Recent comments in /f/Documentaries

KofOaks t1_jcbnn9w wrote

Reply to comment by Spideris in The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of Politics of Fear - (2004) BBC, part 1 of 3 compares the rise of neoconservative movement and the radical Islamist movement [00:59:11] by Damascinos

Thanks.

Well thanks to him being a shitty dad I decided not to have kids to not take the chance of one day mimicking his behaviour.

I'll never tell my child that "You know, I didn't want kids your mom made me do it". I'll never scare them with my fits of rage nor insult them when I'm not-so-secretly drunk. I'll never tell them that the problem in society are artists, intellectuals and insert different races and religions. I won't teach them to hate, rage and smash when they are annoyed or mad.

It's hard to emancipate yourself from a shitty narcissistic parent and I won't risk putting anyone through this.

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McGauth925 t1_jcbj51c wrote

Reply to The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of Politics of Fear - (2004) BBC, part 1 of 3 compares the rise of neoconservative movement and the radical Islamist movement [00:59:11] by Damascinos

I've been reading a Jane Goodall book - you know, the chimpanzee lady. She talks about PSEUDOSPECIATION, which she prefers to call Cultural Speciation.

So, this chimpanzee group split up, with a smaller group kind of taking over a smaller part of the territory the whole group had previously inhabited. After a while, the larger group pretty much declared war on the smaller group and killed almost all of them.

The idea of pseudospeciation is, once a group of humans (and chimpanzees) becomes different enough culturally - by which is intended the things that individuals learn and pass down to offspring, such that, after a while, the whole group is different enough from another group of humans, the groups can stop seeing each other as some kind of kindred, and can kill and harm each other with no inhibitions.

Thus with people. Along almost any line of cultural division, humans can come to see the other side as different enough, and hateful enough that it becomes ok to kill them and war on them. That bodes very poorly for the divisiveness that's become so prevalent in the US, in the past 10 years, or so.

It's almost like a cultural evolution/survival of the fittest group.

It looks to explain racism, war, and all kinds of other group enmities and hatreds. And, we may not be as evil as we think, because it looks like something humans and chimpanzees fall into it fairly readily. And, it's part of why we're always battling it out between morality - the care of other humans, and war.

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33hamsters t1_jcb506f wrote

Reply to comment by Damascinos in The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of Politics of Fear - (2004) BBC, part 1 of 3 compares the rise of neoconservative movement and the radical Islamist movement [00:59:11] by Damascinos

I don't think u/beat-the-heat is dismissing the influence of conservative Islam, I think he's pointing out that there's a lot of ethnographic and cultural factors that get brushed over in Adam Curtis' work. I think that's a mild and valid criticism, one that is understandable in light of the limitations of the BBC archives Curtis is working with.

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33hamsters t1_jcb3a2u wrote

Reply to The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of Politics of Fear - (2004) BBC, part 1 of 3 compares the rise of neoconservative movement and the radical Islamist movement [00:59:11] by Damascinos

Adam Curtis is such a talented documentarian, and the didacticism of his projects is well served by his tangible concern with topical issues, but if you watch a lot of his work its clear that he doesn't handle Asia or Africa in the same way he handles Europe or North America. Just something to watch for. A lot of this is simply the fact that he is working with BBC archive access, if someone wanted to be the next Adam Curtis they could really expand on his methods by collaborating internationally with other networks.

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Commie_EntSniper t1_jcb2yns wrote

Reply to The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of Politics of Fear - (2004) BBC, part 1 of 3 compares the rise of neoconservative movement and the radical Islamist movement [00:59:11] by Damascinos

All someone needs to do is paint a rosy picture of America and people will line up at the polls. Worked for Raegan. Worked for Obama. Worked for Trump.

​

If only Democrats really wanted to win, but I honestly feel at the top they're like the Washington Generals - staged opposition; both sides play for the oligarchs who make money from the exhibition

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Damascinos OP t1_jcaty3i wrote

Reply to comment by PermissiveActionLnk in The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of Politics of Fear - (2004) BBC, part 1 of 3 compares the rise of neoconservative movement and the radical Islamist movement [00:59:11] by Damascinos

I’m sorry I disagree. The fear aspect of the neoconservative movement is prevalent throughout American society. One needs to only turn on the news, irrespective of the channel, national or local.

If you knew how the US was between 1990 and 2001 you would realize how much the neoconservative movement influence has had since 2001 and still has on American society.

And if fear isn’t as prevalent as you want to admit, the American exceptionalism as touted by the neoconservatives is very much prevalent in all manners of society.

These two are proof of the staying power of the neoconservative movement.

As for Trump et al, they are the next step in the neoconservative evolution. They haven’t become popular in a vacuum.

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Damascinos OP t1_jcas31c wrote

Reply to comment by Beat-the-heat in The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of Politics of Fear - (2004) BBC, part 1 of 3 compares the rise of neoconservative movement and the radical Islamist movement [00:59:11] by Damascinos

No, of course they don’t call themselves Islamists, the word doesn’t exist. However they do call themselves adherents of certain schools of Islamic thought led by certain sheiks’ interpretations of the Koran. And that, when you look into their interpretations, is Islamist in nature.

One shouldn’t dismiss the Arab conservatives influence on Islamic resurgence otherwise you wouldn’t be able to explain away the Saudi and Qatari influence throughout the Muslim world post 1990, ie Balkans, Levant and Central Asia (to be fair Iran’s influence has been just as damaging).

As for moral outrage, it’s subjective and not universal. And because of that, manipulation is a lot easier, as has been proven. And that is the real reason why Muslims become militant.

As for your last paragraph, those aren’t the only two options available and your view of either black or white is not fair to those that don’t live in a homogeneous Muslim country, ie Syrians, Palestinians Lebanese, Egyptians, Indians, Chinese etc etc. A secular led government can still have the indigenous interests in mind while still being a productive and independent member on the world stage; Indonesia or Malaysia comes to mind.

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Relevant_Monstrosity t1_jcanm94 wrote

Reply to comment by KofOaks in The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of Politics of Fear - (2004) BBC, part 1 of 3 compares the rise of neoconservative movement and the radical Islamist movement [00:59:11] by Damascinos

Every person is capable of self-realization and change. This is the learning experience that defines subjective humanity. If we never choose the path of fear in our naiveté, we will never understand the transformative power of love.

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PermissiveActionLnk t1_jcai9gn wrote

Reply to The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of Politics of Fear - (2004) BBC, part 1 of 3 compares the rise of neoconservative movement and the radical Islamist movement [00:59:11] by Damascinos

I remember it as a very nicely assembled story but it really does not have staying power. Even in the US, neocons are confused and on the run, as they try to figure out how to deal with the "know nothings" like Trump and Co.

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Beat-the-heat t1_jcahkt9 wrote

Reply to comment by Damascinos in The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of Politics of Fear - (2004) BBC, part 1 of 3 compares the rise of neoconservative movement and the radical Islamist movement [00:59:11] by Damascinos

"Islamists" largely don't call themselves that and this documentary kind of just hashes out the familiar tropes that inflate the relevance of Arab conservatives to the Islamic resurgence when it is largely just an ethno-religious response to foreign intervention more than anything else, after all many of the conflicts that the US got involved in after 2001 were far older than the Muslim brotherhood, some in fact were older than America itself.

This simply just presents the same oversimplified orientalist view of conflicts without really delving deeper into the roots of them; the single highest predictor of Islamic militancy has always been moral outrage and not philosophical or religious disposition (you can see research by Scott Atran to confirm this).

Now i myself am agnostic but raised Muslim, if you ask me who i would rather see in power; a secular government allied with the west or a conservative Islamic government that advocates indigenous interests then i would definitely say the latter, this is essentially why there is a growth of "Islamism" across the world, as Bin Laden himself said even his "pagan ancestors" would have fought against the West.

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