Skip to main content

Borat's Movie Film

 


This illustration has nothing to do with the following text. I was playing with the "insert image" tool here -- the blogger folks have changed their format a bit. And that is the image I came up with. What the heck. I'll keep it. 

I loved Borat's first "movie film," but I think I have had my fill of Borat and will probably skip this one. 

Also, given the mess that one can charitably call my country's politics, and what I've heard of the Giuliani scene, it would probably cut too close to the bone this time. So I'll give him a "thanks, but no." 

It is funny how Giuliani is talking tough about a lawsuit, though. That's not going to happen. Not in the USA, which can still boast a system that resists the attempts the efforts of the publicly powerful to silence their critics through defamation suits. I haven't heard that even the three Trumpets of the Supreme Court have any interest in erasing the line of precedent that began with Times v. Sullivan. 

Maybe that is even one of those "super precedents" one hears about. You know, the precedents with a cape and tights and the word "P" on their chests? 

But I wander. 

Maybe Giuliani will have to wait until the film opens in England. Isn't that the usual destination of the libel tourists? 

But be wary, Rudy. Recently a Hollywood star sued a London tabloid that had called him, in exactly these words, a "wife beater." He lost the suit. The court found that the tabloid had told the truth. So now there has been a formal judicial determination that the Hollywoodite in question IS a wife beater. Not the result he had hoped for 

But of course that can happen. Ask Oscar Wilde. Ask David Irving. Okay, the heck with it, sue Borat in England!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more