I'm not posting this to start an argument or a flamewar, or an anti-Moore/anti-Bush lynchmob. I am curious as to the reactions to this piece (Drysart's, especially), but I'm not looking to start a fight. My motive is simple:
I don't like lies, no matter who happens to be slinging them. I've said before that I wasn't a fan of Moore's one-sided delivery; I'm not a fan of ANY one-sided delivery. It leads to half-truths and fallacies, no matter who wields it, and it's rare that such things are ever addressed.
So. No smearing, no fighting, no mudslinging; the article itself is relatively non-inflammatory, as it should be. All reactions are appreciated.
Without further ado:
Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 911, by Dave Kopel, Research Director of the Independence Institute. Long and well worth the read.
Thoughts?
Ruvyen fucked around with this message on 07-08-2004 at 06:57 PM.
Tell me which ones of those are outright lies from the movie, please. Deceits can be very subjective. For example, he claims as his first one that the opening scene with Gore and his supporters cheering in front of the Florida victory is supposed to make us think this is after the election. I never was under that impression, and even if I was, I don't see how that even matters...
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Proposed Unocal Pipeline in Afghanistan
Deceits 27-31This segment is introduced with the question, "Or was the war in Afghanistan really about something else?" The "something else" is shown to be a Unocal pipeline.
Moore mentions that the Taliban visited Texas while Bush was governor, over a possible pipeline deal with Unocal. But Moore doesnt say that they never actually met with Bush or that the deal went bust in 1998 and had been supported by the Clinton administration.
Labash, Weekly Standard.
Moore asserts that the Afghan war was fought only to enable the Unocal company to build a pipeline. In fact, Unocal dropped that idea back in August 1998.
Jonathan Foreman, Moores The Pity, New York Post, June 23, 2004.
In December 1997, a delegation from Afghanistans ruling and ruthless Taliban visited the United States to meet with an oil and gas company that had extensive dealings in Texas. The company, Unocal, was interested in building a natural gas line through Afghanistan. Moore implies that Bush, who was then governor of Texas, met with the delegation.
But, as Gannett News Service points out, Bush did not meet with the Taliban representatives. Whats more, Clinton administration officials did sit down with Taliban officials, and the delegations visit was made with the Clinton administrations permission.
McNamee, Chicago Sun-Times.
Whatever the motive, the Unocal pipeline project was entirely a Clinton-era proposal: By 1998, as the Taliban hardened its positions, the U.S. oil company pulled out of the deal. By the time George W. Bush took office, it was a dead issueand no longer the subject of any lobbying in Washington.
Isikoff & Hosenball, MSNBC.com.
On December 9, 2003, the new Afghanistan government did sign a protocol with Turkmenistan and Pakistan to facilitate a pipeline. Indeed, any Afghani government (Taliban or otherwise) would rationally seek the revenue that could be gained from a pipeline. But the new pipeline (which has not yet been built) has nothing to do with Unocal. Nor does the new proposed pipeline even resemble Unocal's failed proposal; the new pipeline would the bring oil and gas from the Caspian Sea basin, whereas Unocal's proposal involved deposits five hundred miles away, in eastern Turkmenistan.
Fahrenheit showed images of pipeline construction, but images have nothing to do with the Caspian Sea pipeline, for which construction has never begun. Nor do they have anything to do with the Unocal pipeline, which never existed except on paper.
According to Fahrenheit, Afghanistan's new President, Hamid Karzai, was a Unocal consultant. This is false. Sumana Chatterjee and David Goldstein, "A lowdown on the facts behind the allegations in 'Fahrenheit 9/11'," Knight-Ridder newspapers, July 2, 2004.
Some of them are closer to opinions, many are not. I'd suggest going through the whole thing and (as he prompts you to) deciding for yourself which you place importance behind and which are just matters of opinion.
Even if only half of the 59 active deceits (half-truths, misrepresentation by clever phrasing and editting, outright lies, anything incorporated to sell a point without basing it's case in the objective truth in it's entirety) are in fact accurate, it's enough to kill any assertion that Moore is writing an objective documentary.
In the very least, Moore's fact-checking and information gathering is woefully sloppy. He looks for one or two sources who agree with his point, whether or not those sources are even remotely true (the whole argument about the Bush/Saudi connection being based around military contracts sold to the Saudis...several years before HW Bush was ever associated with the parent investment is a personal favorite or mine; it was a point refuted when the source material was published, Moore didn't bother to confirm the facts) and then edits to fit.
Anyone with any time doing research papers for their major in college (especially in science, where facts are objective, not subjective) can tell you that if your source has been refuted with hard evidence (in the abovementioned case, dates years apart), you shouldn't quote them as supporting your point. I could say I achieved a "cold" fusion reaction, for instance, and cite someone else who said they'd done it, but that doesn't make my point true, and EVEN IF I'm telling the truth, if hard evidence has proved my cited support as having lied (and I sold it as a truthful source), I'm in the wrong. I've misled the people reading my report.
Moore relies on that sort of tactic a lot, mixed with video editting and a lowest-common-denominator sort of out-of-context arguing tactic that even people here around EC denounce as being wrong and lame.
Interesting point, however, is that the Kopel does agree with certain points. For instance, he agrees that the Saudi influence in the United States should be looked into with a much more skeptical eye. What he points out in that case, however, is that Moore chooses to (in a lot of cases) fabricate half-truths and use innuendo to get his point across, while pandering hypocritically to special interests (something he lambasts Republicans for doing).
So it isn't a Conservative-slanted argument. More of an anti-Moore type argument. And to be honest, Moore lacks academic ethical integrity, so even if he does make a legitimate, truthful point, it's besmirched by his overall operational tactics.
sigpic courtesy of This Guy, original modified by me
I have learned you can not reason with people that have their mind made up.
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Caanis Lupus came out of the closet to say:
I have learned you can not reason with people that have their mind made up.
It's telling that the best they can come up with are "deceits", not "lies"; basically, complaints that Moore just didn't give their half of the story; some of them aren't even about the movie, and some of them are outright "deceits" on their own.
Take the "Proposed Unocal Pipeline in Afghanistan" point above -- which proudly points out that Unocal abandoned the pipeline project in 1998. As if to say "look, they left! They weren't involved anymore!" The fact of this point is that while Unocal did abandon the pipeline in 1998, they did in fact re-enter and profited greatly from the project in 2002. Guess they weren't interested in the project unless they could get the government to foot the bill. ...which is exactly what Moore was pointing out! Drysart fucked around with this message on 07-08-2004 at 10:51 PM.
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Everyone wondered WTF when Drysart wrote:
It's telling that the best they can come up with are "deceits", not "lies"; basically, complaints that Moore just didn't give their half of the story; some of them aren't even about the movie, and some of them are outright "deceits" on their own.
It's also very telling that you latch onto the smallest points and that somehow discredits the whole thing. Let's start with "Deceit #2"... the movie says that all the news stations started reporting that Bush won after Fox News did. If what this site says is true, and that it was *CBS* that first reported that Bush won rather than Gore, how is what was said in the movie anything but a lie?
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When the babel fish was in place, it was apparent El Cuchillo said:
It's also very telling that you latch onto the smallest points and that somehow discredits the whole thing. Let's start with "Deceit #2"... the movie says that all the news stations started reporting that Bush won after Fox News did. If what this site says is true, and that it was *CBS* that first reported that Bush won rather than Gore, how is what was said in the movie anything but a lie?
CBS doesn't count.
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Over the mountain, in between the ups and downs, I ran into Drysart who doth quote:
It's telling that the best they can come up with are "deceits", not "lies"[/b]
It's also very telling that your immediate reaction is a meaningless bit of symantics squabbling over the title of the article (similar to that of every other openly left-leaning individual who's read this).
It's obvious that Moore deliberatly LIES and warps the truth in an effort to sway audiences toward his idiotic radial left way of thinking without having to be bothered by things like "journalistic integrity" or that pesky "reality". It's a precedent that he set with Bowling for Columbine, which, by the way, was a complete work of fiction portrayed as a documentary. The Blair Witch Project was closer to reality than either movie. Maradon! fucked around with this message on 07-09-2004 at 12:41 AM.
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El Cuchillo came out of the closet to say:
If what this site says is true, and that it was *CBS* that first reported that Bush won rather than Gore, how is what was said in the movie anything but a lie?
You're obviously confused. Buried amidst all the puffery in that very article:
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The first retracting network was CBS, not Fox. 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.
Except Moore never talked about who retracted first, he talked about who called the win for Bush first. Which he said was Fox. And which this page confirms.
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Maradon! came out of the closet to say:
It's also very telling that your immediate reaction is a meaningless bit of symantics squabbling over the title of the article (similar to that of every other openly left-leaning individual who's read this). It's obvious that Moore deliberatly LIES and warps the truth
It's no worse than this right-winger squabbling over semantics for half of these "deceits". See the above example in this post. Moore told the truth, this guy simply doesn't like the truth and sets about to confuse the issue with other points (CBS retracted first, but who brought up retractions? Not Moore!) instead.
Point out where Moore lied. Not where he didn't mention something, not where he supposedly misled. Point out where he lied.
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Over the mountain, in between the ups and downs, I ran into Drysart who doth quote:
Moore told the truth
Deliberate misrepresentation of the truth is a LIE.
Deliberate omission of the truth is a LIE.
This is more than an issue of symantics, this is an issue of falsehood - Moore's documentaries, much like the Blair Witch Trial documentary, are in no way representative of reality. Maradon! fucked around with this message on 07-09-2004 at 02:05 AM.
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Maradon! stumbled drunkenly to the keyboard and typed:
Deliberate omission of the truth is a LIE.
No, a lie is when you say something that is not, in fact, true.
Deliberate omission is just that. A lie is, generally, when you claim something that has no basis in reality. If you say things that DO have basis in reality, even if there are OTHER truths out there that may expound upon the original truth, then you still have not LIED.
It may not be the most reputable way of going about things, but it's still not claiming something that is not true.
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Over the mountain, in between the ups and downs, I ran into Kegwen who doth quote:
No, a lie is when you say something that is not, in fact, true.
1. A false statement deliberately presented as being true; a falsehood.
2. Something meant to deceive or give a wrong impression.
Even better!
lied, ly·ing, (lng) lies
1. To present false information with the intention of deceiving.
2. To convey a false image or impression: Appearances often lie. Maradon! fucked around with this message on 07-09-2004 at 02:15 AM.
As long as we're on the same page here.
edit:
How is that better? That helped my point, unlike the first definition which actually proved yours. He's presenting TRUE information while completely ignoring some OTHER information that is also true that may make his point less powerful if he also told it as well. Kegwen fucked around with this message on 07-09-2004 at 02:19 AM.
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x--KegwenO-('-'Q) :
Right, so then every political statement made in the last century (hell, last century is probably being really generous) or so can be classified as a lie.Works for me.
Every other political statement made in the last century is completely irrelevant to the conversation at hand.
However, since you did bring it up, even campaign ads are not deliberatly distorted reorganizations of the truth. Kerry may claim that Bush wants to kill senior citizens when Bush talks about reforming social security, but that is a legitmate, realistic point of view from one side of an issue. Bush may claim Kerry is a flag burner, but that is also a legitimate, realistic point of view from one side of an issue.
Moore's documentaries are not legitimate or realistic points of view from any side of any issue. They are complete works of fiction. Maradon! fucked around with this message on 07-09-2004 at 02:20 AM.
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Peanut butter ass Shaq Kegwen booooze lime pole over bench lick:
He's presenting TRUE information.
No, no he's not. That's the entire point. He's presenting FALSE information that is constructed from scraps of information that were ONCE true.
Just look at Bush's campaign ads. Everything he says about Kerry is true, albiet very misleading.
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x--JooJooFlopO-('-'Q) :
Serve it up however you want, Maradon, but truth is truth.Just look at Bush's campaign ads. Everything he says about Kerry is true, albiet very misleading.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.
Very little in either Bowling for Columbine or F'911 was truth.
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Maradon! had this to say about Captain Planet:
If you take a magazine, cut out a picture of Micheal Jackson, cut out the nose, turn it upside-down, color in the eyes with a red sharpie, yellow out the teeth, and paste Dubya's ears on it, then use the end result as proof that Micheal Jackson is ugly, you are lying.
It'd be more like showing a single somewhat ugly feature of a person that is, overall, generally considered to be attractive and being like "look! X is ugly 'cus she has a pimple!" and only showing a picture of the face focused upon the pimple.
At least it seems that way to me.
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Peanut butter ass Shaq Kegwen booooze lime pole over bench lick:
It'd be more like showing a single somewhat ugly feature of a person that is, overall, generally considered to be attractive and being like "look! X is ugly 'cus she has a pimple!" and only showing a picture of the face focused upon the pimple.At least it seems that way to me.
Except the pimple in this case was massively magnified, altered, it's color was adjusted, and stylized bugs and maggots were drawn all over it.
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Drysart wrote this then went back to looking for porn:
It's no worse than this right-winger squabbling over semantics for half of these "deceits". See the above example in this post. Moore told the truth, this guy simply doesn't like the truth and sets about to confuse the issue with other points (CBS retracted first, but who brought up retractions? Not Moore!) instead.Point out where Moore lied. Not where he didn't mention something, not where he supposedly misled. Point out where he lied.
Can we at least concede that Moore is NOT a documen6ary filmmaker and that "Fahrenheit" is not a documentary film?
I base my request simply on the definition of documentary:
quote:
doc·u·men·ta·ry ( P ) Pronunciation Key (dky-mnt-r)
adj.
Consisting of, concerning, or based on documents.
Presenting facts objectively without editorializing or inserting fictional matter, as in a book or film.
Link here, lest you think I redacted anything.
Notwithstanding the fact that folks are quibbling over the difference of "deceits" and "lies", no one could seriously state that Moore isn't editorializing and keep a straight face while saying it.
So call him an advocate, call him partisan, hell, call him a propagandist if you must, but please, don't dignify him or his movie with the title of documentary.
Oh, and for what it's worth, even the French have criticized aspects of the movie. This being the same French who have done everything short of pulling down Moore's pants and sucking his dick.
According to an AP story in today's paper:
Le Monde said the film more closely resembles propaganda, and it carried a separate article to separate "truths" from "errors" in the film.
Moore, in an interview with Liberation, said the movie "presents my own version of the facts."
Even less kind was France's superstar philosopher, Bernard-Henri Levy, who dismissed "Fahrenheit 9/11" as dishonest.
"When Michael Moore describes Iraq, before the American intervention, as a sort of oasis of peace and happiness, where people flew kites .... there wasn't only that," Levy said on RTL radio.
Levy noted that he opposed the war and considers Bush a "catastrophe for America." But, he added: "Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) was also a horrible dictator. And that is not in the film of Michael Moore."
(Story appears here for those who want the whole article.)
Edit for paragraph that I missed. Callalron fucked around with this message on 07-09-2004 at 02:39 AM.
That he tries to portray his fiction as truth makes him a liar.
What Farenheit 9/11 in particular (and his other works in general) amount to is hour+ long versions of those mudslinging commercials that crop up around election times. Beyond a footnote in a PoliSci book about what's wrong with propaganda even if you mean well (which, despite my opinion of Moore, I do believe Moore means well by and large), he has no worth as an academic source, IE no solid academic credibility (in other words, if you cited him you would be best citing his words as OPINIONS or EDITORIALS rather than FACTS or EVIDENCE).
If nothing else, this gentleman (who, I reiterate as I did earlier, does agree with several of Moore's overall points if not his specific conclusions and details) brings Moore's lack of objective credibility to the surface.
sigpic courtesy of This Guy, original modified by me
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From the book of Maradon!, chapter 3, verse 16:
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.Very little in either Bowling for Columbine or F'911 was truth.
And every bit of truth that was twisted to fit Moore's perspective is still truth, not lies. Moore is very careful about not outright lying in his films. He'll present facts and opinions in such a convulted manner that it strongly urges you to make certain connections but he won't actually make them for you.
Fun exercise: Compare Moore's techniques in pointing out links between Bush and the Saudis and the Bush administration's techniques in pointing out links between Saddam Hussein and Al Quada.
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JooJooFloping:
And every bit of truth that was twisted to fit Moore's perspective is still truth, not lies. Moore is very careful about not outright lying in his films. He'll present facts and opinions in such a convulted manner that it strongly urges you to make certain connections but he won't actually make them for you.
Deliberate misrepresentation of the truth in an effort to mislead is still a lie.
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Maradon! wrote this stupid crap:
Deliberate misrepresentation of the truth in an effort to mislead is still a lie.
No, it isn't. A lie requires a falsehood, an absence of truth. Presenting true information with the intention of deceiving != lying, and the definition you posted agrees.
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Everyone wondered WTF when Drysart wrote:
Except Moore never talked about who retracted first, he talked about who called the win for Bush first. Which he said was Fox. And which this page confirms.
You're arguing semantics again. And you left out the next bit:
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CBS had taken the lead in making the erroneous call for Gore, and had taken the lead in retracting that call. At 3:59 a.m., CBS also took the lead in retracting the Florida call for Bush. All the other networks, including Fox, followed the CBS lead within eight minutes. That the networks arrived at similar conclusions within a short period of time is not surprising, since they were all using the same data from the Voter News Service.
So the implication that the other networks were 'following Fox's lead' is spurious at best. The order in which he put those scenes together makes an implication that is without actual basis.
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Robert Wayne Jernigan is now 28 years old. People who knew him said he was quiet, somewhat stand-offish. He was not widely liked in high school.Four years ago, a witness reported seeing Jernigan enter a building in a remote suburb of Dallas with an axe. Four people were found dead at the scene, including a nine year old girl. No charges were filed. Less than two days later, Jernigan turned up again, this time at the scene of a suspicious fire in a day care center. Miraculously, no one was injured. But it was just a matter of time.
During the next several weeks, it is possible to place Jernigan at the scene of no less than thirteen suspicious fires. Eleven people died. Eyewitnesses were unshakable in their determination that Jernigan had been on the scene. And yet the police did nothing.
Jernigan had long been fascinated with fire. A search of his apartment revealed fireman-related magazines, posters and memorabilia. Despite the deaths of fifteen people, despite repeated eyewitness accounts and photographic evidence placing Jernigan at these fires, no criminal charges were ever filed against Robert Wayne Jernigan. He remains a free man to this day.
And rightfully so. Because Robert Wayne Jernigan is an ordinary fireman for the Dallas Fire Department. He is not a serial arsonist at all.
Now re-read the previous paragraphs and tell me where I lied.
NOW do you understand why lying by omission is a bad thing, semantic agruments aside?
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El Cuchillo had this to say about (_|_):
NOW do you understand why lying by omission is a bad thing, semantic agruments aside?
Who said it was good?
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El Cuchillo had this to say about (_|_):
NOW do you understand why lying by omission is a bad thing, semantic agruments aside?
nah, they will just cry that this has nothing to do with the argument at hand. And that their buddy Moore didn't omit anything. 
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Maradon! came out of the closet to say:
Lie1. A false statement deliberately presented as being true; a falsehood.
2. Something meant to deceive or give a wrong impression.
Even better!
lied, ly·ing, (lng) lies
1. To present false information with the intention of deceiving.
2. To convey a false image or impression: Appearances often lie.
Hahahahah... and you tried to give me a hard time for being pedantic.
If you seriously believe that there's a difference between Moore not mentioning things that make Bush not look so bad ('BAD BAD BAD!!!!'), and Bush's campaign not mentioning things that make Kerry not look so bad ('oh it's just a legitimate political view, that's not bad'), you're too far off the deep end to even bother debating with. You're directly contradicting yourself and refuse to acknowledge it, and there's no way to convince someone that the sky is blue if they vehemently believe it's green.
Kegwen fucked around with this message on 07-09-2004 at 03:20 AM.
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El Cuchillo came out of the closet to say:
So the implication that the other networks were 'following Fox's lead' is spurious at best. The order in which he put those scenes together makes an implication that is without actual basis.
It's not fucking semantics, it's two different things. I could say that "Bush is a cold-blooded murderer" because he ordered a war that killed Iraqis, but that's similarly a completely idiotic joining of two seperate things. You'd agree that there's a difference between killing an enemy combatant and killing your innocent neighbor, but you can't grasp the difference between a news agency saying it's too close to call and a news agency declaring the outcome of an election --- one of these things is saying "the votes will decide who wins", and the other is saying "we've decided who won".
Moore presented a fact: Fox News Channel was the first news agency to declare that Bush won Florida. That he didn't explain everything else that happened during the night doesn't make that fact any less of a fact. That we're having this argument at all in face of the fact is a testament that you're playing semantics by trying to change what Moore was saying by rewriting it into something else.
And despite what Maradon says, that he said that FNC awarded Florida to Bush, but didn't mention that CBS retracted their own decision earlier, or that I had a ham sandwich for lunch that day, does not make it a lie. A fact is a fact is a fact, and the definition of a documentary (since it was brought up and quoted for a semantic argument against Moore, ironically by the same people who were pointing fingers and accusing other people of pedantry) is not that it must present all facts; if that were the case, nothing would be a documentary.
And again, I will ask, point out where Moore presented something that was not a fact; where he lied. (Under Maradon's definition 1 of a lie if you must pull a Clinton and dissect the meaning of a simple fucking word.) Drysart fucked around with this message on 07-09-2004 at 03:25 AM.
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Azizza came out of the closet to say:
nah, they will just cry that this has nothing to do with the argument at hand. And that their buddy Moore didn't omit anything.
Contribute or get the fuck out of this thread, troll.
