Reply With QuotePublished by David Horowitz, who went on TV recently and called Moore a "racist communist."
Published by David Horowitz, who went on TV recently and called Moore a "racist communist."
Well, given the comments of Moore's I've seen, communist fits... dunno about racist.Originally Posted by Anonymous
Still, can anyone disprove this article?
If I spent my time disproving every right-wing nutbag's conspiracy theory, I'd have no time to play Dance Dance Revolution with Wumpus's wife while he's at work.
Pretty damning evidense. Very well documented, I doubt much can be disproved. Moore clearly plays with the truth in order to make his points. The article isn't a "crackpot conspiracy theory", though that fairly accurately describes Moore's film.
That's not a legitimate argument.
Where does it document this:
I didn't see any citations to documents supporting this fact.(1) Yes, some Titans and Atlases (54 of them) were used as ICBM launchers -- they were deactivated 25 years ago, long before the Columbine killers were born;
Nor did I see citations to support this fact:
or this:an annual meeting, whose place and date had been fixed years in advance.
No specific corporate law is named to support this claim.the annual members' meeting; that could not be cancelled because corporate law required that it be held.
Was Charlton Heston wearing the same clothes in both speeches? If not, it would seem to be obvious the clips were not from the same speech.Fact: Heston's "cold dead hands" speech, which leads off Moore's depiction of the Denver meeting, was not given at Denver after Columbine. It was given a year later in Charlotte, North Carolina, and was a response to his being given the musket, a collector's piece, at that annual meeting. Bowling leads off with this speech, and then splices in footage which was taken in Denver and refers to Denver, to create the impression that the entire clip was taken at the Denver event.
[/quote]First, right after the weeping victims, Moore puts on Heston's "I have only five words for you . . . cold dead hands" statement, making it seem directed at them. As noted above, it's actually a thank-you speech given a year later to a meeting in North Carolina.[quote]
Actually, I don't have a problem with this. The speech is still incredibly callous given that Columbine and a series of Columbine-like events (remember the day trader who blew a bunch of other people away and other school shootings?) have occurred. The basic point remains.
What is the difference? He is saying the same thing. He will be coming, no matter what the mayor wants. And that is what he told the mayor. He was, in fact, "defiant."Moore then cuts to Heston noting that Denver's mayor asked NRA not to come, and shows Heston replying "I said to the Mayor: Don't come here? We're already here!" as if in defiance.
Actually, Moore put an edit right in the middle of the first sentence! [...]Moore cuts it after "I said to the Mayor" and attaches a sentence from the end of the next paragraph: "As Americans, we're free to travel wherever we want in our broad land." It thus becomes an arrogant "I said to the Mayor: as American's we're free to travel wherever we want in our broad land."
This is idiotic quibbling. Heston is still telling the mayor to shove it. He's telling the mayor they will hold their meeting in his town and there is nothing he can do about it.What Heston actually is saying in "We're already here" was not the implied defiance, but rather this:
"NRA members are in city hall, Fort Carson, NORAD, the Air Force Academy and the Olympic Training Center. And yes, NRA members are surely among the police and fire and SWAT team heroes who risked their lives to rescue the students at Columbine.
Don't come here? We're already here. This community is our home.
[quote]Bowling continues its theme by juxtaposing another Heston speech with a school shooting at Mt. Morris, MI, just north of Flint, making the claim that right after the shooting, NRA came to the locale to stage a defiant rally. In Moore's words, "Just as he did after the Columbine shooting, Charlton Heston showed up in Flint, to have a big pro-gun rally." Fact: Heston's speech was given at a "get out the vote" rally in Flint, which rally was held when elections rolled around some eight months after the shooting.
Wow, this writer is himself telling a whopper. Moore does not say "right after the shooting." Eight months is not exactly a huge amount of time to people who've had their kids shot to death. Note that his only support for the claim that Heston's appearance came "shortly" after the shootings is the incorrect claims of two movie reviewers unconnected with the film.
What a con artist. The film states "the same year that the Klan became an illegal terrorist organization." The author even admits that this fact is true. Oooh! Damning evidence of mendacity!3. Animated sequence equating NRA with KKK. In an animated history send-up, Bowling equates the NRA with the Klan, suggesting NRA was founded in 1871, "the same year that the Klan became an illegal terrorist organization." Bowling goes on to depict an NRA character helping to light a burning cross.
Fact: The Klan wasn't founded in 1871, but in 1866, and quickly became a terrorist organization. One might claim that it technically became an "illegal" terrorist organization with passage of the federal Ku Klux Klan Act and Enforcement Act in 1871. These criminalized interference with civil rights, and empowered the President to suspend habeas corpus and to use troops to suppress the Klan.
What does this change? It's still a child who found a gun in the house, brought it to school, and killed a girl without explanation. The only thing it changes is raise specters in the minds of people who associate "crack houses" with the mouth of hell.Bowling depicts the juvenile shooter as a sympathetic youngster who just found a gun in his uncle's house and took it to school. "No one knew why the little boy wanted to shoot the little girl." [...] Fact: The uncle's house was the neighborhood crack-house. The uncle (together with the shooter's father, then serving a prison term for theft and cocaine possession, and his aunt and maternal grandmother) earned their living off drug dealing. The gun was stolen by one of the uncle's customers and purchased in exchange for drugs.
Wow, this is a good one. THEY WERE EVICTED. Why would she have been evicted (remember, this is not the crack house; this is the house she had to leave to enter the crack house) if she had enough money to live there? The guy implies that any family should be able to feed and clothe and transport an adult and how many children (not sure how many) on $950 a month, and Moore must be lying if he says this wasn't enough."Although Tamarla worked up to 70 hours per week at the two jobs in the mall, she did not earn enough to pay her rent." Fact: The shooter's mother had been promoted, and was making $7.85/hour, or about $1250 per month from that job, and an unknown amount from the other, plus food stamps and health benefits. Fact: The rent for the house from which they were evicted was $300 a month.
How do we know what they used it for? We gave them money, not bags of food.5. The Taliban and American Aid. After discussing military assistance to various countries, Bowling asserts that the U.S. gave $245 million in aid to the Taliban government of Afghanistan in 2000 and 2001, and then shows aircraft hitting the twin towers to illustrate the result.
Fact: The aid in question was humanitarian assistance, given through UN and nongovernmental organizations, to relieve famine in Afghanistan.
Gaahh. I don't have time for any more of this. I have work to do. This screed was obviously written as a political attack, not as an attempt to determine the truth of what the film presents. His entire quibbling with the winning of Bowling for Columbine of a documentary award is sub-moronic. The film could not win a fiction film award because it does not contain fictional characters. The film is a political essay, discussing politics in the real world. There is no other category in which it would fit.
Actually, we did give them bags of food and boxes of medical supplies, not cash. The Taliban did have a nasty habit of seizing humanitarian aide and liquidating it on the black market.How do we know what they used it for? We gave them money, not bags of food.
As for documentation about the ICBMs, that is a matter of public record. 2 minutes of googling and I found this: http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/nudb/datab3.asp
You'll notice that the deployment of Atluses reaches zero in the 60s, and Titans reach zero in 87. Just like the article claimed.
I'm not a corperate lawyer so I don't know about the law requiring a meeting, but it doesn't sound outlandish to me. Can you provide proof that this is not the case? It's also not a surprise that the meeting would have been planed years in advance, we're talking about a fairly large, state wide, once a year thing. To secure meeting space and that kind of thing you have to plan well in advance. For all I know they have a standing policy that this meeting will take place the first weekend of whatever month each year. It's not only disingenuous to claim that this was some kind of gun support rally organized in reaction to the Columbine shootings, it would be a lie.
As to the remarks about the mayor's request that they not come, the footage was clearly edited to make Heston look bad. They cut out everything about the cancellation of lots of other events out of respect for the victims, and skip over the lead up to his already here statements. He's right, NRA members are everywhere and the Mayor had no standing to expect the NRA members in Colorodo not to hold a meeting. Moore wanted to paint the event as a hostile invasion which is far from the truth.
8 months isn't exactly "shortly" either. The clear intent of the film here is to suggest this was the NRA swooping in after another tragedy to hold some kind of offensive rally to rub it in the families faces. We all know that's bullshit, but as is evident from these reviewers' perceptions, Moore wanted people to see it that way.Wow, this writer is himself telling a whopper. Moore does not say "right after the shooting." Eight months is not exactly a huge amount of time to people who've had their kids shot to death. Note that his only support for the claim that Heston's appearance came "shortly" after the shootings is the incorrect claims of two movie reviewers unconnected with the film.
The story about the child finding his uncle's gun also seeks to distort reality. I don't know what the film was trying to convey, but it seems they've glossed over a great deal of contributing factors like drug use in the family, the childs history of serious behavioral problems and violent tendancies. With regards to the housing situation it also seems that there was more going on then we're being told. That $1250 a month figure was only from one of the two jobs. I don't know why she was evicted, but it wasn't in Moore's interest to give the whole picture. Like the author said, there was more assistance available to her that she may not have been taking advantage of. But the intent of the film was to paint a picture of her being held down by the system.
Guest, if you aren't gonna follow any of the links, nor read the entire article, I'd appreciate you confining your insanity to the 'Everything Else' forum like all the other good trolls.
From you, mister "protesters are looting stereos from best buy," that is a motherfucking friggin' riot. Keep your lying mouth shut.
HAHAHA! I've said several times why I used them as an example, not to mention linked to the actual stories. Looks like someone goes to the Micheal Moore school of fact-checking and truth skewing.
Also you'll be glad to know that, unlike you, I CAN type without mouthing the words, so my mouth is shut.
You linked to no stories which documented protesters looting stereos or any other expensive household items. You offered one feeble link to a story in which people were arrested, but the story said they were not arrested for looting. When will you stop lying? Can you possibly ever stop? Are you addicted, child?
Here's a link to the thread, if anyone cares to verify the truth of this account:
http://www.quartertothree.com/phpBB2...r=asc&start=30
Notice that Cookiepants says above that he "linked to the actual stories" of looting to prove his point. Go to the ONLY link he provided (not plural, folks -- the guy just can't stop exaggerating his ass off), and see where it says that anyone was arrested for looting. What a lying little bitch.
BUSTED.
It's ironic that the link you supplied contains the first instance of where I gave in to your unrelenting dipshittedness and told you I used 'Best Buy' as an example, which you apparently forgot to read.You linked to no stories which documented protesters looting stereos or any other expensive household items. You offered one feeble link to a story in which people were arrested, but the story said they were not arrested for looting. When will you stop lying? Can you possibly ever stop? Are you addicted, child?
Here's a link to the thread, if anyone cares to verify the truth of this account:
http://www.quartertothree.com/phpBB2...r=asc&start=30
Notice that Cookiepants says above that he "linked to the actual stories" of looting to prove his point. Go to the ONLY link he provided (not plural, folks -- the guy just can't stop exaggerating his ass off), and see where it says that anyone was arrested for looting. What a lying little bitch.
BUSTED.
And hey look fuckasuarus, it's a link to one of the 'other threads' I mentioned that contains a link to story about peace protests turned violent: with the liberal slant I'll find the other one I was refering to (thus fulfilling the vital quota to justify that 's' you harped on so rabidly) just as soon as I can remember who posted it.
And, because you're a tard squared, here's a story with reports from around the world of peace protests turned violent (of course they don't contain the term 'Best Buy', which I've yet to explain to you of course, so I guess they don't count.)
And to show that it's not just the adults acting stupid, here's a story about High School kids. Maybe you'll see the name of a classmate!
Now will you PLEASE go away Jumping Jesus, Leon, Jerry, or whatever you're calling yourself today? You know how you gave yourself away? Normal people don't need to have hand puppets explain everything to them with felt boards and nice songs about what a friend we have in Jesus, I can make a nice Flash version of this post using those things if it will help.
Well, well, well. Mr. Big Mouth changes his claim of "protesters stealing stereos" to "protests turning violent."
Fucking moron. That was exactly what I was calling you on. You claimed that protesters were stealing stereos. That assigns the motive of greed and self-enrichment to them.
Don't pretend you don't know the difference between someone "turning violent" and getting into a fight and someone stealing high-priced items when the cops are occupied. Don't switch your claim now and pretend you never made repeated statements that protesters are looters and thieves.
First you stated they stole stereos from Best Buy. I demanded documentation. You tried to muddy your claim, saying that protesters loot expensive items "mostly from mom and pop stores," thinking that switching from an easily disproven claim of thefts from Best Buy and Radio Shack would excuse you from having to back up your idiocy with a single shred of proof.
You have been caught. And now you will say ANYTHING to try to distract attention from your lies. How incredibly pathetic of you.
Good job you just proved The Janitor is an idiot - something we already know. But thanks anyway.
Mind disproving anything that's actually on topic to the thread?
After you, kind sir!
A documentary film maker editing his material to support his worldview? OH, SAY IT ISN'T SO!! THE HORROR!!
Particularly one who wears his political beliefs on his sleeve. I could see the outrage if this was presented by someone other than a famous political satirist/provocateur performance artist/leftist activist.
Here's some commentary from a site that, from what I've seen, is incredibly even-handed in criticizing media:
http://www.spinsanity.org/columns/20021119.html
Dunnagan seems to catch Moore in some creative use of editing, but I think he engages in some creative use of statistics in his Canada = rural, US = urban argument.
The Canadian population is not equally distributed across the landmass. It is true that Canada has vast areas of pretty empty land. But that land hardly counts because it's EMPTY. He would have a point if the homicide rate was expressed in terms of murders per 100,000 km^2.Fact: Canada is hardly comparable to the far more urbanized United States. Violence rates correlate strongly to population density. Canada has about 3.3 persons per square kilometer; the U.S. about 29.1. Canada has only four cities with population over a million.
Unless he believes that having this large amount of permafrost and forest (which most of us rarely see) has a calming psychic effect on the Canadian population, average population density is simply the wrong measure to use in this case.
A better measure would be to take something like take the population density averaged across electoral districts (and wieghted by population in the district). That way the small, dense districts where people actually live would be properly represented. The measure he uses is a cheap, easy and totally useless stat. Either he is just completely ignorant about Canada or he is deliberately using the stat to mislead people.
It seems to me that the rest of his Canadian crime section also displays a bit of picking and choosing. For instance, the list of Canadian city homicide rates he gives is hardly random, but taken from a source comparing Toronto (the largest city in Canada) to some of the worst Canadian cities for homicides. He lists Windsor at 4 but the same source has the neighboring city of Detroit at 42. Somehow Detroit didn't make it onto his list of US 'urban areas near the border'. You can prove anything with statistics if you're willing to take a non-random sample.
I haven't seen Moore's flick, so I'm sure it has all sorts of distortions, and I'm not saying that Dunnagan's arguments lack all merit, but it's annoying to see him using such cheap tricks to further his cause in a piece dedicated to exposing Moore's cheap tricks.
Mike[/quote]
Umm, the line:
"I haven't seen Moore's flick, so I'm sure it has all sorts of distortions..."
should probably read:
"I haven't seen Moore's flick, so it could well be full of just this type of distortion..."
The marriage of 'haven't seen' with 'so I'm sure' was not so great :)
Mike J.
Ugh. Both the film and the critique are bunk. Really turns the stomach.
Film Threat has an interesting take...[/url]
Nazis. And that Iraq book.
Ok, I just saw the movie. Covering the objections listed here, in order:
1) I think building giant rockets for the pentagon is "military," regardless of what the pentagon uses them for. It's not like Lockheed Martin is running a band-aid factory for the military there.
2) That the NRA couldn't cancel or move their denver meeting because "corporate law required it to be held" is a bit cute. That's certainly not the reason they gave at the time, is it? The splicing is standard documentary practice; Moore doesn't pretend that all the footage is from one event. It's just a contrasting overlay for the other stuff.
The complaint that Heston really didn't say "we can go where we want" or whatever in response to the mayor telling him not to come is wierd, too; the original:
"Good Morning. Thank you all for coming, and thank you for supporting your organization. I also want to applaud your courage in coming here today." [Footage of protest outside] "I have a message from the Mayor, Mr. Wellington Webb, the Mayor of Denver. [picture of Webb, then back to Heston] He sent me this, and said 'don't come here. We don't want you here.' I said to the Mayor this is our country, as Americans we're free to travel wherever we want in our broad land. [cut to crowd cheering, then back to Heston] Don't come here? We're already here."
The modified:
"I have a message from the mayor, Mr. Wellington Webb, the mayor of Denver. He sent me this and said don't come here, we don't want you here. I said to the mayor, well, my reply to the mayor is, I volunteered for the war they wanted me to attend when I was 18 years old. Since then, I've run small errands for my country, from Nigeria to Vietnam. I know many of you here in this room could say the same thing. But the mayor said don't come.
I'm sorry for that. I'm sorry for the newspaper ads saying the same thing, don't come here. This is our country. As Americans, we're free to travel wherever we want in our broad land."
Boo hoo.
Another complaint:
"Bowling's thrust here is to convince the viewer that Heston intentionally holds defiant protests in response to a firearms tragedy."
Except at end of the movie where he's interviewing Heston, Heston says they didn't know about the shooting in Flint when they planned/had the rally, and Moore pretty much indicates he thinks that was ok. He then asks why Heston keeps showing up after these shootings (joke? can't remember the details), but it's a bit silly to insist he's misleading people.
3) NRA = KKK. The point of the animated sequence wasn't that there's a secret official/unofficial link between the two; it's that the KKK and NRA are two sides of the fear and hysteria coin he focuses the entire movie on.
4) Moore misled people about the Flint mother. Complete bullshit; they fabricate the "he was the class bully" thing out of whole cloth, and wildly blow up the rest of it to try to make it a case of a crazed black kid of a crack-addled family shooting up the school. They also think it's a lie that she couldn't afford to pay her rent and got evicted from a $300 apartment when she was making $1250 a month (before taxes, benefits, housing assistance etc.) Has the author ever tried to live on that much a month? Sheesh, it's easy to get evicted.
5) Taliban aid was for "humanitarian purposes." Accurate criticism, but to be fair lots of the media fucks this up, including US Today, as described in the links.
6) "He left out stuff about Canada." He picks and chooses the lowest crime US areas (Madison instead of Flint, for example, citing ND twice) and compares them to Canada. Pretends Canada is "more rural" than Canada by pretending that population per square kilometer tells the entire story. Five seconds on google points out that 77.9% of Canada lives in urban areas, while 75% of the US lives in urban areas. Five more seconds finds that Canada's big cities are actually denser than the US's big cities. Raw population density for the whole country is a meaningless statistic; it doesn't matter a damn if an area is "undense" if only 5 people live there, which is the case for the virtually uninhabitated hinterlands of Canada.
7) No idea on the scene of him buying ammo in Canada; my explanation would be that she just sold it to him illegally. That she did so would, you know, kind of reinforce his point.
7) That the plaque on the B-52 at the air force academy doesn't say what Moore says it does. What it actually says, from the google cache of the referenced link:
"Flying out of Utapao Royal Thai Naval Airfield in southeast Thailand, the crew of "Diamond Lil" shot down a MIG northeast of Hanoi during "Linebacker II" action on Christmas eve 1972."
Moore says that the plaque "proudly proclaims that the plane killed Vietnamese people on Christmas Eve of 1972." In a stunning turn of events, IT DOES. Unless you think it was dropping candy during Operation Linebacker II. Note the slight of hand here - pretending the Moore lied about the contents of the plaque, when he was actually (accurately) paraphasing to get at the underlying message, and *no one* in the audience thought he meant the plaque actually said "the plane killed Vietnamese people."
8 ) This is just silly. He asks Heston to apologize; how would he have a vendetta against the NRA when he's a goddamn member, and likes to shoot guns?
It's annoying having to defend Moore; it's not like he's a great thinker, and he does a really bad job of defending his sources. But jesus, the critics are worse.
Wow like a sheep, Jason licked Michael Moore's puckered starfish like we all thought he would.
Shocking, just shocking.
Moore doesn't like to shoot guns. He thinks guns should be banned.
Being a lifetime member of the NRA just means that his parents paid $100 to buy him a lifetime membership when he was a kid. Presumably they don't share his far-left views, and besides, the NRA wasn't so much of a political organization back in those days. Moore gets a lot of mileage out of his NRA "lifetime membership", but I wouldn't take it too seriously.
I thought he bought the lifetime membership just before doing this documentary? I'm pretty sure I read that. He did it for access to their meetings and such. But, anyway, McCullough's wrong, Moore isn't a gun fan by any stretch.
Well, he says he got the marksmanship award as a kid.
I'm not sure what he thinks. In this interview with the Guardian, he says he favors gun control, and points out he wants to get rid of the only gun he has (the one from the bank in the movie), but in this interview with a film website he says different things:
"Moore, who reveals in the feature-length documentary that he is a card-carrying member of the NRA, recalls starting off "with a sort of typical liberal view point, in that if only we had less guns and more gun control laws, we?d have less violence."
That changed once he started making the film he began to see things differently. "It became clear to me that that wasn?t the answer and especially once coming to Canada, you know, and going to the office of Canadian statistics where they?ve got seven million registered guns in this country.
Ten million households, right, seven million guns. I thought that?s a hell of a lot of guns to have lying around. Even though the majority of them are shotguns and rifles, you know, they don?t have oozies here, no hand gun in the night table, you know. But, if you want to get a gun in Canada you can. You got to go through a lot of hoops, you can?t be a wife-beater or anything like that, but you know, if you wait a month you can get a gun."
Beats me.
Wasn't that a weapon in Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project?
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