well worth a read. Especially Rat Park, which tells the story of how recreational drugs were tested on rats (i'm sure we've all read about drug research when they compare drugs saying 'this drug made rats take it 2.3 times more than cocaine' etc. - this is the story of how that research worked and how it was flawed - the other comics are fascinating too) (maybe i'm trying to make up for my apparent defending of uri bellend now ;)
 
I take the points in regards to psychic and paranormal phenomena being intrinsically difficult to fit into standard scientific methodologies. Much of the evidence is anecdotal and/or one-off by definition which is not compatible with the scientific method. I'm certainly not overly big on reductionism nor materialism - they work brilliantly for what they work brilliantly for but that is not necessarily all there is to work on. I'm quite open to ideas of there being aspects of existence which do not fit standard materialist views. I'm also deeply suspicious of supposed psychics using that as an excuse to pass of parlour tricks as paranormal events. In many cases claims are being made that absolutely could be investigated and replicated to scientific standards if they are what they say they are. Perhaps not the most stringent scientific standards but there are scales of evidence and I do think that a great mass of certain types of "lesser" evidence can build up to building a good case for there being something more going on that's just very hard - if not impossible - to pin down using traditional scientific approach.

Randi actually had a pretty good TV show back in the late 80s/early 90s or thereabouts doing just that. Taking claims where a person says they can do a thing and giving them a chance to do so with a perfectly reasonable test - essentially asking them to do their thing and giving reasonable leeway but not letting them decide the parameters themselves which is what tends to be the case with Uri and people of that ilk - they decide on what they want to be tested and how it should be tested for then (surprise surprise) they somehow manage to pass the test they set for themselves and use that as "proof" they've passed scientific scrutiny when is nothing of the sort. One example I recall involved a person who claimed to see auras. They agreed that a line-up of people would stand behind a barrier and that they would be able to see their auras as they are supposed to spread out beyond the area the barrier covered. As tended to be the case in all the people tested, they ended up getting exactly as many right as would be predicted by pure chance. Similar psychic phenomena that can easily be tested for include various forms of dowsing and remote viewing. These are claims that are very simple to verify and the person either gets it right or they don't. The shades of grey are perhaps where the debate can be had - perhaps the remotely viewed location wasn't precisely as drawn/described but there were elements that seemed to fit, maybe the dowser didn't hit the hidden treasure but there was an underground stream there nobody had known about. The fact everybody making these claims seems to score only pure chance in terms of absolute accuracy is perhaps telling, perhaps only telling that there is fuzziness around the edges of such phenomena. I'm quite open-minded as to which of those is nearer the truth.

Uri Geller is a flat-out conman though. If he's not he has no reason to have been caught out lying so many times. He's been caught on camera cheating many times and why do that if his powers are actual powers rather than conjuring tricks?

Interesting comment in regards to "the usually staunchly israel-friendly BBC". I've noticed that pretty much everybody who is staunchly pro-Israel sees the BBC as staunchly pro-Palestine/anti-Israel and the precise opposite is the case for those who are staunchly pro-Palestine/anti-Israel. To me this suggests the BBC actually has the balance just right cos both sides are convinced the BBC are against them. I happen to think it leans quite considerably to the pro-Palestinian viewpoint and am of that viewpoint myself so perhaps I am the exception proving the rule, perhaps they taught us how to analyse media outlets better than it seemed at the time at college, perhaps I'm talking rubbish on all counts.

Thanks for the linkies - couple of those look good to me. Aside from that bloody taxi driver geezer. I cannot stand the prick. Dan's a big fan too and used to post his vids around and about the place. To me he's a shouty obnoxious idiot. But I am averse to shouty opinionated people at times so perhaps just me. I don't find his rants illuminating, entertaining or even watchable myself but each to their own. Dan will be pleased cos I don't think he had many takers when he was posting those vids regularly - not even amongst the more left-leaning denizens of EADD like myself.
 
I think bbc (as well as most of the mainstream media) being pro israel is fairly easy to prove objectively (i'm pretty sure there's been such work done by the glasgow media group or someone similar counting up news items, which seems undeniable; as well as media lens or jonathan cook's work showing the same).
EDIT: Links - http://www.glasgowmediagroup.org/more-bad-news-from-israel
This one breaks down the numbers a bit: http://www.medialens.org/index.php?...=623:bad-news-from-the-bbc&catid=24&Itemid=68
One from Jonathan Cook: http://www.medialens.org/index.php?...ing-journalism&catid=24:alerts-2011&Itemid=68

Confirmation bias will make anyone see what they want to on top of that to be sure - similar to how the daily mail always bangs on about the bbc being left-wing biased, which seems unbelievable to me on modern performance (i suppose it depends what you mean by left wing - eg anyone not saying 'hang em and flog em' is a pinko commie scumbag) - the bbc was created as and has always been a tool of the establishment - it'll appear as 'left wing' as it needs to at any point though (this is shown right from the start by how it was used by the state against the general strike in the 20s). Again there is recent research pretty strongly suggestive of pro-neoliberal/city of london bias on the bbc in the last couple of years (in particular on the today program - a cardiff uni professor's research).
EDIT: Link - http://www.newstatesman.com/broadcast/2013/08/hard-evidence-how-biased-bbc

While the bbc has always been this way it's particularly bad at the moment imo - eg the non-reporting of the issues around nhs privitatisation over the last few years, while members of the board have ties to private healthcare; or it's general parroting of government propaganda as fact on any foreign story you can mention (and people talk about RT...).

//and i'll shut up about uri geller now (but in my defence, david bohm and arthur koestler don't strike me as particularly easy to fool)
 
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I've not done actual studies obviously but subjectively I've always found the BBC to be surprisingly balanced given it is pretty much a state broadcaster (not directly tied to government as such but enough links to suggest they need to stay on reasonably friendly terms otherwise they risk geting their charter cancelled). As with anything, it could be better, it could be a helluva lot worse. I don't trust any single news organisation - that seems a somewhat overly optimistic (or downright unrealistic) idea. Somebody somewhere has to make a choice over what to focus attention on and what approach to take with things. I think the Beeb does a decent job of showing a fair variety of viewpoints (meaning across the channels as a whole not specifically the news itself) and - as I mentioned before - the fact that both left and right bitch about it supposedly being biased towards the opposite of whatever political leanings they happen to have suggests it does do a decent job of not being overly biased in either direction. It's far from perfect, it's far better than most (my opinion and all that).

That aside, documentary I just watched was really quite interesting. Bit of a mish mash of things to do with electrical phenomena in the upper atmosphere. Some stuff at the end about the Northern Lights which is pretty but nothing new, but the stuff about Sprites (pretty jellyfish lightning that goes upwards) was really good. Some truly stunning footage - way better than I've seen before - and some detail on what they are and how they form. Last doc I saw about them pretty much just said they were pretty and nobody knew what they were so is good to see how things have moved on and how better optical technology has really helped with the study of such things. They are still mostly very pretty though.

At the Edge of Space
 
The Universe & Local Bodies

Series of short educational docs about Big Bang and Solar System stuff. Much more dense with facts than the average doc (albeit some are outdated and some are perhaps a bit questionable) and genuinely did learn a thing or two. The narrator's voice is annoying as fuck but the content is pretty good. Unusually for such things, it's actually the stuff about the Earth that's perhaps most interesting.
 
Vice doc


Having sex with donkeys is a part of growing up for some of the local boys on the northern coast of Colombia. We went to investigate this obscure tradition and foolishly said, "we'll believe it when we see it."

Donkey Sex: The Most Bizarre Tradition
 
King of Kongs

Classic good guy bad guy tale borne out of the paradoxically mundane and bizarre world of competitive arcade gaming. Brilliant film making.
 
We talked about that Black Fish thing - Did I mention Oxyana

after that I watched the film / doc called 'The Act of killing'

'The Act of killing' is really creepy / disturbing but well worth a watch (Death Squad story but via Moulin Rouge)
 
Interesting wacky series i stumbled on again the other day - crazy rulers of the world - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAMIvDmWbQs doc that the film the men who stare at goats is based on. Watched it when it was on C4 years ago, but interesing to rewatch; especially the First Earth Battalion bit (new age warriors in the us army! holding baby lambs!) and the Barney music - as a doc considerably flaky in places but entertaining (there's a rip off the telly on youtube and it's actually interesting watching the adverts from afew years ago - just how little of them i remember is weird).

Crisis of civilisation by Nafeez Ahmed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMgOTQ7D_lk - quite a good doc about climate change and other stuff - mostly (if not all) him speaking (based on his book), but interesting and informative (you might not like it if you don't think man made climate change might be a thing (i dunno maybe you will)

/hi rickolasnice - i wouldn't say the bbc is monolithically biased towards israel and so you do get things like that louis theroux doc (or 5 broken cameras i linked to above); but then you also get the fuss about that 'Exile: a Myth Unearthed' documentary (bbc pulled it under israeli/zionist pressure (though they did put it on later)).

But concentrating on the news coverage (the most important place to not have bias), imo totting up the numbers is instructive, as in the links above - if you can show me data that persuasive from the other side on the same subject i'll change my opinion. In many ways having a degree of plurality to views expressed in media but ensuring certain boundaries to debate are in place (as in Chomsky's Propganda Model of media control) is a better medium for effective propaganda than totalitarian information control, which everyone soon realises is bollocks.

To bring back on topic: Chomsky's Propaganda Model is described in this video - Manufacturing Consent https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQhEBCWMe44
- haven't watched it for years so can't remember much about the doc, but i think it's a bit long and soporific (as is lots of chomsky's stuff to me - his voice is just calming i find) - but well worth it to learn about the idea

Shambles, those space docs look cool - i'll be having a look at them. I just watched the old Cosmos (actually i skipped some of the solar system episodes) - is the new Cosmos still worth a look if i've recently watched the old one (or should i leave it for a while)?
 
rickolasnice said:
Not a documentary but The Island with Bear Grylls is worth watching (If you are into that kind of thing)

It's a survival reality TV series (started yesterday) in which 12 men are left on an island with very minimal supplies and only one day in survival training.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-island-with-bear-grylls/4od
Click to expand...

Last man standing sort of thing ;) ?

Will check it out... that reminds me of Castaway... anyone remember that programme on the Beeb from 2000? Brought Ben Fogle to fame...
 
Chatative said:
... anyone remember that programme on the Beeb from 2000? Brought Ben Fogle to fame...
Click to expand...

I try to forget...;)

I don't think 'The Island' would be my cup of tea - i like some survival-y type programs, but it looks a bit reality tv which puts me off. Rickolas: Has it got enough facts and stuff, or is it all emotions and shit?


dunno if mentioned before, but i watched Blackfish on bbc4 t'other night (still up on iplayer). About killer whales in captivity; and one of them who starts attacking people (which they never do in the wild). Heartbreaking - by the time they start showing video of the whale going for the trainers, i was so rooting for the whale ("go on, squash him"). Good doc (though a bit american) it was followed by a british doc on killer whales generally which was good too

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03j49l6


And i watched this brief (13min) documentary on Haiti the other day. Stuff i should know really but nice to recap in a digestible form. Excellent brief rundown if you don't know the story from the Haiti slave rebellion to Aristede etc. (ricko - semi-linking to our theology chats, he's an example of a nice christian (liberation theologist))

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nskDm2yhPA
 
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Vurtual said:
Shambles, those space docs look cool - i'll be having a look at them. I just watched the old Cosmos (actually i skipped some of the solar system episodes) - is the new Cosmos still worth a look if i've recently watched the old one (or should i leave it for a while)?
Click to expand...

It absolutely is and so are those episodes of the original you skipped. Bear in mind it's not simply the basic facts you gain from these series it's also the concepts, the wonder and the overall experience. Part of the pleasure is simply being asked questions and being asked to think about things in certain ways which may (or may not) be unfamiliar to us all. That is what makes Cosmos special above and beyond any and all other space docs. I've not seen the last couple of the new series yet (need to catch up) but the original series is platinum gold from beginning to end I promise you. Watch them all. Ideally on psyches ;)

I agree on Crazy Rulers of the World (and the follow up series with a similar (but different) name I forget)). Both series are utterly fascinating as they come at the conspiracy stuff from the "wrong" side yet still somehow end up on the "right" side simply through observation. It's one of the things that made me reconsider conspiratorial stuffs as perhaps having more merit than I initially granted them. I still regard most as fantasy and/or gross exaggeration but I no longer think it baseless exaggeration by any means. There is something to it. What that something is is still highly debatable but there is something for sure.
 
Vurtual said:
Shambles, those space docs look cool - i'll be having a look at them. I just watched the old Cosmos (actually i skipped some of the solar system episodes) - is the new Cosmos still worth a look if i've recently watched the old one (or should i leave it for a while)?
Click to expand...

It absolutely is and so are those episodes of the original you skipped. Bear in mind it's not simply the basic facts you gain from these series it's also the concepts, the wonder and the overall experience. Part of the pleasure is simply being asked questions and being asked to think about things in certain ways which may (or may not) be unfamiliar to us all. That is what makes Cosmos special above and beyond any and all other space docs. I've not seen the last couple of the new series yet (need to catch up) but the original series is platinum gold from beginning to end I promise you. Watch them all. Ideally on psyches ;)

I agree on Crazy Rulers of the World (and the follow up series with a similar (but different) name I forget)). Both series are utterly fascinating as they come at the conspiracy stuff from the "wrong" side yet still somehow end up on the "right" side simply through observation. It's one of the things that made me reconsider conspiratorial stuffs as perhaps having more merit than I initially granted them. I still regard most as fantasy and/or gross exaggeration but I no longer think it baseless exaggeration by any means. There is something to it. What that something is is still highly debatable but there is something for sure.
 
I'm just watching Orbit: Earth's Extraordinary Journey.

It was first broadcast 2 years ago but is re-airing on BBC4. There's only 1 day left to watch the first episode on the iPlayer...

I think the combination of Kate Humble & Helen Czerski works very well. Fascinating programme on the whole too.
 
^ Watched that first time round and was a goodie. I'd not really thought about the whizzing round the galaxy bit too and the effect of going up and down through the layers. Some fascinating stuff in there.

This afternoon I did done watch...

The Brits Who Fought For Hitler

Yes it is yet another WWII doc but it's a story I'd not really heard before. I knew we had a British Nazi Party and that Fascism was surprisingly popular over here around that time but had no idea there were actually Brits who were members of an SS unit. Admittedly a rather unique one but still... Interesting story but mostly made me wonder what I would have done in that position. To be perfectly honest it did sound like a bit of a laugh - get out of jail free and spend the war wandering around Germany getting drunk and shagging locals and seemingly with no expectation of having to do much of anything else. On the other hand, not such a great look posing for photos in an SS uniform with the Union Flag emblazoned right beneath the German eagle and swastika. I bet they had more fun than being stuck in a POW camp though.

Incidentally, just to point out I know damn well I wouldn't have joined cos I'd be too interested in avoiding being shot at and they only found out for sure after they'd joined... If I'd known it was a complete doss I must admit I'd be sorely tempted though.
 
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