>C'mon. People who write from the left [Michael Moore] should be
>extremely careful with their facts. There's nothing worse than having
>some right-wing or centrist wiseguy point out all the errors.... Doug
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-But in the end, does it really matter?
-I am not arguing that the Left, if it is going to use empirical
-evidence to support its claims, that that evidence shouldn't be
-solid. On the other hand, it seems once in the empirical arena, no
-amount of evidence can ever be enough. And ultimately, in a sense the
-argument almost never really requires the support of empirical
-verification.
Of course it's nice if facts are right, since it opens up a weapon to attack when not, but being funny and right on the essence of the issue is far more powerful and ultimately convincing to most people. Ronald Reagan was wrong in most of the facts he cited but he addressed concerns and issues that appealed to a lot of people, so no amount of factual nit-picking undermined his points.
Reagan once said "Facts are stupid things"-- he meant they were stubborn things, but his malpropism was probably more appropriate. People recognize that "facts" can be massaged by different experts to say opposite things, so why take such disputes too seriously? It's not that people don't respect facts from a perceived neutral source, but when political types attack other political types, most people rightly are not going to take fact-nitpicking too seriously.
Yeah, Moore played with the timelines in Flint for dramatic effect, but the real truth of despair and decline he documented was far more "true" than the nitpickers who capture the prose of life without its poetry. No one should take Moore too seriously as a scholar but he operates far more in the world of art, so people rightly give him a lot more slack.
-- Nathan Newman