Did you guys watch SiCKO? What did you think?

[steppinthrax]

I watched it, got boring twords the end. I thought it was pretty good. It's one sided though. But it gets it's point across.

 

[TheSlamma]

Fat guys should not make films about health anything.

 

[PatboyX]

Originally posted by: TheSlamma
Fat guys should not make films about heath anything.

What about heath bars?

I haven't seen the movie yet. I wasn't aware it is out.
Anyway, I imagine it will be like his other films. But, at the very least, people may start caring slightly more about our current health care system.

 

[umbrella39]

Originally posted by: TheSlamma
Fat guys should not make films about heath anything.

Guess what flavor this is: Great commentary. Since I have not seen the movie, I won't make stupid ass remarks about it.

 

[Tab]

It felt like a really big emotional appeal towards socialized heathcare. While I am no fan of Mr. Moore I did find the part about how figures like Reagan actually made records criticize socialized healthcare; but I suppose things were a bit different back then too... Right?

Anyway, I didn't really get a whole lot out of the film. At least I can I say I watched the film...

On a second thought, the problem with healthcare isn't so much the industry but the corruption inside of the industry - that's what hurting us. I don't really see how moving towards a different system would solve this anyhow...

 

[fskimospy]

I thought it was amazing. The part with the lady and her husband who died of cancer made me want to cry.

Of course it was one sided though... it's a Michael Moore movie. He's come out many times and said his movies aren't like PBS nature documentaries, but that they are editorial pieces.

 

[blackangst1]

Originally posted by: Tab
It felt like a really big emotional appeal towards socialized heathcare. While I am no fan of Mr. Moore I did find the part about how figures like Reagan actually made records criticize socialized healthcare; but I suppose things were a bit different back then too... Right?

Anyway, I didn't really get a whole lot out of the film. At least I can I say I watched the film...

On a second thought, the problem with healthcare isn't so much the industry but the corruption inside of the industry - that's what hurting us. I don't really see how moving towards a different system would solve this anyhow...

Unfortunately thats the problem with many industries. But it's inevitable no matter what system you have in place.

 

[steppinthrax]

Well see on the flip-side I was reading that Michael Moore kind of glorified Canadian Health care. Many Canadians said their system is not perfect and have lots of problems. For one your heavily taxed for it.

 

[JulesMaximus]

I haven't seen it but I did hear Michael Moore on the Howard Stern show last week and he was a great guest. I haven't seen any of his movies but I would like to see this one.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

<div class="FTQUOTE"><begin quote>Originally posted by: eskimospy
I thought it was amazing. The part with the lady and her husband who died of cancer made me want to cry.

Of course it was one sided though... it's a Michael Moore movie. He's come out many times and said his movies aren't like PBS nature documentaries, but that they are editorial pieces.</end quote></div>

I wouldn't watch it for free.

NPR did a review of his movie which pointed out things which were true, and things which were outright lies. At the end they played Moore yelling at the interviewers (who had the facts at hand) and denied everything they could prove, and called it "typical" NPR- being shills for the Conservatives

Moore lies like a rug. I won't watch a thing he does.

 

[Craig234]

Haven't seen it yet, but I'm disappointed he didn't cover Germany; Thom Hartmann, who I have a very good opinion of, has said he thinks Germany's system is probably the best.

I look forward to seeing it.

In theory, democracy means an informed public voting well; in practice, the public is propagandized by monied interests, and people like Moore are needed to stir up the public opinion.

Even people like Oliver Stone, who made a movie with a lot of falsehoods with JFK, did a lot of good by exciting the public interest and largely causing a lot of records to be released. Sure, I wish he'd been accurate, but the accurate films didn't have the impact he did, and that counts for something. Democracy can be messy. So, I'll condemn the inaccuracy and praise the good things.

 

[Arkaign]

Moore is the slightly more eloquent Limbaugh of the left. I have little use for either, maybe we can give them a couple of all-you-can-eat passes to Jim's Grease-N-Critters buffet and let them explode.

You have to admit, that like Limbaugh, Moore will take a grain of truth and then embellish it with ten layers of crap, then spin it into the stratosphere with massive partisan interpretation.

 

[Craig234]

Moore advocates good polices, and Limbaugh advocates evil. They're fundamentally different.

Yes, Moore is not always accurate, though far moreso than Limbaugh. That doesn't make them the same.

Moore is out pushing good causes, imperfectly, and I think he's a hero for doing it.

 

[Sinsear]

Originally posted by: Craig234
Moore advocates good polices, and Limbaugh advocates evil.They're fundamentally different.

That's your opinion. Please don't state it like it is fact. The only fact is that they are both partisan hacks with an agenda. And on top of both of their agendas IMO is to make $$$.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

Originally posted by: Craig234
Moore advocates good polices, and Limbaugh advocates evil. They're fundamentally different.

Yes, Moore is not always accurate, though far moreso than Limbaugh. That doesn't make them the same.

Moore is out pushing good causes, imperfectly, and I think he's a hero for doing it. He saved one life alone on his early TV show where he helped a man get a life-saving operation by challenging the HMO. That's not to say the HMO is always wrong; it's just an example, in contrast to Limbaugh.

If one person were advocating the KKK and another the fight to cure cancer, even if they had equal factual inaccuracies in their arguments, I wouldn't equate their efforts.

On the other hand many believe Limbaugh is good, and Moore represents evil. Good and evil are in the eye of the beholder, however to tell a lie to promote "the good" is not heroic. It makes whoever tells a lie a liar.

One "good" thing was the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Back in August 1964 there was a minor skirmish what was turned into an almost complete fabrication. LBJ "knew" that when Vietnam fell, so would all the other countries do the same, and fall into evil Communism. What was needed was to show a Truth larger than the facts in order to motivate American support to defeat the Communists, who after all wanted to eat your babies (yes that was tongue in cheek).

In short, Johnson lied because it was for the benefit of society, and considering the Cuban Missle Crisis in which the US narrowly escaped nuclear destruction, it wasn't altogether an unreasonable thought.

Nor was it unreasonable to lie about WMDs. Virtually everyone thought there MUST be something there. Once we landed, they would be found just as everyone knew they would, but SUPRISE!

Being a liar makes a person precisely one thing. A liar. It shows the person is willing to distort provable facts to fit an agenda. There is no reason to assume that they wouldn't lie to you if it suited their purpose. Good should never sleep with Trechery.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

Did Moore mention that we're spending gobs of money to provide health care for illegal aliens and their families? I bet he didn't.

Did Moore mention that one of the problems is the increasing percentage of Americans who live near or below the poverty line and that, thus, the nation's overall economic malaise is a big contributor to the problem (regardless of whether you have free market or socialized medicine)? I doubt it; I don't think he's that smart.

We can enact socialized medicine, but if the nation's economy falters, it won't do that much good because even socialized medicine is not free. I'm in favor of semi-socialized medicine, but at the same time I recognize that the ability to provide health care is dependent on the rest of the economy. If global labor arbitrage transforms the United States into a third world country, then even an ideal health care system would provide poor care and poor coverage.

 

[jman19]

Originally posted by: Hayabusa Rider
<div class="FTQUOTE"><begin quote>Originally posted by: Craig234
Moore advocates good polices, and Limbaugh advocates evil. They're fundamentally different.

Yes, Moore is not always accurate, though far moreso than Limbaugh. That doesn't make them the same.

Moore is out pushing good causes, imperfectly, and I think he's a hero for doing it. He saved one life alone on his early TV show where he helped a man get a life-saving operation by challenging the HMO. That's not to say the HMO is always wrong; it's just an example, in contrast to Limbaugh.

If one person were advocating the KKK and another the fight to cure cancer, even if they had equal factual inaccuracies in their arguments, I wouldn't equate their efforts.</end quote></div>


On the other hand many believe Limbaugh is good, and Moore represents evil. Good and evil are in the eye of the beholder, however to tell a lie to promote "the good" is not heroic. It makes whoever tells a lie a liar.

One "good" thing was the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Back in August 1964 there was a minor skirmish what was turned into an almost complete fabrication. LBJ "knew" that when Vietnam fell, so would all the other countries do the same, and fall into evil Communism. What was needed was to show a Truth larger than the facts in order to motivate American support to defeat the Communists, who after all wanted to eat your babies (yes that was tongue in cheek).

In short, Johnson lied because it was for the benefit of society, and considering the Cuban Missle Crisis in which the US narrowly escaped nuclear destruction, it wasn't altogether an unreasonable thought.

Nor was it unreasonable to lie about WMDs. Virtually everyone thought there MUST be something there. Once we landed, they would be found just as everyone knew they would, but SUPRISE!

Being a liar makes a person precisely one thing. A liar. It shows the person is willing to distort provable facts to fit an agenda. There is no reason to assume that they wouldn't lie to you if it suited their purpose. Good should never sleep with Trechery.

It is, moreso, a scale of what is good and evil - the further you are to one end, the more "evil" you are... at least in my opinion

 

[nageov3t]

it's michael moore, so I just kind of assumed that everything in the movie was half-truths and smoke and mirrors, though there's certainly a valid point underneath and grandstanding, self-aggrandizing soap box'ing.

 

[Craig234]

I'm not condoning falsehoods by Moore - they're wrong, period. It's missing the point to say that all political messages with lies are equally wrong, though.

To get even more complicated, sometimes we're faced with hard choices of lesser evils. For example, I think John Kennedy being elected president over Richard Nixon in 1960 was a far better thing - and yet, JFK was faced with a political culture that led him to use a dishonest issue, a phony 'missile gap', in the campaign; it was a lie. For the sake of argument, if you assume that his doing that was needed to win, it raises large questions about what to do when the public opinion is 'wrong' in someone's view. Does JFK lying about that mean Nixon would have been the better president? A classic example is FDR's misleading the nation, lying it can be argued, about getting in to WWII. In hindsight, Americans strongly approve of his getting America into the war, but he had to mislead them in various ways when public opinion was against the war. Should he have not lied, if the price would have been not being ready for war, even losing the war?

It's hard to spout off simplistic answers, since either option seems unacceptable, saying it's ok to lie, or saying it's ok to lose WWII (again, if for the sake of argument, that had been the choice). By condoning the exception lie, are you condoning all lies by any president for any reason?

This is why I tend to put the motive of the person into the equation, rather than just looking at whether they lied. I have the luxury of not having high prices for my own policy not to lie; I understand that presidents are in a far tougher situation. Filmmakers and pundits are not, and have no excuse for lying IMO. But that doesn't make Moore and Limbaugh the same at all.

Question for commentary: FDR effectively lied to the American people by hiding his disability while running for president, to counter the prejudice against the disabled.

Assuming he faced not getting elected if he had revealed it honestly, was he wrong to hide it, to effectively lie to the American people about it to get elected around the prejudice?

 

[ericlp]

I thought the film was interesting. We need more films like this. I found it interesting of the protesting in France, where hardly anyone protests here tho, bushes numbers are way down. I think people here are afraid of the government.

One thing that keeps coming up in the movie was... from that British dude that said, if you can find money to kill people then you can find the money to help people....

That was pretty powerful, since, we spending a crap load in Iraq, just think if we used the cash to help our people here? No one wants to think about that tho.

I liked that Canada, Briton, France are all on free health care. I'm sure he could have gotten a few reports where people died.

I mean, people die in hospitols. It's a fact... Can't save them all and hospitals are run by humans, and humans make mistakes. It's a sad fact of life. I think there is always two sides to every story. Moore didn't focus on any positives about all the good America does.

He basically painted a rosy picture for others and pretty much a grim picture for the USA. Yeah, there is a lot of corruption and greed in the drug industry. America needs a lot of work. But, I am sure England and France needs a bit of work themselves. Should we change our heath system to a free social health care? Maybe we should try it out in a few states and see how it works out?

 

[Rainsford]

<div class="FTQUOTE"><begin quote>Originally posted by: Sinsear
<div class="FTQUOTE"><begin quote>Originally posted by: Craig234
Moore advocates good polices, and Limbaugh advocates evil.They're fundamentally different.</end quote></div>

That's your opinion. Please don't state it like it is fact. The only fact is that they are both partisan hacks with an agenda. And on top of both of their agendas IMO is to make $$$.

</end quote></div>

Oh boo hoo, quit being so PC. This isn't kindergarten, not all ideas are equally valid and not all viewpoints are equally good. This moral relativism is pretty sad, especially coming from the right (don't you guys supposedly hate that kind of thing?).

Edit: But I will agree that they are both partisan hacks with an agenda...and they DO both seem to be pretty interested in making money. That doesn't mean Moore's points aren't worth debating (or Rush's, for that matter).

 

[shadow9d9]

Originally posted by: Hayabusa Rider
<div class="FTQUOTE"><begin quote>Originally posted by: eskimospy
I thought it was amazing. The part with the lady and her husband who died of cancer made me want to cry.

Of course it was one sided though... it's a Michael Moore movie. He's come out many times and said his movies aren't like PBS nature documentaries, but that they are editorial pieces.</end quote></div>

I wouldn't watch it for free.

NPR did a review of his movie which pointed out things which were true, and things which were outright lies. At the end they played Moore yelling at the interviewers (who had the facts at hand) and denied everything they could prove, and called it "typical" NPR- being shills for the Conservatives

Moore lies like a rug. I won't watch a thing he does.

The michael moore hate websites are perfect for you then. They try to pick a handful of unimportant points, try to argue against them with semantics, and then say "he lies" and fools like you eat it up.

It is sad that people nowadays need to have other people analyze things for them instead of actually having to do the work themselves. It would be difficult for people to see one of his movies and actually do some research and analysis themselves. it is much easier to rely on websites that push the opinion that the person already wants to believe! It is what the internet is perfect for!

 

[shadow9d9]

Originally posted by: Sinsear
<div class="FTQUOTE"><begin quote>Originally posted by: Craig234
Moore advocates good polices, and Limbaugh advocates evil.They're fundamentally different.</end quote></div>

That's your opinion. Please don't state it like it is fact. The only fact is that they are both partisan hacks with an agenda. And on top of both of their agendas IMO is to make $$$.

That isn't a fact. That is called your opinion.

 

[shadow9d9]

Originally posted by: WhipperSnapper
Did Moore mention that we're spending gobs of money to provide health care for illegal aliens and their families? I bet he didn't.

Did Moore mention that one of the problems is the increasing percentage of Americans who live near or below the poverty line and that, thus, the nation's overall economic malaise is a big contributor to the problem (regardless of whether you have free market or socialized medicine)? I doubt it; I don't think he's that smart.

We can enact socialized medicine, but if the nation's economy falters, it won't do that much good because even socialized medicine is not free. I'm in favor of semi-socialized medicine, but at the same time I recognize that the ability to provide health care is dependent on the rest of the economy. If global labor arbitrage transforms the United States into a third world country, then even an ideal health care system would provide poor care and poor coverage.

If you haven't seen the movie, what is the point of arguing something against it with ASSumptions? Don't waste our time please.

 

[shadow9d9]

Please, if you haven't seen the movie, and if you already hate michael moore, you shouldn't be posting in this thread. This is about people who have SEEN the movie, not people with agenda or hate for a movie and its creator without actually knowing what they are talking about! You need to see the movie in order to criticize it. It is sad that nowadays people just need to make assumptions and read hate websites to feel qualified to criticize something they haven't seen.