FRONTLINE: the pbs documentary series not the flea medicine

this liberia/firestone thing i just started it and it's already so o_O

yea it was so intense

also harbel = harbl in my mind

mine too :)

Ok I finally watched the one about Firestone and the Taylor regime and it completely freaked me out -- it's testament to the self-absorption of teenagers that I could be in high school in Akron in the early 90s, be a politically aware young person, and not know this was happening. I do remember hearing the word Liberia a lot, and I remember seeing some video footage/photos of men with guns packed into military-looking vehicles, but that's about it. Also I really think they could stand to put more trigger warnings before this one -- there were executions and children whose hands had been severed, among other atrocities. Honestly I don't know how I watched this considering all the other shit going on in the world right now, but I did.

Can't say I recommend it exactly, but I'm glad I saw it.

when I was watching it and they said Akron I was like "dang I've never heard of this stuff before but clearly LL will have been on this for decades"

Lol. Good job firestone keeping this shit tamped down I guess!

NB I got really freaked out by this episode and have not finished yet

"trigger warnings" for what? i mean what would it trigger?

other than just, you know, horror

Panic attacks? PTSD?

The one about the rise of the NRA is essential viewing. Interesting portrait of propaganda too, for anyone who teaches persuasion.

yea this nra ep is p well done

pretty sure i'm not going to be able to watch this but new one on tonight

FRONTLINE follows renowned New Yorker writer and Boston surgeon Atul Gawande as he explores the relationships doctors have with patients who are nearing the end of life. In conjunction with Gawande's new book, Being Mortal, the film investigates the practice of caring for the dying, and shows how doctors -- himself included -- are often remarkably untrained, ill-suited and uncomfortable talking about chronic illness and death with their patients.

Watched the NRA one over the weekend. Maybe I expect too much from Frontline, but I thought it was soft by their standards.

there's a pile of old Frontlines on Netflix Canada now, Canadian Frontline-watchers with Netflix.

Not yet watched but clearly of mega interest to me 'cuz I'm a hospice social worker. If I were in charge there would be real-life dying process (not at all like fake TV dying process) on the tube all the time.

Because I mean we are all going to see this not to mention we are all going to do this so I mean c'mon.

"Being Mortal" is v. good, imo. Also much recommended by hospice ppl with way more expertise than I :)

I'm all for realistic talk about dying but sometimes once the topic is on my mind, it stays at the party way too long. Like watching this movie is a long commitment to thinking about the topic and I don't know if I can brush that off tbh!

oof. yeah, i don't know if i couldn't handle this either, unless i have like a week to spare where i just mope around getting nothing done.

frederick wiseman has a six- or seven-hour documentary called "near death" about a hospice. can't bring myself to watch that one, either.

holy shit the Putin episode

not sure what i was expecting but damn

that NRA episode was good.

i watched 10 min of the one about dying and then proceeded to freak out for at least an hour
it wasn't so much the stuff about death that scared me, it just totally pressed some of my other freakout buttons and i started crying :(

i would like to warn anyone prone to intrusive thoughts about death to consider avoiding it tbh
(i'm ok now but watching it was not worth the trouble it caused for me)

i fully recognize it might not be as intense for everyone

who's getting psyched for THE TRUTH ABOUT CHICKEN?

Nooo it is like the only decent protein source left to me

i know i'm not happy about it either
frontline is getting a little out of control with the fear-based programming
i like it when they balance macro fear with more micro stories about the misery of human existence
the horror is a little unbalanced atm no?

i guess i just want more david sutherland programming
he has a lot more movies than i realized! http://davidsutherland.com/films

the chicken-industry footage i've seen in the past is the only bleeding-heart stuff ever to actually give me nightmares

i like it when they balance macro fear with more micro stories about the misery of human existence

this makes me want frosted mini-wheats

<3 David Sutherland

2 things --
a. the one about ebola was really good. I had no idea about the children and the tree full of bats.
b. tonight: CHICKEN http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/trouble-with-chicken/

this week, the making of the CIA's Hollywood propaganda film

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/government-elections-politics/secrets-politics-and-torture/watch-how-the-cia-helped-make-zero-dark-thirty/

ooh!! that sounds good.

Totally

oh hey yes

i watched a little bit of it last night and decided to save the rest for later
i'm saving chicken for possibly never

Chicken truth is a truth we cannot afford to hear

My dad called at the end of last week, horrified by that chicken documentary.

I actually found the chicken documentary less horrifying than I expected! Salmonella is a bitch but relative risk analysis = a million other things will get you before it does. The chicken lobby is a fright, tho.

the meat industry is horrifying

looked at preview online of upcoming "rape on the night shift" and just kind of said to myself, holy shit, noooo

the one on growing up trans was v good

Agree. It was interesting to see how the emotional vocabulary of the kids featured in the movie is soooo much more rich than when I was growing up. Even the boys who suggested to Alex that he burp more and ignore girls. It was really good!

i think they deliberately chose, not only kids who were especially articulate, but -- perhaps more cynically -- kids who were unusually attractive in/as their 'new' gender.

it was very powerful and raised some very difficult questions. the psychologists (psychiatrists?) were very supportive and sensitive and yet i couldn't help but detect a kind of cheerleading that, seen from a different perspective, might seem troubling.

i think the key point in the documentary was the dad (?) who said that they were making the best choices in the absence of a lot of solid answers (answers that science may one day provide).

interesting that the doc essentially offered two endings, one notably ambivalent and the other brightly optimistic

the perspective of the somewhat older dude who admitted its really tough to gauge/appreciate irreversible changes as a young-er person was interesting, like that juxtoposed w the eagerness these kids have to take hormones is def kinda unsettling

xxp yea the clinician cheerleading too

the perspective of the somewhat older dude who admitted its really tough to gauge/appreciate irreversible changes as a young-er person was interesting, like that juxtoposed w the eagerness these kids have to take hormones is def kinda unsettling

― johnny crunch, Sunday, July 5, 2015 4:16 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes, and you have to contrast this perspective with the fact (?) that undergoing these hormonal treatments in adolescence can make the transition easier than undergoing them in adulthood.

what's interesting to me is the seeming consensus among psychologists that gender dysphoria is a "thing"--that is, some kind of irreducible, discrete, empirically observable phenomenon that can't be reversed or placated. which it might be, but the psychiatric profession has a history of deciding such things when they turn out to be, at least, much more complex.

there's also the issue--which wasn't really broached in the documentary--about the relationship between gender and sex. is it just that people who have a sexual dysphoria inevitably express it in terms of the dominant cultural signifiers of that gender?

the mix of culture and biology here is so fraught....

that is, is it possible to desire to be another sex w/o assuming the dominant cultural characteristics of the gender generally associated with that sex? or does the desire to change one's sex (via hormones, surgery, etc.) follow from the desire to achieve those characteristics?

i'm not a hardcore cultural constructionist though and i'm comfortable with the idea that some of the cultural manisfestation of gender are a more or less natural, or rather evolutionary, extension of sex. but that assumption definitely flies in the face of some of the more radical implications of the queering of gender that a lot of activists have been invested in for a long time.

If you're interested in the topic, Andrew Solomon's Far From the Tree has a chapter about transgender kids (and their parents). The book is indispensable as an empathy-generating force. It's really great.

heeeeey http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/immigration-2/rape-in-the-fields/female-farm-workers-awarded-17-million-in-florida-abuse-case/