The Shrine

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '><b>Link:</b> <a href="http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723/">*ducks*</a>

I couldn't read it all, but it's very well done. Why Fahrenheit 9/11 is a piece of garbage. (Oh, and I got this from Tort's profile :P)</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Arial; text-align: left; '>I already linked that article below, but thanks anyway, I guess.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>did you? sorry, damn thread's too dense</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Here is an example from his first point of how he uses two independent opinions and very illogically forces them together into one.

1) If Moore said that Osama is innocent until proven guilty then that is his opinion. Guilty until proven innocent is the French way.

2) If Bush and the government send troops into Afghanistan to capture Osama and fail to do so, it doesn't matter, he is still wasting troops, whether Moore believes Osama is guilty or not is completely independent of this issue.

He also has his article filled with insults towards rational thinkers, and calls the film boring; all irrelivant opinions that just take away his credibility on the subject since he is obviously attempting to target a more ignorant right winged audience. Even though his opinions are all very logically flawed and for the most part incorrect, very pro-Bush readers won't question it, Bush's supporters are generally not rational thinkers.

Very likely this guy is someone who tried his hand in politically documentaries before and utterly failed. So the fact that Michael Moore is successful pisses him off. There was some other guy (possibly the same one), who failed at making documentaries, made similar comments about Michael Moores past films and got shot down on every point he made; and when I say shot down, I mean blasted by a Howitzer.

In conclusion, this article is just a very weak argument with weak points that are essentially pure bullshit anyways. Only blind, non-rational thinking, pro-Bush supporters will buy into this and that is the audience he is targeting; in other words, it's an article writen by an idiot for the idiots.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>so you don't think any part of that film was twisted? And don't call it a documentary, even if you agree with the film you Have to admit it's not a documentary</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Arial; text-align: left; '>>> He also has his article filled with insults towards rational thinkers, and calls the film boring; all irrelivant opinions that just take away his credibility on the subject since he is obviously attempting to target a more ignorant right winged audience. Even though his opinions are all very logically flawed and for the most part incorrect, very pro-Bush readers won't question it, Bush's supporters are generally not rational thinkers.<<

Marvelous. You've just called Hitchens an irrational thinker and Bush supporter without providing a shred of evidence for either claim.

>> Very likely this guy is someone who tried his hand in politically documentaries before and utterly failed. So the fact that Michael Moore is successful pisses him off.<<

An astute psychological observation there, no doubt the result of years of training and expertise. I sometimes wonder why you're wasting your time talking to us on a message board when you could be enlightening the medical community with your trenchant and pithy observations on the human condition.

Perhaps a comparison of sorts is in order. Christopher Hitchens has written several books, gives lectures worldwide, and appears regularly as a commentator on several television shows. So far as I know, the extent of your contribution to the field of knowledge is limited to what you write on this message board. Unless, of course, you've been secretly publishing influential articles in academic journals under a different moniker. Have you?

I'm genuinely curious. Other than posting rambling conspiracy theories and insulting authors far more well-known than yourself, what exactly is it that you do, Seeker? Do you have a thesis, a dissertation, anything at all to convince us that you're something more than a bored Canadian with way too much time on his hands? Enlighten us.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Looks like I hit a nerve =) Face it, the article is filled with logical fallacies and is more or less just a very pathetic attack at someone who is extremely successful in the field which he failed in. In other words, he's jealous, end of story.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>right...it has nothing to do with the fact that Moore is a spindoctor? Even most liberals are admitting that half the film is using twisted facts</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "Comic Sans MS"; text-align: left; '>You mean *was.* I believe if you do a search in the Nation for old Hitchens' articles, you will find his second-to-last article, which more or less details his eventual disdain for liberal thought and his embracing of conservatism.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "Comic Sans MS"; text-align: left; '><b>Link:</b> <a href="http://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/featu ... ">hitchens pwned</a>

You mean *was.*  I believe if you do a search in the Nation for old Hitchens' articles, you will find his second-to-last article, which more or less details his eventual disdain for liberal thought and his embracing of conservatism.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "Comic Sans MS"; text-align: left; '>Yes, yes, playing loose with facts, twisting the facts, making forceful assertions with no basis...much like Bush's drive to war with Iraq, ne? I wonder how right-wingers feel when the shoe's on the other foot.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt Arial; text-align: left; '>Now I liked the movie and I agree with Moore, but there's no reason to get all pissed about somebody giving their point of view. Seriously, you sound worse than almost all of the anti-Moore people in your post.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Aye. Even in the short interview with Moore on the Daily Show, I have the feeling he's twisting the facts on purpose, because he acknowledges that the public as a whole is petty and stupid, and requires manipulation to steer in the other direction.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Aye. Even in the short interview with Moore on the Daily Show, I have the feeling he's twisting the facts on purpose, because he acknowledges that the public as a whole is petty and stupid, and requires manipulation to steer in the other direction. (BTW, I agree with him in this assessment.)</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '><b>Link:</b> <a href="http://66.150.197.51/cgi-bin/rpgboard/v ... F4.html</a>

My reply from below...</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>If it's the left, it's spindoctoring, if it's the right, it's "giving all the facts"</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>I never fell for Bush's bullshit and I'm not falling for Moore's. Where o where does that place me? :P</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '><a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20 ... ">Hitchens leaving The Nation</a>
<a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20 ... itt">Katha Pollitt commenting on his goodbye speech</a>
<a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20 ... ">Hitchens' response to Pollitt's riposte</a>

And quite possibly the best shred of evidence that Hitchens is a Bush supporter (and thus, a irrational thinker):

<a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/Pr ... D=4042">So Long, Fellow Travelers</a>

Man, talk about big fucking straw men in that article. Straw men with big balls of....ummm...straw, but still easy to knock down.

Hell, even just reading the movie article, you can tell that he's a big right-winger. Who else would call his article "Unfairenheit 9/11: The lies of Michael Moore"?</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>*sigh* We're not getting into this bullshit again. If it's not a documentary, then what would you call it?</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Very good counterpoint. I was wondering when somebody would do it.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt "Cooper Black"; text-align: left; '>Please, if complete ignorance on a subject is considered hitting a nerve... Seeker, you got told off by someone who knows what he is talking about and put in your place, take your medicine like a man.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt "Cooper Black"; text-align: left; '>Sine, just because Hitchen is left it doesnt mean he is forced to agree with all the luny lefts out there. In those articles, he is agreeing with the Bush administration on some points, but not giving up his left ideals completely. Let the man have an opinion without saying he is switching sides.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>I didn't know anyone actually believed his reasoning. I didn't care what excuse he gave, just as long as it was done</div>

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>it's somewhere between a mockumentary and propaganda... (I'm not calling it either one, I'm saying it's between them)</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>But he doesn't know what he's talking about, otherwise he would not have made such glaring logical fallacies in his article.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>It doesn't matter what you believe, there is a hell of a lot of truth to Moore's film and a lot of very strong evidence backing it. Also none of the information is new, it is essentially what most people in the world who know about the subject already knew.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>He's the President of your country, he's not supposed to lie to the people he is supposed to be representing; that's called corruption and is essentially anti-democracy.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt "Cooper Black"; text-align: left; '>i was talking about stephen, he knew all sorts of stuff about the guy that was very pertinent and directly contrasted much of what you had to say.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>There's not a word of anger in my post, I was just pointing out some of the very obvious flaws of that guys article and giving reason why he wrote it; all based on what is in the article.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Arial; text-align: left; '>What does this little exercise in intellectual cherry-picking of yours actually prove, if anything? You claim that Christopher Hitchens is a wholesale Bush supporter (since there's obviously no room in Sineswiper's conception of the political universe for partiality and nuance; in your black-white, either-or rendering, one's position on a single issue like the Iraq War must denote either complete acceptance or complete rejection of an entire political philosophy) and therefore irrational. Do the articles you cite buttress this assertion?

No. No, no, and no again. Nothing in any of these articles proves that Hitchens has completely abandoned every tenet of leftist thought for its rightward counterpart. What these writings do show is that Hitchens is dissatisfied with many of the intellectual positions he thinks comprises the current political Left. Read the articles closely, and you will find an unrepentant leftist of an older stripe who finds himself out of favor among those who now call themselves leftists. There is nothing at all to suggest that Hitchens now counts himself among the card-carrying American Right. One need read only this sentence from the last article you provided:

"As someone who has done a good deal of marching and public speaking about Vietnam, Chile, South Africa, Palestine and East Timor in his time (and would do it all again), I can only hint at how much I despise a Left that thinks of Osama bin Laden as a slightly misguided anti-imperialist."

Note the parenthetical: <I>[A]nd would do it all again.</I> That's about as unapologetic as one can get. Clearly, Hitchens is not renouncing his past exploits as a member of the American Left. Clearly, he has not thrown in the towel and picked up a placard for George W. Bush. Clearly, had you fully read the articles you cited, you would not have arrived at the untenable conclusion that Hitchens had become a total right-winger.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember about Hitchens is that he is a strident atheist and secularist whose dislike of religion borders on outright hatred. This includes Islam, which, in case you haven't noticed, presents a far greater threat to secularism than today's lilly-livered strain of Western Christianity. He also despises totalitarianism. Hence, why it is not irrational of him to support the basic idea of Bush's plan to "remake" the Middle East in a more democratic image. It is not at all surprising to me that he supported invading Iraq.

Finally, even speaking as someone who opposes George Bush, intellectual honesty demands that I slap down your silly "logical" claim that anyone and everyone who supports the man must by necessity be "irrational." It's obvious you have no idea what the term "rational" really means, else you would realize that it is not a correlative of "good" or (most likely) "what I, Sineswiper, agree with." Rational thinking simply implies the use of reason (and even this is a vague definition since, ironically, reasonable people can actually disagree on the meaning of "reason," or what reasonable thinking actually entails; trying reading a little philosophy sometime, and you'll understand). A tyrannical dictator can be "rational" and act "rationally." It goes without saying that even supporters of Bush can be "rational," too.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Arial; text-align: left; '>Then pretend I'm a man from Mars, and enlighten me about these "logical fallacies."</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Simple, X does not equal Y, therefore the statement that X = Y in his statement is incorrect. It's already in my first post.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Bwah! "not supposed to lie to the people"? Ha! Like George Carlin said, if honesty were suddenly injected into our politics, the whole system would fall apart. Ideally it wouldn't be this way, but quite frankly, US politics are in fact corrupt.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>No, the guy really did switch sides. He may be left on occasion ("Stupidity of Ronald Reagan"), but in this article about the movie, it's dripping with right-winged bias.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>No, I don't believe in a black-white political mentality, but if somebody actually supports the war BEFORE and AFTER the war occurs, that just steers his political spectrum about 100 points to the right. No sane person can say, at least now, that the war was justified. Even if people believed that there was a connection to Bin Laden, or that Saddam was hiding WMD, those reasons are COMPLETELY destroyed now. The only one reason people are clinging on to is the taking-out-a-dictatorship angle, and if we're doing that, then we have a lot of fucking work to do. (Not to mention we should be repairing our OWN dictatorships, like Columbia.) Thus, irrational and illogical.

And to your "[A]nd would do it all again" comment, actions speak louder than words. If he's said he would do it again, he should put his fucking money where his mouth is. I'm not going to believe that he's going to do "a good deal of marching and public speaking about Vietnam, Chile, South Africa, Palestine and East Timor", fucking ignore Iraq (at least in the direction of how wrong the war was), and then go back to his podum, ranting about the evils of government-sponsored terrorism.

Anyway, in the scope of this article, I really don't give a flying fuck what political leanings his OTHER opinions are about. The topic of the movie, and thus the article, is the war. His opinion of the war is extremely right-winged. Therefore, his heavy bias for that shows through in the article. Besides, that Bitchslap article tears it apart, anyway.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Again, politics on the other side of the fence. How does it feel, knowing that a sheep herder is leading the flock of stupid sheep the other direction?</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Wow...Stephen is actually taking lessons from Chomsky. How ironic.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>You're defining "logical fallacies", not pointing them out, like he said.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Oh, how cute. Who gave you those catch phrases? O'Reilly or Limbaugh?</div>

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>catch phrases? I don't listen to either one of those idiots</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Arial; text-align: left; '><I>No, I don't believe in a black-white political mentality, but if somebody actually supports the war BEFORE and AFTER the war occurs, that just steers his political spectrum about 100 points to the right.</I>

Once again you're conflating a particular stance on a specific issue with a person's entire political outlook. This is a classic case of guilt by association. Let's use an example: Suppose I am left-leaning on most issues of domestic social policy such as welfare reform, abortion, gay marriage, and nationalized health care. Suppose further that I support the removal of Saddam Hussein out of principled opposition to tyrannical, murderous regimes. Does this put me in agreement with a large number of conservatives who also support the Iraq War? Yes. However, all other things being equal, <I>it does not follow that I am a conservative merely because I hold a position that many conservatives agree with.</I>

Let's examine a more fundamental assumption of yours: that a stance supporting the Iraq War before and after its occurrence is on some basic level essentially "conservative." Did you ever consider that a liberal case for the Iraq War might exist? I suppose it never occurred to you that a major center-left intellectual organ like The New Republic (www.tnr.com) could support the Iraq War for both pragmatic and humanitarian reasons. No wonder, if your conception of the American Left exists only in the hermetic vacuum of Noam Chomsky's treatises, Michael Moore's documentaries, and MoveOn.org's noisy agitprop.

<I>No sane person can say, at least now, that the war was justified.</I>

Leaving aside your arbitrary assigning of medical terms, I think the above has demonstrably proved this statement false.

<I>The only one reason people are clinging on to is the taking-out-a-dictatorship angle, and if we're doing that, then we have a lot of fucking work to do.</I>

The world is a nasty place and there are plenty of dictators to go around. The United States, powerful as it is, cannot reasonably be expected to pursue a course of global politics that would have it flailing at every local or regional tyrant at every opportunity. Even if such an approach were possible, it would cost trillions of dollars and require millions of soldiers.

Now, before you go off half-cocked and wail about U.S. support of its own dictatorships--yes, I know, thank you. There's no need to launch into a tirade about Columbia. If you want to have that debate some other time, fine. But let me just point out that one can hold a principled stance against dictatorships in general while still allowing for pragmatic concerns to at least partially dictate the terms and circumstances most conducive to taking the hard steps to physically remove a dictator. A gradualist approach, to me, is preferable to an all-or-nothing one.

<I>If he's said he would do it again, he should put his fucking money where his mouth is. I'm not going to believe that he's going to do "a good deal of marching and public speaking about Vietnam, Chile, South Africa, Palestine and East Timor", fucking ignore Iraq (at least in the direction of how wrong the war was), and then go back to his podum, ranting about the evils of government-sponsored terrorism.</I>

Because the situation in Iraq involves a different set of factors and circumstances than did Vietnam, Chile, South Africa and East Timor.

Leaving that aside, let's take your rationale and apply it to you. Why don't you "put [your] fucking money where [your] mouth is" and undertake some MEANINGFUL protest against the U.S.'s Iraq policy. Or do you consider an occasional diatribe on an Internet message board to constitute meaningful protest?</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Arial; text-align: left; '>You wrote:

<I>1) If Moore said that Osama is innocent until proven guilty then that is his opinion. Guilty until proven innocent is the French way.

2) If Bush and the government send troops into Afghanistan to capture Osama and fail to do so, it doesn't matter, he is still wasting troops, whether Moore believes Osama is guilty or not is completely independent of this issue.</I>

What Hitchens actually said was that Moore was having his cake and trying to eat it, too, by criticizing the Bush administration on the one hand for sending any troops at all to Afghanistan and on the other for not sending enough. He also takes exception to Moore's view that the American lives lost in Afghanistan have been "wasted," as though the capture of Osama Bin Laden is the only criteria by which the whole affair's success or failure can be judged.

I see no logical fallacy of the kind you purport.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>I don't think Chomsky invented the "Walk me through your arguments" line of reasoning.</div>