[Chewbacca]

I'm good for at least one more post on this topic. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Originally posted by Cerek the Barbaric: Hardy did an excellent job at showing exaclty how Moore used the "smoke and mirrors" effect in BfC. He also provided links and sources to back up his claims against the film. In the "controversial" speech by Heston at Denver, he gave a side-by-side comparison of the transcript from the film compared to the transcript of the actual speech. It shows - without any opinion or conjecture - how Moore deliberately took some sentences far out of context and even spliced two separate sentences together to make a completely different statement.

The blue part is conjecture- and heads towards the opinion from Hardy that Moore's editing and use of excerpts were designed to be misleading. This is pure conjecture because intent to decieve cannot be factually proven. The fact of the matter is Moore used excerpts from a speech. That is parts of the speech to make a specific point. Leaving out parts of the speech are hardly damning. The is the whole point of excerpts is to show parts.

As for the claim that two different sentences were spliced together to make a different statement- more conjecture. A few different excerpts were used. The opening narrative of the scnene even had a clip from a totally different speech. [img]tongue.gif[/img] IIRC the scene in question switched around alot from excerpts of Heston's speech to scenes of demonstrators outside and other bits. It is pure conjecture that this part of the film and the use of excerpts from Heston's speech is done as part of a design to mislead.

In general Hardy's work is great for people who may already have negative pre-concieved notions about Moore and BFC. It is also great for these people who have also not even seen the film.

Hardy's excessive use conjecture in a similiar fashion through-out his critisms makes taking him on in a point by point fashion a waste of time for me and dilutes any factual mistakes that are presented.

Even some of these factual mistakes seem born more out of an ignorance or misunderstanding of Moore's satire and a mischaracterization of when Moore is making an opinion. This point it seems can apply to Ebert in his critism of the film as well.

Take out the conjecture, the misunderstanding of satire, and the mischaracterization of Moore's opinions and what is left?

One last point- Cliaming that Moore's rebuttal is designed to specifically counter Hardy's critisms is quite misleading. Moore doesnt name specifically any sources that his rebuttal is aimed towards. His response is evidently meant to be quite general and touches upon some key points.

Case in point:

Moore's defense of Hardy's criticism were mostly red herrings or dodges in my opinion. By an example of a "red herring", I point out the scene in the bank when Moore got his gun for buying a CD. Moore "defends" the criticism of that scene, yet Hardy never criticized it. He said certain parts of it were suspect, but that it wasn't a serious enough deception to be included in his major arguments against the film. I noticed that Moore never answered any of the criticism with a direct answer and he did just completely ignore a couple of the most serious claims (serious in Hardy's opinion).

This appears to be a mis-characterization of Moore's response as it makes it out to seem like Moore was responding directly and specifically to Hardy's critiques and opinions when this is not the case. Hardy is not mention once in Moore's response to the wacko attacks on BFC. The fact that Moore's response is quite a general one is made clear by this part:

So, a whole host of gun lobby groups and individual gun nuts have put up websites where the smears on me range from the pre-adolescent (I'm a "crapweasel," and a "fat f-ing piece of shit") to Orwellian-style venom ("Michael Moore hates America!").

Anyway, it was fun, but I still feel like I am repeating myself and making points made like three threads back on the BFC topic. Hardy's case vs BFC is too lite on fact/heavy on conjecture to be worth tackling point by point. Anyone interested can click the links and decide for themselves.

I would rather discuss F 9/11. It seems once the few 'Moore lies in F-9/11' claims were deflated, no one wanted to discuss it anymore. On this point it turns out that Unocal has denied that Harmid Karzia (Afgan president) was ever a consultant for them. I am still looking into this as it is one factual assertion made as fact in the film ( and in varous media sources before the film) that is yet to be conclusively proven either way. Moore stated on his site that a fact sheet for F-9/11 will be made available soon so we can see sources and such for ourselves.