minor bushco note

Towards the end of Fahrenheit 9/11 (which I finally got around to watching) there's a clip of Condi saying "there is a connection between Iraq and what happened on September 11th", which is exactly what a lot of people have been saying was never (explicitly) said. Of course, given that this is a Michael Moore production, it's probably an edited clip of Condi saying "we never said that there is a connection..." or some such. Other notes on my impression of the movie will show up in waider_geeks, as usual.

on the other hand...

Something of Moore's that I really dislike: building an argument on researchable facts that he explictly hasn't researched. An example from the book Stupid White Men is where he's talking about who invented various methods of killing people; it goes something like "who invented rifle? a white man (name probably given). Who invented the automatic pistol? a white man. Who invented the machine gun? I don't know, but it was probably a white man" Right there, he's lost me. You don't build a logical argument by saying, "I don't know, but probably"; you build it by looking up the fact you don't know, and using the knowledge thus gained, or you don't mention it at all. I was reminded of this during the bit in Farhenheit 9/11 where he's filming outside the Saudi embassy, and he asks the guy with him how much the Saudis have invested in the US. The guy responds, "I heard [some number of billions, or trillions, or whatever]". And on this hearsay Moore builds an anti-Saudi rant (well, more a didactic nag than a rant, but you get the idea). If Moore had even taken the time to coach the guy to not say, "I heard", that whole segment might have carried a bit of weight for me. I'd probably still want to know where the figure came from, but I wouldn't have been sitting there thinking, "you're building this entire argument on what some random guy just said he heard".