More on Zeitgeist

In general we try to avoid politics, but conservative columnist Byron York makes enough good points about Jared Loughner and the pan-conspiracy movie Zeitgeist that I thought it deserved a post.

In the end, "Zeitgeist" tells us we must break free of the slavery. "If the people ever realize the truth," the narrator says, "the entire manufactured zeitgeist ... will collapse like a house of cards."

Is all this left or right? Parts of "Zeitgeist," complete with depictions of Fox News as a government propaganda organ, resemble some paranoid, far-left, anti-Bush tracts of 2004-2007. Other parts resemble far-right paranoia from many years ago. But the more important question is what effect the picture had on Jared Loughner.

At a time when Loughner was increasingly unable to control his own mind, he apparently welcomed "Zeitgeist's" message that there were sinister forces out there trying to control it for him. The meaning of "Zeitgeist's" role in the Tucson violence is not that Loughner's motive was political. It's that the movie's insane incoherence proved to be an awful stimulant for one dangerously incoherent mind.

Loughner Heavily Influenced by Zeitgeist

After finding out that the Tucson shooter Jared Loughner was a paranoid 9/11 conspiracy theorist, it should come as no surprise that he was a fan of the completely incoherent paranoid pan-conspiracy theory movie Zeitgeist. As reported by ABC News:

Zeitgeist Debunked--WTC 7 Section

Great job by JREF forum member EDX!

New Debunker Takes on Zeitgeist and Griffin

Good job! The only problem I have with it is the ending:

Is David R. Griffin incompetent, or did he omit this information on purpose?

This of course is the logical fallacy of false dichotomy; David Ray Griffin is incompetent and he omitted this information on purpose.

9-11 Was a Rick Astley Job!

Somebody was at a Zeitgeist Movie showing and had a great deal of fun spoofing the Troofers. Great job!

Zeitgeist Debunked

The panconspiracy film Zeitgeist has predictably faded lately, but for a short while was top of the pops in the paranoid community. The eSkeptic newsletter from skeptic.com puts this bunk to rest, at least the first religious segment.

Considering that Part II of Zeitgeist asserts that the destruction of the World Trade Center was a conspiracy on the part of the powers that be, and that Part III is an attack on the Federal Reserve Board and income tax as unconstitutional plots devised by hidden powers bent on reducing all of us to poverty, one might wonder why Peter Joseph even bothered to open his film with an attack on Jesus and Christianity. Summing up at the end of Part I, Joseph asserts that Christianity was, in fact, developed by the Romans as a means of social control. He cites the Council of Nicaea in 325 as the beginning of this social control. So this is the connection between Part I and the rest of the film: Everything you’ve ever believed to be true is all a pack of lies foisted on you by the secret manipulators who really run things. They faked the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon to manipulate us into a war. They are undermining our financial and other freedoms through manipulation of our money and — guess what?! — they’ve been at it since the creation of Christianity, back in the time of the Roman Empire!

Zeitgeist is The Da Vinci Code on steroids.

Living the Zeitgeist Life

You may recall the original Zeitgeist film, which was a hilarious melange of "Jesus Christ is based on the pagan Gods, 9-11 was an inside job, and the international bankers suck the lifeblood of the working people conspiracy theories. Apparently there is a Zeitgeist Movement nowadays and it's competing with 9-11 Trutherism for converts, hence the Alex Jones and the Chipmunks video I posted the other day. Here's part of the Zeitgeist Addendum, where the creator (reportedly named Peter Joseph, although that may be a pseudonym) makes his pitch:



Okay, that's pretty creepy. Alex Jones and I don't agree on much, but this guy is pitching the same old woo that Lenin and Mao preached in the 20th Century. As a reminder, in the original Zeitgeist film, he was pronouncing "Colonel" as "cologne-el", so this is not some deep thinker except to drones.

Alex and the Chipmunks

Zeitgeist Gets the Raspberry from Major Canadian Newspaper

I'll confess that my initial reaction to Zeitgeist was that it was entertaining in the lunatic first section about religion, idiotic and offensive in the second part about 9-11 and extremely boring in the third part about the international bankers. But apparently it has become the hot new video among the kook set, replacing 9-11 Mysteries and Loose Change as the Truthers hunger for fresh nuttery.

And Zeitgeist serves that up in heaping platesful, as Ivor Tossel describes:

The movie comes in three parts. The first makes the case that Jesus is a mythological figure built from parts of earlier mythological figures. Christianity, say the filmmakers, is a concoction, just a form of social control.

So far, nothing ground-breaking. But now the movie jumps to 9/11, and things really get moving. The middle segment steps us through the orthodoxy of 9/11 conspiracy thinking. The twin towers weren't destroyed by jetliners; they were intentionally demolished with explosives. Something fishy happened to Flight 93, which the banker-controlled media will tell you crashed in Pennsylvania.

The Air Force, we're told, deliberately failed to intercept any of the planes. Meanwhile, the Pentagon wasn't hit by an airliner, but by something more like a missile. All of this leads to the conclusion that 9/11 was an inside job, staged by elements of the U.S. government to provide a pretext for invading Iraq and curtailing civil liberties.

To what end? Warming to its topic, the film shimmers into its third act. It seems that the Federal Reserve, the U.S. money-printing organ, is in fact the implement of a small cabal of International Bankers (the ethnicity of these money-lenders goes undisclosed) who stage global calamities to spur federal spending and enrich themselves.

You know how it is; the religion part seems true to the reviewer so he doesn't catch onto the lunacy there (a very intelligent atheist told me that he was banging his head on the keyboard during that segment), but he certainly catches the rest of the nonsense:

What troubles me the most is that, for all the talk of skepticism, conspiracy counterculture is really an anti-intellectual, populist movement - much like Intelligent Design. For all their absurdity, conspiracy theorists try to drag everything back to the level of common sense.

(Mostly) Good Review of Zeitgeist

I kind of enjoyed these bits of snark:

Breaking new factual ground is not what Zeitgeist is about, however. Rather, the video is a powerful and fast-acting dose of agitprop, hawking its conclusions as givens. Unfortunately, like most propaganda, it doesn’t play fair with its intended audience. At times, while watching it, I felt like I was getting Malcolm McDowell’s treatment in Clockwork Orange: eyes pried wide open while getting bombarded with quick-cut atrocity photos.

The over-all temper of the video is rather like the John Birch Society on acid, with interludes by Harry Smith. Incongruously, after spending nearly two hours trying to scare the bejeezis out of its viewers, Zeitgeist ends on an oddly upbeat note, telling us that Love — not Fear — is the answer, We are all One, and featuring sound-bites from Ram Dass and Carl Sagan.

But, sadly, the writer undercuts himself with this crap:

It’s a shame, really, that Zeitgeist is, ultimately, such a mess. There are plenty of legitimate questions about what transpired on 9/11, just as there are plenty of shady doings in international finance or puzzling aspects of religious history, for that matter. And what is coming down in the name of National Security is truly unnerving.

Yawn. Wake me when Hillary repeals the Patriot Act (and don't think for a moment that she will).

Zeitgeist--Oh My God!

Here's an easy prediction: You'll be ten minutes into the first part of Zeitgeist and you'll be absolutely convinced that I've flipped my lid, that this has nothing to do with 9-11. And then part two starts with David Ray Griffin and you see how it all ties together. The first part is certainly amusing in a "Chariots of the Gods" kind of way; you definitely sense somebody's pulling your leg, but it's still entertaining as hell.

Unfortunately, the 9-11 nuttiness is the same old, same old. Lots of clips of people talking about explosions, lots of talk about all the warnings the administration supposedly received, lots of talk about how the hijackers are alive. Fat Bin Laden gets wheeled out. We hear griping about the Citgo video (apparently the filmmakers are unaware that video has been released). Wally Miller comes in for the usual bit of quote-mining.

Hilariously, they claim there has been "extraordinary secrecy" surrounding the collapse of WTC 7. Yeah, it was so sooper-sekret that they announced it on the BBC prior to the collapse. We get the claims of molten steel, we get the claim that WTC 7 didn't damage other buildings (like Fiterman Hall or the Verizon building). We get the nutty claims that all three buildings collapsed like a classical controlled demolition (then why did the two towers fall apart from the top?).

Haven't watched Part 3 yet.

Update: Part III is the standard "International Bankers suck the blood of the American people" stuff. Tom Foti and Luke Rudkowski would love it. This seems like another college student production; hilariously the narrator pronounces "Colonel" as "cologne-el"; it's "kernel" you dolt! Note as well that the film claims that prior to entering the war, our failure to sell petroleum to Japan was supposedly against the rules of war; but a moment later he's chiding Standard Oil for selling a petroleum additive to the Germans, also prior to our entering the war. We get the usual bits about how the Lusitania got us into World War I (it only took two years after the sinking).

Heheh, they even get into the North American Union nonsense!