David Mamet and the Irrelevance of the Actual Meanings of Words

[DonCoquixote]

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/01/david-mamet-and-the-irrelevance-of-the-actual-meanings-of-words/272675/?google_editors_picks=true

From the article:
"The Founding Fathers, far from being ideologues, were not even politicians. They were an assortment of businessmen, writers, teachers, planters; men, in short, who knew something of the world, which is to say, of Human Nature. Their struggle to draft a set of rules acceptable to each other was based on the assumption that we human beings, in the mass, are no damned good -- that we are biddable, easily confused, and that we may easily be motivated by a Politician, which is to say, a huckster, mounting a soapbox and inflaming our passions."

The author says in response:

"Which is also to say the Founding Fathers were also slaves, and by slaves I mean white guys who wore wigs. All jest aside, I find the process that produces this sort of work to be utterly amoral."

[Dawson Leery]

1. Dave made his fortune, then turned his back.

[Paladin]

2. Mamet's Taken A Deep Right-Wing Dive. Damned Shame. (nt)

[Dawson Leery]

4. Seeing that he made up his own set of "facts",

it is clear he has adapted the propaganda model of the conservative entertainment complex.

[Paladin]

6. I Agree. He's A Talented Guy; Sorry To See Him Go To The Dark Side. (nt)

[Jim__]

3. I think Andrew Sullivan gives a better rebuttal of Mamet.

Excerpt:

As for Mamet's claim that "there are more than 2 million instances a year of the armed citizen deterring or stopping armed criminals", the evidence, so far as we can glean, seems to come from a 1993 study by Gary Kleck, which is also contained in this 1995 paper (pdf) by Kleck and Gertz, which finds 2.5 million annual "defensive gun uses" by individuals each year. This puts defensive gun use at about five times the frequency of criminal gun use. But another study (pdf) by McDowall and Wiersma criticized the Kleck results by noting that "defensive gun uses" were not defined by actual use of guns in self-defense, but by claims of deterrence by people carrying concealed guns. Which may account for the difference between that datapoint and the National Crime Victimization Survey, which found that "gun offenses exceeded protective incidents by more than 10 to 1." That's not another slightly different result; that's a different universe from Mamet's anarchist mindset.

[Enrique]

5. whom did Mamet learn his history from?

Glenn Beck?