Comments on: More on Moore’s “deceits”

By: q

Fri, 09 Jul 2004 08:13:25 +0000

The willingness to conflate mass-murder with mass-media, Cogent and pithy.

By: a different chris

a different chris — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 23:23:11 +0000

>minority elite Ok, that’s about as good as it gets. I suppose the only place you can find a “majority elite” is in Lake Woebegone. You may wish to make a quick check of Webster’s: besides the obvious fact that it always refers to a minority, “elite” (like “liberal”)is not actually an epithet. After you discover that, you may find out which of the enormous number of Michael Moore wannabies of the Right have induced you to believe that and all the rest of that hateful spew you charmed us with. The first step towards recovery, I’d think. >And then there’s the next obvious step: the fawning crowds also cannot be taken seriously. Good, Alexander, you don’t respect other people’s opinions. Nasty unwashed masses and all that. People like me would probably call you “Alex” or (shudder) Al if we were co-workers. Better keep us at a distance. That whole democracy thing is making you nervous, isn’t it? Care to make the claim that the Right hasn’t ever pointed out Bush’s popularity as a gauge of his ability, huh? Rove wouldn’t stand for it, of course. Well, my take is basically the you all are trying to fit Moore into your little “minority elite” paradigm and then, since your whole world consists of cardboard and stick figures, you just naturally think you know what he’s doing. “He’s saying A” you squeal, and it “just ain’t so..or at least he didn’t prove it!” But he isn’t saying exactly A or sometimes not even close to it. And that’s why these critiques come off as so lame. In any case, if you really think this has degraded to the third-grade level, it’s because we followed you down there. How about leading us back up? How about denouncing Gingrich’s “words to use” and Frank Luntz’s “issue framing” for a start? We breathlessly await.* *Rhetorical flourish, I have no interest in what these clowns actually have to say and will probably forget to return here in any case.

By: GMT

GMT — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 18:43:12 +0000

The willingness to conflate mass-murder with mass-media, I think, shows how trivial these issues are to many of us. Bush has something to hide, and has blood on his hands. Moore is trying to run an expose, and has been very open. Not exactly the same thing. The differences are not so easily glossed over, as the right rushes to construct a tu quoque fallacy (having failed to convince anyone outside The Corner that the movie is all LIES LIES LIES) and thus keep as many people as possible from seeing the film and making up their own minds, or to accuse the left of doing the same thing (!), and thus discredit those so ably discrediting the discreditors. But grant them this childish accusation. It fails on its own terms, since the two aren’t equivalent: One lies to kill. The other, we are told, has also been lying (though particulars are as scarce as the accusations are plentiful), with the express purpose of getting people to recognize the pile of bodies produced in step one. I can only guess that the strawman ‘so you’re saying Bush did it first’ is probably the safest place to hide, at this point. Sort of a wickerman to house the shrinking minority of war supporters. Moore is accused of insinuating. The Bush adm. repeatedly stated AQ presense and the known location of wmd unequivocally. Spin that.

By: Alexander

Alexander — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 21:42:30 +0000

matt, I’m able to focus on more than one thing at a time. Sorry you aren’t.

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 19:15:13 +0000

Alexander, no. When mg picks up your statement that “the weather is terrible,” it corresponds to the claim that Moore told some falsehoods; the snowstorm last week then corresponds to Bush’s much more consequential falsehoods. To claim that s/he is admitting that Moore is terrible is like claiming that s/he is arguing that W is a snowstorm. I don’t think this is particularly important myself, but you can’t get out of a demonstrable falsehood by putting the word “seem” next to your quotation marks. And if you’re concerned about important things, you might want to focus on whether or not the President of the United States used deception to get us into a war, rather than into whether Michael Moore will get into heaven.

By: yabonn

yabonn — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 17:38:41 +0000

I don’t really get the “lefties shouldn’t use the bush did it defence”. First because bush is not, in most of the cases, the justification, at least it seemed to me. More the drum beating of the media relaying bush’s team talk points. It makes a difference because, if we retain that hypothesis (yup, i speak goofy today- bear with me) moore’s movie is a mediatic answer to a mediatic push the one that led to irak, or more broadly that supported bush. I can’t see no problem with that “bushdidit” kind of argument for moore’s movie : a mediatic tit, for quite a few tats. Not that you couldn’t put up some kind of “stop the spiralling down” argumentation here. Provided you were as vehemently against the spin a la fox as you are now against the spin a la moore. Then because it ignores two good arguments : -one’s a controversial movie maker the other’s a president of the usa. “Get it?” (tm yglesias) – from what the bush team implied, you retained that there were wmdal qaida in irak. This is false. From what moore implies, you retain that bush is ah unfit for the job. It’s an opinion, and moore makes no secret about his movie’s goal. (tm daniel, more or less) I didn’t see, during the run up to war, any “unnamed official at the pentagon” similarly precising that the carefully designed piece of news he spoonfeeds the nyt et alii is designed to draw the country to war.

By: peter ramus

peter ramus — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 17:11:47 +0000

Here are two of Mr. Kopel's sentences copied from his critique of Mr. Moore's film: 1. According to the narrator, “Then something called the Fox News Channel called the election in favor of the other guy….All of a sudden the other networks said, ‘Hey, if Fox said it, it must be true.’” 2. Over four hours later, at 2:16 a.m., Fox projected Bush as the Florida winner, as did all the other networks by 2:20 a.m. Assuming the second statement is true, the unwary reader might be forgiven for taking Mr. Moore's quote as a partisan expression of the same facts. But apparently, no. It would be deceitful of me to suggest that the two sentences, the first containing a quote from the film, and the second in Mr. Kopel's own words, in any way support the idea that Mr. Kopel has common ground Mr. Moore on this point. Not at all. Mr. Kopel's intervening commentary, which I've neglected to include, requires the reader to believe that these two sentences have nothing whatsoever in common, and that in fact Mr. Moore's words meet and so far surpass the standard against which Mr. Kopel judges such things as to count as the first two deceits of the fifty-six deceits in Mr. Kopel's list. (No one knew who won that night. The startling headline We Don't Know Who Won Yet! would have served admirably to bear the truth of the matter to an attentive public. But the Fox network's preemptive call unarguably resulted in a media stampede to declare Bush the winner right then instead) Somewhat puckishly, the title of Mr. Kopel essay, organized into thirty-six items, many subjected to the same artful unpacking as the example given above, is Fifty-nine Deceits in Farenheit 9/11, but is found at a web page whose address claims "Fiftysix" deceits. Three of the fifty-nine or thirty-six or however many of them Mr. Kopel eventually decides to enumerate have lost favor with the author, it seems. They are differences of opinion, he has come to conclude. No kidding.

By: alexander

alexander — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 16:53:34 +0000

Matt, Uh huh. I used a weather analogy that included the word “terrible.” mg said it would be “[m]ore like” an analogy which he provided that also suggests Moore is terrible. Since it wasn’t entirely clear whether he thought Moore terrible, I used the word “seem” to modify what I took to be his admission of Moore’s t-ness. Read more carefully, please.

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 15:12:50 +0000

you seem to admit that he is “terrible.” Alexander, since we seem to be agreed that false implication is a mortal sin no matter who does it, and since your use of quotation marks implies that one of the liberals on this thread used the word ‘terrible’ to refer to Moore, you might want to hit control-F and see who introduced the word ‘terrible’ and in what context. Or: By your standards you should be worried about the mote in your eye rather than the beam in Moore’s, although the redwood forest in the eyes of the Bush Administration really does seem of paramount concern.

By: bryan

bryan — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 14:54:48 +0000

So if someone wrote the article about the lies of george bush, and then someone else wrote a blog defense of said lies saying that technically they are not lies but only rimjobs for satan, then I’m willing to do a blog defense comment pointing out how often the same defense has been used for the aforementioned lies.

By: Matthew2

Matthew2 — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 14:47:28 +0000

The various conspiracy theories half-suggested in the film matter little, although many news junkies left and right will find them lacking. What matters is wether the film can break through Bush’s carefully crafted image, totally undisturbed by the US media: show to the average American that Bush has shady connections and is a child of the highest privilege, and not a down-to-earth guy in his ranch. Moore is probably better at this than many much smarter and careful guys, that no-one listens to.

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 14:39:15 +0000

The funny thing, though, is that if I wrote “The 56 Deceits of George W. Bush” (as, indeed, many people have done) then some very intelligent Volokh Conspirator (as, indeed, many of the conspirators are) would doubtless have written a post in response (as, indeed, I’ve read at the Conspiracy) arguing that most of the alleged “lies” weren’t lies per se (and, indeed, they’re mostly misleading juxtapositions of technically true information) and that these sorts of ad hominem attacks don’t really prove that the presidents’ policies are actually wrong.

You are impressed by playground logic? “But George started itttt!”

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 14:15:46 +0000

Just when I thought I finally understood… The British ‘quite’ will always be a mystery to me.

By: Doug Turnbull

Doug Turnbull — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 14:04:35 +0000

To Alexander. Yes, but you, like many commentators, seem to be missing the point that these posts are not defenses of Moore, but rather attacks on Bush and on his hypocritical supporters. The point is, you can take most of the attacks on Moore and simply substitute the name Bush in, and get equally true attacks. However, I think most of those slamming Moore would completely disagree with these substituted critiques. ANd that is the point. Let’s try, shall we? “The responses are just as fascinating as the original post. As always, lots of you admit that Bush passes off “massaged facts” and “mostly true” things, and you seem to admit that he is “terrible.” But you seem unable to take the next tiny step of logic: Bush is a specious liar (and the defense that he does not state untruths as fact but is only intentionally misleading doesn’t pass my laugh test), and therefore reprehensible, and should not be taken seriously, much less given extended standing ovations by fawning crowds. And then there’s the next obvious step: the fawning crowds also cannot be taken seriously.” Other than the admission that Bush is terrible, that seems pretty much spot on.

By: alexander

alexander — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 13:56:07 +0000

The responses are just as fascinating as the original post. As always, lots of you admit that Moore passes off “massaged facts” and “mostly true” things, and you seem to admit that he is “terrible.” But you seem unable to take the next tiny step of logic: Moore is a specious liar (and the defense that he does not state untruths as fact but is only intentionally misleading doesn’t pass my laugh test), and therefore reprehensible, and should not be taken seriously, much less given extended standing ovations by fawning crowds. And then there’s the next obvious step: the fawning crowds also cannot be taken seriously.