Alex Callinicos/SWP vs Laurie Penny/New Statesman Facebook handbags
- Thread starter Prince Rhyus
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frogwoman
No amount of cajolery...
No worries mate!
SpineyNorman
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Seriously? You know who he is, right? He's a journalist and not a very well respected one. And I'm sure that since you find his arguments so credible you'll be able to find is a historian who backs up his ahistorical nonsense?
Actually, a historian isn't good enough is it? That's a second hand reading of a secondary source - you'll be able to find us primary source documents to back up his ahistorical arguments, right?
SpineyNorman
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frogwoman
No amount of cajolery...
got some new stuff on there too recently so be interested in peoples opinions of that as well.
i'm planning to do a post about sexual violence and capitalism at some point as well
Louis MacNeice
Autumn Journalist
Well you're a bit of a fool then; something I'll keep in mind if I read anymore of your contributions.
Louis MacNeice
newbie
undisambiguated
and thus it is that informed opinion crushes debate. To overstate slightly, I know more facts than you so your opinion is plain wrong.
Political conversation is essentially circular, much of it based on citing handy historic precedent. Just as you've done in this conversation, reaching for the protocols or enclosures or Hayek to prove that your ability to re-rehearse one or more previous 'facts' adds greater legitimacy to your opinion.
We are asked to accept that because someone knows more facts their opinion carries more weight. Does it? Well I dunno, but that's what columnists trade on. See Polly Toynbee: fact, fact, fact opinion. Dead easy to read that as fact, fact, fact FACT. Yet few people here would say that because she gets her facts right her opinions are also necessarily right.
There you are, on a plate. An opportunity to 'prove' that because she sometimes gets facts wrong, her opinion is worthless. More to the point, if she can be shown to have got a fact wrong, then the opinion I've just typed out must also be worthless and can be dismissed.
You've noted that informed opinions hinge on the underlying belief system. Well yes, and from that stems the 'facts' that are chosen by each informed opinion, and the relative importance or otherwise they should be given. Does one 'fact' trump another? It might, at the serious academic level, where such things are extensively and rigorously researched, but on a board like this, nah. The academic stuff is borrowed and conveniently promoted or undermined as appropriate. Both informed sides endlessly 'prove' facts about the twin towers or kellys death.
That's not to say debate should always be conducted from a position of complete ignorance (although many of us try
), but that it's worth attempting to distinguish between 'informed' and 'opinion' and noting that respecting the former doesn't have to imply giving credence to the latter.
JimW
支那暗杀团
If the facts they know are germane to the topic under discussion I'd say certainly the derived opinion ought to carry more weight.
Book I'm at reading just now (on Sino-Dutch war in 17th century, Koxinga versus the Dutch East India Company for Taiwan) has an example of a historical debate where new facts kept changing the game, to do with the expansion of the European colonial powers - to sum it up crudely, early belief that something superior/advanced about European societies was undermined at several turns by newly emerging evidence from Asia, e.g. bit I'm on now deals with a later iteration of the argument, that Western powers were militarily superior due to constant warfare between smaller states and that although Chinese had gunpowder hadn't used it for arms, both of which can be shown to be empirically false (former in sense that their was a sophisticated military tradition in China and the Ming especially had emerged out of a similarly lengthy period of conflict that changed war-fighting in China).
eoin_k
Lawyer's fees, beetroot and music
People aren't really using facts to support their political analysis on this thread on the whole. It seems to be more about using historical analysis to discredit an alternative account which is untenable.
newbie
undisambiguated
sure, new facts change debate. the vast number of words spent debating Kelly could all be rendered obsolete by the emergence of a single new fact.
I'm assuming you're not a world class scholar in the field, if you are, then you're somewhat out of place from the rest of us and how we debate. That aside, I'll bow to your opinion on a subject you're more informed about than I am, all the more so because you're explicit that you're basing your post on the more informed author you're reading (and all your other reading). Yet there must be other authors with equally informed opinions, but I doubt they all agree and, unless you're approaching this as a serious academic, I doubt you've read and rigorously tested all of them.
If someone else turns up equally informed but with a different opinion, approaching the same facts from a different perspective, or possibly having read or accepted other facts from different authors, you have to slug it out based on proving assertions and giving them weight. Most of us aren't academics and whist we think through what we're told are facts, we can't and don't extensively research them.
As you've been reading you've been distinguishing between fact and opinion, and you've presented what you've written as the former not the latter. If I choose to regurgitate your fact about military superiority in some later thread, am I informed or simply parroting? What I write can be invested as being informed, cos it can be made to sound so, but actually all I know is what you've just written. 'Informed' isn't necessarily sufficient with people less explicit than you've been.
I'm assuming you're not a world class scholar in the field, if you are, then you're somewhat out of place from the rest of us and how we debate. That aside, I'll bow to your opinion on a subject you're more informed about than I am, all the more so because you're explicit that you're basing your post on the more informed author you're reading (and all your other reading). Yet there must be other authors with equally informed opinions, but I doubt they all agree and, unless you're approaching this as a serious academic, I doubt you've read and rigorously tested all of them.
If someone else turns up equally informed but with a different opinion, approaching the same facts from a different perspective, or possibly having read or accepted other facts from different authors, you have to slug it out based on proving assertions and giving them weight. Most of us aren't academics and whist we think through what we're told are facts, we can't and don't extensively research them.
As you've been reading you've been distinguishing between fact and opinion, and you've presented what you've written as the former not the latter. If I choose to regurgitate your fact about military superiority in some later thread, am I informed or simply parroting? What I write can be invested as being informed, cos it can be made to sound so, but actually all I know is what you've just written. 'Informed' isn't necessarily sufficient with people less explicit than you've been.
rekil
to menny cranks
Ghastly Thatcher puff piece by Laurie's favouritest and most ledge teacher, Anthony Seldon on the Number 10 site.
andysays
Love and solidarity
Does your description of Seldon mean he's the one of Laurie's teachers you'd most like to push off a ledge?
Maybe those who suggest there's too much violent hatred on this thread have a point
JimW
支那暗杀团
Well, the point there was not what my opinion might be, just happened to be currently reading something with an example of a debate (and it was a back and forth with new facts supporting various positions) where certain positions became untenable because of emerging information that no-one reasonable was going to dispute. So while there's wiggle room in almost anything, there are usually certain positions that are just plain wrong (ETA and can be shown to be so).
SpineyNorman
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With all due respect, I don't think you've understood what I was saying at all. I said that there are differences of opinion between equally informed positions. Nobody is denying this at all.
The point I was making, possibly quite clumsily given that it seems to have been misunderstood - is that whilst there is no such thing as a 'right' opinion on political and social questions (for a variety of reasons - contested evidence, the role of values and principles that are not shared by both sides of a debate and so on) there are most definitely wrong ones - ones that are based on false premises - incorrect claims about how the world is now rather than how it should be.
el-ahrairah
forward communism, forward gerbils!
new statesman doing cutting edge commentary http://www.newstatesman.com/lifesty...ing-mistakes-avoid-if-you-dont-want-die-alone
Idris2002
canadian girlfriend
I'd love to get a message that began "hey, sexy".
newbie
undisambiguated
You're right that that's not what I read you as saying, so thanks for the clarification.
Why should they even come up as a point of comparison though? Other than both being women and journalists (and one a columnist, the other a news broadcaster) I can't really see much similarity?
Point is, they can be as bad as each other in their own different ways. Kay Burley might have made Peter Andre cry, but her job isn't to recuperate radical movements for the Independent and New Statesman.
*post of the day* award to you!
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
What's your new title suggestion?
British left commentators: The bubbletariat.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
...is a cliché, and should be treated as such.
trabuquera
Modesty Bag
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