I just finished reading this book on a whim, and while it made some interesting points and offered a lot of comic relief, I found myself questioning the validity of many of the facts and anecdotes presented. I don't personally read a lot of books in this vein, so I may come off as sounding relatively naive. I just felt as though I was being blatantly manipulated while I was reading this book. Anybody else read it?

Once you accept that it's a polemic, it's pretty entertaining. I've usually found Moore to be fairly well researched, but obviously his presentation of the facts is ridculously, if unabashedly, biased. Where he does stray from the actual facts he does, yeah, tend to go out on several limbs. On the whole, though, he takes far fewer editorial liberties than, say, an Ann Coulter and, as many of his opinions coincide with my own, I find him a lot more palatable than many do (though he does seem to be pretty popular at the moment).

Wonder what would happen if a conservative wrote a book titled "Stupid Black Men"

Funny you should say that. Last night, I read the first chapter of slander, and I stopped reading after that, because it was WAY too biased for my tastes. I think that the only thing that kept me going with the Michael Moore book was the entertainment value behind it.



I think you know the answer to that question, Hugo.

Powell or Rice might be able to pull it off and Chris Rock could make millions of dollars off of it.

I went to Amazon.com and checked out the book's listing. It is still rated 20 for sales, meaning it is the 20th best seller. The copyright is 2001. Not bad! Some excerpts are available. Contrasting this with my current technical book on Amazon, mine is at 994,129 for sales. Eh, I didn't set out to write a best seller. It's a good tome though, for those who work with big computing systems.

I unabashedly enjoy the dickens out of Moore's work. He demonstrates a sardonic, edgy humor with a Midwestern nice-guy foil. His political, economic, and social commentary is up there with Garrison Keillor for tone, but with a definite working class blueness that pines for better days when he really believed in Mom and apple pie. Keillor pines for the days when his id outdid his ego, and big black beards were normal.

Where Keillor will throw a broadside at the sitting powers, the wind of excellent acting artists and musicians filling his sails, Moore stands alone, a somewhat unimpressive figure in the crowd--until he raises his pen like a musket and lets it bark at The Powers that Be.

If you peruse the reader reviews on Amazon, you will see that people either really like him or really hate him. However, his star rating has remained at four out of five.

I thought, hey, this guy is like the Rush Limbaugh for liberals! So I checked out Rush's most recent book, and you know what?

There isn't one. His books are out of print. Yet other writers are doing well writing *about* Rush. It seems that the tide, at least in the literary sense, is turning.

Eeyore,

Rock, yes. Powell/Rice, no.

Rock has the edge for it and the sense of absurdity that black men could ever be conservative. I'm not sure of his politics, but in order to successfully lampoon stupid black men and support it with realties, you have to be on the opposite side. Powell and Rice are not, and of course Rice is a woman, so she'd have to write about stupid black women. This is due to the fact that humor also requires brutal honesty with self. It doesn't work to just attack others if you don't share some of their weaknesses. I think this is why Rush's humor had a short life span--he got too big for his britches (even though he has shrunk).

If you want to see this in action, check out Comedy Central's great artists doing live gigs. You'll notice that the self-deprecating humor always follows any attack on others.

AM, that was an excellent post. I agree, I really enjoy Moore's writing style and humour.

I think he serves as a great introduction to leftist politics. If you feel like he is making a lot of unsupported statements, you can always get into much more detailed, resourced works like those of Chomsky, Zinn, Monbiot, etc.

It is obviously Mike's humour (please excuse my British spellings - my early schooling was in India) that makes him popular and palatable to the general public. I think the left has really needed someone like Moore for a long time now.

Michael Moore looks like he ate 10 boxes of Krispy Kreme doughnuts and slept in the same clothes for a week. He doesn't present a very good image of the liberal media. Matt Lauer and Katie Couric are much more photogenic.

I spent eighteen years in Ireland, Alan Wood is from Australia, and Cyan's a Goth in recovery, so we have no problem with Anglo spellings. I agree pretty entirely with your assessment of Moore, btw...


They're also much more conservative. And, while you may feel "clothes make the man", I'm more of a "don't judge a book by it's cover" kinda guy (even Moore's).

Me too. I wasn't fond of Michael Moore's book, but it has nothing to do with his appearance.

I read this book awhile ago and used it a reference for a couple of my posts. If you're questioning the validity of his facts look at the last 20 or so pages of his book he cites every little fact he uses...

Why does this have anything to do with his appearance? How photogenic someone is doesn't raise there acceptability...