Hopefully Not Stupid
Friday, July 30, 2004
Link: "Double-Time March To War"
Original story.
Found on Michael Moore's "Mike's Latest News" archives, most of the piece takes the mainstream media to task for failing to challenge Bush on his war on Iraq. But the most interesting paragraph in it only has to do indirectly with Bush:
Everybody who's ever worked in a large organization knows the difficulty of moving unwelcome information up the chain of command inside hierarchical bureaucracies. Nobody's eager to tell his boss' boss something that person doesn't want to hear. The stronger the command structure, i.e. military and quasi-military bureaucracies, the harder it gets to push bad news to the top. It's one big reason communism never worked.
Above anything in Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine (which I generally liked), this strikes me as insightful. It's just a really cool observation, I think.
Job search update:
It continues to go badly. Getting fed up with this town, may have to go elsewhere.
Original story.
Found on Michael Moore's "Mike's Latest News" archives, most of the piece takes the mainstream media to task for failing to challenge Bush on his war on Iraq. But the most interesting paragraph in it only has to do indirectly with Bush:
Everybody who's ever worked in a large organization knows the difficulty of moving unwelcome information up the chain of command inside hierarchical bureaucracies. Nobody's eager to tell his boss' boss something that person doesn't want to hear. The stronger the command structure, i.e. military and quasi-military bureaucracies, the harder it gets to push bad news to the top. It's one big reason communism never worked.
Above anything in Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine (which I generally liked), this strikes me as insightful. It's just a really cool observation, I think.
Job search update:
It continues to go badly. Getting fed up with this town, may have to go elsewhere.
Sunday, July 25, 2004
News: Republicans campaigning to put Kerry on ballots
Original Article
After the last presidential election, which was so narrowly decided in favor of Bush that the Supreme Court basically decided the election, yet if it weren't for the fact that if Nader hadn't split the liberal vote due to one of those typical futile third-party efforts the presidency would certainly have gone to Gore without contest, we're seeing a rather cynical ploy on behalf of some Republican groups: conservatives campaigning to put Nader on the ballet in some states.
Yeah, it sounds a bit iffish just out of the blue like that, "C'mon now, would they really be so cynical to play such numbers games?" Well maybe I'd agree with you, except if you go to page two of the above-linked article, the CEO of one such organization outright admits to doing it, almost seeming pleased with his own cleverness?
Why does this happen? Simply, it's because some people are more concerned with getting "my guy" in, than trying to discover the true will of the American people. There's no law against campaigning for someone with diametrically-opposed views, true, and I'd rather not see one passed. But it does illustrate what an atmosphere of gamesmanship has arisen in our political process.
And due to the particular mathematics of our electoral system that greatly favors a two-party system, combined with the incredible inertia against any changes whatsoever to the mechanics of our political process (because whoever wins would naturally be reluctant to change the procedure that granted them power, in case another chocolate bar falls out of the machine), I figure this kind of thing will only get worse.
In other news, blog posts are still extremely infrequent at the moment due to continuing job search. I'm getting really frustrated with it all.
Original Article
After the last presidential election, which was so narrowly decided in favor of Bush that the Supreme Court basically decided the election, yet if it weren't for the fact that if Nader hadn't split the liberal vote due to one of those typical futile third-party efforts the presidency would certainly have gone to Gore without contest, we're seeing a rather cynical ploy on behalf of some Republican groups: conservatives campaigning to put Nader on the ballet in some states.
Yeah, it sounds a bit iffish just out of the blue like that, "C'mon now, would they really be so cynical to play such numbers games?" Well maybe I'd agree with you, except if you go to page two of the above-linked article, the CEO of one such organization outright admits to doing it, almost seeming pleased with his own cleverness?
Why does this happen? Simply, it's because some people are more concerned with getting "my guy" in, than trying to discover the true will of the American people. There's no law against campaigning for someone with diametrically-opposed views, true, and I'd rather not see one passed. But it does illustrate what an atmosphere of gamesmanship has arisen in our political process.
And due to the particular mathematics of our electoral system that greatly favors a two-party system, combined with the incredible inertia against any changes whatsoever to the mechanics of our political process (because whoever wins would naturally be reluctant to change the procedure that granted them power, in case another chocolate bar falls out of the machine), I figure this kind of thing will only get worse.
In other news, blog posts are still extremely infrequent at the moment due to continuing job search. I'm getting really frustrated with it all.
Friday, July 16, 2004
Link: Failure Is Not an Option, It's Mandatory (NYT)
A New York Times op-ed piece (registration required) that I believe sums up well part of the hidden strategy behind the right's attempt to remain in control in the upcoming elections: long hours attempting to pass a brain-dead constitutional amendment (the "Federal Marriage Amendment," as appropriate and well-named addition to the ol' parchment as the Bill of Rights, I'm sure) that no one seriously expects will garner the two-thirds majority it needs, in order to generate the necessary degree of failure to alarm voters into action in November. Kind of like using a legislative gravitational slingshot effect.
An interesting concept. I'm rather certain that things like this happen to some degree, though I honestly don't know how effect this one will be.
In other news, sorry for the lack of Headlines lately. I'm considering giving them a different name, in order to distinguish them from Jay Leno's frequent (and frequently lame) Headline feature. But what, oh what, could the new name be?
A New York Times op-ed piece (registration required) that I believe sums up well part of the hidden strategy behind the right's attempt to remain in control in the upcoming elections: long hours attempting to pass a brain-dead constitutional amendment (the "Federal Marriage Amendment," as appropriate and well-named addition to the ol' parchment as the Bill of Rights, I'm sure) that no one seriously expects will garner the two-thirds majority it needs, in order to generate the necessary degree of failure to alarm voters into action in November. Kind of like using a legislative gravitational slingshot effect.
An interesting concept. I'm rather certain that things like this happen to some degree, though I honestly don't know how effect this one will be.
In other news, sorry for the lack of Headlines lately. I'm considering giving them a different name, in order to distinguish them from Jay Leno's frequent (and frequently lame) Headline feature. But what, oh what, could the new name be?
Thursday, July 15, 2004
Games: Rogue for Dreamcast
What's the oldschool RPG that's a sex machine to all the chicks? Why it's Rogue, the ancient originator of computer RPGs, representational dungeon graphics, randomly-generated gameplay and the genre of Roguelike games, the most famous member of which being the Honored Representative from the Great State of Roguelike, awesome, all-powerful Nethack.
Some wonderful person has actually hacked together, from several different sources, a version of Rogue for the Sega Dreamcast video game console. The Dreamcast suffered from an early demise, some say because of extreme software piracy, but really, more likely due to Ess-Oh-Enn-Why, but the system has gained a second life due to the fact that it’s relatively easy to create homebrew games for it; the basic system is perfectly capable of reading, and even booting games off of, CD-Rs.
And now that there’s a version of Rogue, magnificent Rogue, wonderful Rogue, great and terrible Rogue, I finally have a good excuse to drag my machine out of mothballs. What an incredibly cool thing!
What's the oldschool RPG that's a sex machine to all the chicks? Why it's Rogue, the ancient originator of computer RPGs, representational dungeon graphics, randomly-generated gameplay and the genre of Roguelike games, the most famous member of which being the Honored Representative from the Great State of Roguelike, awesome, all-powerful Nethack.
Some wonderful person has actually hacked together, from several different sources, a version of Rogue for the Sega Dreamcast video game console. The Dreamcast suffered from an early demise, some say because of extreme software piracy, but really, more likely due to Ess-Oh-Enn-Why, but the system has gained a second life due to the fact that it’s relatively easy to create homebrew games for it; the basic system is perfectly capable of reading, and even booting games off of, CD-Rs.
And now that there’s a version of Rogue, magnificent Rogue, wonderful Rogue, great and terrible Rogue, I finally have a good excuse to drag my machine out of mothballs. What an incredibly cool thing!
Wednesday, July 07, 2004
Movie discussion: "Michael Moore Hates America"
Has Michael Moore become so much of an institution that people are making movies to discredit him? Evidently so. "Michael Moore Hates America" is the unwieldy title of a film that purports to show.... well, that Moore hates America, I guess. Take a look at the movie's web site real quick so we're on the same page.
Saying that Michael Moore hates America is just stupid. No one I know with half a brain thinks Moore hates the United States; our vaunted First Amendment is the source of his success. But more importantly, by giving the film this title, whatever truth the movie contains is overshadowed by that massive ad hominem attack on Moore's work. The title is stupid, and even counter-productive: people who've never heard of Michael Moore will look at it and may think, maybe I should look this guy up. You haven't really become a big player in our country's combative political environment until someone decides you're worth a huge discrediting effort, and armchair pundits subconsciously recognize this.
What do I hate about Michael Moore Hates America? For one thing, it feels slimy. The site's subtitle is "The Official Site for a Documentary that Tells the Truth About a Great Nation." Statements like that... what possesses someone to write that? If you're going to discredit Moore, you should do it without confusing the issue with agitprop. Instead, you try to make yourself sound objective. And while Moore's works are themselves somewhat propagandistic, they aren't necessarily one-sided; the conservatives who've complained about Bowling for Columbine's factual basis never complain about the movie's real point: that guns are not the problem in the United States so much as the NRA, the nightly news, and the uniquely American attitude of national paranoia. This is precisely the reason that it's Moore's most popular movie to date, the reason it's won those awards, and why Moore doesn't deserve to be painted with the Strident Liberal paint that the Right loves to slather on anything they don't understand.
There's almost a cottage industry of Moore discreditors these days, and field research done, in of all places, the message boards over at Slashdot, have uncovered two primary types: those people who think Moore is a "limousine liberal," and those who say he lies.
The people who seek to discredit him by saying he's not the working-class person he seems to be, of course, are using a logical fallacy. Truth is truth, whether it's spoken by the President of the United States, a rogue filmmaker, or that guy on the street corner with the "The End Is Near" sign. I get an uncomfortable feeling when people present this information as if it affects the truth value of his books, movies or TV series, almost as if there were some sort of organizing force that sought to destroy Moore, or more accurately public opinion of Moore, in any way possible.
Furthermore, if Moore has indeed become rich from his work (it wouldn't have been from his documentaries in this case but his books), the question remains: what is wrong with this? I thought conservatives were all nutso about personal achievement, and soaring eagles, and lone wolves, and accomplishment, and standing on tall crags looking visionary, etc. You don't set out on a career as a documentary filmmaker thinking you're going to get rich. If you do so you are a fool. No one could have predicted Fahrenheit 9/11's success, or Bowling for Columbine's, or even Roger & Me's for that matter. The fact is, Moore's path to success has been exactly the same one that conservatives have been lauding and claiming to pave for American individuals for a long time, though actually they seem less concerned about helping the working class travel it than their Yale-graduate favorite sons.
Now we get to a trickier issue, concerning the many niggly little lies that people claim to have found in his work. I once looked through a page purporting to list out the lies in Bowling for Columbine. (Also, check out Moore's response to it.) What happened here is, one person goes out and claims Moore lied on this range of points (which, as noted in Bowling's case, generally miss the point of the movie). Then Moore responds to them, and points out the movie underwent extensive fact-checking and lawyer-vetting before release. Then the person who claimed the lies in the first place claims that Moore sidestepped issues, or brings up new, less compelling, more niggly, lies, etc.
What is truth? Can you go out and say, conclusively, that anything is true? Both political conservatives and liberals, and most people who practice some kind of religion, make a habit of presenting things they merely believe in as absolutely correct. They may even believe it themselves. Many times they present something they merely think is true as something that can be rigorously defended. Hell, sometimes different organizations release studies that claim opposite things as true. I'm not saying there's no such thing as truth, but that it's really easy to tell people what they want to hear, and they'll then believe it above anything else. If I say two plus two is four, and you say I'm wrong, does it mean there's a 50% chance I'm right? What if ten people said I'm wrong?
There are a few things in Bowling that may not be exactly true; Roger Ebert points out the text on a plaque mentioned in the movie may not match what's said in the film. Moore responded that yes, it's true, how could you do this to me Roger? Unless you live in Washington D.C. you can't check for sure, and if you did go there to check and it turned out that Moore was right, you'll just become the next target for being called a liar. People continually claim that the opening scenes of the movie, in which Michael Moore receives a gun in a bank that was giving them away in a promotion, were staged. Moore says no, it wasn't staged, it really happened that way, have a look at the outtakes. Then other people come up and say, but what about these other things, and so on. It's an atmosphere of uncertainty, and I can't help but think that it's engineered to be so.
But Bowling For Columbine is primarily a work of opinion, with fact-checker-approved supporting arguments, and overall the opinion is still an extremely compelling one, despite the rather muddy interview with Charlton Heston at the end (honestly, the movie could have done without that). It costs a lot of money, effort, sweat, tears, what have you, to make a movie. To impugn it, all you need is a web server and basic grammar skills, which tends to lend less credence to the people scurrying around trying to damage its credibility. Which is probably why Michael Moore Hates America is getting made. I predict it will prove popular with a certain group of people, the ones who watch FOX News religiously. Fahrenheit 9/11, however, for all the people who claim it's preaching to no one but liberals, is playing well even in Republican states. Which is the bigger story, that Bush's presidency isn't on the level or that Michael Moore hates America? I think Moore's the ultimate winner in this round, though whether he intentionally lies or not, I don't think it'd stop those people from criticizing him either way.
One more thing. Recently, Moore himself has said that he would not be opposed to people downloading copies of Fahrenheit 9/11, despite Hollywood disapproval. Remembering some people clamoring loudly that Moore should release his film on the Internet, and thinking those people would applaud him for doing so (well okay, not release it so much as agree to not prevent other people from doing it, but is it really so important to you that he foots the bill?), I did a Google search for that page. What I found, instead of a page congratulating Moore on his enlightened service to the truth, was a lot of broken links to http://www.moorewatch.com/releasethemovie/. I don't know if it's just a web site hiccup that's breaking those links and preventing me from seeing the glorious mea culpas from the Moore-haters, or a broken site upgrade or hackers or whatever. I can't even seem to get a Google cache for that page. Most curious. I'm sure the answer can't be that the page was quietly taken down once news broke. Couldn't be.
Has Michael Moore become so much of an institution that people are making movies to discredit him? Evidently so. "Michael Moore Hates America" is the unwieldy title of a film that purports to show.... well, that Moore hates America, I guess. Take a look at the movie's web site real quick so we're on the same page.
Saying that Michael Moore hates America is just stupid. No one I know with half a brain thinks Moore hates the United States; our vaunted First Amendment is the source of his success. But more importantly, by giving the film this title, whatever truth the movie contains is overshadowed by that massive ad hominem attack on Moore's work. The title is stupid, and even counter-productive: people who've never heard of Michael Moore will look at it and may think, maybe I should look this guy up. You haven't really become a big player in our country's combative political environment until someone decides you're worth a huge discrediting effort, and armchair pundits subconsciously recognize this.
What do I hate about Michael Moore Hates America? For one thing, it feels slimy. The site's subtitle is "The Official Site for a Documentary that Tells the Truth About a Great Nation." Statements like that... what possesses someone to write that? If you're going to discredit Moore, you should do it without confusing the issue with agitprop. Instead, you try to make yourself sound objective. And while Moore's works are themselves somewhat propagandistic, they aren't necessarily one-sided; the conservatives who've complained about Bowling for Columbine's factual basis never complain about the movie's real point: that guns are not the problem in the United States so much as the NRA, the nightly news, and the uniquely American attitude of national paranoia. This is precisely the reason that it's Moore's most popular movie to date, the reason it's won those awards, and why Moore doesn't deserve to be painted with the Strident Liberal paint that the Right loves to slather on anything they don't understand.
There's almost a cottage industry of Moore discreditors these days, and field research done, in of all places, the message boards over at Slashdot, have uncovered two primary types: those people who think Moore is a "limousine liberal," and those who say he lies.
The people who seek to discredit him by saying he's not the working-class person he seems to be, of course, are using a logical fallacy. Truth is truth, whether it's spoken by the President of the United States, a rogue filmmaker, or that guy on the street corner with the "The End Is Near" sign. I get an uncomfortable feeling when people present this information as if it affects the truth value of his books, movies or TV series, almost as if there were some sort of organizing force that sought to destroy Moore, or more accurately public opinion of Moore, in any way possible.
Furthermore, if Moore has indeed become rich from his work (it wouldn't have been from his documentaries in this case but his books), the question remains: what is wrong with this? I thought conservatives were all nutso about personal achievement, and soaring eagles, and lone wolves, and accomplishment, and standing on tall crags looking visionary, etc. You don't set out on a career as a documentary filmmaker thinking you're going to get rich. If you do so you are a fool. No one could have predicted Fahrenheit 9/11's success, or Bowling for Columbine's, or even Roger & Me's for that matter. The fact is, Moore's path to success has been exactly the same one that conservatives have been lauding and claiming to pave for American individuals for a long time, though actually they seem less concerned about helping the working class travel it than their Yale-graduate favorite sons.
Now we get to a trickier issue, concerning the many niggly little lies that people claim to have found in his work. I once looked through a page purporting to list out the lies in Bowling for Columbine. (Also, check out Moore's response to it.) What happened here is, one person goes out and claims Moore lied on this range of points (which, as noted in Bowling's case, generally miss the point of the movie). Then Moore responds to them, and points out the movie underwent extensive fact-checking and lawyer-vetting before release. Then the person who claimed the lies in the first place claims that Moore sidestepped issues, or brings up new, less compelling, more niggly, lies, etc.
What is truth? Can you go out and say, conclusively, that anything is true? Both political conservatives and liberals, and most people who practice some kind of religion, make a habit of presenting things they merely believe in as absolutely correct. They may even believe it themselves. Many times they present something they merely think is true as something that can be rigorously defended. Hell, sometimes different organizations release studies that claim opposite things as true. I'm not saying there's no such thing as truth, but that it's really easy to tell people what they want to hear, and they'll then believe it above anything else. If I say two plus two is four, and you say I'm wrong, does it mean there's a 50% chance I'm right? What if ten people said I'm wrong?
There are a few things in Bowling that may not be exactly true; Roger Ebert points out the text on a plaque mentioned in the movie may not match what's said in the film. Moore responded that yes, it's true, how could you do this to me Roger? Unless you live in Washington D.C. you can't check for sure, and if you did go there to check and it turned out that Moore was right, you'll just become the next target for being called a liar. People continually claim that the opening scenes of the movie, in which Michael Moore receives a gun in a bank that was giving them away in a promotion, were staged. Moore says no, it wasn't staged, it really happened that way, have a look at the outtakes. Then other people come up and say, but what about these other things, and so on. It's an atmosphere of uncertainty, and I can't help but think that it's engineered to be so.
But Bowling For Columbine is primarily a work of opinion, with fact-checker-approved supporting arguments, and overall the opinion is still an extremely compelling one, despite the rather muddy interview with Charlton Heston at the end (honestly, the movie could have done without that). It costs a lot of money, effort, sweat, tears, what have you, to make a movie. To impugn it, all you need is a web server and basic grammar skills, which tends to lend less credence to the people scurrying around trying to damage its credibility. Which is probably why Michael Moore Hates America is getting made. I predict it will prove popular with a certain group of people, the ones who watch FOX News religiously. Fahrenheit 9/11, however, for all the people who claim it's preaching to no one but liberals, is playing well even in Republican states. Which is the bigger story, that Bush's presidency isn't on the level or that Michael Moore hates America? I think Moore's the ultimate winner in this round, though whether he intentionally lies or not, I don't think it'd stop those people from criticizing him either way.
One more thing. Recently, Moore himself has said that he would not be opposed to people downloading copies of Fahrenheit 9/11, despite Hollywood disapproval. Remembering some people clamoring loudly that Moore should release his film on the Internet, and thinking those people would applaud him for doing so (well okay, not release it so much as agree to not prevent other people from doing it, but is it really so important to you that he foots the bill?), I did a Google search for that page. What I found, instead of a page congratulating Moore on his enlightened service to the truth, was a lot of broken links to http://www.moorewatch.com/releasethemovie/. I don't know if it's just a web site hiccup that's breaking those links and preventing me from seeing the glorious mea culpas from the Moore-haters, or a broken site upgrade or hackers or whatever. I can't even seem to get a Google cache for that page. Most curious. I'm sure the answer can't be that the page was quietly taken down once news broke. Couldn't be.
Link: Fafblog on the Bush/McCain ad
Am I alive? Yes, barely. To prove it, here's a link: Fafblog's take on the Bush/McCain political ad. 'Tis hilarious.
Am I alive? Yes, barely. To prove it, here's a link: Fafblog's take on the Bush/McCain political ad. 'Tis hilarious.
