Michael Moore, Hero or Rogue

Thomas, California has changed tremendously since your visit as a child, but it's still the center of the world's high tech industry, and still a great place to live. My wife will attest to that! LOL She doesn't want to move from this area. We still attract the brightest and best to this valley, and probably have more people with college degrees (bachelors, masters, and PhDs) as a percentage of the population than most places on this planet. The families that live next door to us, both left side and right side, have PhDs. It seems the high tech industry is beginning to hire again; our unemployment rate dropped to below six percent. If you decide to search in this area, I'll be more than happy to show you around Silicon Valley. We're 40 miles from San Francisco and about 7 miles from San Jose.

You may already be aware of this, but of the various areas under your consideration, the following have very high, by US standards, costs of living:

In order

Bay Area
Boston
Princeton

I'm not familiar with the cost of living in Boulder, but it is beautiful...if you like winter.

Raleigh and Dallas are the most affordable. Austin TX is a tech town too and more enjoyable than Dallas.

If you're wealthy enough to be a German citizen donating to Kerry's campaign, though, you can probably afford any of these places.

Just about every city in America is a great place, except of course Boston.

Now nimh, how long have we been acquainted? Several years now, I fear. And you believe that I wish for you to be more selective in your passions? Heavens no, dear........please! Enjoy, and I will be delighted. I get as annoyed as you do when anyone behaves in a destructive manner........left or right and I agree that there are all sorts of kooks and literal minded fundamentalists. We have no difference there.

My point is simply this. That the majority of the electorate do not choose a candidate based on rational decision alone. There are many reasons for this, but at it's base I believe the reason is simple human nature. We want to feel like we're doing the right thing. We want what we want. And many people make up their minds based on their gut (feelings.) They vote for the candidate that makes them feel good (safe, vindicated, gratified through hero worship, loved, understood........whatever) If this weren't the case, a candidate would be able to run and win based on his good sense and superior plan for action alone. Most, if not all people, vote for the candidate with the best advertising campaign. (And of course, it doesn't hurt if the candidate can cheat on the vote count as well.)

I don't disagree with anything Moore does in his film. He states the facts, from his prejudiced perspective and invites others to join him. He makes no pretense of objectivity. The Moore's and others, both left and right have their place. My judgement of these types is based, to some degree, on their skill. To win, one side or the other has to outdo in the effort to influence the voters.

Moore's antics may offend you........but I was entertained by them. He asks some hard questions......and it's up to someone to answer his questions and counter with good questions of their own in order to take him on. So far, I haven't seen anyone do this....the best anyone can do is call him "ungrown up." No one has pointed out any factual incorrectness. Isn't there a logical fallacy in here somewhere? (and I do realize that the question is set up this way......and for this reason, I suggest we not take the title too literally.)

As far as his points go........maybe you don't agree with me that his questions are critical.....in that case then..............., we just don't agree on what's important ....



Craven........I agree that rationalilty and heart are not mutually exclusive. One must balance the other or distortions will result. I was commenting on the absence of considerations of the "heart" ...........absence, not mutual exclusivity.

Well, I think nimh's a better example than I of what my point was. There isn't an absence of heart.

On the contrary, many are passionate about this sense of... dunno what to call it other than "intellectual honesty".

Again, using nimh as an example, he demonstrates a lot of it, and has a lot of heart too. Moore may have heart, but is, IMO, sorely lacking in the intellectual honesty department.

Another example of Moore's lies.




Pete Townsend replies:

Thanks a lot for your kind offer. I may well take you up on it sometime in the next 12 months!


Thanks for the information! I'm aware that the places I'm most likely to go are horribly expensive, but I'm also told they're worth it. (including Boston, which my little sister is an extreme partisan of. She'll tear you apart if she catches you messing with Boston! )

Boston is a wonderful city. Compared to Dallas it's paradise. If you offered me Hell and Dallas, I'd sell Dallas.

So, Roger Daltry may be a liar. Who in the Hell cares? The film stand alone with or without the potshots taken at what is now a phenomena that can't be ignored whether one has seen it or not or likes it or not.

I don't know if what Moore has done with Townsend is actually lying, but it is a perfect example of how he spins and twists the truth to satisfiy his own agenda: the continued revolution of the world around Michael Moore.

After so much evidence demonstrating what a liar Moore is, you continue to hold on to your idolotry of Moore, yet the mere suggestion that Bush MAY have mislead you and he is evil incarnate... I just don't get it.

Craven wrote:


I agree with you, Craven that nimh has a lot of heart. I didn't suggest that he didn't. My point was that he and Thomas seem to believe that an election can be won by a candidate's mature behavior alone. Rationality is great........I love it. But this election or any other will never be won by the demonstration of a candidate's intellectual honesty alone. For one thing, it's much too subjective a judgement. And for another, many people, I'd guess a large majority of the electorate don't make decisions based on rational thought alone. They will settle for, indeed they prefer........demand to be sold, persuaded. We all like to feel good about our decisions. And here I'm emphasizing the word "feel" which is what I meant when I used the word "heart." Perhaps it was a poor chose of words to describe my meaning.

(I am reading Charles Dickens' Hard Times. And it was this distinction I was thinking of......)

While I agree that nimh has heart and is intellectually honest, I wouldn't agree that he's more so than many of the rest of us. Again it's a highly subjective term. Just because Moore is successful in getting his point across doesn't mean he's intellectually dishonest. His facts were correct. He is trying to persuade and persuade he does. And, IMO the world may eventually owe him a great debt. This is indeed the most important election for many decades. Bush has to go. I'm grateful to Moore for his artistic and persuasive presentation.

Thomas, Most of my days are flexible, except I'll be crusing Antarctica in January 2005 for 18 days. PM me any time.

The "evidence" if examined closely can be characterized as just as dishonest or more as the claims that Moore is dishonest. It's all in the viewpoint and it's all opinion. They don't bother to provide any emperical evidence -- they'd lose in court or in a debate. There are other rock stars who laud Moore's efforts. Again, so what? I suppose going to the theater and actually seeing the film to make one's own judgement is too much to ask. Nevermind, Sony has purchased the rights for the DVD in a few months and it's also going to be on Pay-Per-View and Showtime. If one who despises Moore doesn't bother to see it, that's also not important. Continuing to state that I "idolize" Moore is just as lot of mindless prattle.

You can say the same thing about the converse. It will not be won by intellectual dishonesty alone.



Correct, it's not "just" because he's "successful in getting his point across" but rather because he uses intellectually dishonest methods for doing so.

So, were he to be able to get his point across without the intellectual dishonesty he would not be intellectually dishonest.

Simply put, the complaints about his intellectual dishonesty have precious little to do with his "success" or that he's "getting his point accross".



Um, ok...

I mean, I hope he can help get rid of Bush and all but I think this is waxing a wee bit... silly....

Then again, fanhood tends to be silly. My opinions on Michael Jordan make as little sense.

Anywho, I gotta get working so I can pay back Michael Moore. ;-)

Did Moore loan you money, Crave? I guess he is a foolish man.

I can see where you feel Moore is being "intellectually dishonest" in that he often plays on emotional strings and that can make one uncomfortable. I didn't interpret those scenes you question in quite the same way but I definitely see how one could have a different interpretation.

I repeat -- Moore doesn't expect that all his opinions are right and has said so in many interviews.

Nah, but Lola said we'd owe him a bunch.



'twouldn't be follish, I'm pretty ethical about money and always pay people back ASAP.



That wouldn't be intellectual dishonesty IMO.



If he did say so I'd have little qualm with it, the charge for intellectual dishonesty is not about what his opinion of his opinions is but rather the way he constructs arguments. Lot's of cheap shots with the first victim being intellectual honesty.

I fault him because he can make more powerful arguments by going for a cheap (and often prevaricating) argument less often.

Hey everyone,

I was searching for something entirely different and stumbled onto this little gem of discussion... please don't mind me joining the party fasionably late.

Anyway there is so much to talk about here I thought I would start out by helping L-dub see that Moore is perhaps a little more creative than factual. (Sorry my first post is so long).

Michael Moore's "Un-Fair-enheit"

Richard Mullenax
June 30, 2004

The movie ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' starts off with a flashback at the presidential election in November, 2000. Al Gore and company were celebrating their victory in Florida, the state where Gore thought he had won. Moore narrates as if it were just a dream. He accuses the alleged evil empire, Fox News, of making CNN and MSNBC fold under its pressure to announce Bush as the winner and Florida Governor Jeb Bush for rigging the votes in Florida while allegedly ignoring Black votes. Despite the argument of the Black voters and certain congressmen, not one Democratic or Republican senator supported the accusation. Michael Moore attempts to get sympathies from his audience rather than provide the facts.

The film goes on to accuse the president of many different things. One of the allegations is that the GOP is currently scaring Americans with the terrorist alerts. It seems hypocritical since Moore blamed Bush for not doing enough before 9/11 and now blames him for scaring people from living their daily lives. I also find it ironic that in late 2002, Moore had a debate with Christopher Hitchens at the Telluride Film Festival about Osama bin Laden's role in the 9/11 attacks. Moore said that Osama Bin Laden should be considered innocent until proven guilty. That indicates that we should not have gone into Afghanistan until we had the facts. Yet for whatever ''unknown'' reason, Moore now believes that bin Laden is indeed guilty. I can understand that Michael Moore made a mistake and had changed his feelings about someone like bin Laden, but how could he go after Bush in the same way? He blamed Bush for waiting three months to retaliate against the Taliban regime.

Michael Moore does a better job of mocking his opponents than he does of showing any facts about them. He sarcastically lists the small countries in the ''coalition of the willing,'' but mysteriously leaves out England, Spain, and Australia.

One of the most ridiculous remarks in ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' was when Michael Moore made Iraq sound like a peaceful place before the coalition's invasion. As suspected, Moore is confused about what freedom is if he can't tell the difference between democracy and dictatorship. He made Iraq to be a place where life was happy and then suddenly, he showed the imperial United States bombing the innocent country of Iraq. Moore also said that Saddam was no threat to America at all. For the sake of all the readers, including Michael Moore's ilk, let's list exactly how sovereign and terror-free Iraq really was.


• Saddam's regime was the only one in the region that openly celebrated the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. and described them as just the beginning of a larger revenge.


• Baghdad was for years the official, undisguised home address of Abu Nidal, then the most-wanted gangster in the world, who had been sentenced to death even by the PLO and had blown up airports in Vienna and Rome.


• Dec. 1, 2003, the New York Times reported ?- and the David Kay report had established ?- that Saddam had been secretly negotiating with the ''Dear Leader'' Kim Jong-il in a series of secret meetings in Syria, as late as the spring of 2003, to buy a North Korean missile system, and missile-production system, right off the shelf.


• Human rights groups state that hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed under Saddam Hussein's regime


• Hussein sponsored terrorism in Israel and sheltered a key figure in the first World Trade Center attack in 1993.


The movie took an interesting turn when Moore interviewed former White House counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke. During the interview, Moore points to President Bush's rumored relationship with Saudi officials as the motivating factor in the president allegedly allowing relatives of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden to fly out of the country following the Sept.11, 2001 terror attacks. Richard Clarke has been one of the many critics of President George W. Bush, and Clark's testimony during the 9/11 Commission was that the FBI approved the flights for the bin Ladens and Saudis. However, Clark would contradict himself in a big way. Clarke bashes the FBI for releasing the bin Laden and Saudis after 9/11 even though Clarke admits he was responsible for letting them go and is not sorry for his decision.

According to ''The Hill'' newspaper:

The decision to approve the flights, Clarke admitted last week, had been his own. The request "didn't get any higher than me," he told The Hill.

"On 9-11, 9-12 and 9-13, many things didn't get any higher than me. I decided it in consultation with the FBI," Clarke said of the plane flight carrying bin Laden's relatives.

"I take responsibility for it. I don't think it was a mistake, and I'd do it again," he added. The Saudis and bin Laden's relatives were flown from the U.S. out of fear for their safety following the terror attacks.

In some of the most laughable scenes, Bush is on a golf course, making a stern statement to a question on Palestinian terrorism and after his statement he tells reporters to watch his drive. Moore tries to bury Bush at this point in the film by making him look insensitive, but it's actually called calm statesmanship. A lot of the presidents played golf such as John F. Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, and Bill Clinton. But it gets even funnier when Michael Moore stupidly asked members of Congress to sign their children up for the military. Besides the fact that parents cannot send their children off into the military like that, Moore fails to say that Congressional Representative Mark Kennedy has a nephew in the military and was willing to help Moore pass out recruitment brochures because he believed the War in Iraq was a noble cause.

Since we are on the topic of war, Moore goes back to his roots in Flint, Michigan, as he depicts poor African-Americans being persuaded to join the military by two men in uniform. It's funny that for over a century-and-a-half African-Americans insisted on their rights to join the U.S. Army and when they are being recruited, it's considered wrong despite the opportunities that would be granted to them. Before this scene, Moore made a point that few soldiers were in Afghanistan and Iraq and now he is criticizing recruitment.

In other various scenes, Moore tries to put religion on his side by using a poor Christian mother who lost her child in Iraq. You truly can't help but to feel sorry for the woman, but when did Christianity ever play into Michael Moore's views? Would a person for the war be non-Christian? How about when Moore was stopped by the Secret Service outside the Saudi Arabian embassy? He acts like a victim, but could you blame these men? After all, Michael Moore is okay with terrorist support from the Middle East terrorist organization Hezbollah.

The only thing consistent about Michael Moore's film is that it is inconsistent. Not only does he not provide another side, he pretends that there isn't even another side. Despite if ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' portrays truth or propaganda, one thing is for certain: he made millions of dollars. It toped the box office with over 21 million dollars for its opening week and Michael Moore is laughing all the way to the bank. Moore got what he wanted and to him, that's all that matters.

jpinM, Welcome to A2K. You certainly did "jump in."

Excellent start JPiM!

Actually, part of my argument is that I'm convinced that rabble-rousing populist cheapshots that dont take the truth too literally will, if anything, lose you the election. They might be fine to fire up one's hardcore supporters at a political rally, but theyre gonna chase away many of the undecideds you wanna be winning over.


That is exactly whats being contended here. I still havent seen the film yet (not released here yet), but already seen many greatly detailed arguments about individual things that Moore's purported "facts" were not correct on - and his own blogging in defence against these allegations (yes, LW, I've read it, even summarized some of it here) as often as not doesn't convince much - if it addresses all of 'em at all.

I dont think ANYONE here said Moore is intellectually dishonest "just because he's successful" - that's just a rhetorical straw man thingie. Plenty of people have gone into some detail about how, when and on what scores Moore showed himself to be intellectually dishonest. Its Moore's defenders who want to bring his success into the argument - as if his box office success somehow "proves" that he didnt deceive or mislead.


That is still very much an open question. How many people has Moore "persuaded"? Or is he merely confirming people who go see his movies in opinions they already had - and quite plausibly, turning people who didn't already have those opinions further off?

nimh,

If this were true, then we'd also have to agree that Limbaugh, Coulter and Fox News are not/have not been assets to the conservative/contemporary Republican party. If you believe that's true as well, then we'll just have to wait until time tells. Until then, we apparently will have to disagree about it.

Many of the sited "intellectually dishonest" segments or points in Michael Moore's movie are all, IMO, points of reasonable contention. There is nothing Moore claimed in his movie that does not have some basis in fact. Many of Richard Mullenix's points are based entirely on his own subjective opinion about the reading of certain events and his evaluation of their meaning. His peice is another example of an attempt to influence, as is Moore's movie. We're talking perspective. Anyway, Moore isn't trying to win the prize for most intellectually honest.......he's trying to influence. He thinks he's helping his cause. I do too. But that's based at least in part of my subjective experience about what influences me. How like you and how many like me there are remains to be seen. You're turned off by his tactics, but that's you. Me, I'm laughing all the way to the ballot box.

These discussions sometimes revolve around issues like how many angels can sit on the head of a pin. I think it would serve us all well if we acknowledged that the way we see a given situation is based on many personal and complicated factors and our ability to know whether Moore is helping or hurting his cause is highly limited at best. We all have our opinions....but I'll be fully prepared to admit that mine have been wrong in the event they seem to be proven to be so. That seems very grown up of me, don't you agree?

The American electorate is made up of a highly diverse number of types of people. No one technique is effective with all. Moore's movie is a gamble, as is everything we try, but it's a highly educated gamble. We'll see if it pays off or not.

The statistics from the CNN poll about the numbers of people who intend to see the movie were very impressive to me. I haven't been able to find the report on the internet, but it was reported on Wednesday or so on CNN. Something like 45 percent of people who plan to vote have seen or plan to see the movie before the election.

I saw the movie twice. Once at 8pm on a Sunday night and again at 8:45 pm on a Monday of the second week of it's release in Dallas. I saw it at a theater in Plano, Texas (wealthy suburb of Dallas and the center of conservative Republican types) The movie was showing on three screens (and it was showing all over town on multiple screens as well). Both times I saw it, the theater was full. (I've been to other controversial/progressive films in this same theater and the audience has been extremely small.) The audience members were sober and involved in serious consideration of the film in the discussions I overheard as the movie let out. Nationally, the movie made more in the first week end than did Bowling for Columbine in it's entire run.

The movie will be influential. And none of us knows how many people there are out there ripe enough to be influenced in the way Moore wants them to be. But we do know that many people are still not happy with Bush about his election tricks in 2000. Remember that the country was divided. Moore doesn't have to tip very far in the progressive direction to realize a major impact. And folks are growing restless about the war in Iraq. The ground is fertile. And we shall see.