Netflix Documentaries

[Bouncer]

Just getting to the part now where the Spanish thought California was an Island and how it remained untouched by Spain for 200 years after they had become aware of it because they thought it was worthless little island. Interesting little things like that I just love.

[Bouncer]

Holy shit scrum! I'm sitting here watching The West and they start talking about the place that started the gold rush in Cali.. The American River.. This is where I take my dogs! Just got back as a matter of fact. You can actually kick up the rocks and little tiny gold and silver flakes glitter in the sun. I had been wondering what it was since the first day I noticed it. They are tiny like powder but you can absolutely see the color shining in the water when the sun shines on it. There's massive piles of little rocks like a huge wall at this park. Always thought it was a dam or something. Now I know its what's left from the mining operation. Had no idea I was taking my dogs to such an amazing place and piece of American history.

[Scrumhalf]

^ I love it! Nothing like walking around in places where history was made.

[Bouncer]

Some more from the park today were the gold rush started. The huge walls of rocks from the mining process and the American River.

[Bouncer]

I'm up to episode 5 of The West series.

I knew we treated the Native Americans like shit but god damn, We literally couldn't have been more unfair to them if we had tried. What's even more scary is how we justified it and lied to ourselves to feel better about the situation. We knew what we were doing was wrong but we searched for any little slip-up by the Indians and responded with insanity. Funny how we called them the "savages"... in-fact we were the savages.

Makes me think about the meaning behind thanksgiving and all the sports teams with Indians names etc.. it's like this sort of tongue in cheek tribute to them. We need a stronger word for irony...

[Scrumhalf]

There was SO MUCH land and we just couldn't share it with them! And we did truly heinous things like deliberately killing off the buffalo herds specifically because the Indians depended on the buffalo for everything and we knew this would make them totally dependent on us.

The worst is yet to come, in the last couple of episodes, I think. I know it changed me as a person after watching this series and reading "Bury my heart at Wounded Knee."

[Bouncer]

Just got to this part. Makes me sick. http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/biso...rtilizer-1870/

They are definitely making a come back though so at least that's something to be happy about.

[Bouncer]

Finished The West last night. Scrum, I'd like your opinion on what I'm about to say no matter if you agree or disagree. I have some superior/inferior thoughts on this that I can't seem to shake. As much as the series wants to paint this picture of the natives being such a great people, I cant help but see how weak they were mentally.

I think we can all agree that we treated the natives pretty terribly. BUT... I kept thinking this throughout the series and I'm gonna say it now.. The natives didn't exactly help their own cause. I noticed a few key things that in my mind made them a very weak people and essentially sealed their own fate.

1: (The main problem) Their inability to come together and fight a common cause. Instead of all the tribes realizing they needed to set aside their differences and come together to fight the real threat (the white man), they continued to fight against each other and even work with the white man to wipe out other tribes. Sitting Bull was killed by his own people for fuck sake! It's like an American solder killing FDR during WW2!! This to me is unbelievably stupid and honestly it makes me question their mental abilities as a whole.

2: Trust. They welcomed us to their shores with open arms and failed to identify a potential threat. Early on, they absolutly had the upper hand and did nothing to stop us from building up our numbers. They continued to trust the white man at his word time and time again. I understand this is a cultural thing but jesus christ, how many times does someone have to lie and hurt you before you stop believing their word! At heart the natives were a good and pure people but that is the very reason they were so weak against us. They had never known such evil. In the real world good does not always defeat evil.

3: Religion: Even when it was absolutely clear that the natives needed a drastic new game plan if they had any hope of lasting as a people they did nothing but revert back to old ways and do dances and put on magical shirts where they told their people white bullets could not penetrate. Obviously this was nonsense and they got wiped out.

I feel like any great society with real mental ability would have identified these issues at some point and made the changes necessary to give their people at least a fighting chance.

If you compare the natives to other great societies they really were an inferior people in terms of identifying threats and war planning. I can't help but believe if the natives had someone like a Napoleon Bonaparte to pull their people together and fight as one strategic unit they would have had much better results.

4: Non-ability. Once the war was over and it was clear the Natives were going to have to change to survive, very very few did so. Even when given farm land and tools 99% failed and did nothing with it. To this day they are mostly still on their reservations usually with alcohol in hand.

Compare them to a people like the Jews who no matter what seem able to adapt and succeed no matter what the hardship every single time.

I know what I'm saying comes across almost racist but I assure you it isn't. It's just an observation I kept feeling the whole series. I just kept screaming in my head, "come on guys, come up with a better plan than this!" I was fucken pulling for them but at every single point they acted in a way that could only ever have 1 result.. defeat.

[Scrumhalf]

Bouncer, this is a complicated topic. I appreciate your watching the whole series, taking time to think about it and writing up your thoughts in the way you did. However, I think you are holding the Indians to an impossibly high set of expectations.

There is no question that the Native Americans were a much more "backward" people by any metric of modern civilization. There was no way they were going to win. They didn't have the manpower, the weapons, whatever.

Also, many of the Indians, especially those of the plains and the Great Basin, were hunter gatherers. They followed the buffalo and depended on the herds for everything. There were a few - they Hopi in Arizona, for eaxmple, who did agriculture, but for the most part, they didn't. You can't just give them farms and expect them to change overnight.

You also have to understand that the Indians were culturally completely different from the whites. For one, they had no concept of ownership of land. To them, the land was there for them to come and go as they pleased and it belonged to everybody. The comparison to the Jews is not fair either. The Jews basically lived in the same society as everyone else. Yes, they were stepped on by everybody through the ages and somehow succeeded despite it all, but the natives were never part of modern society.

Given all this, and the fact that by the mid 1800s, the whites outnumbered them 10 to 1 in the West, it was inevitable that the Indians were going to lose. There is no question about it.

The major disappointment for me was why we had to completely disenfranchise them in the way we did. We won. Manifest Destiny, etc. etc. We got the whole continent from ocean to ocean. Why couldn't we have shared? Why did we not carve out a large area of the West, let the buffalo roam in there and GIVE THEM ROOM AND TIME to gradually figure out how to blend their culture with that of the nation growing up around them. Remember, this was in the 1800s, long after the Enlightenment. We are not talking about the Dark Ages here. This was after the great European philosophers came along. We had the knowledge and wisdom to do better, yet we didn't.

Why did we also have to be so dishonorable? Why did we make treaties we had no intentions of honoring? We would give them land and the moment something valuable was discovered on it, take them back. Just like slavery, we should have known better. We should have done better. Our actions were so completely contrary to everything an honorable person should have done.

The reason, in addition to the fact that we didn't take the time to understand them culturally, is that we didn't really view them as humans equal to us. Just like blacks before the civil war, and shamefully, well into the 20th century as well with Jim Crow laws, we viewed them as subhuman, as savages. When you marginalize someone and consider them as not really human on par with yourself, you can justify anything you do to them.

We had a chance to have this be our finest hour. Instead, it ended up, along with slavery, being one of the darkest chapters of our nation's history. And that, to me, is what is most disappointing.

[Bouncer]

Good stuff scrum, I understand and agree with your perspective. I'm just comparing the Indians to the powerful civilizations of the past in terms of military power. The Romans of 2000 years ago would have handed the Natives their ass. I guess Europe evolved at a much faster pace due to constant war and competition.

Do you think the nation would have been more honorable and fair to the natives had this not taken place during the civil war? By that I mean do you think the nation and it's citizens were just too wrapped up in the civil war to be concerned with the natives?

We still would have treated them like shit but I wonder if the horrors of the civil war made people more numb to it all.

[Scrumhalf]

Nah, I don't think the civil war honestly made a difference. The land grab in the West was under way well before the civil war started. Though I do believe that the underlying feeling of European superiority and assessment as the natives as savages and the blacks as subhuman was a common theme in both cases.

The civil was was another shameful chapter. A war that should never have happened, with an outrageous justification. Equally bad was the followup, where the south was appeased way too much, resulting in the worst kind of terrorism that our country has experienced. Absolutely shameful.

[Bouncer]

Here ya go blm. Its available to stream now.

(Note: You'll especially want to watch this one if you plan to see "Black Mass," Johnny Depp's Whitey biopic.)

Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger

James "Whitey" Bulger is one of the most notorious gangsters of all time. At one point in his career of crime, he joined Osama Bin Laden on FBI's Most Wanted List. In his notorious 2013 trial, he was accused of 33 crimes, including the alleged murders of 19 people, but Bulger had no interest in proving he was innocent; he just wanted to set the record straight that he was not a snitch. "Whitey" works through the issue of whether he was an informant, weighing both sides to look at not just Bulger's legacy, but the depth of corruption inherent in federal law enforcement.

[blm]

Already have it saved to my list.

[Bouncer]

I watched it, its interesting but its a bit of a mess. Million different names of who was involved with who and which agent was in charge of this gang member, which guy killed this guy etc.. Its not a very well organized documentary.

[blm]

I've seen one on him before and it was the same way. It might even be the same one.