Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/29/michael-moore-shares-details-o.html
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While I may not always agree with Moore’s approach to issues, he’s a damn fine filmmaker, and a brave voice for the left. I’m glad he’s out there doing his thing.
If you strip away his often over the top (and sometimes very misleading) presentation of his arguments (no doubt to rile up and agitate the right), he ends up being completely correct far more often than he’s wrong. He got booed off the stage at the Oscars when he dared to criticize W back in the height of his post-9/11 popularity – and ended up being later vindicated. He got all kinds of hate when he stated that Hillary would lose to Trump, and when this happened all the reasons he cited ended up being right on the nose.
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Michael Moore has really irritated me in the past with his misleading presentations of things I otherwise agree with. The facts speak for themselves; why muddy the waters?
It would be great for someone with his clout to try pulling the country together. We can’t move forward without the Conservatives on the other side. As Moore points out, they’re almost half the country.
History shows that the way to move the country forward is to win. The conservatives will come along with you afterwards.
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But that’s his problem. As long as he keeps misleading, those misleading topics will get torn apart and his presented facts will thus be criticized and questioned along side those. I would think for this movie there are enough facts to present that stand on their own merit that don’t need hyperbole or exaggeration. I guess we’ll see.
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Left, right, centrist, liberal, conservative, moderate - all meaningless in my view when talking about the public. People who are supposed to be right wing or conservative are pushing spending and taxing and people who are supposed to be liberal or left wing are corporate shills. It’s all just theater as to who is left or right. The way I see it is that It’s about whether you want reform, recidivism, or stagnation. In other words, you are either progressive, regressive, or obstructionist. Applying labels based on actions rather than accepting that someone is what they say they are is a better approach in my view.
As for the partisan politicians, that’s another kettle of stink.
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That’s a great sentiment, but coming together is a goal state, not a method for getting there. How do you propose doing that?
I don’t know how to come together if one side doesn’t want to. By definition, it requires both sides to want it. I despair that the right wing propaganda machine has convinced their followers that coming together is losing, and their goal is to win by destroying the opposition, not coming together. They don’t believe in win-win. They made it a mission to obstruct all progress when Democrats had the presidency, regardless of whether it was in the people’s interests, and now they actively prevent Democrats from coming to the table, blocking them from government meetings, and undermining objectivity and the rule of law. This is a bad time.
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We love choosing sides. But also it’s not entirely meaningless.
Objectively you’re right. But that’s some really loaded terminology. But I’ve been thinking along the same lines. I find it difficult to agree with either conservative or progressive ideology.
Conservatives assume that society remains static and that laws can be couples to an absolute set of morals. It’s very easy to slide into state religion with this model, so vigilance is a difficult necessity. Arguments that appeal to authority carry too much weigh with this crowd, and a tolerance of long standing injustice is a serious flaw. (status quo is often unfair)
Progressives wish to advance society through a series of social experiments, often proposed by soft science academics that historically have difficulty with testing models within their own field. That’s not the say that the soft sciences are bad, but with untestable models and lack of physical evidence they resort to unreliable consensus building as a form of research.
I recognize that a Constitution is a set of rules, but it is not immutable and is modified explicitly by new legislation and a process of Amendment. And is modified implicitly through judicial interpretation that tends to follow with the changes of view of newer generations. Conservatives call the later “legislating from the bench”, and that interpretation fits in with their static absolute views on law.
I’m severely disappointed that my high school education did not teach things like the social contract. We never delved into Hobbes or Locke. Not even civic republicanism or Paine’s Common Sense were covered. Without even a basic education in civics, I’m not really sure how your average voter is supposed to process what is going on in the world around them.
Perhaps if people no longer know what responsibilities and duties citizens have we’ll slip into a process of decline as Rome did. Our existing state of affairs seems it is not something we can maintained indefinitely. Some change will occur soon, for good or ill.
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You can say that again. But our political leadership is not us. It falls to us to listen to the human beings on the other side of this political divide, take their concerns seriously, and offer them alternate solutions to those problems. It’s going to be a slog and it’s going to be ugly, but it just has to get done. And it has to get done by us, because the other guys won’t do it.
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He’s at his best when he’s being funny. ( TV Nation was brlliant; Caroling Big Tobacco with a bunch of former smokers who’d had laryngectomies. Going to Russia and finding the missile aimed at his house) When he tries to do straight it’s so lopsided it’s nauseating.
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I generally agree with you and think people should stick to the facts as a matter of principle, and I don’t think Moore should be an exception… but would also like to point out that even if everything Moore says is 100% factual, that won’t have any influence on his opponents whatsoever. They’ll make up lies and believe those lies, regardless of contradictory evidence, same as usual. I find it hard to imagine there are many fence-sitters left at this point- Moore will either be preaching to the choir, or be ignored by the people who would still support Trump if he ate a baby on live television.
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The political terrain in the United State is defined by race mainly – it’s a topic we try to categorize, but it’s part of every political campaign and every political issue.
So I can agree that it’s impressive that the Democrats have won the popular vote in every presidential election since 1988, and I can cheer along with Michael Moore about who the people prefer. But the more telling statistic here is that democrats have lost the white majority vote in every presidential election for the last 50 years – pretty much since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
That’s an amazing trend and goes far toward explaining why obvious solutions to persistent problems – get corporate money out of politics, pass universal healthcare, end mass incarceration – don’t get much traction in practice.
The Republicans know they have the white majority, and that majority is more relevant than any other characteristic of power in the United States.
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you post took quite the dark turn, but I like it.
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Let me darken it a little more: but that I mean literally all Trump supporters. Not to say that all of them are in favor of child murder (unless the child isn’t white, of course- immigrant children are likely dying as we speak as a direct result of Trump’s actions and they’re a-okay with that), but if it did happen I’m sure they’d just say “fake news!” and move on with their lives as though nothing had happened.
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As a wise man once said, a person is not a group. That some progressive have done this does not make it a progressive cornerstone. Progressives are defined broadly as reformers. Those who seek to curb pollution are progressive. Those who seek sexual equality are progressive. Those who seek social justice are progressive. The core of progressive ideology is simply that governance should be adjusted as society continues to evolve. That some experiments in this have failed is reflection on the attempt and not the motivation behind it.
I get the impulse to see labeling people in to the three categories of progressive, regressive, or obstructionist as being overly reductive and using loaded terminology but that’s simply an appeal to fairness when none is called for. If you oppose changing government to suit the current society in a nation designed to have a government of the people rather than a government of the forefathers, what can you be said to be other than regressive or obstructionist? No matter the term used, the effect is the same. Our nation was created in a way to allow the people to change the government as needed. This nation is a fundamentally progressive one at its core and fighting against that can’t be said to be anything other than obstructionist or worse regressive.
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THIS.
The GOP gives two shits about truth or america or the constitution - they care about winning, and cheating to win is part of that.
Its time to win back and box them the fuck out, just like they are doing to us right now. They can come along, or not - I really don’t give a shit about them being happy about it. Its their right to not enjoy a free society.
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No, it’s simple; a majority of US citizens are liberal, but they live too close together, so their vote is diminished due to an 18th century understanding of territorial integrity (and a heaping dollop of white supremacy.)
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I guess that’s the only-moderately-right-wing way of glossing over the entirety of progressive politics, sure. I mean, progressives would probably object to the term “experiments” as a description of policies that are well established in other countries and/or US history (like universal healthcare, access to contraception and abortion, gun control, trade unions, progressive taxation, environmental protections, voting rights, bank regulation…) but meh; by Fox News standards it barely registers as shade. And there have been times and places where, yes, the “left” agenda was pretty experimental.
But the US is not currently one of those places; to suggest that the “right” is small-c conservative and the “left” wants radical change would be the opposite of true. The GOP has been pushing a radically experimental market-fundamentalist agenda for 30+ years, and the more it fails the harder they push it. By any measure apart from racism, genuine small-c conservatives ought to be running away in droves.
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My examples of conservatives don’t apply to every individual either.
Not necessarily. There is a strong sense of stewardship and conservationism in some otherwise “conservative” states. For example Michiganders are very sensitive to the kinds of water pollution we had in the past that harms sport fishing. Having a clean forest or pristine lake that your grandchildren can enjoy can be a conservative position. Even though it’s not a neo-conservative position.
Depends on motives and audience. If I want certain people to listen than I probably shouldn’t trigger them to shut down and respond emotionally. If I’m preaching to the choir then I can use any sort of inflammatory rhetoric I want to charge up my audience.
So true. The United States is founded on liberal principles. Even if the details and people have changed in the last 250 years. Even so there are different philosophies to consider. Should we change reactively, in response to a real event? Should we be proactive, and change in order to avoid future problems that may only be theoretical? Are we federalists? Do we want central planning like the Soviets? There are lots of ways to break it down.
I’ve heard accusations that the left is playing “identity politics” from self-described right wing supports. And that people would assert themselves on a left-right spectrum and follow up with that accusation is shockingly stupid. But beyond the usual labels, I think we can agree that nepotism, cronyism, kleptocracy, and fascism are not American ideals. And I personally believe those rising “values”, if you can call them that, are of the most immediate concern.
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The clip answers the question about what you get when you put Roseanne Barr, Donald Trump, and Michael Moore in the same room.
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