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[grinninfoole]

Early this year, I posted about how impressed I was with Bowling For Columbine. I have read some criticisms of the movie, the most cogent of which I mentioned here:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/grinninfoole/2003/03/19/

Michael Moore has posted a rebuttal, which I find quite impressive, though he doesn't answer some of the points brought up by the Hardylaw fellow. You can read it here:
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/wackoattacko/

Comments

[leftahead.livejournal.com]

Frankly, the most telling statistic in the whole thing is this one:

"Well, guess what. Total number of lawsuits to date against me or my film by the NRA? NONE. "

Which I think pretty much lays the discussion to rest, but for the shouting.

-Lefty

[crouchback.livejournal.com]

No, it doesn't. It's almost impossible to win a libel suit in the US if you get famous enough. (Contrast this with Britain, where it is almost impossible for famous people not to win libel suits.) The burden of proof required to prove libel (which is about all you could sue for) is huge.

[crouchback.livejournal.com]

Whoops! I meant slander, not libel. s/libel/slander/g in my earlier response.

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that it's that compelling a point, regardless of the legal structures in question. Consider: the film has been shown in Britain and was funded in part by British film companies. Why doesn't Heston sue Moore over there? He's a rich guy who can afford smart lawyers, and he's president of a rich organization with an aggressive and extremist political agenda. There are a lot of answers besides: because Moore is right and they are wrong, but I don't think that point is completely invalidated by the nature of US libel laws.

[crouchback.livejournal.com]

Heston is suffering from Alzheimers, and responding to Moore may not be his highest priority, especially since other people have done it. I find Heston to be a fascinating figure: he was regarded as a liberal in the 1960s (when he did things like going on Freedom Rides), but his political viewpoints have not changed one bit since then, which makes him a conservative nowadays.

I can think of one recent case where an American sued a publciation for libel in Britian: Richard Perle did so, and got rightly slammed for it. After all, that is essentially a stealth attempt to undermien US libel law, with a big potential slippery slope. If British libel law holds sway in the US, does Saudi Arabian sharia law, for instance?

Personally, I think our libel laws are way better than Britain's. The net effect of the British libel laws is to stifle criticism of the famous and rich..and American law diverged from it for that reason (http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h566.html).

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

Can the NRA sue for slander? (Or is it libel in a film?) I suspect that Moore may have been somewhat sloppy in his handling of Heston and the NRA in the film, but I haven't seen anything that leads me to think he hasn't depicted it accurately. But, then, I don't respect the NRA or its legislative agenda.

I had a look over the critique I linked to back in March, and I think, for instance, that the claim that Moore is wrong to link the KKK and NRA is valid, but may miss the heart of the matter. It is quite possible to deplore the KKK for its methods and not for its racism, and the early history of the NRA presented there (as far as I can recall it at this moment), doesn't demonstrate that the NRA's founders and early members were against the KKK on more than tactical grounds. That is, they may have shared with the KKK a deep-seated fear and hatred of black people and their growing enfranchisement. They may NOT have shared it, also, but Moore's main point in the animated segment (as best as I can recall it a year later) is that an organization and political movement stressing gun-ownership rights for whites may emerge and quickly gain strength for precisely the same reasons as a more overt terrorist organization.

So, it seems to me that Moore answered some of the criticisms quite well (though I notice that the Hardylaw folks didn't make many of the one's he demolished most effectively) and hasn't addressed others at all, and that the criticisms may not serve to actually rebut Moore's message in various scenes.

I don't recall anyone except Millari sharing with me what I see as the most serious challenge to the film: what's the point? What is the source of the USA's gun problem? How, exactly, do we wish to define that problem? Is there really a gun problem, as opposed to a violence problem, in the USA, or is Moore as guilty as TV news programs in over-dramatizing the issue? (Related to that, do we need to answer with statistics, or can our personal feelings count?)

[crouchback.livejournal.com]

The NRA was founded by Union vets, who had been dismayed by the poor marksmanship shown by Union recruits. I'm not familiar with their activities during the post-Reconstruction era, but during Reconstruction, they were very supportive of blacks. (Heston marched with Martin Luther King, although that's not really pertinent to the NRA as an organization.)

[crouchback.livejournal.com]

I note that he doesn't respond to the Spinsanity (http://www.spinsanity.org/post.html?2003_08_31_archive.html#10624779059990811) people at all..probably because they lean to the left, thus making their criticism hard to dismiss under a "right-wing whacko" rubric. Then there's the introduction of information unrelated to the subject (it's nice to know the IMDB makes mistakes, but what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?). I won't even pause to note that Moore, who is quite venomous in his language, can't really complain too much about other people being that way.

The change made to the DVD regarding Willie Horton is not noted anywhere on the DVD as being a change. The additoin of a caption that was not in the original ad is still there, of course, even if that caption now reflects the facts.

We also have a continued connection between the Columbine slaughter and conditions which the people who performed it never referred to or referenced.

Moore, as you'll note if you follow the link above, has threatened to sue people who criticized his film for libel.

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

Moore can be venomous, though in not pausing you nevertheless did note it. :)

Does the DVD package mention anywhere that there have been changes and additions? If so, what else needs to be said? Even for a scholarly article, a note that changes have been made is sufficient in a later printing.

It is possible to draw connections between events that the actors themselves never remarked upon. You may challenge those connections, but making them does not invalidate the whole argument ipso facto.

Moore has threatened to sue for libel? I'll have to check that out with a faster connection (the link doesn't work right now). In light of Lefty's comment, and your response re: US libel law, what an interesting thing for him to do.

[crouchback.livejournal.com]

The DVD package does not mention changes. They were just done. (Moore is hardly alone in this. There is a disturbing trend among media of making corrections on the fly without mentioning them. The BBC is particularly bad about this, but I've seen the LA Times, NY Post, NY Times and Chicago Sun-Times do it as well.) Moore has done this kind of thing before. In the lead-up to the November 2002 elections, he was predicting that they would be "Payback Tuesday," and the Republicans would be soundly crushed. When that didn't happen, his article vanished from his web site. (It was saved by others.)

I'm still not sure what point Moore was trying to make in Bowling for Columbine, past the observation that the media is hysterical and given to overexaggerting threats..a theory that is not original to him. I very clearly got the impression that he was arguing that the Columbine killers were somehow responding to the violence in US culture...but that wasn't made explicitly, so I may just be reading things into it that were not intended.

I think Moore was just mad and not thinking when he made that threat. When he calmed down, he probably thought better of it, if he did not just forget about it.

Moore is hardly alone in his behavior..as the Spinsanity guys document, the state of political discourse in this country is pretty bad.

I think the larger point has been missed:

[filthyassistant.livejournal.com]

     The point of a movie that asks questions and provides no answers is to generate discussion. Not discussion on the movie itself, but on the issues it brings up. The issues being: Does the US have a gun problem? Does the US have a violence problem? Are the two issues related or should we be dealing with them separately? There are no easy answers to those questions and Moore wasn't about to had you some and tell you to swallow. The answers are ones we need to come up with and tell to those we have in our lives. This will make this country a better and safer place. But debate on whether the film is accurate and who is being more slanderous/libelous... there doesn't seem to be much in that but paired tail-chasing.