Streetwise.  It's from the 80's and you can watch it all on youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZERDYwSUgCE

when i made this topic i mostly wanted a documentary that just got me out of my bedroom for a while in a kind of less restricted way than a fictional film. i'd like to see/make a movie which is just kind of a series of i guess semi-spatially related people talking about things in an interesting way.

Then Wild Combinations: Portrait of Arthur Russell might be right up in ya alley!?!? idk, it's got talking heads but hey it's about a really interesting musician and it gets into the whole world thing behind his life rather than exact deciption of his life events. It's pleasant and not particulary long but should be inspiring/lifting.

The documentary of Harvey Pekar called American Splendor is really good if you can stand yet another document about an interesting artist.

I don't know if either of these are what you are looking but if accurate biographiness isn't what you are looking for then these should be interesting and entertaining at the very least. I don't think they would be waste of time though.


edit if ya wanna get real hard depressed then the documentary about the company Monsanto is a real killer. i bet doktor knows this one.

this black dude I use to work with told me about a documentary that says jay-z is controlled by the illuminati or something anyone ever heard of it?

I love rap illuminati theories because there is one about pretty much every mainstream rapper in existence. Even rappers that think that other rappers are in the illuminati. I think there is a subgenre of rap that consists entirely of conspiracy theory songs but I haven't found it yet.

Also the only episode of Penn and Teller I saw was where they sell people water straight from a garden hose as 'expensive bottled water', which I found amusing and somewhat anti-consumeristic. That Chomsky interview sounds awful though. Guess I know not to see any more. I don't think that it's unfair to point out a correlation between higher education and (comparatively) leftist political leanings though. Maybe bookreaders and science doers are less susceptible to faulty arguments? ??? ?

yeah dada i was kind of into that show when it was like PETA IS AGAINST ANIMAL TESTING FOR MEDICAL RESEARCH EVEN THO ONE OF THEIR HEAD PEOPLE USES INSULIN EVERY DAY (GUESS WHAT ANIMAL TESTING), but i only ever saw a few eps and as soon as i saw that one you were talking about i was like "welp...this went in a really dumb direction really fast."

I used to watch penn and teller a lot, there's some funny episodes (like the water, or the haute cuisine one), but p&t are huge jerks with a definate right/wrong in their head.Like they did an episode where they prettymuch saidworld peace=global trading (which is very much working out, as we can tell, Gaddafi stopped killing as soon as we blocked his credit card!)
But yeah some of the shows are allright, as long as they don't mention politics, education or the economy.

If you want anything political, check out Adam Curtis' 'The power of Nightmares', it's really interesting show, kinda illustraiting the rise of the neoconservatives in US as well as Islamic conservatives in the middle-east, and how they use an imaginary enemy to get support.
A more sensationalist yet decent documentary is 'the doomsday code', where Baldrick talks about end-timers and how they're fucking everything up.

Pointing out that correlation has nothing to do with fairness. It's fact: people high up on the intellectual ladder are typically left-wing progressives. It's the same all over the planet.

The problem is when you start claiming that this is a massive conspiracy for the purpose of brainwashing students. The reason why smart people are left-wing is because pretty much everything self-described as right-wing is disastrously flawed and exists for the sole purpose of destroying others for personal gain.

Yes exactly. What's interesting about libertarians is that they are mysteriously unable to see this. There was this one guy from a campus political group who said on national television that his arguments against global warming "are so powerful they don't even need to be discussed." I guess when you see everyone as players in a nuclear war scenario rather than in a collective action problem it's hard to imagine that academics would have anyone's but their own interests in mind.

I love rap illuminati theories because there is one about pretty much every mainstream rapper in existence. Even rappers that think that other rappers are in the illuminati. I think there is a subgenre of rap that consists entirely of conspiracy theory songs but I haven't found it yet.

me too. but I love illuminati theories about everything.

Penn and teller and the fuckin' dregs man, they are every uneducated shitheel who thinks they know a thing'er two about a thing'er two.

Penn is a proud proponent of ayn rand's "objectivist" "philosophy", a fellow at the Cato institute, and guess what: he graduated from clown college.

me too. but I love illuminati theories about everything.

http://vigilantcitizen.com/musicbusiness/the-hidden-meaning-of-lady-gagas-telephone/

there's a lot of articles on this site about illuminati lady gaga brainwashing everyone, i can't find it atm but there is an faq on here somewhere that is really fantastic, it had something that went along the lines of this:

"what makes you think lady gaga is trying to mind control us????"
"SHE IS EXPLOITING THE MEDIA TO CONTROL EVERYONE"
"how do i know YOU aren't trying to mind control me????"
"oh well this is just a blog of my opinions as guaranteed by my first amendment rights!!!!"

my favourites on that site are the ones about how the black eyed peas produce transhumanist propaganda because as far as I know transhumanists are almost exclusively sci-fi obsessed AI researchers praying to the singularity. and the guy who writes dresden codak. the point is you can kind of imagine a mysterious evil cult manipulating global politics and worshipping satan. it's a good villain story. disoriented old AI professors and comic book artists allying with the black eyed peas to bring about the end of humanity through brain augmentation and the technological singularity? that's something else.

i highly recommend anything by louis theroux and adam curtis, cosmos by carl sagan, and any david attenborough

I know one that fits jamie's request perfectly,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iZK4Ka5d9A
but it's in Finnish so tough luck foreigners. (Ramci I found it, I found it! I asked the guy who uploaded it if he could send it to me but he hasn't replied yet, gonna have to consider more effective measures soon (try to find his email address))

Hell yeah?! Try to contact him yeah, do your very best soldier. Second goal: get english subs to that document.
I don't remember much from it so i'll check the whole doc at some point through youtube to refresh memory/see if i still dig it.

my favourites on that site are the ones about how the black eyed peas produce transhumanist propaganda because as far as I know transhumanists are almost exclusively sci-fi obsessed AI researchers praying to the singularity. and the guy who writes dresden codak. the point is you can kind of imagine a mysterious evil cult manipulating global politics and worshipping satan. it's a good villain story. disoriented old AI professors and comic book artists allying with the black eyed peas to bring about the end of humanity through brain augmentation and the technological singularity? that's something else.

As someone with a vested casual interest in the trans-humanist agenda, if I find out this is true I will shoot myself. The only thing that could stall me and prolong my life is if I knew I had some way of possibly ensuring the destruction and total extinction of the entire world first. Not out of spite due to the world not being at all what I expected, but out of pure necessity to prevent such a future from ever happening to it.

I'm not taking out of my ass here either, I mean it! If the one thing I have ever truly believed in turns out to be inexplicably aligned with something as awful as the band Black Eyed Peas, then there is literally nothing left of this world for me to ever look forward to again. Maybe that's why it's such a good conspiracy, since the very notion of it being true is so awful to think about, that it's far too risky for you to just dismiss or ignore the chance of that possibility actually being true.


Oh yeah, I did get to see a documentary on the author of the comic 'American Splendor' just earlier today. I don't want to say much about it except I think anyone who visits this place could get into it very easily. You should check out the comic at the very least, which watching the documentary will definitely make you want to do. (Let me put it like this: If it's not a comic book series Hundely himself is already intimately aware of, then I will express absolute and genuine shock at that fact.)

As someone with a vested casual interest in the trans-humanist agenda...

lol if you think that people like yourself will even be considered for access, let alone feel entitled to, the 'transhumanist agenda'... that shit is going to be the exclusive playground of the ultra rich.