Well, maybe I exaggerated a little… If you want to go with pissed off, that’s OK with me. He seemed more interested in yelling at CNN and making outrageous claims about them then about discussing the subject at hand. He had to drag the whole Iraq War discussion into an interview that was supposed to be about healthcare.
But the fact of the matter is that FEMA has fucked up. And the military has fucked up big time, too. They can smash another army pretty well, but only because we spend massive amounts of money on it.
Yes, the government is largely run by career bureaucrats, but the heads of those departments change with every administration and those guys set policy, not the lower level career folks.
No matter how you look at it, once you cede control of something to the government, you lose control of it yourself. I can shop around for different insurance coverage, but I can’t shop around for different governments.
Having watched both clips, we apparently agree on the stupidity of the ‘mockery charge’ – I didn’t hear it anywhere either.
However, I complete disagree (what a surprise, right, John?) with your above quote.
What he actually did, was rightly call Wolf, and the MSM exactly what they are: an extension of the current quasi-democracy that rules your nation.
Furthermore, and as promised by MM, here’s a quote from the alternet site (second video):
Go ahead! Click on it and see if you can refute what he posted.
Oh, and BTW, I’ve seen “Sicko.” Great documentary – too bad it won’t do any good for those who refuse to see what is in front of their eyes. Quite a few in this thread actually.
And lastly, we have Social Democracies all over the EU and we seem to be doing quite well – despite the traditional American phobia whenever the word “socialism” appears.
PS-I’ve said this before, but even as a current non-resident, I have my Spanish universal healthcare card. As someone upthread rightly said, a much better alternative than than the one proposed by the always moderate conservative, Mr Martin Hyde. Oh, and we’re ranked 7th in the world too.
And “obnoxious” =! “irrelevant.” The MSM as a whole deserves and needs that kind of reaming, and Moore would be remiss in his duties to neglect to dish it out at any available opportunity.
That’s an interesting opinion. One that I don’t share. I don’t think it really can proven one way or the other, though. Media bias is as much in the eye of the beholder as it an absolute truth.
Eh. They’re mainly playing the game of dueling statistics and quibbling over round off errors. For example, to back up his numbers about how much Americans “spend” on healthcare, Moore uses projections, not actual data. I don’t know for sure, but my guess is that Gupta was looking at past numbers as that would easily explain the slight difference in figures they come up with
**Kimstu **called it right: Tempest in a teapot on this supposed media scandal. Still, rather than calmly discuss the issue in a rational tone, Moore flew off the handle and played the media victim. Boo hoo hoo for him! :rolleyes:
Just wondering, John, is that fence that you spend so much time sitting on made by LZ-Boy? 'cause with all the time you spend astride it, it must be mighty comfy. Bet it has drink holders and a bin for all your remotes.
Seriously now, if even the flag-ship of your “liberal” newspapers in the MSM had to publish a retraction on the way they handled the build-up to the invasion, how could you possibly deny that your MSM in general didn’t just lie down at the feet of your Boy King?
The Times and Iraq – registration possibly required. Though I’m fairly sure we all remember this.
– my highlights. More at source.
Lame as it was, it rather proves MM’s point. In my opinion of course – which I am keenly aware rarely matches yours.
:::sigh:::
Sure is taking me a long time to make a Social Democrat out of you…but time’s on my side.
But they don’t. That’s too broad a term to use. Maybe they have better health insurance coverage or some such, but it just looks silly if you’re saying that other countries have better hospitals than the US or better medical technology. Those are a part of the “health care system”, and I think that an ingenuous argument would make the proper differentiation.
You just knocked down one strawman only to introduce another of your own. Socialism is objectively bad, just as Hayek proved. It is incapable of establishing rational market prices. But corporatism is not the same as capitalism. In fact, in a capitalist system, there’d be no rights-bearing entities other than human beings.
And of course what you forget is that this was a war supported by a large number of liberals. To simply look at how the MSM treated the Iraq war and somehow think that it proves the MSN is “conservative” is pretty wrongheaded. There are plenty of conservatives who opposed the Iraq war and plenty of liberals who supported it. You can’t really use it as a yardstick for political ideology.
Now that’s just absurd. He puts a little stress on the first syllable of the last name, that’s all. It takes quite a bit more than that to determine an accent.
But, again, for the sake of the argument, (and this is a Big Hypothetical,) how is using a mock Indian accent racist? Is it really your contention that Michael Moore was suggesting that people from India are inferior in some way, simply because they are from India? Is “Indian” even a race?
I think to say the war was supported by the liberals is an incomplete concept. To vote against a war that is a huge success would be political suicide. If the war worked out they would been slaughtered. U.S. Grant said that once the guns are armed and fired that history will not remember those that voted against it fondly. I wish they had the guts to stand up. They did not. But to say they backed it is going too far. It was a political calculation that still haunts them.
The EU is basically a free-market zone, Lib, but on the main we are Social Democrats. IOW, many/most of our public institutions are Government-run and it matters not wheter a right or left wing Party takes over – that’s not going to change, e.g., socialized medicine.
As for “having better hospitals” and the like? Have you ever been to any of the top five nations in the EU? Have you, for instance heard of El Instituto Barraquer? It’s not like we’re practicing 19th Century medicine in Europe you know? And with such a globalized world, any medical advances in either continent don’t take long to reach the “other side.”
Didn’t say they were “conservative,” as much as I implied that they were lackeys. And no, I am not sparing Democrats/liberals in the least. Anyone that supported the invasion has a share of the blame IMO. As I’ve often said, the counter-facts were readily available for anyone who wanted to find them.
I guess you could say “Asian” instead of Indian, to be strictly accurate (but less clear).
Using a mock accent isn’t racist. Using a mock accent as you’re disparaging someone is. How is that not obvious? If I start mocking a hispanic guy by calling his name in a Speedy Gonzales voice, that’s pretty damn racist, don’t you think?
Saying that it’s impossible to prove something is not the same as sitting on the fence. The “mainstream media” is an enormous entity, and pointing to one instance where one newspaper felt they didn’t do their investigative duty is an anecdote, Red, and nothing more. In the same way, the apology issued by CBS after the 60 Minutes fiasco with the forged documents about Bush doesn’t prove there is some anti-Republican bias in the “mainstream media”.
It makes a good soundbite to rail against the mainstream media and claim that it’s just an extension of the government, but that claim is absurd on the face of it. It’s not that I’m sitting on the fence on this issue, it’s that there isn’t a fence in the first place. I’ll take a stance on pretty much any issue any day of the week. What I won’t do is play mental masturbation with conspiracy theories or rest my case on wild assertions that cannot be proved.
If you actually read the links in the OP, you can see that Gupta is mainly agreeing with the overall conclusion that Moore is trying to make even if he thinks Moore exaggerates the facts backing it up. Moore didn’t set out trying to present a balanced view of the situation, and nobody expected him to. But he’s a good salesman, and this manufactured outrage of his makes a good advertisement for his movie.
Both he and Gupta are going to be on Larry King tonight. I’d watch, but King puts me to sleep…
Actually, the brainwashing drama was tossed out about capitalism, not health care. Unless Dio is using “brainwash” as a synonym for “reading”, he’s mistaken at least about me. And I didn’t mean to imply that every hospital in the US is better than every hospital everywhere else, but only that the notion that US hospitals are in some way inferior to those of other countries is summarily ridiculous. And I don’t think anyone without an already ironclad agendy would buy into it.
OK, I listened to the whole thing and he does seem to be affecting a mock Indian accent when he says GOOP-ta just as the recording is ending. He’s laughing as he does that, so I don’t know what he’s trying to communicate. But it was a live interview, so I might cut the guy some slack for that. Not in good taste, though, and I wonder if SG will call him on it tonight. It’s pretty subtle, and easy to miss.
What I meant was that Americans are heavily enculturated to believe that the “free market” is always superior to any state (or “socialist”) controls, not only in practical terms but moral ones as well.
If you want to go with pissed off, that’s OK with me. He seemed more interested in yelling at CNN and making outrageous claims about them then about discussing the subject at hand. He had to drag the whole Iraq War discussion into an interview that was supposed to be about healthcare.
