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| Do you want the U.S. to lose all power. |
| Hell yeah! Burn baby burn! |
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23% |
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| Kick the Republicans out of office and we'll see. |
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17% |
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| Bring on the Pax Americana. |
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29% |
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| Just stop bombing brown people for oil and I'll be happy. |
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29% |
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| Total Votes : 34 |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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 Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 3:49 am Post subject: |
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| I don't know about Ruppert. I think he is an exception he is not so much anti US is that he is just full of himself. Kind of like Moore. Except he is even whackier than Moore. |
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Nowhere Man
Joined: 08 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 4:26 am Post subject: ... |
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Goopher,
A) What is your evidence that Moore is a "nutjob"?
B) Give an example of Chomsky of stating something that is factually incorrect. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 5:46 am Post subject: |
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| On the other hand wrote: |
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mithridates wrote:
Gopher wrote:
No. I say that Michael Moore is a college drop-out and a nutjob.
Nothing wrong with college dropouts.
No, but for expertise on U.S. affairs and foreign policy, I prefer to look elsewhere for analysis, don't you |
Not necessarily. As far as I can tell from Wiki, Walter Cronkite never went to college. And who would you, Gopher, trust more for analysis of American foreign affairs: Walter Cronkite, or Noam Chomsky Ph.D?
With all due respect Gopher, your "college dropout" remark reminded me of those liberal snobs who think they're really scoring a devastating hit against Bush by pointing out that he flunked Chemistry at Yale or something. |
Excellent points, OTOH and Mithridates. The real problem with both Bush and Michael Moore is that not only are each intellectually lazy in the extreme, but they are proportionately intellectually dishonest as well. |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 6:07 am Post subject: |
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Excellent points, OTOH and Mithridates. The real problem with both Bush and Michael Moore is that not only are each intellectually lazy in the extreme, but they are proportionately intellectually dishonest as well.
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I've only ever seen Fahrenheit 9/11, and I actually thought it was pretty good as a piece of polemical satire. I didn't like the way images were taken out of context, and I thought he overstated the importance of certain things(for example, I didn't see anything really wrong with the way Bush kept reading the book to the kids after hearing of the attacks; it isn't as if Bush himself had to repsond to the crisis at that exact moment, and I'm not sure if just getting up and announcing that there was a national emergency would have been the best thing to do in front of a bunch of kindergarteners).
I also thought that Moore appealed(or at least ended up appealing) to anti-arab prejudice with his examination of the Bush/bin laden connections. That part of the film seemed directed at the America First crowd, the kind of people who got riled up about the ports deal earlier this year.
Moore later tried to say that the film wasn't meant as a documentary, but as a "political cartoon", presumably not to be taken literally. Which is fine, but I think it's pretty clear that most people who saw the film understood it to be a documentary, and that Moore originally made no attempt to stop people from seeing it that way. If the same images had been used as part of a satirical multimedia installation, with the understanding that they are meant as an impressionistic rendering of the artist's opinions and not the actual course of events, I wouldn't have had as much of a problem with it. |
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Nowhere Man
Joined: 08 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 6:33 am Post subject: ... |
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| What images were taken out of context? |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 7:00 am Post subject: |
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There was a newspaper clipping shown which contained the headline "Gore Won Florida". Watching the movie, you got the impression that this was a regular news headline. It was later revealed that it was in fact the headline of a Letter To The Editor, from someone arguing a partisan Democratic line.
As well, there was a short clip shown of Bush at his ranch, with the narration saying that he was on vacation during a time of crisis. Christopher Hitchens pointed out that Tony Blair was standing next to Bush, but that the film was edited in such a way so that Blair wasn't really noticable. But of course, if Bush was with Blair, they were probably doing a bit more than just fishing and barbequeing. |
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Nowhere Man
Joined: 08 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 7:34 am Post subject: ... |
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OK.
Was Bush on vacation the month before 9/11?
Does Tony Blair's presence determine context?
Anyone who was paying attention to the US 2000 election knows the circumstances under which Gore lost. It took a month to announce a proper winner.
The point being that I can't imagine any "adult" alive at the time of these events being "duped" by these items.
Mind you, he made the movie amidst the fallout of Bowling for Columbine.
He had people fact-checking everything.
The only fallacies I know of were Bush involvement in the Carleton group and the date of a newspaper featured.
Honestly, I thought that the movie was pretty boring. It was a review of what anyone who'd been paying attention already knew.
How that qualifies him as a nutjob is beyond me.
I believe the context challenges you are making were unintentional and largely superfluous.
Do these context issues take away from the film as a whole?
Is the movie a big propagandist lie? |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 8:05 am Post subject: |
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| Does Tony Blair's presence determine context? |
Well, if we know that Tony Blair was with Bush, we might assume that he and Bush were working on matters of governance, as opposed to it just being Bush goofing off. And we have to assume that Moore was aware that the presence of Blair might undermine his point, given the way he edited the film.
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Anyone who was paying attention to the US 2000 election knows the circumstances under which Gore lost. It took a month to announce a proper winner.
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Yes, but then why didn't Moore make it clear that he was showing a headline to a letter? Why did he have to let the impression take hold that he was showing an actual news headline? If newspaper headlines HAD said that Gore won Florida, at some point in the recount, why couldn't Moore have found one of those? |
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Nowhere Man
Joined: 08 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 8:39 am Post subject: ... |
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I don't recall either.
Was the Blair thing while Bush was golfing and saying that, "We have to do something about terrorism"?
I think there might be a bigger point. Internationally, it might have been better with Tony Blair in it, no?
And again, the 2000 election, I believe, was a minor part of the movie.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_election,_2000
It was a movie about the Iraq War.
Not to pick bones with you, OTOH, but was it a big propagandist lie?
Does it misinterpret the way we went into war?
50 years from now, will it be summarily dismissed? |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 8:48 am Post subject: |
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Not to pick bones with you, OTOH, but was it a big propagandist lie?
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I wouldn't say it was an outright lie, no. I would say that some of the points it focussed on were not entirely relevant(eg. My Pet Goat), and at the time I watched it I wasn't entirely convinced that the Bush/Saudi connections were as sinister as Moore tried to make out.
For example, Moore seemed to be implying that there was something amiss about the fact that an American law enforcement agent was questionisng people in front of the Saudi embassy. Like, why is our government protecting the a foreign embassy? But he didn't tell us whether or not this was standard procedure for embassies in Washington DC. And might middle eastern embassies have been recieving a lot of death threats post-911, thus necessitating more security? Would Moore have preferred it if the Saudis had their own security forces running around Washington? |
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Nowhere Man
Joined: 08 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 9:13 am Post subject: ... |
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Ok.
Was security around embassies a pivotal point?
Does that disparage or promote bush?
It seems kind of moot. |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 4:08 pm Post subject: |
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Ok.
Was security around embassies a pivotal point?
Does that disparage or promote bush?
It seems kind of moot.
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The alleged closeness between Bush and the Saudis was, in my view, a pivotal point of the film, and Moore's implications about the embassy were meant to illustrate that closeness.
It seems to me that every time I give an example of Moore using bad logic or failing to make his point, you say that the matter in question was not of any particular importance.
What, in your view, were the important points of the film? |
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Hater Depot
Joined: 29 Mar 2005
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| Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 4:11 pm Post subject: |
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Hard to say what it's major points were, yeah? It was kind of the 'throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks' approach.
The major message from it, for me, was the callousness with which Bush and co. treated the lived of American soldiers. The line I remember best was one of the last ones -- they do their duty and all they ask in return is that we don't put them in harm's way unnecessarily. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 4:46 pm Post subject: |
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[deleted]
Last edited by Gopher on Sun Jun 11, 2006 2:06 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Wishmaster
Joined: 06 Feb 2003
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| Posted: Fri May 12, 2006 5:53 am Post subject: |
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| Will the US collapse? You never know. But one thing that you can be assured of...the US will never be without power. Over 100,000 nuclear weapons along with technology like Stealth...yeah, you may be able to manipulate the US in the future but you sure as hell won't be able to control it. Just like Russia...they may be weaker but you pick a fight with them and you'll more than likely lose...they are still quite powerful... |
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