Newsgroup: it.cultura.libri
Titolo: stupid white man

qualcuno lo ha letto ?

 
Se non fosse che Moore mente in continuazione, non sarebbe un brutto libro. 
La buona satira comunque sta altrove, per esempio su 
www.theonion.com
, e 
proprio perché non ha pretese giornalistiche o documentaristiche. The Onion 
spaccia verità, non fatti. Moore vorrebbe spacciare fatti, ma poi li 
trucca, e alla fin fine non fa un gran bene nemmeno alle sue tesi.
Per una lettura critica del libro, prova su 
salon.com
 (l'articolo mi sembra 
si chiamasse "one more stupid white man"). Ancora più stringente la critica 
a Bowling for Columbine, ma quella purtroppo l'ho sentita per radio: se sei 
interessato puoi andare su 
www.mediawatch.co.nz
 e farti dare gli estremi 
del documentario sul documentario di Moore, andato in onda domenica scorsa.  
(Sia Salon che soprattutto Mediawatch pendono decisamente verso sinistra, 
va aggiunto). 
-- 
Giovanni

si chiamasse "one more stupid white man"). 
L'articolo s'intitola "One Moore Stupid White Man" (giusto per rendere
piů facile la ricerca), ma si puň leggere tutto solo abbonandosi. Per
la precisione.
Ciao,
 
-- 
Isa
Work like you don't need money,
Love like you've never been hurt,
And dance like no one's watching
http://web.tiscali.it/alfabeto_auschwitz/index.htm

 la precisione.
Ah, bene, grazie: col titolo giusto l'ho trovato anche per chi non fosse 
abbonato: 
http://www.spinsanity.org/columns/20020403.html
-- 
Giovanni

 abbonato: 
http://www.spinsanity.org/columns/20020403.html
Grazie del link.
Riguardo al film (Booling for Columbine - non ricordo di preciso il titolo),
io ho l'imressione che Moore avrebbe potuto, senza perdere in efficacia,
concentrarsi sul solo tema fondamentale (perché distribuire armi che ci si
augura non vengano usate?) senza pretendere di fare un documentario
inappuntabile con cifre e riferimenti.
M
--------------------------------
Inviato via 
http://usenet.libero.it

 abbonato: 
http://www.spinsanity.org/columns/20020403.html
Perche' non postarlo tutto qui? Pensiamo anche alle future generazioni
che su Google troveranno solo un link sicuramente ormai non piu' valido.
-- 
UFV:Red Riding Hood/Il pranzo della domenica/Colpevole di omicidio
Eccomi qua/L'anima gemella/X-Men(DVD)/UHF(DVD)Cose di questo mondo

One Moore stupid white man
With his factually challenged bestseller, Michael Moore becomes an 
unfortunate poster boy for dissent.
By Ben Fritz (
b...@spinsanity.org
)
April 3, 2002
[First published on Salon.com (Salon Premium subscription required)]
Michael Moore's latest success might be his most remarkable. At a time 
when the public remains strongly supportive of the Bush administration 
-- and few dissenting voices have risen above the din -- his book 
"Stupid White Men" stands atop the New York Times bestseller list for a 
third week running.
And at a time when some Republican leaders are using Bush's popularity 
to equate any criticism of U.S. policy with treason, Moore's success 
should be a reason for any democracy-loving American to cheer.
It should be, but it isn't.
"Stupid White Men" is full of the biting satire Moore has honed on a 
large scale ever since the release of his 1989 documentary of General 
Motors' mistreatment of its workers in Flint, Mich., "Roger and Me," 
became a hit. He followed that up with a mid-'90s TV series, "TV 
Nation," the bestselling book "Downsize This!" and the 1998 documentary 
"The Big One," all of which employ his trademark defense of the little 
guy against the unchecked callousness of corporate America. [Disclosure: 
My co-editor Brendan Nyhan and I helped bring Moore to speak at 
Swarthmore College while we were students there. Moore was paid an 
honorarium by the college for his speech.]
With the success of "Roger and Me" also came a critical rap: That he 
took liberties with the truth, fiddling with the chronology, for greater 
dramatic effect. But that criticism doesn't seem to have made an 
impression on Moore, and that's nowhere more apparent than in "Stupid 
White Men." In it, readers are told that 10 million people left the 
welfare rolls during the '90s, brutally kicked off by Bill Clinton. He 
writes that five-sixths of the defense budget in 2001 went toward 
building a single type of plane and that the recent recession is nothing 
more than a fabrication by the wealthy to keep down the working classes. 
And readers who uncritically accept those "facts" -- along with a number 
of other egregious and sloppy distortions -- will be duped. Good satire 
also should be grounded in fact. Regrettably, Moore gets his facts wrong 
again and again and again, and a simple check of the sources he cites 
shows that lazy research is often to blame.
Consider, for instance, his claim that "two-thirds of [the over $190 
million President Bush raised during the presidential campaign] came 
from just over seven hundred individuals." Given the $2,000 federal 
limit on individual donations, this claim is obviously false. To back it 
up, he cites the Center for Responsive Politics Web site 
(
opensecrets.org
) and an August 2000 article from the New York Times. As 
opensecrets.org
 clearly indicates, however, only 52.6 percent of Bush's 
total $193 million in campaign funds came from individuals. The Times 
article Moore references actually states that 739 people gave two-thirds 
of the soft money raised by the Republican Party (which uses its money 
for "party-building" activities that support all GOP candidates, not 
just Bush) in the 2000 election cycle as of June of that year. Whether 
out of malice or laziness, Moore conflates the party's soft money with 
Bush's campaign funds.
This pattern -- the very sources Moore cites proving him wrong -- 
continues throughout the book.
In a discussion of Pentagon spending, he refers to the "$250 billion the 
Pentagon plans to spend in 2001 to build 2800 new Joint Strike Fighter 
planes" and states that "the proposed increase in monies for the 
Pentagon over the next four years is $1.6 trillion." To back this up, he 
refers to the Web site of the peace activist group Council for a Livable 
World. CLW's own analysis of the 2001 budget, however, shows that $250 
billion is the total multiyear cost of the Joint Strike Fighter program, 
not the amount spent in one year. $1.6 trillion, meanwhile, was the 
total amount of money requested by the Pentagon at the time for 
2001-2005. It covers five years, not four, and is a total budget 
request, not a "proposed increase" over previously requested budget 
levels. It shouldn't even take this much research, however, to determine 
that out of the total defense budget request of $305.4 billion in 2001, 
$250 billion was never intended to go toward one type of plane, nor that 
an increase of $400 billion per year in military spending was never 
proposed.
Most baffling of Moore's misstatements may come in a listing of 
categories that the U.S. tops, such as per capita energy use and births 
to teenagers. In a blatant misrepresentation, he states: "We're number 
one in budget deficit (as a percentage of GDP)." When Moore wrote his 
book last year, the United States was running a budget surplus, as it 
had for the previous three years.
Just how did Moore get so many of his facts wrong? Lazy cribbing from 
media outlets and the Internet seems the most likely culprit, as 
evidenced by a four-page list of allegedly dubious policy 
accomplishments by President Bush, including cutting funds from 
libraries and appointing former business executives to regulatory posts. 
All but one of the 48 accusations appear in the same order and with very 
similar phrasing to a list that has been printed this winter (but before 
Moore's book came out) on liberal Web sites and, according to Dr. David 
A. Sprintzen (often wrongly cited, though not by Moore, as its author), 
was circulating via e-mail last summer. Belying a lack of original 
research, Moore even apes many of the negative characterizations of 
individuals, calling judicial appointee Terrence Boyle a "civil rights 
opponent," for example (the list refers to him as a "foe of civil 
rights"), with absolutely no context for why exactly Boyle deserves that 
moniker (one certainly has to wonder whether Moore himself knows).
Curiously, Moore cites no source for this list. He only notes that 
readers "can keep track of what Bush did and does during his 
administration" by reading Molly Ivins' syndicated column and the Web 
sites 
smirkingchimp.com
 and 
bushwatch.com
. The latter two did print the 
list, but not until this winter, well after Moore wrote his book, though 
before it was published.
Just as worrisome as Moore's frequent mistakes is the distorted manner 
in which he presents some of his claims that have a factual basis. 
Consider, for example, this critique of Bill Clinton.
"[H]e has been able to kick ten million people off welfare," he writes 
in a list of attacks on the former president. While the welfare rolls 
did drop substantially while Clinton was in office (although the total 
number as of June 2000 was 8.3 million), many people left voluntarily to 
take jobs as the economy grew or for other reasons. Far fewer were 
booted from the rolls by the five-year limits Clinton signed into law in 
1996 or by stricter state limits.
Grossly misrepresenting the facts to make Bill Clinton look bad is a 
pattern in his chapter "Democrats, DOA." Moore also derides Clinton's 
record on feminism, stating "Clinton learned that by talking a good 
feminist line, he could arrange it so that not one feminist leader would 
decry the order he signed in 1999 to deny federal funds to any foreign 
group that discussed abortion during consultations."
Moore is correct about the law here (although Gloria Feldt of the 
Planned Parenthood Federation of America did criticize the move). In 
framing Clinton as having a crafty antiabortion agenda, however, he 
blatantly ignores that Clinton eliminated the so-called "Mexico City 
Policy" banning U.S. funding of overseas clinics that perform or promote 
abortion in 1993 and only reluctantly signed it back into law in 1999 as 
part of a deal to pay nearly $1 billion in arrears to the United 
Nations. The funding was then restored in the next year's budget, albeit 
with concessions to delay its implementation, which Moore also fails to 
note.
To truly understand how absurdly Moore twists the truth to advance his 
agenda, consider his description of the economic downturn. After 
accurately describing the hard times that have hit the country in the 
past year, he offers this analysis to his readers:
"There is no recession, my friends. No downturn. No hard times. The rich 
are wallowing in the loot they've accumulated in the past two decades, 
and now they want to make sure you don't come a-lookin' for your piece 
of the pie."
Forget about overinvestment during the tech boom, a sharp drop in 
business spending or even the simple facts of the business cycle. 
Michael Moore has the real answer: "[The rich have] decided to perform a 
preemptive strike in the hope that you'll never even think of eyeing 
their piles of cash." Not content to simply berate the wealthy for their 
disproportionate advances in income and wealth during the '90s boom, 
Moore takes his aggressive jargon to extremes by concocting a conspiracy 
in which the elite simply created a downturn that he claims doesn't 
really exist. This isn't satire, it's paranoid propaganda.
For the bestselling nonfiction book in the country, "Stupid White Men" 
has received remarkably little scrutiny and few serious reviews. Moore 
is much beloved in Britain, and a review on a BBC show called his book 
"fantastic" with "loads of research." Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to 
have read much of it -- though the thousands of people who have bought 
his book surely don't know that.

 che su Google troveranno solo un link sicuramente ormai non piu' valido.
Perché di norma non posto nelle news articoli troppo lunghi, quando si 
possono trovare in rete. Scomparisse il link, penso che col titolo 
l'articolo si potrebbe sempre trovare. 
Ma sono scuole di pensiero, indubbiamente. Ad esempio il sommo Mamo e i 
suoi discepoli amano copincollare in continuazione la filippica contro gli 
OT (la cui lunghezza riporta alla mente una frase di Karl Kraus: "Ci sono 
scrittori che riescono a esprimere già in venti pagine cose per cui 
talvolta mi ci vogliono addirittura due righe"). Chissà quante volte ce la 
siamo scaricata, un po' tutti.
-- 
Giovanni

 unfortunate poster boy for dissent.
Grazie, molto interessante davvero. La mia copia del libro dovrebbe
arrivarmi prossimamente (mi han tirato dentro un "Bookcrossing Ring") e
mi terro' questo post accanto nel corso della lettura.
Non sono troppo sorpreso. Vedendo il (bel) film "Bowling a Columbine"
avevo notato un dettaglio strano - stupidissimo ma che quantomeno
gettava qualche dubbio su come fosse stato girato il documentario (trovi
tutto, volendo, su Googlegroups, in un thread di qualche mese fa).
Leggero' il libro comunque, magari tenendo gli occhi un po' piu' aperti.


 gettava qualche dubbio su come fosse stato girato il documentario
Molte recensioni americane di Bowling a Columbine hanno criticato la
tendenza di Michael Moore a manipolare i fatti. In Roger & Me pare che Moore
si fosse preso molte libertà soprattutto relativamente alla ricostruzione
cronologica degli eventi.
Stefano

 siamo scaricata, un po' tutti.
Eh, beh, certo il problema opposto esiste. credo che in ogni newsgroup
sia stato postato almeno una volta il delirio fallaciano sulle twin
towers poi uscito in volume. Pensa a quanti byte sprecati. Ma meglio
troppo che troppo poco, per la scuola di pensiero mia. :-)


 cronologica degli eventi.
Business is business.
-- 
Godibilissimi giorni, Fanny.