That's a very good point. I tend to endorse the idea that our system doesn't need a permanent revolution, but rather a reboot, to resize national government down to sizes and issues that it more effectively addresses. Issues as fine-grained as you describe are better handled at the local level where a person's vote has proportionately more leverage, and issues can be effectively addressed in a locally relevant way. Only issues that have pathologically national import (defense, basic infrastructure, environment, and a few others) need be controled by national agencies...at least for a little while, while we catch our breath.
The difference is that corporations are inherently *fictional*. Corporate personhood, and all the concerns derivative from that status as an artificial person, are the problem in this conversation. American government was inteded as a relationship between properly constituted sovereigns, namely between individual persons, their state, and the federated states. The idea that a corporation (which is simply an arrangement of assets protected from attachment by liability to its owners) has a legitimate role equally sovereign to the above listed agencies is the original absurdity that has led our system to its present point.
The old concept of corporation, i.e. a publically-chartered monopoly, was directly regulated by the state to provide for a narrow public interest, and were dissolved if they failed to meet the goal of servicing those interests. Modern corporations only exist in the service of themselves, and the extention of personhood rights to them belies the fiction that they have a *political* role wherein their interests as fictional beings should be taken as seriously as the interests of flesh-and-blood beings or elected governments.
Many of these arguments also apply to organizations like unions and political parties as well. Organizations *aren't* people; they are constituted by people who individually already have the right to participate in their individual capacities...EXACTLY as was originally intended.
I agree with you, but she doesn't. She believes my Libertarian tendencies are evil and will end in catastrophe, whereas I am more cosmopolitan when it comes to political theory. I was talking to an old philosophy professor of mine about libertarianism not so long ago (he ain't one), and I was telling him that the practical limits of Lib. are such that it can't be embraced wholly as a guiding ideology, as if we had the problems of slavery and segregation (and civil rights in general) would perhaps still not be addressed today. The human consequences of an ideal governmental system are grotesque because often when you let people do *exactly* what they want, they do objectively horrible things, esp. through callous neglect and simply embracing the status quo. BUT...our government has grown to resemble a life-manipulating Leviathan of the first-order, and is sooooooo far from the ideal that it causes damage in many other ways, and so I don't feel bad at all endorsing a countervailing ideology.
I say what we need is not a Libertarian 'regime', but rather just a quick and sharp dose of it; a reboot, if you will. Then move back to our regularly scheduled programming.;)
Interesting points, but on the last few I have an issue. On number 5, the unit cohesion argument is the worst joke ever. When they integrated the army with regards to race, there were "unit cohesion problems" like you wouldn't believe...it didn't stop them. His incrementalism was meaningless because there was no vision attached to it, so it was simple as pie for the next guy to gut everything he had built. I mean geez, when FDR set up entitlemet programs, a few years later when Eisenhower was president he said the only people who would mess with those programs were crazy wingnuts; that's how strongly embedded the belief in those programs was, that the guy on the opposite side of the political spectrum could say only a madman would mess. How long did it take for Americorps to get busted like a pinata? And who cared?
Which brings me to my next point, which is that Top Ten is unbelievably ridiculous. He's in the top ten in the 20th century, I'd say, (there were only 17 in that century). Overall, he gets beat easily by Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington, Madison, FDR, TR (my personal fav), Eisenhower and Wilson. Kennedy and Reagan had more vision. Nixon beats everyone on foreign policy. Clinton's political legacy was merely like you said, incrementalism without a vision, easily reversed and made irrelevant by the next guy in charge. I'd say, 7th in this century, maybe 12th overall, tops.
When I say *Dean* Democrat, I mean literally "she walks around wearing a Dean for America sweatshirt". And, she is very much a Vermont liberal, as she grew up next door in NH. I didn't mean it as an insult or derogation, but only as a sharp and accurate descriptor. About the only thing we depart on is where the line of legitimate governmet interference lies. I think it lies somewhere back in the 1870's....;)
Not true. The difference is that my words can be asymmetrically effective *as intended* when they leave my mouth (to Candidate A: "You are the best candidate", to Candidate B: "Your breath is inoffensive"). I am praising by speech both candidates; clearly I want one to win more. The problem with money is that giving money in any amount is tantamount to endorsing in an undifferentiatable fashion the candidate and what he/she stands for, since the money is, so far as you know, going to be spend in the most effective way possible in order to increase the chances of the person so donate to to get elected.
d
More to the point, though, is that legally any restriction on speech requires a very strong justification in the form of a compelling state interest narrowly approached; there seems to be a significant interest in preventing bribery, whereas there doesn't seem to be any sort of harm that proceeds from a person who is confused enough to support two candidates with words. My whole problem with money=speech is that everyone knows it is not being used as legitimate political speech. They are not saying with their money "I want you to win", they are saying "if you win, I own your ass".
He turned out to be...a slightly less mediocre president. Look, he was charismatic enough to convince a sedimentary rock to sleep with him ("Oooh, your layers, are reallll nice!"), and he at least pretended to be a multilateralist non-psychopath on the foreign policy front (except when bombing factories in African countries). But his domestic agenda was somewhere to the right of Nixon, and not in a good way. He was lucky enough to preside over a technology driven economic boom that he was smart enough not to fool with. On the other hand, his fairly uncritical support of everything free-trade and globalization-related while ignoring the real world human effects of such moves and policies was, I think, over the long term quite destructive. He was undoubtedly the person with the greatest raw inteligence to occupy the oval in recent times. He did sell out gays in the military...
My basic point is that he was basically competent and basically boring. He made some low key decisions that were a break even, and did not change our course overall for better or worse. He gave Americans very little to believe in, while I suppose also denying us anything to really hate (except for investigator's reports about BJs). Ah well. At least he didn't start any wars of conquest. These days, presidents who restrain themselves to horrific bombing campaigns and "UN" occupation forces are angels compared to what has followed.
That would be *interesting* to say the least; I'd switch it around though. In the era of the imperial presidency, I think Paul would have a better respect for what the person in that job shouldn't do, while Obama has the more interesting positive policy agenda, which should of course proceed from Congress instead of the executive.
I have to say, I am naturally extremely suspicious of government power, which tends to stick me somewhere between Libertarianism and armed rebellion by default; but on the other hand I don't worship free markets either, and do believe that the zones in which governments can and should be involved in some capacity are wider than preventing fraud and maintaining infrastructure. As an Atheist trying to pick amongst a field absolutely lousy with Christians, I found Obama's comments on the subject of faith in politics by far the most well thought out as well as the gutsiest.
My GF harasses me all the time; she's a hard-core democrat, like a *Dean* democrat, and so my conservative tendencies are an evil aberration to her. Ah well. Here's for the parties self-destructing spectacularly. The best news I've heard all year was the party affiliation rates absolutely crashing and people registering as independents en masse.
Well, to be fair to Paul and, for that matter, any other candidate that participates in those shams we now seem to call debates, ninety seconds isn't enough time to articulate any sort of monetary policy more complicated than "we print too much money". Knowing that encapsulated in that obviously broad-brush oversimplified soundbyte way are his actual concerns about controlling the money supply via interest rate adjustments, and his concerns about foreign assets (particularly oil assets) being heavily traded upon the dollar. Both of these things he has talked about before, just not in the context of the ninety second answer.
OTOH, he was the only Republican who was willing to say that nasty things happen to America sometimes because of blowback. Everyone else was too busy wrapping themselves in the Flag and Reagan's corpse to say anything meaningful on foreign policy.
No, it's more like everyone is sour on pretty much everyone (except the fanboy wingnuts). The average American thinks that Republicans are soulless plutocrats, and Democrats are pansy socialists. For those that have heard of them, they think that the Libertarians are batshit crazy, and the Greens...well, the Greens endorsed a career product liability reformer for President not so long ago. It's not so much cheerleading as it is simply 'no way out'. The only people with a lower approval rating than the President is Congress, and they are controlled by opposing parties.
People hold on to parties because it gives them a shadow of an identity. It lets them identify with their parents or their parents' generation, to connect with the past and to meaningful political legacies. After all one party freed the slaves, another delivered on civil rights. They belong to parties because it is so damn inconvenient having to explain ones own political idiosyncrasies every time they meet someone new. They join to pretend that issues can be simplified, or marginalized, or shunted into more comfortable sizes and spaces. They join to have something to fight. Sometimes, they join because there is fresh coffee.
And the way I understand it, it isn't a whole lot different in most other voting republics.
BTW, Xbox, Maple Walnut, and Cats FTW. Everyone else is simply crazy. (Ironically, I AM a card-carrying member of the ACLU.)
I'll give you seasoned and intelligent, but that buys her nothing (most everyone who is in national Presidential level politics is both of those things, regardless of popular images to the contrary); principled is a laugh, and party 'lines' are one ginat blurry smudge when it comes to issues of actual governance. Hillary would make, IMO, a mediocre president; one who does not lead but rather follows slavishly the polls and bends with the wind as a pseudo-populist centrist who cares less about constitution than 'keeping America safe', and less about proper governmental restraint than about 'raising our children' for us.
Truly a cynical idealist would be better than the messianic wacko we have now, but only just, and there are better in the field on both sides.
We still, by and large, have food, clothes, heat (or AC), cars, and sex with no short-term end in sight. Thus, there will be no revolution here. Even a tiny burp of one. Well fed well fscked people do not change their circumstances, if they can help it, even if there is a nagging feeling of wrongness about the whole enterprise of continuing onward.
Corruption is a specially cruel joke in a two-party government, because we all know they are both in it up to their necks, they have all the money they will ever need (mostly donated by 'people' made primarily of stock portfolios and imaginary assets) and they get it from literally the same sources.
You know, the other day in the shower I was thinking about the legitimacy of a corporation giving money to both candidates in an election. It occurred to me that the 'money is speech' argument usually trotted out for justifying scant regulation in the area that allows people to donate out of both sides of their ass is self-defeating. After all, since elections are zero-sum games between the candidates, the only way a speech argument could be legitimated is by arguing that the gift of money is intended to encourage the victory of a preferred candidate; giving money is a political act of approval and that political expression is thus a form of speech. Problem is, if someone gives money to both candidates, they are saying exactly the same thing as if they had given no money at all, which is essentially they don't care who wins. Thus the introduction of money does not substantially lend to any political speech in such cases. And if the money doesn't contribute to a speech act, it shouldn't be protected.
Maybe I'm crazy, but I think a tiny first step might be not allowing a given individual or corporation to buy *both* candidates in an election; maybe people should have to make real the speech argument and actually say something with their money that is actually relevant to the political contest, namely by wanting one to win over the other.
Rant over. Back to your original question; if Dick Cheney sat on the average American's face, they (sorry, we) would complain loudly, and yet there would Cheney be, still sitting on their (our!) face. I sometimes wonder whether free speech has not become the most brilliant pacification tool ever devised; as long as people are shouting, they feel accomplished and they don't move forward to....doing anything.
I'd go with docudrama; I really dislike his histrionics and melodramatic tug-at-the-heartstrings sequences. My thing is, and I give Moore much more leeway than I probably ought to (ditto for Spurlock, et al.) because they are the first generation of media producers who has operated in the 24-hour TV news cycle and reality television culture, and as such, have come to realize that prosaic and strident imagery is less impactful than sharp juxtaposition and appeals to a sense of absurdity. So, it is probably questionable from a 'journalistic' point of view to constrct photo-ops for the gun-bank thing, it sought to underline and make memorable just how engrained gun-ownership culture is in many parts of America. Long after the facts, true or false, fade from memory the absurd image of a gun giveaway in a bank is persistent and poignant, and serves as a visual marker for the true underlying point: Americans by and large really really love their guns. Seeing the sequence's placement very near the beginning of the film, I think it was intended to convey exactly that point.
Along the same lines, muckrakers at the turn of the twentieth took liberties with how they portrayed actual abuses, always to show them as subjectively worse than they actually were, but their methods changed people's way of thinking about issues in ways that were genuinely positive, in ways that dry facts simply would not served. Upton Sinclair, in between his socialist rants and his overenthusiastic bloviating about meat-packing, wove a compelling picturesque narrative that made a nation pay attention to the real inadequacies of an entire industry. And that, I might submit, is the more important legacy.
But as you say, and I do agree, any attempt to persuade should be approached by the audience from a skeptical, wary stance. I would be happy as a pig in slop if high schools started teaching deductive reasoning and syllogistic logic again, I'll tell ya! Ditto for media analysis, and critical reading/viewing.
Very good point. In the universe of all media, one does have to separate the chaff from the wheat, especially when media tends to cost so damn much as well as taking up your time. My only thing is, people in general tend to consider 'adverse opinons' disproportionately as chaff, and that is bothersome to me. (I guess that makes me a cranky, slighy younger man;).
I'll take your DUH and raise you a *pssht*. There are marginally more daytime burglaries than nighttime burglaries, but sadly no statistics available for "Daytime burglaries when victims are present" vs. "nightime burglaries when victims are present" which, of course, was the entire point of my point. There are usually many easily identifiable indications to a passing potential burglar than a person is present as opposed to absent, such as the presence or absence of a vehicle, general sounds of activity, looking through a goddamn window, etc., which leads me tentatively to believe that the "daytime when victim is present" statistics are pretty low. Obviously they do occassionally happen, and so anecdotal evidence on any side of this is likely to be deceptive either way. If someone could find a hard statistic, I'd be interested in the numbers.
Also, one of the primary factors (which is disapprearing in many jurisdictions) is the fact that nighttime burglary is punished with greater severity than daytime burglary. That is certainly a factor in determining when the crimes take place.
I imagine if you surveyed people about their relative feelings of safety when they are home during the day, versus when they are home at night, the general perception would be that daytime is safer. And of course it is the perception that determines behavior, like, for example, locking the fscking front door or not when one is home.
Before accusing someone of "spewing crap" pay attention to their actual argument and respond to that, instead of some strawman.
Already marked flamebait? Wow, some mods can't take a joke. Just to be clear for the less abstractly minded, the "n" word was "Nazi" and the "h" word was "Hitler". Jeez.
Oh come on, that was barely a Godwin honorable mention at best. It was a highly oblique comparison that didn't even invoke the "N" word or the "H" word.
But you're still guilty. Were you following orders, minion?
I'm sure the guy means well, but I don't share his views, I don't trust his facts, and I don't plan to watch this movie.
Begging your pardon, but that alone isn't a great reason not to watch the movie. Truth is, there are no 'trustworthy' collections of facts, for all facts are collected by interested parties, tainted at the very least by preconceptions. Even in hard sciences this human subjective effect cannot be entirely banished (thouh it is minimized). That you don't trust the guy's facts doesn't mean that you won't get anything valuable from the film.
In point of fact, I think that because you don't take all his facts at face value that you may gain more from the film than someone who is critically unreflective, because you have a motivation (from your prior experiences and conceptions of Moore) to remain aware, and thus have a a sense of which facts to accept and which to take skeptically. You know, for example, that his distortions tend to be pro-populist, a bit histrionic, and has a tendency for broader generalizations than are warranted; taking that information, you know exactly how seriously to take each scene with histrionic antics and also to filter through towards the narrower facts that might have inspired overebullient sweeping statements.
As a conservative, I read The Nation as much as I read the Wall Street Journal. I even sat down and read Obama's "Audacity of Hope" a month or so ago. Just because I didn't believe every bloody word (of any of those three) doesn't mean I don't/didn't gain valuable understandings of different perspectives and exposure to different arguments from those publications. And when an argument was sufficiently intruiging, it spurred me to search for corroborative and refutative evidence; sometimes, I was honestly surprised by the results.
I also tend to believe that Orwell was right when he said that all public (and many private) issues are political issues at bottom, and so those entanglements are unavoidable. What is more important in documentary filmmaking as well as other documentary enterprises is the ability for the viewer/reader to be able to identify probable biases. Our obsession with unencumbered facts is damn unhealthy, because it tends to convince us to outright ignore or minimize the importance of issues that seem too one-sided.
I meant "poor Mr. Heston" in the sense that he suffers from Alzheimer's, and it is questionable whether he was 'together', coherent, or even basically aware of what he was being accused of during the interview. The person he was may be ethically reprehensible for what he has done, but the person he is now bears little functional resemblance to that man. I think it entirely possible, and preferable for that matter, to impugn someone's actual crimes without stooping to nastiness, and also addressing targets that have the capacity for response and therefore for responsibility.
And to refocus a little bit on my original point, I didn't have a problem with the interaction until Moore started 'peppering' him with causitric questions toward the end, when it was clear he did not want Heston to have a decent oportunity to articulate what he originally clumsily had stated. And finally the antics of the picture of the little girl did nothing to enhance Moore's point in any fashion, certainly not to the audience and I would suspect with Heston himself as well.
I certainly wouldn't argue the point that what Heston did in scheduling the timing of those rallies was reprehensible; merely that simply his being a jackass does not in any way excuse M. Moore then in turn acting like a jackass to redress the issue. It detracted from the effectiveness of his point, one which he in fact made quite clearly and more intelligibly earlier in the film.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a very good point. I tend to endorse the idea that our system doesn't need a permanent revolution, but rather a reboot, to resize national government down to sizes and issues that it more effectively addresses. Issues as fine-grained as you describe are better handled at the local level where a person's vote has proportionately more leverage, and issues can be effectively addressed in a locally relevant way. Only issues that have pathologically national import (defense, basic infrastructure, environment, and a few others) need be controled by national agencies...at least for a little while, while we catch our breath.
The difference is that corporations are inherently *fictional*. Corporate personhood, and all the concerns derivative from that status as an artificial person, are the problem in this conversation. American government was inteded as a relationship between properly constituted sovereigns, namely between individual persons, their state, and the federated states. The idea that a corporation (which is simply an arrangement of assets protected from attachment by liability to its owners) has a legitimate role equally sovereign to the above listed agencies is the original absurdity that has led our system to its present point.
The old concept of corporation, i.e. a publically-chartered monopoly, was directly regulated by the state to provide for a narrow public interest, and were dissolved if they failed to meet the goal of servicing those interests. Modern corporations only exist in the service of themselves, and the extention of personhood rights to them belies the fiction that they have a *political* role wherein their interests as fictional beings should be taken as seriously as the interests of flesh-and-blood beings or elected governments.
Many of these arguments also apply to organizations like unions and political parties as well. Organizations *aren't* people; they are constituted by people who individually already have the right to participate in their individual capacities...EXACTLY as was originally intended.
I agree with you, but she doesn't. She believes my Libertarian tendencies are evil and will end in catastrophe, whereas I am more cosmopolitan when it comes to political theory. I was talking to an old philosophy professor of mine about libertarianism not so long ago (he ain't one), and I was telling him that the practical limits of Lib. are such that it can't be embraced wholly as a guiding ideology, as if we had the problems of slavery and segregation (and civil rights in general) would perhaps still not be addressed today. The human consequences of an ideal governmental system are grotesque because often when you let people do *exactly* what they want, they do objectively horrible things, esp. through callous neglect and simply embracing the status quo. BUT...our government has grown to resemble a life-manipulating Leviathan of the first-order, and is sooooooo far from the ideal that it causes damage in many other ways, and so I don't feel bad at all endorsing a countervailing ideology.
I say what we need is not a Libertarian 'regime', but rather just a quick and sharp dose of it; a reboot, if you will. Then move back to our regularly scheduled programming. ;)
Interesting points, but on the last few I have an issue. On number 5, the unit cohesion argument is the worst joke ever. When they integrated the army with regards to race, there were "unit cohesion problems" like you wouldn't believe...it didn't stop them. His incrementalism was meaningless because there was no vision attached to it, so it was simple as pie for the next guy to gut everything he had built. I mean geez, when FDR set up entitlemet programs, a few years later when Eisenhower was president he said the only people who would mess with those programs were crazy wingnuts; that's how strongly embedded the belief in those programs was, that the guy on the opposite side of the political spectrum could say only a madman would mess. How long did it take for Americorps to get busted like a pinata? And who cared?
Which brings me to my next point, which is that Top Ten is unbelievably ridiculous. He's in the top ten in the 20th century, I'd say, (there were only 17 in that century). Overall, he gets beat easily by Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington, Madison, FDR, TR (my personal fav), Eisenhower and Wilson. Kennedy and Reagan had more vision. Nixon beats everyone on foreign policy. Clinton's political legacy was merely like you said, incrementalism without a vision, easily reversed and made irrelevant by the next guy in charge. I'd say, 7th in this century, maybe 12th overall, tops.
When I say *Dean* Democrat, I mean literally "she walks around wearing a Dean for America sweatshirt". And, she is very much a Vermont liberal, as she grew up next door in NH. I didn't mean it as an insult or derogation, but only as a sharp and accurate descriptor. About the only thing we depart on is where the line of legitimate governmet interference lies. I think it lies somewhere back in the 1870's....;)
I agree that *Kerry Democrat* is far worse.
Not true. The difference is that my words can be asymmetrically effective *as intended* when they leave my mouth (to Candidate A: "You are the best candidate", to Candidate B: "Your breath is inoffensive"). I am praising by speech both candidates; clearly I want one to win more. The problem with money is that giving money in any amount is tantamount to endorsing in an undifferentiatable fashion the candidate and what he/she stands for, since the money is, so far as you know, going to be spend in the most effective way possible in order to increase the chances of the person so donate to to get elected. d
More to the point, though, is that legally any restriction on speech requires a very strong justification in the form of a compelling state interest narrowly approached; there seems to be a significant interest in preventing bribery, whereas there doesn't seem to be any sort of harm that proceeds from a person who is confused enough to support two candidates with words. My whole problem with money=speech is that everyone knows it is not being used as legitimate political speech. They are not saying with their money "I want you to win", they are saying "if you win, I own your ass".
I'm pretty sure that's a Bill Hicks quote that was just sampled by MJK for 'Third Eye'. Could be wrong, though.
He turned out to be...a slightly less mediocre president. Look, he was charismatic enough to convince a sedimentary rock to sleep with him ("Oooh, your layers, are reallll nice!"), and he at least pretended to be a multilateralist non-psychopath on the foreign policy front (except when bombing factories in African countries). But his domestic agenda was somewhere to the right of Nixon, and not in a good way. He was lucky enough to preside over a technology driven economic boom that he was smart enough not to fool with. On the other hand, his fairly uncritical support of everything free-trade and globalization-related while ignoring the real world human effects of such moves and policies was, I think, over the long term quite destructive. He was undoubtedly the person with the greatest raw inteligence to occupy the oval in recent times. He did sell out gays in the military...
My basic point is that he was basically competent and basically boring. He made some low key decisions that were a break even, and did not change our course overall for better or worse. He gave Americans very little to believe in, while I suppose also denying us anything to really hate (except for investigator's reports about BJs). Ah well. At least he didn't start any wars of conquest. These days, presidents who restrain themselves to horrific bombing campaigns and "UN" occupation forces are angels compared to what has followed.
That would be *interesting* to say the least; I'd switch it around though. In the era of the imperial presidency, I think Paul would have a better respect for what the person in that job shouldn't do, while Obama has the more interesting positive policy agenda, which should of course proceed from Congress instead of the executive.
I have to say, I am naturally extremely suspicious of government power, which tends to stick me somewhere between Libertarianism and armed rebellion by default; but on the other hand I don't worship free markets either, and do believe that the zones in which governments can and should be involved in some capacity are wider than preventing fraud and maintaining infrastructure. As an Atheist trying to pick amongst a field absolutely lousy with Christians, I found Obama's comments on the subject of faith in politics by far the most well thought out as well as the gutsiest.
My GF harasses me all the time; she's a hard-core democrat, like a *Dean* democrat, and so my conservative tendencies are an evil aberration to her. Ah well. Here's for the parties self-destructing spectacularly. The best news I've heard all year was the party affiliation rates absolutely crashing and people registering as independents en masse.
Well, to be fair to Paul and, for that matter, any other candidate that participates in those shams we now seem to call debates, ninety seconds isn't enough time to articulate any sort of monetary policy more complicated than "we print too much money". Knowing that encapsulated in that obviously broad-brush oversimplified soundbyte way are his actual concerns about controlling the money supply via interest rate adjustments, and his concerns about foreign assets (particularly oil assets) being heavily traded upon the dollar. Both of these things he has talked about before, just not in the context of the ninety second answer.
OTOH, he was the only Republican who was willing to say that nasty things happen to America sometimes because of blowback. Everyone else was too busy wrapping themselves in the Flag and Reagan's corpse to say anything meaningful on foreign policy.
No, it's more like everyone is sour on pretty much everyone (except the fanboy wingnuts). The average American thinks that Republicans are soulless plutocrats, and Democrats are pansy socialists. For those that have heard of them, they think that the Libertarians are batshit crazy, and the Greens...well, the Greens endorsed a career product liability reformer for President not so long ago. It's not so much cheerleading as it is simply 'no way out'. The only people with a lower approval rating than the President is Congress, and they are controlled by opposing parties.
People hold on to parties because it gives them a shadow of an identity. It lets them identify with their parents or their parents' generation, to connect with the past and to meaningful political legacies. After all one party freed the slaves, another delivered on civil rights. They belong to parties because it is so damn inconvenient having to explain ones own political idiosyncrasies every time they meet someone new. They join to pretend that issues can be simplified, or marginalized, or shunted into more comfortable sizes and spaces. They join to have something to fight. Sometimes, they join because there is fresh coffee.
And the way I understand it, it isn't a whole lot different in most other voting republics.
BTW, Xbox, Maple Walnut, and Cats FTW. Everyone else is simply crazy. (Ironically, I AM a card-carrying member of the ACLU.)
I got the joke; you didn't get mine. Ah well. If you're really curious, go Wikipedia "Frank Luntz".
I'll give you seasoned and intelligent, but that buys her nothing (most everyone who is in national Presidential level politics is both of those things, regardless of popular images to the contrary); principled is a laugh, and party 'lines' are one ginat blurry smudge when it comes to issues of actual governance. Hillary would make, IMO, a mediocre president; one who does not lead but rather follows slavishly the polls and bends with the wind as a pseudo-populist centrist who cares less about constitution than 'keeping America safe', and less about proper governmental restraint than about 'raising our children' for us.
Truly a cynical idealist would be better than the messianic wacko we have now, but only just, and there are better in the field on both sides.
e.g. B. Obama and R. Paul.
Thank you Mr. Luntz. You have raped the English language yet one more time; I didn't think it was possible, but there it is.
We still, by and large, have food, clothes, heat (or AC), cars, and sex with no short-term end in sight. Thus, there will be no revolution here. Even a tiny burp of one. Well fed well fscked people do not change their circumstances, if they can help it, even if there is a nagging feeling of wrongness about the whole enterprise of continuing onward.
Corruption is a specially cruel joke in a two-party government, because we all know they are both in it up to their necks, they have all the money they will ever need (mostly donated by 'people' made primarily of stock portfolios and imaginary assets) and they get it from literally the same sources.
You know, the other day in the shower I was thinking about the legitimacy of a corporation giving money to both candidates in an election. It occurred to me that the 'money is speech' argument usually trotted out for justifying scant regulation in the area that allows people to donate out of both sides of their ass is self-defeating. After all, since elections are zero-sum games between the candidates, the only way a speech argument could be legitimated is by arguing that the gift of money is intended to encourage the victory of a preferred candidate; giving money is a political act of approval and that political expression is thus a form of speech. Problem is, if someone gives money to both candidates, they are saying exactly the same thing as if they had given no money at all, which is essentially they don't care who wins. Thus the introduction of money does not substantially lend to any political speech in such cases. And if the money doesn't contribute to a speech act, it shouldn't be protected.
Maybe I'm crazy, but I think a tiny first step might be not allowing a given individual or corporation to buy *both* candidates in an election; maybe people should have to make real the speech argument and actually say something with their money that is actually relevant to the political contest, namely by wanting one to win over the other.
Rant over. Back to your original question; if Dick Cheney sat on the average American's face, they (sorry, we) would complain loudly, and yet there would Cheney be, still sitting on their (our!) face. I sometimes wonder whether free speech has not become the most brilliant pacification tool ever devised; as long as people are shouting, they feel accomplished and they don't move forward to....doing anything.
My apologies, then, about my crankiness. Happens to everyone.
I'd go with docudrama; I really dislike his histrionics and melodramatic tug-at-the-heartstrings sequences. My thing is, and I give Moore much more leeway than I probably ought to (ditto for Spurlock, et al.) because they are the first generation of media producers who has operated in the 24-hour TV news cycle and reality television culture, and as such, have come to realize that prosaic and strident imagery is less impactful than sharp juxtaposition and appeals to a sense of absurdity. So, it is probably questionable from a 'journalistic' point of view to constrct photo-ops for the gun-bank thing, it sought to underline and make memorable just how engrained gun-ownership culture is in many parts of America. Long after the facts, true or false, fade from memory the absurd image of a gun giveaway in a bank is persistent and poignant, and serves as a visual marker for the true underlying point: Americans by and large really really love their guns. Seeing the sequence's placement very near the beginning of the film, I think it was intended to convey exactly that point.
Along the same lines, muckrakers at the turn of the twentieth took liberties with how they portrayed actual abuses, always to show them as subjectively worse than they actually were, but their methods changed people's way of thinking about issues in ways that were genuinely positive, in ways that dry facts simply would not served. Upton Sinclair, in between his socialist rants and his overenthusiastic bloviating about meat-packing, wove a compelling picturesque narrative that made a nation pay attention to the real inadequacies of an entire industry. And that, I might submit, is the more important legacy.
But as you say, and I do agree, any attempt to persuade should be approached by the audience from a skeptical, wary stance. I would be happy as a pig in slop if high schools started teaching deductive reasoning and syllogistic logic again, I'll tell ya! Ditto for media analysis, and critical reading/viewing.
Very good point. In the universe of all media, one does have to separate the chaff from the wheat, especially when media tends to cost so damn much as well as taking up your time. My only thing is, people in general tend to consider 'adverse opinons' disproportionately as chaff, and that is bothersome to me. (I guess that makes me a cranky, slighy younger man ;).
I'll take your DUH and raise you a *pssht*. There are marginally more daytime burglaries than nighttime burglaries, but sadly no statistics available for "Daytime burglaries when victims are present" vs. "nightime burglaries when victims are present" which, of course, was the entire point of my point. There are usually many easily identifiable indications to a passing potential burglar than a person is present as opposed to absent, such as the presence or absence of a vehicle, general sounds of activity, looking through a goddamn window, etc., which leads me tentatively to believe that the "daytime when victim is present" statistics are pretty low. Obviously they do occassionally happen, and so anecdotal evidence on any side of this is likely to be deceptive either way. If someone could find a hard statistic, I'd be interested in the numbers.
Also, one of the primary factors (which is disapprearing in many jurisdictions) is the fact that nighttime burglary is punished with greater severity than daytime burglary. That is certainly a factor in determining when the crimes take place.
I imagine if you surveyed people about their relative feelings of safety when they are home during the day, versus when they are home at night, the general perception would be that daytime is safer. And of course it is the perception that determines behavior, like, for example, locking the fscking front door or not when one is home.
Before accusing someone of "spewing crap" pay attention to their actual argument and respond to that, instead of some strawman.
TY. I was wondering about the proper adjectival-substansive form.
Already marked flamebait? Wow, some mods can't take a joke. Just to be clear for the less abstractly minded, the "n" word was "Nazi" and the "h" word was "Hitler". Jeez.
Why? Were there lips of indeterminate size?
Oh come on, that was barely a Godwin honorable mention at best. It was a highly oblique comparison that didn't even invoke the "N" word or the "H" word.
But you're still guilty. Were you following orders, minion?
I'm sure the guy means well, but I don't share his views, I don't trust his facts, and I don't plan to watch this movie.
Begging your pardon, but that alone isn't a great reason not to watch the movie. Truth is, there are no 'trustworthy' collections of facts, for all facts are collected by interested parties, tainted at the very least by preconceptions. Even in hard sciences this human subjective effect cannot be entirely banished (thouh it is minimized). That you don't trust the guy's facts doesn't mean that you won't get anything valuable from the film.
In point of fact, I think that because you don't take all his facts at face value that you may gain more from the film than someone who is critically unreflective, because you have a motivation (from your prior experiences and conceptions of Moore) to remain aware, and thus have a a sense of which facts to accept and which to take skeptically. You know, for example, that his distortions tend to be pro-populist, a bit histrionic, and has a tendency for broader generalizations than are warranted; taking that information, you know exactly how seriously to take each scene with histrionic antics and also to filter through towards the narrower facts that might have inspired overebullient sweeping statements.
As a conservative, I read The Nation as much as I read the Wall Street Journal. I even sat down and read Obama's "Audacity of Hope" a month or so ago. Just because I didn't believe every bloody word (of any of those three) doesn't mean I don't/didn't gain valuable understandings of different perspectives and exposure to different arguments from those publications. And when an argument was sufficiently intruiging, it spurred me to search for corroborative and refutative evidence; sometimes, I was honestly surprised by the results.
I also tend to believe that Orwell was right when he said that all public (and many private) issues are political issues at bottom, and so those entanglements are unavoidable. What is more important in documentary filmmaking as well as other documentary enterprises is the ability for the viewer/reader to be able to identify probable biases. Our obsession with unencumbered facts is damn unhealthy, because it tends to convince us to outright ignore or minimize the importance of issues that seem too one-sided.
I meant "poor Mr. Heston" in the sense that he suffers from Alzheimer's, and it is questionable whether he was 'together', coherent, or even basically aware of what he was being accused of during the interview. The person he was may be ethically reprehensible for what he has done, but the person he is now bears little functional resemblance to that man. I think it entirely possible, and preferable for that matter, to impugn someone's actual crimes without stooping to nastiness, and also addressing targets that have the capacity for response and therefore for responsibility.
And to refocus a little bit on my original point, I didn't have a problem with the interaction until Moore started 'peppering' him with causitric questions toward the end, when it was clear he did not want Heston to have a decent oportunity to articulate what he originally clumsily had stated. And finally the antics of the picture of the little girl did nothing to enhance Moore's point in any fashion, certainly not to the audience and I would suspect with Heston himself as well.
I certainly wouldn't argue the point that what Heston did in scheduling the timing of those rallies was reprehensible; merely that simply his being a jackass does not in any way excuse M. Moore then in turn acting like a jackass to redress the issue. It detracted from the effectiveness of his point, one which he in fact made quite clearly and more intelligibly earlier in the film.