In Response to Another Blogger

just getting it into the record

Just because you can find info on the internet that support any claim doesn’t – by itself – discredit that claim. I have a National Enquirer tabloid that has a photo of Jesse Jackson on its cover with his mistress. Just because the National Enquirer gets it wrong 98% of the time doesn’t mean Jesse Jackson didn’t have an affair.

I can say the same about authors who write books. Michael Moore comes to mind first off. All his books are full of misstatements and misquotes put forward as truths. I will give one small example:

According to Moore in his book Stupid White Men, “the entire nation is composed of morons”. He writes: “There are forty-four million Americans who cannot read and write above a fourth-grade level – in other words, who are functional illiterates. How did I learn this statistic? Well, I read it.”

Moore should have read better. His endnotes attribute the figure to the U.S. Deptpartment of Education’s national Adult Literacy Survey. Yes, that survey found that 40-44 million Americans performed in the lowest level of literacy. But the survey doesn’t end there. In the next paragraph, it goes on to note that 25% of the people who scored in the lowest literacy category were immigrants who have learned little or no English. And in classic Moore fashion, he also fails to disclose that nearly 19% of the group he includes in the uneducated masses are actually people who have “visual difficulties that affect their ability to read print.”

Surprise: Functional English literacy is not high among the blind, and people learning to speak English may be highly educated, but only able to read their native klanguage. This hardly makes the United States a nation that, writes Moore, “GOES OUT OF ITS WAY TO REMASIN IGNORANT AND STUPID” (capitalization in the original).

Page 67 of Dude Where’s My Country: Moore claims that, in building the famous Maginot Line, France "built the bunkers facing the wrong way and Germans were deep into France before you could say 'garcon, stinky cheese, please!'" In fact, the Maginot Line was built with many of the heavy weapons facing back and to the flanks of the line, to allow the bunkers to support each other, and the German invasion avoided it entirely, coming through the Ardennes north of the line.

Page 69: Moore misrepresents US contributions to the United Nations oil-for-food program in Iraq as "trade." He writes, "There were claims that the French were only opposing war to get economic benefits out of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. In fact, it was the Americans who were making a killing. In 2001, the U.S. was Iraq's leading trading partner, consuming more than 40 percent of Iraq's oil exports. That's $6 billion in trade with the Iraqi dictator." Most of the money, however, was used to purchase food and other UN-approved humanitarian aid; the rest went to pay war reparations and administrative fees for the program. (For details on the program, see this report to Congress.)

So you need to deal with the merits of the argument and not where they come from, and in doing so you will not be committing a fallacy of logic.

PapaG

I will post two refutations of Michael Moore

From other authors

Bowling Truths: Michael Moore’s Mocking

SpinSanity – Dude Where’s My Intellectual Honesty