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Not asking the obvious question

Last night, when flicking through the TV channels, I watched the “documentary” film-maker, Michael Moore, talk about his own views on the Occupy Wall Street/wherever people. And he adopted that seductively reasonable tone of voice, although the general effect is spoilt by that annoying baseball cap he insists on wearing (who is he trying to fool, exactly?). The questions from the Channel Four interviewer were fairly softball stuff. At no point did the interviewer say something like: “So, given what you have said about greedy bankers and corporations, can we take it that you oppose the multi-billion bailouts of Wall Street banks, Mr Moore?”

I suspect that some of the OWS might indeed think that bailouts for banks are wrong, although if they follow their views through to a logical conclusion, it leads to laissez-faire, not the socialist nonsense of the film-maker from Flint. We need to keep making this point.

29 comments to Not asking the obvious question

  • llamas

    For the four-thousand-and-fifteenth time – Moore is not “from” Flint. He may have been born in a Flint hospital but he was raised in Davison, an entirely-agreeable bedroom community about 10 miles East of Flint. Davison is an overwhelmingly middle-class, white-bread community, known far and wide as the home of Williams Gunsight, a huge retail firearms store and shooting-sports center.

    I know Moore likes to push his gritty ‘man of the people’ populist shtick by suggesting that he’s just off a late turn at the Buick plant, but there’s not too many working-class heroes with a 10-acre home on Torch Lake and a Manhattan penthouse. According to published reports, his career on the assembly line at the Flint Buick plant was measured in days.

    Describing Moore as being “from Flint” is like describing a merchant banker from Chislehurst as being “from Brixton” because he was born in a Brixton hospital 55 years before and occasionally flies over Brixton when the plane to his weekend retreat in the Algarve happens to take off in that direction.

    llater,

    llamas

  • Johnathan Pearce

    Llamas, there is nit-picking and there is nitpicking. Moore was born in Flint, so technically, that’s where he is from. It is not as if he was raised in Bel-Air or Liechtenstein.

    I do of course agree about the hypocrisy of these people, and Moore is one of the very the worst. But he taps into popular resentments and hatreds, and that makes him dangerous.

  • llamas

    This is NOT nitpicking. We’re not arguing about genealogical trivia here. Being ‘from Flint’ – a blue-collar industrial town that’s in terminal decline – is an integral part of Moore’s manufactured persona – the ‘man of the people’, a gritty man from a gritty town who therefore somehow has added credibility to speak about the things he does.

    He aggressively pushes this manufactured persona to the masses – it’s why the rumpled donkey-jacket, lumpy sweaters and ever-present ball cap, which are ridiculous affectations for a man of his age and circumstances until you figure out that they are part of the costume for the part he plays. (He collects his awards in a tuxedo). The truth is that he’s a well-to-do boy from a well-to-do family in a well-to-do town, who has done very well by assiduously avoiding the kinds of work and the kinds of places that he tries so hard to assciate himself with. He’s the classic limousine liberal – holds himself out to be an authentic voice of the 99%, while firmly placed in the 1%. You should see his home on Torch Lake (he calls it a ‘cabin’) – it’s certainly outside the norm for the blue-collar working stiff that he likes to portray himself to be.

    llater,

    llamas

  • Laird

    Why does anyone pay the slightest attention to anything Moore has to say? He’s a serial liar and a moron to boot. If we all just ignore him maybe he’ll go away. And even if he doesn’t, your blood pressure will remain in the normal range if you simply don’t listen to his idiocies.

  • Paul Marks

    Laird – correct.

    Even most British bookshops (some of the worst bookshops this side of North Korea) no longer tend to stock much work by the liar M. Moore.

    They just do not sell any more (not even in Britain).

  • Paul Marks

    I will say one good thing about Mr Moore – at least he sent his children to private school.

    He was not going to play “I am a noble collectivist” at the expense of his own child.

  • llamas

    To be painfully nitpicky – Moore has no children of his own. His wife Kathleen has a daughter from a prior marriage. So the decision about where and how that daughter was schooled may not have been up to him.

    llater,

    llamas

  • Dom

    “who is he trying to fool, exactly?”

    He’s a class-transvestite.

  • Laird

    ‘Moore has no children of his own.”

    Well, that’s a relief! At least those worthless genes aren’t going to be perpetuated to further pollute the gene pool.

  • steve

    LOL, class-transvestite. I like that one.

    Does that make Gore a politician that cross dresses as a scientist?

  • Sorry guys, but who are we trying to convince here?

    Every one of us knows the Michael Moore is a died in the blood Marxist (regardless of what he claims to be) for all of his protestations, I don’t see him giving over the vast majority of his serious wealth to the left-wing causes that he allegedly supports – sure a bit of pin money here and there, but he wears the fat block in a baseball cap a bit too hypocritically for a multi-millionaire.

    I’d have a lot more time for this fat fuck if he actually turned around and said “although I bitch about the US incessantly, I’ve done rather well out of it”.

    Sorry, but the guy is an irredeemable cunt.

    End of.

  • Mike James

    LOL, class-transvestite. I like that one.

    Well, I don’t.

    Trans-classism is wrong, and has been for years, Dom. 😉

  • Mike James

    Quotes around “LOL, class-transvestite. I like that one”, of course. I am stupid.

  • Laird

    Smite-bitten. On an obloquy of Michael Moore! How is this even possible?

    O perverse man! If all disgusted be,
    The extreme scab take thee and thine, for me.

  • Someone actually married him? Why?

  • Rob

    Bravado? Cash? Hostages?

  • Come on, he can’t be that rich.

  • Alsadius

    Actually, someone did a poll of the OWS crowd in New York. 49% thought the bailouts were a good idea. I have absolutely no idea how they square that with the protests they’re doing(seriously, it boggles my mind), but them’s the stats.

  • Eddie Willers

    Schtick indeed – this is the man who tried to sell himself as a working joe by his friendship with Ben Hamper (who really knoweth of that which he speaks!)

  • RRS

    Back to JP’s point about the occupation forces and their “outlooks:”

    Here is an old saying I made up a few years back in the midst of some serious “take-over” negotiations:

    You can’t outwit the witless

  • Paul,
    The reason for that is the movie “Sicko” in which MM praised the NHS to the skies. It bombed in the UK. Onme wonders why? Well not if you’re British you don’t! I recall Jon Simpson eviscerating the cap-wearing loon on C4 news over it. MM hadn’t even been lying – he simply didn’t know what he was on about. Now that’s the point. And also the fact (it is worth noting) that JS is not exactly a right-wing ideologue. I mean when a fellow lefty foes that then the game is up. And JS had the stats – cancer five-year survival rates the full nine yards. MM was forced into the utter absurdity of having to defend his indefensible position by claiming US healthcare was “too technological”. It was beautiful to watch.

  • Sunfish

    Laird-

    What genes? I’m pretty sure that douchebaggery comes from nurture, not nature.

  • …excessive nurture, I might add.

  • Laird

    Maybe, Sunfish, but one can never be too careful!

  • Paul Marks

    Yes Nick.

    And Mr Moore even praised Cuban healthcare (in the same film) – this baffled even the propagandists of the Castro regime (who had partly given defending the vile structure – basically they just go through the motions these days). Moore came out with the sort of absurd propaganda that the Castro regime propagandists used to come out with.

    By the way “Sicko” was prased on the Fox News internet site – infiltration of the staff.

    A serious problem with News International (which seems to have no system for checking the ideological loyalties of potential staff) hence the “exposure” of the Wall Street Journal (Europe) for engaging in circulation tactics that every major publication engages in.

    Time magazine (and so on) is not expossed for its (obviously rigged) circulation numbers – because its staff are loyal to it (or rather have no ideological reason not to be).

    But some staff members of News International (both at the WSJ and Fox News) do have ideological reasons to be disloyal – they are “good students” i.e. leftist “mainstream media” types (eager to get in the good graces of other msm people – by “exposing” stuff at News International).

  • bobby b

    “The reason for that is the movie “Sicko” in which MM praised the NHS to the skies. It bombed in the UK.”
    – – – – –

    Confusing.

    I had watched a lecture/discussion with Mr. Daniel Hannan here in the U.S.A. in which he warned us, in forthright terms, to avoid nationalized health care at all costs.

    When he returned home, he was (I thought) excoriated widely for criticizing the NHS.

    That would imply that the majority of the people have a positive feeling for it. But if that were true, I would think Moore’s “Sicko” would have done better.

  • Laird

    FWIW, I’ve despised and distrusted MM every since I was forced (for some reason I can’t now remember) to watch his first documentary, “Roger and Me”, in business school. He came across as smarmy and dishonest, and he’s only gotten worse since then.

  • Paul Marks

    An honest version of “Roger and Me” would have been as followers…..

    The United Auto Workers union, backed by Federal government regulations and influence, has destroyed the town of Flint – and will end up destroying General Motors.

    But Roger (the then head of General Motors) is too weak (and to fearful of government, media and U.A.W. revenge) to even tell the truth about this, let alone fight back.

    But, of course, Mr Moore’s show was rather different.

    Of course now it is known that Mr Moore welcomed the destruction of the auto industry in Flint (because he thinks cars are evil) but, somehow, he forget to mention this in “Roger and Me”.