Is every journalist that witnesses events of ill-treatment who doesn’t immediately go running to the military police a ‘thug’?
I’m baffled by the question. If I had videotape of you being sodomized by a gang of hoodlums, would you prefer that I give it over to police or sell it to theaters for profit?
I couldn’t get the link to the outtakes to work, but if they show what you claim (and I’m confident they do) then I’ll admit that my original statement was likely wrong. What matters are the facts, and in this particular case, they’ve been hard to come by since the two sides seem to be disagreeing on one important and simple point Does the bank typically keep guns onsite to give out to customers? This is what Moore claimed to be true, and what the bank claimed to be false.
For a guy like me, who wants to form opinions based directly on the data, I feel like I’m waffling back and forth depending on who’s version of the events I’m hearing. 
Sorting through the lies is just a damn pain in the ass.
If what you describe was actually a part of ongoing systematic abuse, and your position and power (as a journalist) meant that you had a greater ability to stop such things happening by temporarily keeping quiet and then making it fully public, don’t you have a slight dilemma? And, if you hand the footage over to the guys in charge, how can you be confident it doesn’t go straight into the bin?
(…such as if the Rodney King tape was handed straight to the LAPD? Would anybody have ever heard about it?)
What the fuck would prevent Moore from going to the NYT or some other media outlet with a copy of the tape? You know they can make copies of them these days, right? Don’t have to hand over the original…
What was suggested was that he should notify ‘authorities’. Last time I checked the NYT wasn’t affiliated to the military.
I didn’t mention my view on the claim at the time of the statement because it wasn’t relevant. Additionally, in my view, I had already commented in the previous thread that the segment didn’t give me the impression that Parker and Stone had anything to do with it, and at that time, I thought I’d mentioned my reasons for saying so.
You are really stretching. Given the task of being Moore’s mindless defender, it’s quite understandable, but still, use some common sense:
Why the living fuck, if he was truly so concerned, didn’t he go public with the footage? Did it not cross his mind? Apparently not. Hey, why not make dozens of copies and send them to various people in Congress?
Nope. He saves it for the movie, only to be thwarted in the pursuit of ‘the scoop’ by a media outlet that he (apparently) could have informed earlier.
You’re still ignoring the fact that what he did is what journalists the world over are doing every single day…witholding information, with the intention of publicising it in a way which has maximum impact. Do you feel all such journalism is irresponsible?
Sweeping generalization fallacy. It is one thing to withhold that Madonna is going to publish another children’s book, but quite another to withhold that US military personnel have sexually assaulted Iraqi citizens. Let’s give you for the sake of argument — despite how ridiculous it is — that Moore is a journalist. (He considers himself to be a filmmaker.) Would you be just as quick to defend a reporter for Stars and Stripes who did the same thing: reviewed footage of sexual torture by US soldiers and, rather than report the news, used it to turn a profit for himself?
How do you think freelance journalists make a living, other than ‘turning a profit’ from the stories they report?
(And a reporter for Stars and Stripes is not an independent journalist. Nice try.)
I am not defending him you little fucking punk. I am calling you a liar. But I think everyone knows that already.
Lib, just exactly how old are you? Cause I honestly can’t believe that someone who is so immature, asinine and loony is over the age of fifteen. I have long suspected that you are just some dumb kid pretending to be a wise old sage.
Regardless, you’re an idiot. In further news, the Pope wears…
I will be 49 years old in a couple of months, your suspicions notwithstanding.
And movie theaters aren’t news outlets. Moore watched men get raped and used it for his personal gain and agenda. He is a barbarian, as are all who defend his act.
Moore watched men get raped? Cite?
The most I saw was that he saw a guy get his genitals fondled. The descriptions of read of the abuses shown in the movie seem to consist of verbal abuse, taunting, hooding and at least one guy getting his package grabbed.
If that’s all the abuse that Moore saw, then it’s not out of the ordinary for what journalists see in the field and Moore knew that if he publicized the footage (and remember he didn’t know about Abu Ghraib at the time) that he would have been accused of self-promotion, attacking the troops, etc.
I haven’t seen any reports that Moore actually witnessed or had footage of a rape. If that is the case then by all means he should have reported it.
Is that the case?
There’s a simple answer for why it would have been ineffective for Moore to simply ‘draw the attention’ of military authorities over what he saw happening - they knew already. It was condoned. The only way to stop it was to expose it - given that he was already in the process of making a film, using the film to expose what was happening seems a reasonable decision. It’s only because other images surfaced elsewhere while the film was in production that anybody is now claiming Moore was ‘hiding’ things.
(And calling people ‘thugs’ and ‘hooligans’ is hardly a debating tactic that’s going to impress, even in the pit.)
So from this I extrapolate that you believe that, as long as the majority is doing it, it’s all right.
Sure, buddy.
As for Moore… he’s not a liar. I will go on record: I do not think Michael Moore is a liar. He is a Con Man.
Slight difference here. A liar will just… lie. “I dug the Grand Canyon, personally.” “I can fly if I close my eyes and think happy thoughts.” “Christ tells me that all fags are burning in hell.” Those are lies. They are stupid, mindless, thoughtless, blowhard lies.
Moore does not tell stupid, mindless, thoughtless, blowhard lies. He tells very cunning and very shrewd lies, and makes sure he always has a way out once backed into a corner. “No, I didn’t fake the scene where I walked out of the bank with a gun… I called and arranged it months beforehand! Haha, gotcha ya!”
If anybody pulled that sort of behavior on the boards, he’d be banned.
Think of a child, that’s just hit a baseball through a window. His mommy comes out: “Did you break this window?”
“Nuh-uh,” says the child.
“But you’re holding a baseball bat.”
“I didn’t do it!” the child says.
Of course, after being questioned at length, the child will justify the events thus: “The BASEBALL broke the window, not me!”
See, technically, it’s true. The baseball did, indeed, break the window. That is what happened. But the child caused the baseball to break the window.
But it’s still technically not a lie.
Michael Moore’s stated point in Bowling For Columbine was to address the growing fear in our country. A noble goal, to be sure, and I applaud anyone that makes a sincere effort to combat that phenomenon. However, if one wants to try to use an event to justify his claim - that the proliferation of weapons, for instance, helps spread the fear - wouldn’t he want to present events that are actually the norm?
If giving people a voucher to purchase a rifle is, in and of itself, so scary, why didn’t Moore portray THAT in his movie? Why would he need to set up an atypical scenario - which, as far as we know, has happened ONCE in the history of man - to try to demonstrate what he claims is HOW THINGS NORMALLY ARE?
And, with these questions in mind, how can ANYBODY claim that the man is not dishonest?
SPOOFE, are you still taking BfT as gospel, despite it being shown to apparently use the same dishonesty and downright inaccuracy that Moore is accused of?
Dio
Moore said the same thing you did — if he’d released it, people would have accused him of seeking publicity. And yet, he, um, used it to seek publicity. Lauer described it as sexual humiliation. Originally, I said sexual abuse. Molesting a man’s penis against his will is legally a sexual assault. I concede that rape is a (very slight) exaggeration (perhaps), but I didn’t use the term rape to describe the act until GorillaMan used the term journalist to describe Moore. Moore said the reason that he didn’t turn it in is because he doesn’t trust mainstream media. He apparently gained his embedding privileges fraudulently, by the way, and admitted that he did not inform everyone he interviewed of his intentions to document what they said. He’s a sleaze.
A nicely Moore-ish misrepresentation.
:rolleyes:
I don’t think you understand what exactly a lie is. If someone says something while believing it to be true, it doesn’t make them a liar. Wrong, perhaps, liar, no.
secondly, there is a freaking newspaper advert advertising the guns for CD accounts in the bank. do you really want to claim it only happened once?