Good documentaries

[Dave The Triffids]

Untold: Malice at the Palace is now showing on Netflix.  Part of a series of short(ish) documentaries, this covers an incident between players and fans at a 2004 NBA game.  I have no interest in basketball, but this was fantastic.  Jaw-dropping stuff.

[Retinend]

Enjoyed Class Action Park too

Watching Crazy, Not Insane now. Can quite imagine it being the sort of thing that Cabbers would enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVrOVlS5TMU

Some heartbreaking scenes (although you could well argue that the victims of the crimes don't get much of a look in). The idea that there is such a job in the US as travelling executioner is perhaps the scariest thing.

I liked this a lot! It's the same guy who did "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room", which is also a really good doc.

The psychiatrist at the centre of it is clearly a pioneer and was rediscovering something true about human psychology that had been long-deemed unscientific: that the soul is divided, and that sometimes we channel evil spirits, essentially becoming possessed by them. It was compelling how clear and incontrovertible her evidence was... and yet scepticism endured for so long - the flawed reasoning going that the subjects of hypnotic regression were "going along" with the lead of the psychiatrist and were spontaneously acting for the sake of getting off lightly. I think that the fact of this scepticism shows that humankind still finds it difficult to accept that "evil" can be contextualized and mitigated to any degree.

On the other hand, it was also uncertain from the doc alone whether or not she had a wider view of psychotic violence, for lack of a better term. Are all psychotic murderers just victims of their alters? The documentary doesn't ever confront her with this natural question - perhaps it seems simplistic?  But documentaries are a simplistic medium. I would say this was the biggest hole in the film. It seems as if there's a lack of falsifiability to the theory as presented: if at any given time we can suppose that the acts which are beyond the pale were carried out in a "fugue state" in which no culpability is due to the "real" person, and all culpability is taken by the "unreal" "alter" persona... it just seems like a carte blanche for depraved people to indulge their victimhood complex while victimizing others.

I would like to read the actual work of Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis in order to find out how she answers these criticisms... but if I'm honest I probably won't.

[Neomod]

Guy who did "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room", which is also a really good doc.

I really should watch this as I worked for Enron back in 2000[nb]at their uk headquarters behind Buckingham Palace[/nb] and it was one of the cushiest temping jobs I've ever had. I should have realised something was up when Bart, our Ohian team leader took the whole department out for drinks on my first day and everyone got hammered on the Enron credit card.

[Retinend]

"behind Buckingham Palace" - wow, that's pretty Enron, even for Enron

[Retinend]

The Crime of the Century on NOW TV is pretty outstanding. Only watched part 1 so far (it's a 2 parter and nearly four hours long), but it's about this rise of the opioid crisis in the US. Made by HBO so you know it's good stuff.

Oh wow, the director of this two-parter on the opioid crisis, Alex Gibney, is also the director of the aforementioned Crazy, Not Insane and Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room documentaries. He's a real powerhouse.

[Mr Banlon]

I don't know whether this is faked or not, but was entertained by it none the less :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkyoMEGvCMw
Man wants to know what gang life in the favelas of Brasil is like, so he joins a gang in a favela. The bloke is a proper bellend, but I think that's why I enjoyed it.

[sovietrussia]

"Just Another Day" - Waterloo Station 1983

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lxAJCL2XVw

[Retinend]

I've been on a "cult" themed documentaries trip.

I can highly recommend

the two NXIVM series -

1.  "The Vow" (HBO, 10 eps) - this does an excellent job of laying out how "anyone" (let's be PC about this) could have fallen into the self-help/sex cult in the first place, and how exactly the world view worked
2. "Seduced" (Starz, 4 eps) - this documentary series is even better than The Vow, going into the psychology of a sex slave in the secret harem of the foppish, new-age cult leader, Keith Raniere - a secret harem that was operated mainly via WhatsApp.


"LuLaRich"

This 4-part documentary could be stamped "MADE IN THE USA". Its subject, LuLaRoe, was a "cult" of sorts, but one that stretches the traditional definition of "cult". At a superficial level, it was a clothing company, but in reality it was a pyramid scheme. Though pyramid schemes typically rely on the greed of its "suckers", the way the documentary spins it, the suckers in this scheme were the ones who were NOT greedy, but rather were looking to find their community and "live their best lives" as bored housewives in the suburbs. The end result was that many felt peer pressure to buy unsellable wares, merely to fit into the community. The documentary is a light watch compared to the NXIVM documentaries, because the tragedy is undercut with constant unintentional comedy at the expense of the victims and the victimizers. It's simply too ludicrous to believe, at times.


"The Cult Next Door"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JsOtAQqU1Q

a very "Scarfolk" story of an Indian guru living in poverty in 1970s Brixton, London and his imprisoned victims, who treated him as God's messenger. With his rantings about the imminent communist takeover of the British Government, he was able to rope in a small coterie of female followers and keep them trapped in a small flat for several decades, threatening them with summoning the powers of JACKIE to make them spontaneously combust if they ever attempted to escape. JACKIE stands for Jehovah Allah Christ Krishna Immortal Easwaran. The documentary is confronting. We are typically bombarded with the PC message "anyone could join a cult". Yet the more you learn about cults, the more you realize that most cults target a specific kind of person - they are like viruses which fit only a certain type of cell receptor. In this case, being a communist of a very certain stripe (the kind which took it more as a religion than a political philosophy) was a prerequisite.

[Retinend]

The Insane Loyalty of Fandom
440,198 viewsNov 16, 2021

A Vice documentary that will make you feel very old - though perhaps happy to be so.