Category: Internet

Armond White’s critique – from the left – of Fahrenheit 9/11 is an excellent read:

Propaganda like Fahrenheit 9/11 won’t help today’s moviegoers gain political insight. Moore’s condescension settles on young GIs wounded in Iraq, now in a veterans’ hospital (where they face lost funding and benefits). One vet gives Moore what he wants: “I’m going to be very active this year and make sure that the Democrats take power.” We’re not supposed to remember the opening sequence that showed Democrats complicit with Bush’s ascension and the invasion of Iraq. Moore, as desultory as Jerry Bruckheimer, simply wants to get a rise out of us. Like Tarantino, he’s uninterested in making movies that show how the world really works.

Godard’s criticism of the film included at no extra charge. Via Winds of Change.

Athena has dug up this wonderful piece from Captain Ed on the non-cooperation between Osama and Saddam from The Guardian, that great and compliant organ of Republican propaganda (not):

Saddam Hussein’s regime has opened talks with Osama bin Laden, bringing closer the threat of a terrorist attack using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, according to US intelligence sources and Iraqi opposition officials.

The key meeting took place in the Afghan mountains near Kandahar in late December. The Iraqi delegation was led by Farouk Hijazi, Baghdad’s ambassador in Turkey and one of Saddam’s most powerful secret policemen, who is thought to have offered Bin Laden asylum in Iraq.

The Saudi-born fundamentalist’s response is unknown. He is thought to have rejected earlier Iraqi advances, disapproving of the Saddam Hussein’s secular Baathist regime. But analysts believe that Bin Laden’s bolthole in Afghanistan, where he has lived for the past three years, is now in doubt as a result of increasing US and Saudi government pressure.

News of the negotiations emerged in a week when the US attorney general, Janet Reno, warned the Senate that a terrorist attack involving weapons of mass destruction was a growing concern. “There’s a threat, and it’s real,” Ms Reno said, adding that such weapons “are being considered for use.”

Impossible, right? Heh.

Christopher Hitchens certainly can turn a phrase:

To describe [Fahrenheit 9/11] as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of “dissenting” bravery.

Hitchens isn’t alone in his contempt for this movie; Ray Bradbury, the man who wrote the story whose title Moore stole, says Moore has no regard for truth.

But Moore has his fans as well as his detractors. Dan Gillmor, Joi Ito, and Cory Doctorow complain that Bradbury is victimizing Moore on the misleading use his title, and then there are these allies:

The movie industry publication Screen Daily reported, ?In terms of marketing the film, [distributor] Front Row is getting a boost from organizations related to Hezbollah which have rung up from Lebanon to ask if there?s anything they can do to support the film.?

Which side are you on, gentle reader?

protein wisdom quotes this from World Tribune:

The United Nations has determined that Saddam Hussein shipped weapons of mass destruction components as well as medium-range ballistic missiles before, during and after the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003.

So why indeed is this not top news in the mainstream media?

Don’t forget to do something about prostate cancer, the most common form of cancer. The Prostate Cancer Foundation has a challenge going with Major League Baseball to raise money for education and research.

Now back to our regularly scheduled ball-busting.

I wasn’t surprised to see the Pistons run circles around the Lakers on their home court in game 1 of the NBA finals, frankly. The Pistons showed they have both talent and character in their series with Indiana, and the ability to carry out the coaches plans with perfection. They’re a team that lacks a super-duper star, but what they have is more important – 11 guys who are willing to check their egos at the door and go out on the court and do whatever it takes to win. The Lakers are basically a two man team with a supporting cast of waterboys who get so flummoxed whenever they touch the basketball they turn it over as quick as possible. Shaq and Kobe are great players, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a team sport, right? Putting single coverage on Shaq and Kobe – basically demolishing their star status and making it a five-on-five game – was all it took to blow their minds.

Unless the Lakers can learn the fundamentals of NBA defense in two days, the Pistons will win it in 5.

See Laker soul-searching here.

We finally got some decent barbeque in Portland yesterday, from LOW Barbeque at the Portland Farmers’ Market at PSU. “LOW” stands for “Laid-Off Workers” on account of the fact that the proprietors, Rodney and Kyle, have 15 years experience in the semiconductor business but no current gig in that industry. They smoke up brisket, pork spare ribs, and lamb ribs and sell it at the farmers’ market and from a little stand in SE Portland.

Before serving their first customer, the boys returned to their native Texas for a tour of the principal barbeque joints, such as Louie Mueller’s in Taylor, Smitty’s in Lockhart, and Crosstown in Elgin. They skipped Kruez on this trip since they used to eat there a lot in the old days before the hassle in the Kruez family and all the unpleasantness. The study trip shows you how serious these boys are about their meat, and it’s chronicled here with pictures – don’t watch on an empty stomach.

The article in the New Statesman about the alliance between hard-left and hard-right forces in the anti-war movement’s getting a lot of attention today (Jarvis, Simon, Hurryup Harry, et. al.) and it’s fair reading, although a bit insular. It makes the point that the SWP/radical Islamist alliance behind the anti-war movement wasn’t reported by the BBC on orders from management:

The anti-war movement wasn’t a simple repetition of the old story of the politically naive being led by the nose by sly operators. The far left was becoming the far right. It had gone as close to supporting Ba’athist fascism as it dared and had formed a working alliance with the Muslim Association of Britain, which, along with the usual misogyny and homophobia of such organisations, also believed that Muslims who decided that there was no God deserved to die for the crime of free thought. In a few weeks hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, would allow themselves to be organised by the opponents of democracy and modernity and would march through the streets of London without a flicker of self-doubt. Wasn’t this a story?

It’s a great story, I cried. But why don’t you broadcast it?

We can’t, said the bitter hacks. Our editors won’t let us.

…and goes on to marvel about the fact that the far left has become, in effect, pro-fascist. How this transformation has come about bears some examination (Simon does his usual soul-searching on the issue), and in the end comes down to one key observation, I think: a generation ago, the left had a plausible case that socialism’s ability to manage the distribution of wealth was indispensible for the creation of just societies. But socialism, we’ve learned, can only achieve just distribution by suppressing the formation of wealth, that is, it can make us all equally poor but it can’t make us all equally rich.

On balance, the poor fare better in a free economy than in the condition of state-managed (and some would say -mandated) poverty that socialism creates. So the forces of progress have been forced to abandon socialism, leaving only a hard core behind. Fascists have always been in favor of state-run economy, so they have the core issue in common with the hard left. And this is the way it’s always been.

Yummy.

If you’re a wack-job:

NEW YORK – Abu Hamza al-Masri, the fiery Muslim cleric whose shuttered London mosque was linked to Zacarias Moussaoui and shoe bomber Richard Reid, was arrested Thursday in Britain, accused in a U.S. indictment of trying to establish a terrorist training camp in Oregon and providing aid to al-Qaida, officials said.

Or you could just go the Portland Farmers’ Market and look at the chickens.