Zeitgeist Movement

[Sad Grandfather]

Anybody familiar with this one? From what he posts on Facebook, it appears that my grandson has escaped from the ramster cult, and may have jumped into something equally ridiculous.

From what I could find on Google (not much that made any sense), it involves a world society, where money is replaced by "resources", and where a few people, coming up with "inovations", would provide a world where most would be consumers without working. In a way, it sounds similar to "From each according to his abilities, and to each according to his needs". I also heard mention of Carl Sagan, a science fiction author and conspiracy theorist regarding space aliens and flying saucers.

I didn't bother to watch the movie, pushed on youtube, since I did sit painfully through "What the bleep" though I found it ridiculous after the first few minutes.

I am hoping for a visit, around the end of this month, from my grand daughter, who seems to be the only member of that family who hasn't fallen for the BS. I hope to get her back to my Alma Mater to attend college when she graduates from public school in WA state. I'd surely like to salvage one grandchild!

[Sad Grandfather]

Hmm! Still no "Edit" button? I was going to edit to say the granddaughter finishes HS next year.

[WofthesunEofthemoon]

Forgive me, Sad Grandfather, if I say, with respect, that you have completely misrepresented the late, great Carl Sagan here.

Please see:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan

[WofthesunEofthemoon]

It is indeed a pity that the edit button has disappeared again, as I have to amend the above link to:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan

[David McCarthy]

It is indeed a pity that the edit button has disappeared again,

Dang..
Anyone else having this problem?
I think its a quirky fault in phpbb3, perhaps an upgrade will fix it?
Rest assured its not EMF admin or the mods that's creating this ongoing problem....

David

[Sad Grandfather]

Forgive me, Sad Grandfather, if I say, with respect, that you have completely misrepresented the late, great Carl Sagan here.
Please see:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan

Perhaps I did misrepresent Carl Sagan. I guess I only remembered him in connection with SETI which probably had bonifide scientists, but IMO also had some crackpots. I had not heard of either in quite a few years.

So forget Carl Sagan, does anyone know anything about this "Zeitgeist Movement"?

[David McCarthy]

Hi Sad Grandfather,

I would rather not forget Carl Sagan on EMF, he is one of the few brilliant scientist who publicly challenged JZ Knight and her 'Ramtha' BS.
I for one have immense respect for this man.

Carl Sagan on 'Ramtha': things we would like 'Ramtha' to tell us!

"J.Z.Knight of the State of Washington claims to be in touch with a 35,000-year-old somebody called 'Ramtha'. He speaks English very well, using Knight's tongue, lips and vocal cords, producing what sounds to me like an accent from the Indian Raj. Since most people know how to talk, and many - from children or professional actors - have a repertoire of voices at their command, the simplest hypothesis is that Ms Knight makes 'Ramtha' speak all by herself, and that she has no contact with disembodied entities from the Pleistocene Ice Age. If there's evidence to the contrary, I'd love to hear it. It would be considerably more impressive if Ramtha could speak all by himself, without the assistance of Ms Knight's mouth. Failing that, how might we test the claim? (The actress Shirley Maclaine attests that Ramtha was her brother in Atlantis, but that's another story.)

"Suppose Ramtha were available for questioning. Could we verify whether he is who he says he is? How does he know that he lived 35,000 years ago, even approximately? What calendar does he employ? Who is keeping track of the intervening millenia? Thirty-five thousand plus or minus what? Either Ramtha really is 35,000 years old, or he's a phoney and he'll (or rather she'll) slip up.

"Where did Ramtha live? (I know he speaks English with an Indian accent, but where 35,000 years ago did they do that?) What was the climate? What did Ramtha eat? (Archaeologists know something about what people ate back then.) What were the indigenous languages and social structure? Who else did Ramtha live with - wife, wives, children, grandchildren? What was the life cycle, the infant mortality rate, the life expectancy? Did they have birth control? What clothes did they wear? How were the clothes manufactured? What were the most dangerous predators? Hunting and fishing implements and strategies? Weapons? Endemic sexism? Xenophobia and ethnocentrism? And if Ramtha came from the 'high civilisation' of Atlantis, where are the linguistic, technological, historical and other details? What was their writing like? Tell us. Instead, all we are offered are banal homilies."

- Carl Sagan, Ch. 12 ("The Fine Art of Baloney Detection"), The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (pp. 191-2).

while Carl Sagan in his book The Demon-Haunted World says that "the simplest hypothesis is that Ms. Knight makes 'Ramtha' speak all by herself, and that she has no contact with disembodied entities from the Pleistocene Ice Age." He goes on to write a list of questions that Ramtha's answers would help us determine whether he is actually a disembodied entity from the paleolithic times (such as "What were the indigenous languages, and social structure?", "What was their writing like?" or "How does he know that he lived 35,000 years ago?"), and ends by saying that "nstead, all we are offered are banal homilies."[22]
J. Z. Knight - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Z._Knight

Remember we do have a search engine on EMF and the topic of the zeitgeist movie can be found here
posted by Joe Szimhart (EMF) View topic - More crackpot cults
viewtopic.php?f=30&t=1491&p=11861&hilit ... ist#p11861

thanks for lead on venus project. and zeitgeist. been a long time since I paid any attention to the failed, paranoid zeitgeist film and movement.
I watched several interviews with this guy Jack Fresco incl one from 1974 w Larry King
--Fresco has not really evolved since those old hippy-view-of-the-future times.
he predicted back then that the US would collapse by 1989...the Soviet Union collapsed then but i can't think of anything else. Cuba had to scramble for stability due its dependence on communist soviet money.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfzKWmcgwPY is a synopsis of the Venus Project. You will notice how the entire project as presented seems sanitized of people---it is all about machines doing labor thus creating an eqalitarian society without money or a federal reserve "creating" money. what fresco fails to grasp is that all cultures always invented artificial money exchanges to try to relieve all the ripping off that goes with any barter system. even gold, if you really look at it, is an agreed upon value as if out of thin air when it comes to money.
Fresco's design for a city harks back 2500 years to Plato's Republic. Plato recommended a form of selective human breeding and a way to eradicate the flawed and those of lower intelligence. Ideally, we can all accept that as a metaphor, but imposing something like a Republic or Venus Project on a complex mix of cultures that make up the human race would be inhuman, or as some critics say about Venus---it is a fascist notion.
Fresco is very interesting, he has gotten a lot of attention from progressives and futurists but he is a prime example of someone who is basically self-taught [dropped out of school at age 14] with grandiose notions of how he would "rule" or shape the world to "make" it a better place. His language reveals his strong inclination to find slick ways in film to manipulate people into accepting his vision.

Fresco reminds me of the old medicine show barkers who sold self-made ointments, tonics and 'preparations' that can cure practically anything.
viewtopic.php?f=30&t=1491&p=11861&hilit ... ist#p11861

David

[Sad Grandfather]

OK, with Carl Sagan! Anyone who debunks Judith's scam is a friend if mine! Sorr, I guess my mind has started to go! I forgot I had previously posted regarding this cult. I reviewed the answers given then and sent them to my grandson.

[Ockham]

The constrast between Ramtha's School of Enlightenment and The Zeitgeist Movement is that one may vist the latter's web site and have a fairly reasonable idea of what the latter is really about and have a sense of group's ethos.

To me, the Zeightgeist Movement sounds like Karl Marx meets Alex Jones and New Age philosophy. The ZGM's Marxian utopian ideas seem impractical, but at least the group is willing to have a cogent discussion about it (unlike RSE and its dogmatic drivel). Given the global scope of the ZGM there are apt to be local groups that bend of outright misinterpret the overall ZGM ethos. ZGM seems like a perfect opportunity for disgruntled ex-ramsters to find sympathetic ears for some of the wacky RSE business/government conspiracy theories sans JZ Knight and the tiresome Ramtha character. No doubt, some local ZGM enclaves are wackier than others -- like the the one near Yelm, Washington, perhaps....