Hacker Cinema
Captain Fantastic
2016 · Film · 119 min
Directed by Matt Ross
Deep in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, a father devoted to raising his six kids with a rigorous physical and intellectual education is forced to leave his paradise and enter the world, beginning a journey that challenges his idea of what it means to be a parent.
7 positive4 neutralfrom 11 commenters
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11 comments on Hacker News
I already have problem with negligent people using products like Ring that is to surveil anyone around without control, with uncontrollable and unreliable level of standard handling collected data (no high hopes here). But when I find it very very hard and limited purchasing products that cannot spy on me - special mention here for smart phones and cars - that makes me mad to the next level. Even for the elevated level privacy concious folks the car and the smart phone bringing hostility for your private life is getting harder and harder to avoid. Not having the suitable time to do the tedious investigations and costly trials into the reliability of products with low surveillance risks, not to mention the constant need of keeping yourself up do date to everything involved in this regard! We need to live our life, cannot spend it on constant workarounds, hacks, and very reasonable paranoia. When logging into essential services are MANDATING the use of smart phones (i.e. MFA, but own apps sometimes, requiring specific vendors!!), not to mention the need of getting from A to B the way required (goods, children, time limits, navigation), but cannot procure a solution that will not expose you to adverse agents or even criminals (those getting in and out of systems nowadays like they live there) that makes me really really mad! This society is shit. I cannot do it, but feel the highly increasing need for becoming the real life Captain Fantastic [1].
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3553976/
I was surprised when I learned Gavin Belson (Matt Ross) wrote and directed one of my favorite movies of the past few years, Captain Fantastic
> Including minors, whose rights it's most socially acceptable to infringe, and who can't vote so politically they don't matter. It is absolutely reasonable to advocate for those rights and what those rights are, and observe when they're being infringed.
Minors have plenty of human rights as well as legal rights. The only thing you are worried about is your owm ability to indoctrinate other people's children who are not mature enough to see through propaganda, you want to get them as young and naive as possible because you feel 18yr olds are too hard to deceive I guess? Because why else would you insist on infringing on parental rights if your indoctrination is correct?
> "minor" should not mean an utter lack of ability to learn about other viewpoints. Minor children have rights as well, and I'm arguing that "find out viewpoints other than those of your parents" is not in fact a right that should be restricted until you turn 18
That is not a right at all. You are talking about how things should be not what a democratic society agreed is a right. Parents can absolutley prevent their children from learning about harmful ideologies or content. They can even force schools to exclude their kids from sex-ed that isn't inline with their beliefs. They can homeschool them or raise them in the woods isolated from the world. The only alternative viee points children have to learn about are those prescribed in the education system as manadatory because those are skills they need to survive as adults. And even that is very debatable, beyond reading and writing most things are fluid there. You just really don't like the idea that people will raise religious kids. You should know that this is such a basic right that no law can take it away from parents, even I would participate in armed conflict over this.
You have the right to free speech which I am more than willing to respect but you are arguing for freedom of reach here, and not just to anyone but to minors who are members of society explicitly designated as too weak and immature to care and fend for themselves and it is the entire reason people have children, to pass on their ways and themselves. People don't have children just to increase the population. And information and "view points" or even their ability to interact with arbitrary content/people can be considered harmful. TV and movies have to go through rigorous rating specically so that parents can prevents kids from discovering alternative view points.
Think of it this way, it sounds like you want your secular world views indoctrinated to kids, but that also means every religion has the right to indoctrinate your child but not just that every corporate interest, the military, the porn industry, and so much more also must be allowed to indoctrinate your child against your permission. At that point in your ideal world, parents are merely food and shelter providers, nothing more.
> That isn't a very politically feasible thing to advocate. It is, however, useful to argue the correlates: it's a good thing that children sometimes manage to work around restrictions placed on their access, it's a good thing that such restrictions are not perfectly secure, and it's a bad thing for them to become more difficult to bypass.
You are justifying means because you like ends. Kids also kill themselves, get eating disorders and self harm as a result of bypassing these restrictions. It's not a good thing for parents to not be able to protect their children best they can, weaking of that ability is never a good thing. Children should have access to social services and the police though in case their parents are abusive, not just holding unpopular views.
> I wish all the success in the world to anyone trying to work around restrictions they're under in order to learn when they've been prevented from doing so. And I wish unending failure and disappointment to anyone trying to build systems to control and lock down such access.
For adults I agree. For children, absolutley no way! I advocate for the right to be raised protected from alternative view points and indoctrinated by parents. Parents have the right to live isolated from technology and any viewpoints in the woods and homeschool their kids and raise them to be vile nazis or extereme communists so long as they can read and write and are able to leave the family when they are 18.
I highly recommend watching "captain fantastic" which is about a very liberal family raising their kids in the woods, shielded from alternative view points like this.
Ultimately you should recognize that every responsibility and obligation comes with a right. Parents have an obligaion to their children for bringing them into the world and as a result they have many rights over them. But the ability to indoctrinate and regulate their children's viewpoints is not just their right but also an obligation they have to keep them safe both physically and mentally. Children are very easy to influence and indoctrinate, that's why anyone from the gun industry to the porn and tech industry tries to get to them as young as possible to see things their way. And parents have every right to get in the way. And the government doesn't get to decide what content is harmful so parents get to do that.
There's a movie with a similar theme, Captain Fantastic. Great flick if you like indie films.
> Why can’t I just walk away from social strata to begin with, and live my life happily as a “lower class” citizen living in the woods if I want?
That's certainly an idealistic or romantic idea but it's not in any way realistic.
Being poor, depending on where you live, also means having no social safety net. It means you can't educate your children, it means you and your family are vulnerable to all the social ills that afflict those who are in poverty. Being poor gives you the short end of the stick in almost every way that matters.
It's not like everyone (or anyone, really) can live like the family in the film "Captain Fantastic", isolated in the woods, yet somehow thriving, more fit, and better educated. There's a documentary about people that lived for generations in the woods in Siberia for religious reasons. It was fanatic Christian sect called "True Believers" (can't find the documentary, but here's the Vice News story, https://youtu.be/tt2AYafET68). Definitely not an attractive lifestyle!
Check out "Captain Fantastic" with Viggo Mortensen. A pretty good road movie where he uses an old school bus as a motor home for his hippy family.
Watch Captain Fantastic - one of my favorite movies.
What most kids really need: time, attention, and role models who instill the values mentioned above (intellectual curiosity, love of reading/learning, creativity, achievement.) Kids are pretty minimalist when it comes to money.
There's a movie relevant to this topic called Captain Fantastic. It's about a father who raises his kids in the forests of the Pacific NW.
I do think it's true that school is oppressive. I guess it's oppressive for the same reason modern mass societies are oppressive: strict conformity is tacitly enforced. The nail that stands out (for whatever reason) is usually hammered in. Of course we also gain a lot from the way we've arranged our societies (and our schools). We're optimizing for the best outcomes on average -- and we may be doing that fairly well -- but that doesn't mean we're anywhere close to optimal for a given individual.
Unfortunately, "optimal for each individual" may not be a realizable goal. But if you have the resources, alternative means of educating your children seem tempting.
It's also well-documented that girls seem to tolerate school better than boys (and get better grades), which is interesting.
Forest Kindergartens remind me of a movie I quite liked, which others might find interesting: Captain Fantastic (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3553976/
> I am still trying to figure out how to clearly, effectively and consistently communicate on the internet when I am being straight up serious and when I am kidding. I have yet to figure out an internet version of The Dripping Sarcasm Voice. That fact sometimes gets me into all kinds of trouble.
This is what /s is for.
I agree with the comments saying that this is quite self-congratulatory and does not have must useful substance.
> With that incident in my past and still weighing heavily on my mind, in high school, I was painfully aware that many of my classmates simply did not have the background knowledge I had and this gap in knowledge about the world was growing with every single passing day as I continued to take yet more advanced classes.
I think that by the author's metric I would be considered "very smart". I've taken and done well in many fancy classes. However the type of "smart" that comes from classes is worth a lot less than one would think, and I think that a lot of us learn that lesson much later in life than we would like.
There is a great scene in the movie "Captain Fantastic" where the eldest in a homeschooled family lashes out and says "I don't know anything! If it doesn't come from a book I don't know it at all!" This character was accepted to all of the best universities, had a strong grasp of physics and philosophy, etc. But, after a series of awkward social encounters, realized that they had some deficiencies.
Captain Fantastic is a great movie to get you thinking about kids' education and safety.