I'm glad that Michael Moore isn't popular anymore.

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Hi all. I just want to share some stuff that I have been thinking.

Remember Michael Moore? I remember when he was super-popular during the 2000s. He became a symbol of the American left. Right-wingers treated him as though he was the anti-Christ.

After a while, he just kinda fizzled out. People lost interest in him. Nowadays, he is back to being a random nobody from Flint, Michigan.

Today, I want to talk about why his decline is a good thing. Although Michael Moore still has many defenders, he had several gaping flaws which made him a bad leftist.

I want to start with Michael Moore's biggest problem. His films contain too much emotional manipulation. That's why I can't stand his films. His films contain too many cheap scenes of people in tears. In my opinion, emotional manipulation is a sign of intellectual weakness. If what you are saying is truly correct, you should be able to simply state the facts and let the facts speak for themselves.

If you want to know how to make a political documentary in the right way, watch The Power of Nightmares by Adam Curtis.

Additionally, I find that Moore was too trusting of corporate Democrats. During Barack Obama's presidency, Moore stated in an interview that he was deeply disappointed by Barack Obama. Meanwhile, Noam Chomsky knew from the get-go that Obama was a fake liberal and a corporate shill. Chomsky wasn't disappointed because he didn't have high hopes to begin with. Chomsky, unlike Moore, correctly predicted that Barack Obama would betray his voters.

Addionally, Dude, Where's my Country? contains a few quotations from Nineteen Eighty-Four which were taken completely out of context. This may seem like a minor point, but I really don't like it when one of my all-time favorite books is butchered.

For a long time, leftists have relied on emotional manipulation. Look at where it has gotten us. Today's Republicans have become callous, nihilistic trolls who enjoy causing offense. Emotional manipulation simply isn't working anymore. Trump supporters are like antibiotic-resistant bacteria that we created through our foolishness, carelessness and intellectual laziness.

Emotional manipulation is lazy because our world is full of useful facts and statistics. History is full of useful information which reinforces leftist principles, and yet most leftists refuse to use this information ... so the hard work of noble historians going to waste. If you read about human history, you will see a long line of people who became addicted to power and then manufactured xenophobic propaganda in order to gain more power. That's human history in a nutshell. We already have history and science on our side.

I'm glad that Michael Moore is a has-been. He was always emotionally unstable and his emotional instability was contagious. If you are emotionally unstable, politics simply isn't for you.

Well said...
I am in general agreement...
Except I would add: emotional manipulation is often a sign of malevolency rather than weakness...
In either case, I agree that it is a sign of a weak argument...

Most people are better at emotional manipulation than intellectual integrity, imo...
But I think most don't even know what they are doing...

The effusive orgy of emotionalism in society is hugely encouraged and I suspect that it often has to do with manipulative practices by our covert social architects to prime the general public into being malleable to their wishes...
The best example I can think of: Hitler, a grand master of psychological rape...


Hey!
I resemble that remark!

Well, it actually is but not in the way one would wish it to be...
If you are emotionally unstable you are the chattel of the cynical manipulators...a tool of the covert social architects...
Personally, and seriously, I think emotionalism is never a good thing...

hmm. I always felt he tried to express his outrage, and skewed the facts, doing the issue and his anger a disservice.

You say that emotional manipulations don't work, but how do you think Donald Trump was elected? That's right! Emotional manipulations!
I think that liberal politicians don't use enough emotional manipulations, and are counting too much on rationality, which is why they lose to right wingers who are master in propaganda using emotions.

Liberal politicians should show video of immigrants in tears because of Trump deportation politics to counter intolerant nationalism, they should show communities destroyed by pollution to grow concern over environment, they should show poor living in slums near mansions to show that trickle down economic is not working, and so on.

Intellectual and rational discourses are good for university professors, but not for ordinary peoples who don't know how to properly think; telling them is not enough, they must be shown. Conservatives are manipulating emotions through lies, but liberals have the opportunity to manipulate emotions by showing sad things that are true.

A wise man once said: "Passion is the nemesis of objectivity..."
That wise man is me...

Edit:


Here is a radical idea...
Educate the ignorant great unwashed...

What if the "ignorant" don't have the intellectual capacity to understand the rational discourse? (Not meant to be cheeky, but actually inquiring???)

Damn!
You saw that critical error in my reasoning...
You must be one of the few who has a greater intellectual capacity...
Go away, you are weakening my argument...

DarthMetaKnight in his OP seems to be painting a false dilemma here about emotions vs. statistics and data. He should correct me if that isn't the case.

I never said that emotions were bad. We humans all have feelings and we can't avoid that. That's just part of what makes us a beautiful species.

We can, however, keep our emotions under control so that we can maintain a realistic worldview.

If you still don't understand what I'm saying, watch Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore and then compare it to The Power of Nightmares by Adam Curtis. You'll surely find that Adam Curtis has more emotional stability and this generally makes his film more pleasant to watch.

Moore's been getting up in years, and so I'd expect his days of belting out one movie after another are behind him.
I hardly agreed with everything Moore said, and while I believe his primary motivation in life is to make money off his films, I think I have a more charitable view of him than Darth and other posters, but that's just my opinion.

Have you been watching The Matrix again?
Mouse: "To deny our own impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human."

While I will always admit that there are many genuinely decent moments of personal interaction throughout a person's life, as a species, humanity gets an 'F' imo...

But I am old...
You are young...
No doubt you will snap out of it one day...



And yet there is so much intolerance in the world...
More than you can shake a Michael Moore at...

However...
It is more than a little disconcerting that we agree on something...
We both believe that emotions need to be put in their place if we are to more accurately see the world as it truely is (as far as it is possible for we mere humans, of course)...
"Passion is the nemesis of objectivity..."

Keep that infernal internal emotional reptile on a tight leash!
And some of us have/will taken/take the red pill rather than the blue...

Bottom line, though...
Better to be dead than red...
Errr...no, that isn't it...
Ahhh...Better to be a Vulcan than a human...

Tuvok out...

And here I thought you liked the challenge!

In my view emotions aren't bad or good, they just are. And we don't need to control them, we just need to observe them and not let the emotions control our actions. The problems that seem to arise - and what seems to be disliked by the OP, at least relative to Michael Moore - is that the majority of people cannot use, or do not know how to use, their intellectual capabilities to make decisions. Thus, those who want to see change, whether for bad or for good, use emotional appeals. Maybe we now have mob mentality, courtesy of the internet.

I think that Moore typically came to correct conclusions ... though the logic and evidence which he used to back up his conclusions was lacking.

To be honest, this is how I view most liberals and leftists. They typically come to correct conclusions, but they shoddily justify these conclusions.

Liberalism is like a castle built on a swamp. It needs a more solid foundation.

"I belong to the left, and I must work with it."
- George Orwell

"The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Liberals tend to think with their bleeding hearts, while conservatives think with their hearts of stone. I know, that's a generalization.

It's pretty accurate though.

The world needs more people who think with their heads ...though this can be difficult because the media runs on sensationalism. The media deliberately tries to make us irrational, in order to restrict our potential.

That's why I avoid the TV news media ... or anything else which looks too sensationalistic.

It’s essential that people think with their heads AND their hearts.