More Lunacy from Michael Moore:

[AZhitman]

Moore On Wealthy People's Money: "That's Not Theirs, That's A National Resource, It's Ours"

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/ ... _ours.html

Are you effing serious?

Y'know, Michael - If you hadn't hogged up all that extra food, no one in Somalia would be starving. That extra food wasn't FOR you, you fatass lumpy POS. That was for everyone ELSE. You TOOK their food. Better yet, let's see YOUR million-dollar donations to the US Government, since you're so gung-ho on the redistribution of wealth.

I hate that gasbag. Go choke on a chicken bone, you slovenly retard.

"National resource"? GTFOH.

[AppleBonker]

slovenly retard.

Greg, to be perfectly fair, I don't think this is a reasonable assessment. A lot of his films have brilliant slight-of-hand and editing techniques that make his points look more reasonable (or other people look crazy). He is a GENIUS when it comes to presenting things. Granted, his views are awful and completely ridiculous. But, he knows precisely how to spin them to make his point. More power to him, he found a way to take financial advantage of the left-leaning folks. In that sense, I think he's similar to Rush. Polar opposite ends of the political spectrum, but neither are retarded. They know EXACTLY how to manipulate facts/data to get people to buy into their arguments. The more interesting question, in my opinion, is whether either character actually believes what they're saying or if they truly are in it for the money (all whilst laughing at the mouth-breathers eating up their viewpoint).

[stebo0728]

I care a little less for Michael Moore and any of his works, as I do for Charlie Sheen and any of his works.

Attention whores like attention

[the a3k]

he's just delusional. if i make 6 or 7 figures, i pay taxes, best believe that im not giving away any more money to the government. you think deep down inside he really cares about the people? not really. he's rich just like most of the movie makers, actors, directors, etc. take his money away and see what happens

[AZhitman]

slovenly retard.

Greg, to be perfectly fair, I don't think this is a reasonable assessment. A lot of his films have brilliant slight-of-hand and editing techniques that make his points look more reasonable (or other people look crazy).

In that case, oops. It appears I misspelled "charlatan". My bad.

[Cold_Zero]

Well then he can start by forking over his 'Natural Resources' (money) to me.

[AppleBonker]

charlatan

Now that is a label I can support. I dislike the guy as much as any one else. But I am jealous of his uncanny ability to pilfer from large quantities of people in order to amass a substantial amount of wealth.

[AZhitman]

With that being the case, it makes me even MORE disdainful of the ignorant sheep that flock to his movies and chug his Kool-Aid... Oblivious to the fact that they're being fleeced AND deluded.

[s0m3th1ngAZ]

So...he's a communist?

[AppleBonker]

But doesn't that make you want their money even more? Do the ignorant sheep deserve to keep their funds? I feel I could do something far more awesome than they can with it.

[stebo0728]

Reminds me of Atlas Shrugged, in there a guy publishes a book of lunatic philosophical stuff, and publishes it under the scientific foundation's name. When asked by the boss why he wrote such garbage, he said something to the effect that, "this isnt meant for people that think, its meant for the mundane people who just want to hear stuff like this, to feel better about their miserable status". Michael Moore strikes me similarly, his stuff is meant for people who already think the way his material goes, and just bolsters their already misinformed beliefs.

[IBCoupe]

"Hey, what are the odds -- five Ayn Rand fans on the same train! Must be going to a convention."

[stebo0728]

LAWLS on that one. Still she was a hell of a novelist, and its scary just how some of the "evil" stuff she wrote about is now pretty common place.

[IBCoupe]

Heh, I like this blog post, about the missing second volume of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged trilogy:

Atlas Shrugged, for those of you who never read it, can be summarized entirely fairly as follows. Unknown to our viewpoint characters at first, an inventor named John Galt has invented a "free energy" machine, a motor that runs on ambient static electricity and the Earth's own inertia and puts out enough electricity in a fairly small unit to power almost anything, including vehicles, force field generators, energy weapons, even an invisibility cloak if you use a big enough unit. He invented this while working at a company where his contract gave them rights to stuff he invented on the clock, like most professional engineers and inventors, but he assumed that as the inventor, he was entitled to all of the profits from this fabulous new invention. The company's management and other employees, though, saw just how much resentment would happen if one company owned the monopoly on an invention this valuable, and started making plans for how to invest some of the profits into charitable ventures, so they wouldn't get the whole thing taken away from them via eminent domain. John Galt, outraged that anybody would even suggest that he or the company he worked for owed anything to the nation that provided his education, protected him from infectious disease outbreaks, protected him from Communist invasion, built the roads that got him to work each day, provided the police that kept him safe, and provided the court system that protected his property rights at all, sabotaged the Galt Engine, so nobody could have it.

Then he went further and, in a fit of offended pique, promised to "stop the motor of the world," to kill 90% or so of Earth's population by intentionally wrecking the economy. Which he then did. How? By finding every other competent engineer or manager in the US and persuading them to be just as selfish as him, just as unwilling to pay back or protect their country; he declared a covert "strike of the mind," as he called it. He hid them all in a secretive compound in the Rocky Mountains, protected by force field and invisibility cloak, and waited for the US economy to collapse, which, obligingly, it did -- because John Galt had carefully sabotaged the bridges and railroads that made it possible for fuel and seeds to make it from the coastal cities to inland farms, and make it possible for food grown on inland farms to make it to the coastal cities. And as chaos was breaking out, he and his fellow inventors hijacked every radio transmitter in the US to broadcast his manifesto: You all deserve to die, for asking us to pay you back even one nickel, because we are all so selfish we don't consider any of the things you all paid for out of your taxes and that you did with your labor to have been at all helpful to us as entirely self-sufficient brilliant inventors and managers. So die.

And that's where the series is interrupted. But from where the third book picks up, and by applying a little common sense, we can outline the main plot points, if not the characterizations, from the untitled middle volume, the one I'm whimsically calling Atlas Shrugged 2: Shrug Harder. When the previous book ran out, America was winding down to what was clearly going to be the last harvest, ever, and the Strikers were planning for the day that they, as the only people possessing any high tech or any capability of mass production of food or anything else, would ride out of their hidden Colorado fortress as humanity's saviors. They were pledging to themselves to build a new world based, as John Galt's manifesto had promised all Americans, on the virtue of selfishness. They assumed that a grateful (or at least desperately needy) and vastly reduced in number population would welcome them as liberators, chastened and having learned their lesson. Except that we know from the third book that that's not what happened, and anybody who knows human nature should have been able to predict that.

Outside the valley, the conversion to local subsistence farming and the work of scavenging the dead cities for any usable metal would have been rough. No time or energy would have been available to save even minimal technology. We're looking at a collapse all the way back to (at best) early iron age levels, maybe even all the way back to the bronze age, and nobody will even have time to teach the next generation to read and write. But one thing very clearly did happen, in every survivor's village, and became world-wide policy as soon as even minimal travel and communication made it possible for the chiefs of the scattered villages of survivors began to reunite society into any kind of a civilization, and that is a fierce determination to make sure that the next generation remembered who had done this to them, and why they had done it. They would have educated their children to remember the names and descriptions of every one of the hated Strikers who had personally murdered four and a half billion people for a political point. And they would have educated their children that one idea, one idea in the Strikers' twisted minds, had lead to those four and a half billion deaths, the greatest act of genocide in human history: selfishness. How far did they go to eradicate selfishness? They went so far as to eradicate the first person pronoun from the language.

Because she died without telling anyone, it's not entirely clear how Shrug Harder would have ended. We know that at some point, at least one of the Strikers does leave Galt Valley. He built a high-tech home, stuffed it with a library and all the wonders of the Strikers' science, and then (apparently) set out to make contact with the nearest survivors' village, assuming that they'd worship him as a god for his technological superiority, assuming they'd cheerfully feed him and provide him with anything he wanted for the products of his labor. And, rather obviously, they did what anybody would do: they executed him for crimes against humanity. His technological redoubt was never found. Did other Strikers meet the same fate, or are they all holed up in Galt Valley still? We'll never know. But that brings us to the book that would clearly have been relabeled once the trilogy was complete ... Atlas Shrugged 3: Anthem.

Anthem is actually the best book of the three. And it's a credit to Rand that she realized just how monstrous the real results of the Strike would be. Many, many so-called Objectivists and Libertarians, who only read the first book, thought they were supposed to cheer for the Strikers, believed the Strikers' personal delusion that the Strike, and the resulting mass genocide, would usher in a techno-libertarian paradise on earth. No, in Anthem we get a view of John Galt's Earth from the viewpoint of someone who grew up in the next generation, never having known a technological world, knowing only a world in which selfishness is labeled the ultimate sin. The massive die-off from John Galt's strike has resulted in the rise of the most vicious and backwards and cruelly unfair totalitarian regime in human history. And our nameless hero slowly has it dawn on him that the ruling council is so afraid of selfishness that they're retarding any attempt to restore human technological civilization, no matter how miserable and stunted low-tech life is, until they figure out some way to integrate technological progress into their civilization without anybody being able to claim credit for it. Which cannot possibly work.

Our nameless hero, having found working light bulbs and a working electrical system in the ruins of the city his farming town is built over, even offers to forgo personal credit for the discovery, offers to accept no credit for it at all. But their paranoia and terror that he's a prospective future Striker pushes them to hound him to the point where in desperation he and his girlfriend flee the city into the uninhabited wasteland ... where they find the technological trove, and the library, left behind by the unnamed Striker at the end of Shrug Harder. He and his now wife settle down to raise children, to use the subsistence farming skills they learned from their own civilization to sustain them, to gather any other stragglers who escape the cities, and to stay out of sight until they find a way to overthrow the horribly dictatorial Councils that rule the world and lead it to a saner middle ground, one that (presumably) knows to watch out for civilization-wreckers like John Galt but that also knows that giving personal credit is a prerequisite for technological advance. It is, if not an entirely happy ending, a hopeful one.

Oh, except for one thing. I made up the whole bit about the second book. I don't think Ayn Rand was aware enough of the limitations of her philosophy for her to realize that the communo-primitivist dictatorship of Anthem, not a techno-libertarian utopia, would be the inevitable outcome of a genocide of almost the entire human race by techno-libertarians. Oops. Never mind, then. Sorry!

[AppleBonker]

John Galt? Not Art Galt?

[stebo0728]

You'll understand if I dont read that just now, as I am currently reading "Atlas Shrugged" I'm assuming there are spoilers in there

[IBCoupe]

I just presumed everybody knows the basic story of Atlas Shrugged. I've yet to read it (don't imagine I will, I get enough of it from my douchebag libertarian associates), but I know enough about the bits and pieces to be pissed off at it. Mostly, though, what pisses me off are the AS fanboys. The quote quite adequately makes them shut up.

Also, if you're reading it now, then you know about the train signal: it was very stupid of the protagonist to assume that the train had been sitting there for two hours because the red signal ahead was defective. Even having memorized the train schedule doesn't excuse it. There are any number of unexpected events that could lead to an unanticipated red signal, including broken or washed-out tracks or maybe even a derailed train.

What the protagonist should have done is have the conductor contact the dispatch and inquire as to the red.

[AZhitman]

I've not read it either. Looks pretentious, and reeks of navel-gazing.

Or maybe I'm just an uncultured cretin from a flyover state.

[IBCoupe]

Read it; no navel-gazing. Flaw-pointing-outing.

Maybe a little pretentious. 'Specially the last paragraph.

[AZhitman]

"Read", as in "I suggest that you..."?

or

"Read" as in, "I did. Quickly." ?

[audtatious]

I've not read it either. Looks pretentious, and reeks of navel-gazing.

Or maybe I'm just an uncultured cretin from a flyover state.

The movie is being released this month and is supposed to exactly match the book...so.....no reason to read it?

[IBCoupe]

I suggest that you.

It's an entertaining read.

[stebo0728]

Well Im really anxious to finish reading it, so I can read your quote above, but I can say, without reading your quote, if all it focuses on is the "free energy motor" thats looming as im reading, so far thats minuscule to what really is covered in the book. I am going to wait till I finish the read to post about it, but that free energy motor is light weight compared to the things so far that have transpired. Im abuot 1/3 done with it, just starting up where they are looking for the guy that invented this motor. But all the social policies, and frankly arrogant bills that get passed in this book reak of reality today. Cant wait to finish and give a good testiment to it.

I hear Angelina Jolie is playing Daggny Taggart, im really hesitant as to how well that is going to work out, guess we'll see...

[IBCoupe]

That's not what it focuses on. It's described, but not harped on.

[telcoman]

Moore On Wealthy People's Money: "That's Not Theirs, That's A National Resource, It's Ours"

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/ ... _ours.html

Are you effing serious?

Y'know, Michael - If you hadn't hogged up all that extra food, no one in Somalia would be starving. That extra food wasn't FOR you, you fatass lumpy POS. That was for everyone ELSE. You TOOK their food. Better yet, let's see YOUR million-dollar donations to the US Government, since you're so gung-ho on the redistribution of wealth.

I hate that gasbag. Go choke on a chicken bone, you slovenly retard.

"National resource"? GTFOH.

There is much more to the story than you realize.

Please stop trying to mislead the NICO members with right wing garbage

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2011/03/994 ... n-protests


Telcoman

[audtatious]

I don't know why Moore is still in the US as Cuba has such a better system. Oh yeah, he likes to make millions of dollars making movies with his own twist, likes the freedom we have even if he does not support it, likes capitalism for his own benefit although he speaks against it. Just another uber-hypocrit in the US. Remember, don't look at the man behind the curtain. Just look at the images he is trying to portray as truth.

[telcoman]

I don't know why Moore is still in the US as Cuba has such a better system. Oh yeah, he likes to make millions of dollars making movies with his own twist, likes the freedom we have even if he does not support it, likes capitalism for his own benefit although he speaks against it. Just another uber-hypocrit in the US. Remember, don't look at the man behind the curtain. Just look at the images he is trying to portray as truth.

He is here because he wants to help working people keep their jobs and keep the right to collective bargaining.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01138.html

Perhaps you would like to explain how giving tax cuts to the wealthest and laying off or firing thousands of workers is going to solve the budget deficit?
So far none of the republicians can offer an explanation that makes any sense.
Perhaps you are smarter than they are?

Telcoman

[audtatious]

Because you won't listen to another opinion anyway. We all know this.

Moore is a POS who is only out working for himself. He cares nothing about the "people". He's just a good little socialist. The only rich people he cares to attack are the ones who do not have his same view points.

Maybe you are right about taxing the rich. They do nothing for us. We need to follow your way and the Moore way which is to make everything part of the US Gov so they can monitor every aspect of our lives and structure our pay for us. You know, support Unions until they can be combined into one "peoples workers union" with the Fed Gov managing everything. History has shown how well that works.

[AZhitman]

There is much more to the story than you realize.

No, there's NOT "more to the story" than I realize.

Unlike someone who sucks the left nut of that crackhead that publishes the DailyKos, I get my news from several different sources.

And I wasn't discussing Wisconsin, or the Unions, or Gov Walker, or any such thing.

If you'd read, I was pointing out something colossally moronic that came out of Michael Moore's fat manpleaser. So, where's the "more to the story"?

If you had linked me to a story that showed terrorists holding a knife to Moore's throat and threatening to gut him like the sow that he is unless he said what he said, then you'd be correct. But that didn't happen.

No, Howie, there IS NO "more to the story". Moore is a clown and a hypocrite. How much money has he given you? If he's got such a hardon for redistribution of wealth, he should lead by example. F*** him and those who follow him.

[audtatious]

Moore is their speaker so he does not have to "give" by example, just like Howie hasn't spread his 401k and retirement money around to all the poor folk. They are too busy with their hands in other peoples pockets.