If the second position had, in fact, been more thoughtful, i would agree with you.
While the second post did represent a change of position, however, Airman Doors feigned disbelief that anyone could have interpreted his earlier position as saying that he would stop Moore making more films, and accused them of making “blithe assumptions” when all they were doing was taking his earlier post at face value.
If he had come out and said, “Hey, my first post was a bit of a knee-jerk, and what i really neat to say was…” then i would have had no trouble with it. But he changed his position while pretending that his earlier position was being misrepresented by people making “blithe assumptions.”
And that seems disingenuous, or even downright dishonest.
No you wouldn’t. You may mouth off about it on message boards, but in real life you wouldn’t lift a finger. This is what I mean about the difference between knee-jerk reactions and the actions when the chips are on the table. In point of fact “George Lucas is currently working on the post production stages of Episode III, the last chapter of the Star Wars saga, and he also has Indiana Jones 4 in pre-production” and you aren’t doing a thing about it. My evidence? No news reports of crazed lawyers attempting to assassinate Mr Lucas or sabotage the films in production. I have also not seen any bills introduced into legislation which would suppress these films. Guess your representatives are letting you down.
Enjoy,
Steven
On Preview: I see what you’re saying mhendo and it is a good point. There is a difference between actually recanting a knee-jerk position then taking a more thoughtful one and trying to simply pretend the knee-jerk hadn’t happened. The latter is a result of peer pressure, as opposed to actual change, prompting the second statement of position. Such changes should probably be considered insincere. Presumably, lacking challenge from peers, the original statement(and the endorsement of censorship it represents) would remain unchanged.
I can’t speak for my husband, of course, but I intend to see Fahrenheit 9/11, not because I need more reasons to hate BushCo with a passion (Lord knows I’ve got plenty of those!), but because I want to see what the film is about and decide for myself. If I can drag Airman along, I will. But I won’t force him to see it, and I won’t let him dissuade me from seeing it.
And Brutus, if you lived in PA, I’d swear you were Patrick, the Class Tool in my Poli Sci class last semester. Both of you have your heads so far up Bush’s ass, you shampoo with his shit.
You are claiming that errors in speech make it more acceptable to be suppressed - by anyone. The Founding Fathers saw no difference in true speech and false speech.
so, is it okay, in your opinion, for private people to try to prevent the movie from being seen by threats? Picketing a theater is a free speech right, and I have no problem with anyone who wants to do that - so long as anyone wanting to go see the movie has free access. Is this too tough for you?
The first statement I made was the “lie”, as it were. I loathe that man as much as you loathe Bush, and my first reaction was to say that I would smack him down. Upon reflection, however, I realized that hey, that’s just not right, let the guy talk. So I was out of line being indignant, Moore can say what he wants to, and I’ll forever think that he’s a tool.
Fair enough; i’ve got no trouble with that at all.
Truth be told, even though Moore and i share very similar political viewpoints, i think he’s something of a tool at times as well. I certainly have problems with his journalistic techniques. Even if everything he says is factually accurate (which it may or may not be), i think his interview technique is awful, and his over-the-top self-righteous indignation is a bit hard to take at the best of times.
If you’re a film-maker, and what you’re telling the audience is truly as horrifying and as important as you say it is, then there’s no need for the dramatic facial expressions or the other types of sledgehammer subtlety that Moore engages in.
But you guys see some problem with this groups’ speech? Hey, the theaters are under no obligation to so much as give them the time of day, much less not show Moores propaganda in their establishments. Like anyone with a few cells rattling around in their noggins would realize, Moore ‘fans’ can still get their dose of propaganda via DVD or the Internet, assuming the group is successfull. (Which obviously, it won’t be, but don’t let reality fuck with your perception of events!)
Not only would picketing a theater be a protected 1st Amendment right, so would be writing the theater owners and telling them they shouldn’t show this movie would also be protected 1st Amendment speech. It protects even the stuff that you don’t like, you know.
Again, let me know when the gov’t starts censoring Mssr.Moore. Until then, all I see is citizens engaged in an ‘exchange’ of ideas.
No, but 'luce is going to sneak into Skywalker Ranch and splice in individual frames of male genitalia. Not enough to actually discern in the movie…but enough to know it’s there.
I would vote for Hillary’s reelection if she did this. I’d switch parties if she introduced legislation to prohibit Lucas-style “special editioning” of classic films.
And then I suppose he’s going to kick his own ass for our amusement? Steal his own girlfriend? Shoot himself?
Well, what are you sitting around for? Haven’t you ever seen “Schoolhouse Rock”? Write your congresscritters! Are you waiting for some activists judges to do it for you?
…Or they’ll think you’re a dork like most of the many servicemen amongst my friends and family. They’d much rather you buy them a beer or at least have something genuine to say if you’re going to say anything at all. The general consensus is that a handshake and a thank you is corny makes them feel very akward.
I was sitting next to an army servicewoman on an airplane awhile back and the guy next to us pulled the handshake/thank you bit and she went noticeably red in the face. When he got up to go to the bathroom she said “god I wish people wouldn’t do that.”
It is certainly true, as many have pointed out, that this is not a first amendment issue. People need to realize when and where the first amendment does and does not apply, and need to be able to distinguish between the two.
Of course, while some people have trouble sorting out the legal issues, others, like our friend here, have difficulty making moral distinctions.
Sure, these people have the right to picket theaters and to say that the movie shouldn’t be screened. But, contrary to your claim, this is hardly “an ‘exchange’ of ideas,” in any real sense of the term. The only “ideas” being exchanged are “Moore should shut up” or “People shouldn’t watch Moore’s film.”
Personally, i think a much more productive and reasonable use of freedom of expression is to actually debate the issues involved in a film like this, rather than simply to try and prevent people from seeing it. I think that ignorance is best fought through dissemination, not suppression, of information. While i fully concede and support the right of those people to try and prevent the film being shown, i have no respect for their methods, because those methods, if successful, would deny others the opportunity to make infomed decisions about the film’s content.
Someone who tries to prevent certain speech from entering the public domain, and who then claims that their efforts are simply freedom of expression, has very little moral ground to stand on, IMO.
This has always been, for me, something of a sticking point about first amendment arguments in the US. Plenty of people consistently point out that the first amendment only applies to government situations, and not to a wide variety of other spheres. And legally, they’re completely correct. But it seems to me that if you’re really in favour of the fundamental principle of freedom of expression, your concern should not be limited to areas where government is the actor.
I’ll grant Doors that Moore might be a propagandist (albiet probably a sincere one), but I notice that while he’s incredibly worked up by whatever untruths Moore is in the habit of telling, the lies and mistruths in the quoted OP apparently didn’t bother him in the slightest. This dulls his criticism of Moore considerably.
Methinks some of you are missing the ultimate point: No matter how hard this group tries (and I am not sure if it is actually sending letter to theater owners, or if it is asking others to do so) to keep Moore’s film out of the theaters, it isn’t going to happen. I doubt that anyone sincerely expects a letter-writing campaign to suppress a movie. The mere act of sending the letters to the owners, raising a little ruckus about the value of giving a propagandist access to the theaters, stuff like that is the point. Sort of like how your stupid ‘antiwar’ protests don’t actually have a chance in hell of slowing down, much less stopping, a war.
There is no point in ‘debating’ Moore, any more so than there is a point in debating Eisenstein or Riefenstahl. Well, you can debate the lighting and camera angles or whatnot, but they are all fanciful works of misdirection and lies that pimping a single point of view. Propaganda. In Moore’s case, it’s leftist propaganda.
And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what will be contained in the movie. Let me consult my scrying devices…let’s see…
Moore will mention, in his own stupid way, the following:
-Something about ‘big business’. It will not be flattering. Indeed, it will be insulting/negative. Nothing good will be said about the world of business.
-Nothing good will be said about Bush. (Moore is clever though, he may throw in a perfunctory ‘Bush wears nice ties’, so that later Moore can squeel that he was being fair and balanced.)
-Vague information, from vague sources, all vaguely believable, will be trumpted as Gospel Truth.
And so on. There isn’t going to be anything to honestly ‘debate’, that is for damned sure.
I don’t have to actually read a Brutus post, I already know what he’s going to say. A Brutus post will necessarily contain the following:
A statement suggesting that anyone to the left of Kublai Khan is either a well-meaning but chucklewitted doofus or a seething anarchist bent on undermining all that is good and noble about the USA. Oh, and they want our women and they hate freedom.
That the right is a cruelly oppressed majority, who currently control all three branches of gov. by sheer force of will and moral clarity, in thier ongoing crusade against the corruption and moral bankruptcy represented by, well, me.
That the Shining One combines the Bismarck-like realpolitik of a Kissinger with the righteous tenacity of Truman and the sunny optimism of a Reagan, bequethed to a desperately confused America by a benign Providence to lead us in our time of turmoil and trouble.
That anyone who believes otherwise is either a concious agent of the dark and turgid anti-American conspiracy, or an effete, limp-wristed liberal pansy led astray by the machinations and insidious propaganda of the Moores, the Frankens, and the Krugmans.
You’re not even trying! Come now, if this is something you feel passionately about then you should at least put some effort into it. There’s so much material available and you could push the Senator’s buttons all day long. Talk about those who wish to revise history. Talk about the erosion of the principles put forth in one of the greatest social messages of the 70’s. Talk about the needless overuse of technology as a creeping evil and the need to be vigilant to stand against wasteful revisionism for revisionisms sake. Heck you could probably score major points with the Junior Senator by snidely insuinuating that Mr Bush has given honors to this vile revisionist historian and personally applauded his efforts.
There’s just so much material here. Think of the amusement some staffer would get when your eloquent masterpiece on the evils of historical revisionism et al ends with a call to action to repress future “special editions” of “Star Wars”. Comedy gold I tell you, and you don’t even care enough to put forth the effort. Bah.
In nineteen dickety seven, Hollywood moved beyond the silent film era with the debut of “The Jazz Singer.” We had to say “dickety” because the Kaiser had stolen our word for “twenty.” I chased him down the road but gave up after dickety-six miles.
After the chase, I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. ‘Give me five bees for a quarter,’ you’d say.
Now where were we? Oh yeah - the important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones…
Anyway, George Lucas needs to stop making movies. Please take all necessary action.