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"Stupid White Men (the whole book this time......)"

I got this before me little soiree to Paris.

Bloomin' funny and very very inciteful.

If only I wasn't British and so lazy.

Actualy just lazy methinks.

*hears ~~Belldandy~~ approaching*

I'm reading at the moment as well. It's quite good, but Moore does go on a bit at times...

Unknown Kernel, reading your reply I was about to go off on a rant about how Moore is nothing new, and everything he says has been said before...

Until I ready in your penultimate sentence, "...Moore is capable of changing peoples minds..."

Up till now, I've always seen more as a populist who is trying to cash in on sensationalism by reproducing other people's ideas and not being have his own foresight. Although this may well be very, very true, you point out that his mission may simply to change people's minds. Likelihood is that it is a combination of the two.

Anyway, the whole point is that the world is in a pretty bad shape...

At a time when global warming is about to become a serious problem, America wants to go to war with Iraq almost solely to secure oil there. Bush wants to drill up the Alaskan Nature Reserve and pipe the Gulf of Mexico.

Why is he doing all of this? Because he was a failed oil worker whos election campaign was funded is a great part by his old friends in oil companies. America's campaign funding style is geared to create crooks for presidents.

Sonic

Exactly.

He is FAR less guilty than truth twisters/spin-docters etc whatever-the- hell-they-are.

There is a lot wrong, even his facts, that maybe, but that is little to the hard evidence of the corruption and totla imbalance of wealth and food in the world.

Etc etc etc.... *expects somebody to pick this post apart*.........

Michael Moore isn't always 100% accurate - although I haven't seen many criticisms NOT included in that article floating about the net. He picks and chooses, and even distorts, the facts that back up his argument. But he is far less guilty of this than our politicians and the mainstream media. We're seeing this process right now over Iraq: inconvenient facts have been airbrushed from history, and 9/11 is casually and falsely intertwined with Bush's grudge against Saddam.

Michael Moore is a populist, not an academic, but his ideas are right: something is very wrong with this world and it needs changing. Moore is capable of changing peoples minds, which is just as important as being an academic dissident like Noam Chomsky. And he's very, very funny.

Now, I haven't read the whole book yet, but there is a lot to be said about its mistakes.. For some reason, very few people seem to critise the points that Moore makes even though many are complete rubbish.

Here's a great extract from a website:

*****

"Consider, for instance, his claim that "two-thirds of [the over $190 million President Bush raised during the presidential campaign] came from just over seven hundred individuals." Given the $2,000 federal limit on individual donations, this claim is obviously false. To back it up, he cites the Center for Responsive Politics Web site (opensecrets.org) and an August 2000 article from the New York Times. As opensecrets.org clearly indicates, however, only 52.6 percent of Bush's total $193 million in campaign funds came from individuals. The Times article Moore references actually states that 739 people gave two-thirds of the soft money raised by the Republican Party (which uses its money for "party-building" activities that support all GOP candidates, not just Bush) in the 2000 election cycle as of June of that year. Whether out of malice or laziness, Moore conflates the party's soft money with Bush's campaign funds.

This pattern -- the very sources Moore cites proving him wrong -- continues throughout the book.

In a discussion of Pentagon spending, he refers to the "$250 billion the Pentagon plans to spend in 2001 to build 2800 new Joint Strike Fighter planes" and states that "the proposed increase in monies for the Pentagon over the next four years is $1.6 trillion." To back this up, he refers to the Web site of the peace activist group Council for a Livable World. CLW's own analysis of the 2001 budget, however, shows that $250 billion is the total multiyear cost of the Joint Strike Fighter program, not the amount spent in one year. $1.6 trillion, meanwhile, was the total amount of money requested by the Pentagon at the time for 2001-2005. It covers five years, not four, and is a total budget request, not a "proposed increase" over previously requested budget levels. It shouldn't even take this much research, however, to determine that out of the total defense budget request of $305.4 billion in 2001, $250 billion was never intended to go toward one type of plane, nor that an increase of $400 billion per year in military spending was never proposed.

Most baffling of Moore's misstatements may come in a listing of categories that the U.S. tops, such as per capita energy use and births to teenagers. In a blatant misrepresentation, he states: "We're number one in budget deficit (as a percentage of GDP)." When Moore wrote his book last year, the United States was running a budget surplus, as it had for the previous three years."


*****

There are lots of great sources of information about the faults in America on line and in books, but Moore's publicity campaign in America ensured that it was his book that people turn to about political scandel.

Sonic

Now go and read Noam Chomsky.

I recommend "Manufacturing Consent", it'll open your eyes on how mass media operates and distorts "news" to fit in with whichever political pursuit is popular that month.

I like his jokey style, but the facts that are irrefutable add a real weight to his argument.

Although I'm not so sure his solution to Northern Island will work.

although Holy Water firing hoses could be fun.....

Excellent book. I reccomend it.

:D

This is one of the greatest books I've ever read. I finished it last night, and I got his first book, 'Downsize This!' for a present today, so I'm reading that as well. From my initial impressions of DT!, it seems a lot more focused on the fact that millions of people losinig their jobs, and the injustices of life, economically-speaking. SWM is a more general rant about the state of America.

SWM has a brilliant style of writing, and the killer thing about Moore is that has his points of view, but then has the cold, hard facts to back them up. The first chapter is about the presidential election of 2000. There are some shocking things about restricting the number of black and hispanic voters in Florida, thanks to Bush and his daddy's friends. It also has the real winner of the election, and by how many votes.

Good Gos, I'm starting to sound like a reviewer...:-S

I got this before me little soiree to Paris.

Bloomin' funny and very very inciteful.

If only I wasn't British and so lazy.

Actualy just lazy methinks.

*hears ~~Belldandy~~ approaching*