See post #141. To summarize - The site claims A.) It looks like South Park and B.) it was strategically placed in the film near Matt Stone’s interview.
A) - it doesn’t.
B) - it isn’t.
In a related vein, it looks like Moore is moving heaven and earth to make sur eFahrenheit 9/11 stands up to all the fact-checking his detractors can throw at it:
it doesn’t look or sound anything like south park! unless a midwestern american accent = South Park. do you not think if Matt Stone had actually done the piece he would want to be credited it for it in the movie?
The weirdest thing about F-911 to me is that Moore had obtained footage of an Iraqi detainee being sexually abused (which he uses in his film) months before the story broke on Abu Ghraib, and he says that he did not notify any authorities. He told Lauer that he had agonized over that one but, in the end, decided that the film would suffer if news of such torture leaked before the movie played. Even if he isn’t a liar — and I believe he is — he is certainly a jackass.
I read in a review that that scene is only one of two (I think) scenes in which Moore appears, and the narration is minimal as well.
You are misrepresenting what he said. Why don’t you post the entire quote instead of rephrasing it?
I don’t see anyone else jumping in to defend your claim that “I don’t think it looks like South Park” is a fair substitute for “I don’t think Michael Moore intended people to think it was by the creators of South Park”. If anyone does buy that, they’re welcome to speak up and explain their reasoning.
*Which you have since mentioned. You didn’t say you were referring to your statements in another thread in post #132. You still haven’t bothered to link to your post in that other thread, which is customary when one wants to introduce information found somewhere else. Which part of “You’ll note that I’ve stated several times that I disagree with the site’s assertion on that score” was meant to indicate to me (the “you” that was supposed to be doing the “noting”) that the other one of these “several” (actually “two”) statements was not in this thread at all?
The post I presume you are referring to took place on the last page of a three-week-old thread. That’s what I was meant to “note” now? Granted, I had previously participated in that thread, but given that you couldn’t remember its contents correctly it’s a lot to ask me to do so, especially since on the preceeding page I had already posted that I was leaving that thread because I was going out of town. And looking at your post, I see that not only does it not say “I disagree that Moore intended people to think the cartoon was by the creators of South Park”, it doesn’t even say “I don’t think the cartoon looks like South Park.” It says:
This is just a statement that you wouldn’t have assumed that it was by the same people. You don’t say anything about the “look” of the cartoon at all, and you do say that the voices are similar. This isn’t a denial that the cartoon resembles South Park. It’s a confirmation that the cartoon resembles South Park, although not in the same way that the “Bowling for Truth” site specifically mentioned.
*Not if you want to be honest and make sense, you can’t.
*I don’t know what sort of logic training you have, but I didn’t spend all those hours pounding out proofs to be fooled by something like this. A conclusion can be true even if the argument isn’t sound. One cannot reject the conclusion of an argument simply by discovering a given argument for that conclusion to be flawed. It doesn’t “follow” that you find fault with the conclusion just because you don’t buy the premises. For instance:
- If the cartoon was by Matt Stone, Michael Moore must have met Stone while making Bowling for Columbine.
- The cartoon was by Matt Stone.
- Michael Moore met Stone while making Bowling for Columbine.
This is a valid argument, and the conclusion is true. However, premise 2 is false and premise 1 is questionable. If you were to say “But that cartoon wasn’t by Matt Stone!” it would not necessarily mean that you disagreed with the conclusion. It certainly isn’t a statement of disagreement with the conclusion. A statement of disagreement with the conclusion would take the form “I disagree with the conclusion” not “I disagree with the premises”.
You may continue to insist that, in defiance of both English grammar and logic, “I found the animation style very dissimilar to South Park… but the voice talent somewhat similar” satisfies your claim that you stated several times that you disagreed that Moore intended people to mistakenly believe that the animation was by the creators of South Park…but this is pretty strange behavior from someone willing to brand Moore a liar for saying “his own NRA website” in reference to Charlton Heston. I have yet to see anyone come up with an example of Michael Moore expressing himself anywhere near as poorly, illogically, or misleadingly as you have done on this point. But for some reason anytime Michael Moore fails to express himself with perfect clarity he’s a big fat liar out to trick the American people for his own selfish gain.
And I would hope they wouldn’t. I don’t really need any help.
It wasn’t important enough to me to dig up the old post, but thank you for doing so. But I acknowledged that I hadn’t pointed out my reasons in that thread already :
What I said in the previous thread is that I didn’t see the association between the cartoon and the South Park fellows… I wouldn’t have assumed it came from them, in other words, based on what I saw.
Sure I can. I am honest, and it makes perfect sense to me.
I already acknowledged the site’s arguments as less than logical, but I think the situation here is still applicable. Why? The two points in the cartoon-authorship structure are the sum totality of the evidence that Moore wanted to mislead.
In your structure, we have other evidence for the conclusion. IE : the face to face interview between the two. In other words, BfT’s author was making use of all available evidence - all of which I dispute - and you’re purposefully avoiding the most direct evidence, to make a strained-logic argument.
Again, I recanted on the “several”. See above.
Ha-ha-ha… Great link. BTW, who’da thunk that the book is endorsed by such a sterling group as the VPC. :rolleyes:
My point precisely - your version of the NRA’s history was on one end of the spectrum, my cite was on the other.
Which is all you need if you want to talk to yourself. But again, in attempting to communicate with other people, “it makes perfect sense to me” isn’t quite enough.
*The sum totality of the evidence presented by that site. You have brought up two more data points yourself in this thread: that the voices sound South Park-esque to you, and “the puzzling fact that clips from South Park appear in BfC at all”. Someone could disagree with the “Bowling for Truth” evidence, but use yours (or some other as yet unmentioned evidence) to reach the same conclusion: that Moore was intentionally trying to mislead people.
In other words, it’s possible to think that “Bowling for Truth” was right for the wrong reasons. It doesn’t follow that anyone who states disagreement with the site’s premises disagrees with the conclusion. Given that you mentioned an additional potential supporting premise of your own in the very same sentence in which you rejected one of the site’s, it seems particularly unreasonable to expect others to read this as a clear statement of disagreement with the site’s conclusion.
*I had to use an example where there was other available evidence, or you wouldn’t know that the conclusion was true despite the faulty premises. But one could make a valid but unsound argument with a true conclusion and completely nonsensical premises:
- If the moon is made of green cheese, my username is Lamia.
- The moon is made of green cheese.
- My username is Lamia.
Or, to be less silly, I could rework my earlier example this way:
- If the cartoon was by South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, Michael Moore must have met them both while making Bowling for Columbine.
- The cartoon was by Matt Stone and Trey Parker.
- Michael Moore met Parker while making Bowling for Columbine.
Again, valid argument, but premise 1 is questionable and premise 2 is false, so it’s unsound. But is the conclusion true or not? More importantly for our purposes here, what does my rejection of premise 2 and questioning of premise 1 tell you about my beliefs in regard to the conclusion? If I haven’t stated my opinion of the conclusion, can I resonably expect you to understand what it is based on my statements about the premises? Could I fairly claim that my rejection of the premises was a statement of disagreement with the conclusion?
It is not logical to reject a conclusion solely because a given argument in support of that conclusion is flawed. This means it is also not logical to claim that rejecting a premise or an entire argument is the same thing as rejecting the conclusion.
*Now all you need to do is recant the rest and say that you’ll be less hasty to call other people liars because they don’t always say things in the best or clearest possible way, and we’ll be in perfect agreement.
Ah, but the only person for whom I have evidence of a communication failure is you, and bluntly, that’s really not important to me.
Eh, the voice thing I don’t buy as evidence of anything, but I will go on record and say that the clips from South Park, located as they are, don’t connect to the cartoon in BfC in any way. So, there, a third piece of “evidence” disputed. Happy now?
I don’t view my comment on the voices as supportive of the conclusion. Many cartoons have voices similar to other cartoons - there’s a subset of silyl voices that are easy for a lot of people to do, and they get used over and over again.
The fact that we know it is true outside of the premises is precisely the problem.
Again we have external evidence.
Better. If this were presented to me, I would say, as you did, that 1 assumes too much, and 2 is false. For that reason, I disagree with the conclusion. It is implied that I disagree with the conclusion because there is no other reason to believe it, if I dispute the premises. We’re still skirting dangerously close to the issue that I said I wouldn’t discuss again. I’m closing the dialogue regarding the statement-quibbling from my end. Obviously we have different understandings here, we’re not reaching an agreement, and it’s wasting tremendous amounts of my time. You can say more if you like, but I’m done. If you believe my understanding of logic and the implications thereof are wrong, good for you. If you believe I intentionally meant to deceive, you’re wrong, but you’re welcome to believe it.
But I wasn’t hasty. And you and I will never be in perfect agreement on this issue.
You’ve wasted a lot of time and words on something that’s not important to you, then. That’s a shame. If communicating with me doesn’t matter to you, you could have saved us both some trouble by simply not telling me what I was supposed to be “noting” in the first place.
*I know your understanding of logic and the implications thereof are wrong. One reason why I have been willing to spend so much time on this is that it’s important to me that people understand these things properly. And I don’t just mean you, I mean anyone else who might still be paying attention and could be confused on this point. It isn’t true that disproving the premises also proves the conclusion false or that disputing the premises necessarily indicates a lack of belief in the conclusion. Believing otherwise isn’t only incorrect, I think it’s actually dangerous because it could lead people to make judgement errors in other areas.
*If it means anything to you, I don’t believe that to be the case. I believe that you are probably a man (woman? giant turtle of unspecified sex?) of at least average honesty and probably no less than average grasp of logic. But you have been wrong here.
It began for me with your reply to the post wherein I mentioned BfT. I am, and always have been, a defensive fellow. I perceived that as a personal shot, based on our previous interactions, and began in earnest. Shortly after that, it became a matter of simple momentum.
Let me try one more analogy on for size - it just came to me. I’m viewing the situation somewhat like a criminal court case… Moore as the defendant, BfT as the prosecutor. The prosecutor has chosen what he feels is the strongest evidence for the conclusion that Michael Moore is guilty of attempting to mislead people into thinking the cartoon was done by the South Park guys. The prosecutor presents his evidence to me, a juror or judge. I evaluate the evidence. I find it lacking. Therefore I must disagree with the prosecutor’s conclusion that Moore is guilty. Moore may in fact be guilty, and given the other things I have observed, I’m biased enough that it should taint my judgment against the man, but in this case, there’s nothing to support the conclusion. I cannot say with certainty that he is innocent, but I have no reason to think he is guilty. Of course, the rules in a court of law force you to explicitly state such, but this isn’t really a court - yet I’m still working on a basic assumption of innocent until proven guilty. Does that help at all?
The problem is that the situation isn’t purely a logical argument. I try to fit it in that mold as much as I can, because it gives me some useful vocabulary and thought structure, but it’s not quite a perfect fit.
[Here’s a link to further discussion on the topic]](kuro5hin.org) from someone who has reviewed the outtakes from that scene. The outtakes can be accessed through a link on the page as well. Here’s a quote from the author of that site.
I watched the outtakes, and more than once the bank employees indicate that the guns are on-site and available. The gun is brought out in the box by an employee, who pulls it out for Moore. It is evident from the actions of the bank employees that nothing has been prearranged, unless they are all acting. Given that they have not claimed this since, such an excuse is dubious.
I strongly recommend that anyone interested in the veracity of this charge against Moore and BfC look at the outtakes. I would suggest that those, such as Cheesesteak withdraw their claims of lying or misrepresentation. On your list above, items 4-6 appear to be reversed. That is, they should respectively be “Not Fact”, “Fact”, and “Fact.”
Nice one Hentor the Barbarian. The woman in the outtake clearly says that if you couldn’t pick up the gun at the bank then you could do so at a dealer. Now from BfT
http://www.bowlingfortruth.com/bowlingforcolumbine/scenes/bank.htm
Who’d have thunk it? Inconsistencies from that site? I never would have guessed 
I’m not having any trouble following your thought process, and I think it is quite reasonable and fair (if not strictly logical in the academic sense) to hold an “innocent until proven guilty” view of such claims. But I still do not see how I, or any other reader, could possibly have been expected to realize that these were your standards and then correctly infer your opinion of the “Bowling for Truth” site’s allegation before you had explicitly stated that you didn’t buy it.
“Innocent until proven guilty” isn’t even a universal standard for the legal system, and it’s certainly not the way all people form their personal judgements. I’d be wrong an awful lot if I attempted to predict the views of strangers based on the assumption that they operated under such a belief system. Opinions could also vary as to what constitutes sufficient proof. You’re the one who introduced the site’s allegation of intentional cartoon trickery into the discussion in the first place, and it would have saved a lot of trouble if you’d just said flat-out then that you had reasonable doubt as to its accuracy. Adding a simple parenthetical comment such as “…that’s a mistaken impression many seem to get from the film, and one that BowlingForTruth seems to think Moore wanted to convey (although I doubt he really did)” would have been enough. I’d still be puzzled as to why you wanted to mention it at all if you didn’t agree with it, but at least your personal opinion would have been clear from the beginning.
Any Time, Michael My Boy - Christopher Hitchens hands the fat idiot his ass.
Imagine that. The fat idiot laying his grubby greasy fingers on not only Brandury’s great novel but also 1984; the best book bar none. Oh the horror! The disgust!
Aw, that’s gotta hurt! 
I take it that Hitchens can prove that “recent history” has been “rewritten” in this movie?
Judging by what he wrote, Hitchens is looking for contradictions that aren’t there. His big point about “Troops shouldn’t be there in the first place” contradicting “There wasn’t enough troops sent out” isn’t necessarily a contradiction.
Troops should never have been sent out in the first place.
However, seeing as the troops were sent out, there should have been enough troops and equipment sent out to ensure their safety.
How is that a contradiction?
Hitchens is certainly weighing heavily on the Ad Hominem also.
Why don’t you? You’re the one challenging my veracity. What a thug you are for defending Moore’s refusal to notify authorities about abuses of Iraqis.