When people have more money than they need to survive, they buy stuff they don't need. Many save money, but not all of it. Before we had tech toys people bought other stuff--nicer furniture, more expensive watches, and so on. That stuff is still around, but now tech stuff competes with it for our money.
I know someone who makes less than $30K a year yet saw fit to buy a $4K bed. We don't say people have an "expensive furniture addiction." I've met non-rich guys whose car rims cost $1.5K each. Why is this any different than with plasma screens or cellphones? We all buy what we want, and beyond food/shelter/clothing/medicine, almost all of it is luxury.
Well, I was being ironic, but ultimately I think it's about veneration of power. People get fed up with red tape and complication and dream of just having the power to "get stuff done." Law enforcement/military ops superficially seem to be areas where stuff most urgently needs to get done, so seem to be prime candidates for cutting the red tape and administrative overhead, including oversight. It's not for nothing that people love action movies of burly men just mowing through the bad guys, namby-pamby due process "rights" be damned. It's a power fantasy. I don't think we're a particularly healthy country, mentally speaking. Not to say that others are wonderful by comparison, but this one is mine, so the problems are more relevant to me than those of Lichtenstein.
But surely the facts that I'm skeptical of the germ theory, and that I think the science behind plate tectonics is murky, and I think the jury is still out on the atomic theory, should carry some weight in the scientific community? Sigh. I guess asking the tough questions isn't allowed. You'd think science would profit from honest debate, but "scientists" seem to prefer ignoring problems with the conventional theories. Can't rock the boat, lest you lose your funding. They should just follow the evidence wherever it leads, and if that leads past the limitations of materialistic science, so be it. But not everyone, it seems, has the intellectual integrity to acknowledge the Invisible Pink Unicorn, um, I mean not everyone is willing to recognize the ever-present hand of a designer.
Your speech isn't encrypted either, but if I bug your house it's considered a violation of your privacy. I don't even have to enter your house for that--the laser microphone will let me listen/record from the sidewalk. Since your sound waves are traveling outside your home, you must not have an expectation of privacy.
Letters in the mail? Sealed with glue. Glue. Wow. You must not have much expectation of privacy there, otherwise you would've used a more robust method of ensuring your privacy. Even your phone calls are unencryped, sent as electrical impulses over wires and cables. Is it okay to listen to and record cellphone conversations, because they are transmitted through the air? If not, why not? If people wanted security, they wouldn't have transmitted those radio waves all over the place. People are so stupid.
It's true that we have laws against most (or all) of this type of surveillance. But it's just to protect the stupid people. I think that anytime it's possible to intercept your message, everyone should be able to do so, no warrant or probable cause needed, and use it in any way they want. That's the only way people will stop being so stupid that they think they have an expectation of privacy.
prosecutors|police vs mere mortals
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The Privacy of Email
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Yes, I can see why a prosecutor would consider the ability to read people's email without warrants, oversight, or checks/balances "very important." It makes sense that he doesn't want to have to go before a third party and demonstrate probable cause, otherwise he can't go fishing for information, target people he doesn't like for political|religious reasons, etc.
Despite the torrent of "email isn't private, and only stupid people think it is" posts that will follow, if a monkey at the local ISP took sensitive customer emails (to each other, not to the company) that he had plucked from their servers and posted them to a blog or whatever, there would be an outcry, criminal investigation, lawsuit, and (fake) apologies. If the prosecutor's own dirty emails to his wife|mistress|whatever were publicized, the prosecutor would suddenly discover that a crime had been committed.
When it comes to private parties, either communication is private, or it isn't. If it isn't, then Joe Schmoe who works at AOL or the local ISP can read customers' emails at random and post the amusing bits to a public forum. Anything Joe Schmoe can't legally do, his brother Officer Jim needs a warrant to do. If Officer Jim doesn't need a warrant to do it, that means Joe the private citizen can do it with impunity.
What we're saying is, "you have an expectation of privacy in your private affairs, unless it's a police eyeball/eardrum, and in those cases you have no expectation of privacy because your action was public and they don't need a warrant." Bullshit. Anything the police don't need a warrant for is something every single private citizen should be able to do with impunity. Anything we don't want the public doing (privacy-wise) is something the police should need a warrant to do. Otherwise you're giving police and prosecutors the power to arbitrarily target anytone they want, without any oversight at all. This isn't complicated, people. I can understand why they would ask for it, but not why we would be so stupid as to give it to them.
Not only that, but the car would be made of incompatible parts that the auto makers coughed up when they were directed to hand over parts to a competing agency--i.e. the parts that the company found least useful and valuable. There aren't many bosses who, when told to give up people, wouldn't use it as an excuse to jettison all the incompetents, whiners, bullies, and troublemakers they couldn't manage to fire earlier. So the DHS is comprised of rejects, and has no discernable mission, and has to deal with bureaucratic infighting.
You don't need to prove malice or incompetence when the acts were illegal. Motive is always speculative, but if it makes sense to think they were probably covering things up, they probably were.
but we aren't willing to pay the cost. The price of freedom is not a $700B defense budget, or the occupation of Iraq, or the Patriot Act. The price of freedom is a constant vigilance to keep government under control, a constant skepticism when government tries to increase its scope and power.
The price of freedom is also a bit of perceived safety--you have to give up torture and detention without trial as means of conducting government, because those are inimical to freedom. But we don't want to pay those things--everyone wants more government, the only difference being that each person wants different things controlled. I'd personally turn my entire country into Amsterdam if I could, but you'd find that probably about 3% of the nation, if that, would agree with me.
Despite what they say, people want a big, powerful, ubiquitous government, and not just because of handouts and pork. When someone wants to ban gay marriage, or marijuana, or prostitution, or mandate seatbelts, or to give senior citizens drug benefits, or imprison people without trial, or ban dirty words on TV, then that means they believe in big government, rhetoric notwithstanding.
Moore is crediting viewers with the mental capacity necessary to follow an idea through multiple scenes, of seeing the continuity in different speeches. The underlying continuity is there, and the splicing of scenes is meant to illustrate that, not to trick you into thinking this was all one speech.
I saw that part of the film. I am anti-gun, and I still didn't reach the conclusion that Moore is said by his critics to have foisted on me. That's part of what I find odd about the criticisms of his movies. Politically I'm in his neighborhood (roughly), but I never saw what everyone says he is showing. I take hyperbole for hyperbole, rhetorical questions for rhetorical questions, metaphor for metaphor, and so on--I guess I'm not literalist enough to feel that he's trying to lie to me. The main ideas of the film are what matter to me, and oddly, I haven't seen those questioned. I just see them thrown out altogether, sight unseen, because Moore spliced two speeches together and "that means we can't trust him."
In the documentary I have seen by him, he presented central points, buttressed by multiple arguments. He took some dramatic license, to which many have objected, but his central points about deceptions on the war, profits from the war, and odd loyalties to the Saudi royal family, stand. I'm not saying that he's a master filmmaker, only that the things he brings up need to be talked over.
But instead of talking about the questions he raises, we get mired in talk about Michael Moore himself, about his annoyingness, or bias, or halitosis, or whatever. Yet another example of our obsession with personality and aversion to actual discussion of things that matter. Were we misled on the Iraq war? Who is profiting from the war? These questions matter, whereas Moore himself does not. I would wager that he'd agree. This conversation is meaningless--we should be spending our time not asking "Did Michael Moore present things exactly as they really were?" but, "He brings up interesting points--what did really happen to lead us into Iraq?"
The sins you cite are common to all filmmakers, authors, columnists, comedians, and cartoonists who want to make a point about something. He is biased--as is everyone else on the planet. The people who rail at Michael Moore's bias are rarely the same ones who rail at Ann Coulter's bias--because we're biased even in our perception of bias. He's stacking the scene to convey what he wants to convey, just as William F. Buckley or Seymour Hersh select examples to illustrate their point. You have to take everything you read, see, or hear with a grain of salt, because everyone has an agenda, whether they know it or not. Forgive me for thinking that everyone knows that.
I think a partially-blanked out letter captures the whole issue with documentaries. A filmmaker has something they want to say, so they make a movie to say it. But "objectivity" is impossible, because even if the facts are presented impartially, the very selection of which facts to present involves bias. The parts of the picture (or letter) you blank do indeed call attention to what you wanted to focus on, but only by obscuring the rest of the picture. But if you don't obscure part of the picture, you can't make a film (or write a story, or a book, or anything else). All communication involves paring down reality to the bits we want to communicate.
But you can mislead with factually true statements. You can talk about congressional pork, and if you go on and on about Republican pork projects, while just omitting any mention of Democratic pork, then you have lied even if all of your statements were factually correct.
But documentaries are always slanted. Even if you go back to "Nanook of the North," they didn't use harpoons by that time (from what I've read), but shotguns. But in the film, you see harpoons, because the filmmakers are trying to evoke a lost innocence, or something like that. So I don't ask for objectivity, and I sort of assume that there is an agenda there, whether disguised or not. My question is whether or not the issues raised have some connection to reality, can I corroborate with other sources, and so on. I also happen to like right-wing documentaries on Waco and Ruby Ridge. Are they true? I'm sure parts are.
Michael Moore brings important questions to the fore, questions that are flatly ignored by the mainstream media. Some of the objections to his work are nitpicky, and I get the feeling that they're looking for some pretext to throw out the entire set of questions. If you look at the entire PNAC/9-11/Iraq/Haliburton casserole it's obvious that the official explanations don't add up, and a gadfly like Moore does the public a service by pointing out problems, even if he gets sloppy. I just wish his screen presence wasn't so grating. It's like he's taken every stereotype of the smarmy, self-righteous liberal and decided "that's who I want to be!"
This is the problem with political topics--it makes you bedfellows with someone you don't really like. I'm not a Moore fan, and I've only seen that one movie. The movie piqued my interest in some questions, but I also did a lot of reading, so some of the "gotcha" moments were already known to me. I read of the Bin Laden flights in the House of Bush, House of Saud bookI never took his movie for gospel or the definitive word on anything.
All works like that are going to have inaccuracies. I've read about the gun-in-the-bank issue, but I forgot about it. I guess I just look at the main questions someone's bringing up and look at those. It would never occur to me to "just believe" Michael Moore, so I'm always surprized that others point out the seemingly obvious fact that we can't just believe him. Everyone has an agenda.
What "outright lies" did he tell in the movie? I'm not a fan, and I only watched it once (I find him very irritating), so I'm curious. I've read many "he's a liar" posts, but I've never seen any specifics that I couldn't chalk up to a different interpretation of the facts, or that someone else disagreed with a fact he cited. Please give an example, or more if you have them.
Before we get off on a tangent, I want to point out that being wrong isn't lying. Citing a source, whether it be a document, government testimony, interview, whatever, that is later found to be false isn't lying--it's just being wrong. That is, unless there was specific effort made to cover up the known truth and mislead people, such as in the Saddam-is-seeking-nukes lie.
I wish I had read your posts before replying to 2 others. I agree that Michael Moore is a hack, but I think that his 9/11 movie raised some important questions. I just wish he hadn't been in the movie. The evidence he presented was so eloquent that all he had to do was not screw it up, but his very screen presence is so obnoxious that people want to disbelieve him, even if all the evidence comes from independently verifiable sources. He is an impediment to his own message.
Please post an actual lie that Michael Moore had in his movies. The arguments in Fahrenheit 9/11 were presented in terms of evidence--government documents, congressional transcripts/testimony, interviews, books, etc. You can interpret the facts differently if you wish, but that doesn't mean he's lying.
I've read a bit of the "Michael Moore is a liar" threads here and elsewhere, but their content is, from what I've seen, limited to re-interpreting the facts a different way, just leaving out the facts that led to his conclusion, all the while pretending that he's just spouting foundationless opinion, a la Rush Limbaugh.
I've only watched the Fahrenheit 9/11 movie, so I'm not a Moore expert. But he didn't just give me "his opinion." He didn't just stand there and say "I'm a liberal who hates Bush. I'm smart, so believe me." He gave evidence, linked to sources in the mainstream media, government reports, interviews, and other verifiable sources. He pointed out stuff that looked fishy as hell, that anyone using just their common sense, rather than their political loyalties, would want to think about a bit. Everyone who wants to discredit him says "he's biased!" as if there is any sentient mammal who isn't biased. Pointing out something that is true of all humans doesn't refute any argument.
If Bush's businesses were funded by the Saudis, that may matter. If prominent Saudis (related to Bin Laden, no less) were flown out of the country without being interviewed by the FBI when the rest of the non-military planes were grounded, that may matter. If the Saudi ambassador is so close to the Bushes that he has a pet name and is considered a close personal friend, that may matter. If Cheney still owns stock in Haliburton and stands to make money off of it when he steps out of office, that may matter.
I've seen concerted efforts to discredit Moore, and they always hinge on a different interpretation of the facts, not catching him in an outright falsehood. The facts he puts on the table need to be on the table, and Fox sure as hell isn't going to put them there. If his facts are correct and the facts indicate that something was awry, then we needed to look at that. We chose not to. We allowed cries of "he's biased!" to trump the question of "are his facts correct and what conclusion do they lead to?" Even if smoking guns can't be found, there were a lot of things brought to light by his movie that looked fishy as hell.
If you want to see bias, look at an Ann Coulter book. At least Moore's references check out.
Screw that. I want to die when life is still good. I don't want to live a miserable life staring doom in the face. At least now we have the solace of denial--maybe it won't happen, or it's so far in the future we can ignore it. But even long before heat death or the death of our star, what do you think life will be like here with no fossil fuels and a population of 15 billion?
We're living in the last twinkling of the good ol' days. Our kids may not have it that bad, but in the next 100 years things are going to get ugly. The fossil fuel banquet will be over. Other sources will be found, but energy will never again be this cheap or plentiful. We will have plagues, natural or manmade. We will have wars over oil, water, land, food. Slavery will eventually come back. Well, it never really left, and it's being used even now in China, from whom we buy all that cheap stuff they sell at Wal-Mart. Corporate interests will stop co-opting democracy and just take over altogether. Already we have corporate armies (Blackwater), corporate prisons, corporate police forces, etc. Earth will resemble something from a Philip K. Dick novel. I sure as hell don't want to be here for that.
The technology has advanced, but the mores of society are largely arbitrary. Rather, there is not a steady downward trend, with strict morals in the good ol' days and lax morals now. There have been plenty of societies with morals more lax (at least by our standards) than what we see today.
Heliogabalus was a Roman emperor, and he went into battle dressed in drag. And won. I'm sure his husband was proud of him. Alexander the Great had boys in his harem. There have been societies with even more lax divorce laws, where people could just say they were divorced and that was it.
And as far as "God is dead," unbelief is not new. Seneca, a Roman, wrote "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful". There have always been skeptics, and polticians have always exploited religion for their ends.
the real PR stunt is that Congress would ban the use of labels, such as, "War on Terror" and the "long war".
Well, I don't know if they can "ban" terms, but I think those terms are a bit misleading. Calling the Iraq occupation part of "the war on terror" begs the question of whether Iraq had anything to do with terrorism, and also ignores the analysis that says our occupation of Iraq is making terrorism worse. Calling the occupation "the long war" begs the same question by assuming that Iraq's security problem is our problem, and assumes that this is a war we're in--something that is not beyond debate. Many people, including many in the DoD and elsewhere in the government, question the term of "war" at all. Terrorism isn't an enemy--it's a tactic, and you can't have a war against a tactic. So I understand the objections to using those terms, because the terms are calculated for a political purpose. You can't even say that you oppose Operation Iraq Freedom without saying that you oppose Iraqi freedom--naming it that wasn't an accident.
that the Sunni tribes remain anti-American, but what's more important _now_ is that they're turning against al Qaeda
Al Qaeda is more of a loose coalition than a rigid structure. There has always been infighting between these groups, as there are between the Shiite militias, Sunni insurgents, and violent groups in other nations and movements. We are just choosing to fund/arm one of them, and taking their word for it that they'll stay bought once we buy them. We're also funding/arming/training the police force and army, which are well-known to be heavily infiltrated by the Shiite militias and heavily involved in torturing/murdering Sunnis. As in "death squads," to be brief. I know that our motives can always be explained in intelligent-sounding, reasonable-sounding arguments. But in the wider context of evaluating what we've already done, and the effects our decisions have already had, and looking at our past bedfellows, we can see that the ostensibly sensible decisions are pretty foolish. I don't blame our military or even the state department--they are just tasked with doing what Bush and Cheney want to do, and they have to do something to try and affect those ends.
But you can keep going back and back and back and still see fiascos and tragedies that resulted from our prior decisions. Even the Iranian hostage crisis leapt directly from our overthrow of a democratic government in Iran and reinstallment of the Shah. We always think we know what we're doing when we tinker with other people's countries (Pinochet, anyone?) and it usually bites us in the ass, whereupon we are shocked at the idea that people don't like us, and proceed to tinker some more with other people's countries.
So if I steal your car and burn down your house, I could say in my defense that I didn't torture you to death, set your family on fire, and poison the water system, and that would serve to put what I actually did in perspective? I mean, there are millions of people Hitler and Stalin didn't kill, so I wish people would keep that in mind when they are being so alarmist. But I guess groupthink is easier than thinking. Or something.
I rarely carry my cell, I don't watch TV, and I'm discovering that I can live without home internet. But I miss the enthusiasm I had when I was younger--I remember drooling over the idea of broadband, 500GB HDs, video cellphones, etc. The realization is so much more prosaic than the aspiration.
But when I think of giving it up and going back, what panics me is not having the shopping available. I look at the books and DVDs I've bought via Amazon et al, and I know I never would've found them in my local stores. Many of them I've found via Listmania lists or "People who bought this also bought..." links, and I never even would've known about them if I had to rely on the pre-internet shopping world. So I guess I am addicted to a few things. I just take them for granted, so they aren't as exciting anymore.
I'm not a gamer, and I'm not trying to insult them en masse. But I've met more than a couple of video game widows. I understand men not wanting to go shopping, buy groceries, or go over to visit the mother-in-law, and women maybe blaming video games. But I've met women, attractive women, who couldn't get laid because their husband would rather play Star Wars or World of Warcraft all night than have sex. I understand having a hobby, even a passion, but being offered a blowjob tends to cut through the fog a bit, at least for me.
Iraq only became a "long war" after we failed. Before that, it was known as a "cake walk." Calling it a long war is just a PR stunt roughly translated as: "We shouldn't even evaluate the success of anything this administration has done for at least fifty years." And as far as:
"Sunni tribes that were once anti-America and pro-al Qaeda are now turning against al Qaeda"
We know that they're taking our money and weapons--what we don't know is who they will fight long-term. The Sunni insurgents are dedicated to overthrowing the Shiite government, who in turn is dedicated to further marginalizing, and possibly getting rid of, the Sunni minority. Remember that Bin Laden took our weapons and money, too, as did Saddam Hussein. We have a long and rich history of fighting against the people we were wise enough to fund and arm. The word "naive" applies, but not to me.
You're taking the stated aims of an approximately 2-week old plan and just assuming that the outcome will be as expected, which seems odd considering how badly all the rest of the Iraq planning has gone since the invasion. Sunni tribes that "were" anti-American are still anti-American. We're just giving them cash, so they pretend to like us.
Saddam's injustices (atrocities, really) were committed well over 10 years before the USA 'liberated' Iraq. He was a US ally before, during, and after he gassed the Kurds. It wasn't until he invaded Kuwait that we decided he was the wrong kind of tyrant. We invaded that country the 2nd time mainly because of a few visionary politicians (Google "PNAC") who wanted to remake the middle east, not because of those gassed Kurds.
I agree that many nations stand by and do nothing when genocide is happening, but the USA does that just as well. We did nothing while the thing in Rwanda was happening, and many of our politicians (and population) opposed Clinton's intervention in Kosovo. Ignoring atrocity is something all countries seem to do well. Once in a while humanitarian concerns are available to justify what we wanted to do for economic reasons, but it's still the economic reasons that drive foreign policy. When there's no money/oil at stake, no one really cares.
Slashdot Mirror
I know someone who makes less than $30K a year yet saw fit to buy a $4K bed. We don't say people have an "expensive furniture addiction." I've met non-rich guys whose car rims cost $1.5K each. Why is this any different than with plasma screens or cellphones? We all buy what we want, and beyond food/shelter/clothing/medicine, almost all of it is luxury.
Well, I was being ironic, but ultimately I think it's about veneration of power. People get fed up with red tape and complication and dream of just having the power to "get stuff done." Law enforcement/military ops superficially seem to be areas where stuff most urgently needs to get done, so seem to be prime candidates for cutting the red tape and administrative overhead, including oversight. It's not for nothing that people love action movies of burly men just mowing through the bad guys, namby-pamby due process "rights" be damned. It's a power fantasy. I don't think we're a particularly healthy country, mentally speaking. Not to say that others are wonderful by comparison, but this one is mine, so the problems are more relevant to me than those of Lichtenstein.
But surely the facts that I'm skeptical of the germ theory, and that I think the science behind plate tectonics is murky, and I think the jury is still out on the atomic theory, should carry some weight in the scientific community? Sigh. I guess asking the tough questions isn't allowed. You'd think science would profit from honest debate, but "scientists" seem to prefer ignoring problems with the conventional theories. Can't rock the boat, lest you lose your funding. They should just follow the evidence wherever it leads, and if that leads past the limitations of materialistic science, so be it. But not everyone, it seems, has the intellectual integrity to acknowledge the Invisible Pink Unicorn, um, I mean not everyone is willing to recognize the ever-present hand of a designer.
Letters in the mail? Sealed with glue. Glue. Wow. You must not have much expectation of privacy there, otherwise you would've used a more robust method of ensuring your privacy. Even your phone calls are unencryped, sent as electrical impulses over wires and cables. Is it okay to listen to and record cellphone conversations, because they are transmitted through the air? If not, why not? If people wanted security, they wouldn't have transmitted those radio waves all over the place. People are so stupid.
It's true that we have laws against most (or all) of this type of surveillance. But it's just to protect the stupid people. I think that anytime it's possible to intercept your message, everyone should be able to do so, no warrant or probable cause needed, and use it in any way they want. That's the only way people will stop being so stupid that they think they have an expectation of privacy.
Despite the torrent of "email isn't private, and only stupid people think it is" posts that will follow, if a monkey at the local ISP took sensitive customer emails (to each other, not to the company) that he had plucked from their servers and posted them to a blog or whatever, there would be an outcry, criminal investigation, lawsuit, and (fake) apologies. If the prosecutor's own dirty emails to his wife|mistress|whatever were publicized, the prosecutor would suddenly discover that a crime had been committed.
When it comes to private parties, either communication is private, or it isn't. If it isn't, then Joe Schmoe who works at AOL or the local ISP can read customers' emails at random and post the amusing bits to a public forum. Anything Joe Schmoe can't legally do, his brother Officer Jim needs a warrant to do. If Officer Jim doesn't need a warrant to do it, that means Joe the private citizen can do it with impunity.
What we're saying is, "you have an expectation of privacy in your private affairs, unless it's a police eyeball/eardrum, and in those cases you have no expectation of privacy because your action was public and they don't need a warrant." Bullshit. Anything the police don't need a warrant for is something every single private citizen should be able to do with impunity. Anything we don't want the public doing (privacy-wise) is something the police should need a warrant to do. Otherwise you're giving police and prosecutors the power to arbitrarily target anytone they want, without any oversight at all. This isn't complicated, people. I can understand why they would ask for it, but not why we would be so stupid as to give it to them.
Not only that, but the car would be made of incompatible parts that the auto makers coughed up when they were directed to hand over parts to a competing agency--i.e. the parts that the company found least useful and valuable. There aren't many bosses who, when told to give up people, wouldn't use it as an excuse to jettison all the incompetents, whiners, bullies, and troublemakers they couldn't manage to fire earlier. So the DHS is comprised of rejects, and has no discernable mission, and has to deal with bureaucratic infighting.
You don't need to prove malice or incompetence when the acts were illegal. Motive is always speculative, but if it makes sense to think they were probably covering things up, they probably were.
The price of freedom is also a bit of perceived safety--you have to give up torture and detention without trial as means of conducting government, because those are inimical to freedom. But we don't want to pay those things--everyone wants more government, the only difference being that each person wants different things controlled. I'd personally turn my entire country into Amsterdam if I could, but you'd find that probably about 3% of the nation, if that, would agree with me.
Despite what they say, people want a big, powerful, ubiquitous government, and not just because of handouts and pork. When someone wants to ban gay marriage, or marijuana, or prostitution, or mandate seatbelts, or to give senior citizens drug benefits, or imprison people without trial, or ban dirty words on TV, then that means they believe in big government, rhetoric notwithstanding.
Fog of War
The Corporation
Why We Fight
The Persuaders
I saw that part of the film. I am anti-gun, and I still didn't reach the conclusion that Moore is said by his critics to have foisted on me. That's part of what I find odd about the criticisms of his movies. Politically I'm in his neighborhood (roughly), but I never saw what everyone says he is showing. I take hyperbole for hyperbole, rhetorical questions for rhetorical questions, metaphor for metaphor, and so on--I guess I'm not literalist enough to feel that he's trying to lie to me. The main ideas of the film are what matter to me, and oddly, I haven't seen those questioned. I just see them thrown out altogether, sight unseen, because Moore spliced two speeches together and "that means we can't trust him."
But instead of talking about the questions he raises, we get mired in talk about Michael Moore himself, about his annoyingness, or bias, or halitosis, or whatever. Yet another example of our obsession with personality and aversion to actual discussion of things that matter. Were we misled on the Iraq war? Who is profiting from the war? These questions matter, whereas Moore himself does not. I would wager that he'd agree. This conversation is meaningless--we should be spending our time not asking "Did Michael Moore present things exactly as they really were?" but, "He brings up interesting points--what did really happen to lead us into Iraq?"
The sins you cite are common to all filmmakers, authors, columnists, comedians, and cartoonists who want to make a point about something. He is biased--as is everyone else on the planet. The people who rail at Michael Moore's bias are rarely the same ones who rail at Ann Coulter's bias--because we're biased even in our perception of bias. He's stacking the scene to convey what he wants to convey, just as William F. Buckley or Seymour Hersh select examples to illustrate their point. You have to take everything you read, see, or hear with a grain of salt, because everyone has an agenda, whether they know it or not. Forgive me for thinking that everyone knows that.
But you can mislead with factually true statements. You can talk about congressional pork, and if you go on and on about Republican pork projects, while just omitting any mention of Democratic pork, then you have lied even if all of your statements were factually correct.
But documentaries are always slanted. Even if you go back to "Nanook of the North," they didn't use harpoons by that time (from what I've read), but shotguns. But in the film, you see harpoons, because the filmmakers are trying to evoke a lost innocence, or something like that. So I don't ask for objectivity, and I sort of assume that there is an agenda there, whether disguised or not. My question is whether or not the issues raised have some connection to reality, can I corroborate with other sources, and so on. I also happen to like right-wing documentaries on Waco and Ruby Ridge. Are they true? I'm sure parts are.
Michael Moore brings important questions to the fore, questions that are flatly ignored by the mainstream media. Some of the objections to his work are nitpicky, and I get the feeling that they're looking for some pretext to throw out the entire set of questions. If you look at the entire PNAC/9-11/Iraq/Haliburton casserole it's obvious that the official explanations don't add up, and a gadfly like Moore does the public a service by pointing out problems, even if he gets sloppy. I just wish his screen presence wasn't so grating. It's like he's taken every stereotype of the smarmy, self-righteous liberal and decided "that's who I want to be!"
All works like that are going to have inaccuracies. I've read about the gun-in-the-bank issue, but I forgot about it. I guess I just look at the main questions someone's bringing up and look at those. It would never occur to me to "just believe" Michael Moore, so I'm always surprized that others point out the seemingly obvious fact that we can't just believe him. Everyone has an agenda.
Before we get off on a tangent, I want to point out that being wrong isn't lying. Citing a source, whether it be a document, government testimony, interview, whatever, that is later found to be false isn't lying--it's just being wrong. That is, unless there was specific effort made to cover up the known truth and mislead people, such as in the Saddam-is-seeking-nukes lie.
I wish I had read your posts before replying to 2 others. I agree that Michael Moore is a hack, but I think that his 9/11 movie raised some important questions. I just wish he hadn't been in the movie. The evidence he presented was so eloquent that all he had to do was not screw it up, but his very screen presence is so obnoxious that people want to disbelieve him, even if all the evidence comes from independently verifiable sources. He is an impediment to his own message.
I've read a bit of the "Michael Moore is a liar" threads here and elsewhere, but their content is, from what I've seen, limited to re-interpreting the facts a different way, just leaving out the facts that led to his conclusion, all the while pretending that he's just spouting foundationless opinion, a la Rush Limbaugh.
If Bush's businesses were funded by the Saudis, that may matter. If prominent Saudis (related to Bin Laden, no less) were flown out of the country without being interviewed by the FBI when the rest of the non-military planes were grounded, that may matter. If the Saudi ambassador is so close to the Bushes that he has a pet name and is considered a close personal friend, that may matter. If Cheney still owns stock in Haliburton and stands to make money off of it when he steps out of office, that may matter.
I've seen concerted efforts to discredit Moore, and they always hinge on a different interpretation of the facts, not catching him in an outright falsehood. The facts he puts on the table need to be on the table, and Fox sure as hell isn't going to put them there. If his facts are correct and the facts indicate that something was awry, then we needed to look at that. We chose not to. We allowed cries of "he's biased!" to trump the question of "are his facts correct and what conclusion do they lead to?" Even if smoking guns can't be found, there were a lot of things brought to light by his movie that looked fishy as hell.
If you want to see bias, look at an Ann Coulter book. At least Moore's references check out.
We're living in the last twinkling of the good ol' days. Our kids may not have it that bad, but in the next 100 years things are going to get ugly. The fossil fuel banquet will be over. Other sources will be found, but energy will never again be this cheap or plentiful. We will have plagues, natural or manmade. We will have wars over oil, water, land, food. Slavery will eventually come back. Well, it never really left, and it's being used even now in China, from whom we buy all that cheap stuff they sell at Wal-Mart. Corporate interests will stop co-opting democracy and just take over altogether. Already we have corporate armies (Blackwater), corporate prisons, corporate police forces, etc. Earth will resemble something from a Philip K. Dick novel. I sure as hell don't want to be here for that.
Heliogabalus was a Roman emperor, and he went into battle dressed in drag. And won. I'm sure his husband was proud of him. Alexander the Great had boys in his harem. There have been societies with even more lax divorce laws, where people could just say they were divorced and that was it.
And as far as "God is dead," unbelief is not new. Seneca, a Roman, wrote "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful". There have always been skeptics, and polticians have always exploited religion for their ends.
But you can keep going back and back and back and still see fiascos and tragedies that resulted from our prior decisions. Even the Iranian hostage crisis leapt directly from our overthrow of a democratic government in Iran and reinstallment of the Shah. We always think we know what we're doing when we tinker with other people's countries (Pinochet, anyone?) and it usually bites us in the ass, whereupon we are shocked at the idea that people don't like us, and proceed to tinker some more with other people's countries.
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But when I think of giving it up and going back, what panics me is not having the shopping available. I look at the books and DVDs I've bought via Amazon et al, and I know I never would've found them in my local stores. Many of them I've found via Listmania lists or "People who bought this also bought..." links, and I never even would've known about them if I had to rely on the pre-internet shopping world. So I guess I am addicted to a few things. I just take them for granted, so they aren't as exciting anymore.
I'm not a gamer, and I'm not trying to insult them en masse. But I've met more than a couple of video game widows. I understand men not wanting to go shopping, buy groceries, or go over to visit the mother-in-law, and women maybe blaming video games. But I've met women, attractive women, who couldn't get laid because their husband would rather play Star Wars or World of Warcraft all night than have sex. I understand having a hobby, even a passion, but being offered a blowjob tends to cut through the fog a bit, at least for me.
You're taking the stated aims of an approximately 2-week old plan and just assuming that the outcome will be as expected, which seems odd considering how badly all the rest of the Iraq planning has gone since the invasion. Sunni tribes that "were" anti-American are still anti-American. We're just giving them cash, so they pretend to like us.
I agree that many nations stand by and do nothing when genocide is happening, but the USA does that just as well. We did nothing while the thing in Rwanda was happening, and many of our politicians (and population) opposed Clinton's intervention in Kosovo. Ignoring atrocity is something all countries seem to do well. Once in a while humanitarian concerns are available to justify what we wanted to do for economic reasons, but it's still the economic reasons that drive foreign policy. When there's no money/oil at stake, no one really cares.