this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
1052 points (81.7% liked)
Memes
45759 readers
994 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm confused, isn't criticism without alternatives itself useless and pointless?
No, it broadens and deepens understanding.
Alternatives come from that understanding. Criticism is the fundamental step towards alternatives.
How exactly do you come to that conclusion?
Edit: "Thing bad" doesn't broaden or deepen anything. "Thing has specific shortcomings which aren't present in specific alternative to thing" is a useful criticism. Criticism without alternatives is just called complaining.
"thing has specific shortcomings" is a useful criticism.
Not always, sometimes it's just an acknowledgement of insurmountable facts. Pointing out the inability of a particular engine to overcome the laws of thermodynamics to output more energy than is input is not useful criticism. Pointing out the mortality of individuals is not useful criticism. Those shortcomings are specific, but unless there's some alternative that doesn't have those shortcomings, those aren't useful observations, they're pointless complaints.
youre wrong.
if we're talking about the input requirements of some engine to drive its load and those don't match then "yells in thermodynamics" is an incredibly useful criticism.
if we're talking about a project that relies on one person then discussing their mortality is an incredibly useful criticism.
in this case, the thing we're talking about is markets and the comment youre accusing of being a pointless complaint is
which is an absolutely useful criticism. relying on markets to pass information is a holdover from before we had better methods to do so. the most profitable companies now use data outside the marketplace to make decisions to the point of developing enormous networks to collect, store, parse, interpret and disseminate that information. Cybersyn, the socialist version of this technology, allowed such powerful subversion of american plots against Chile that the only alternative was a fascist military coup.
so it's not a pointless complaint, but an accurate distillation of criticism most recently offered up to the american public eye as the book The Peoples Republic of Walmart.
My response was to the implicit irony of
Everything else is opinion, and I'm not really invested in opinions.
Your response was:
It was refuted in detail.
I quoted the top level comment for context to show that your response was wrong not just in general, but in this particular instance.
My comment was a flippant derision of the hypocrisy of the poster directly above it. I don't really care about defining pointlessness, as I haven't really cared about any part of this conversation with you.
I care about calling out hypocrisy. You read too much into my comment, and instead of letting it stand, as intended, as a directed comment toward the person I responded to, decided to interject with your opinion on pointlessness.
I repeat, opinion. You refuted nothing, you diverted from my examples to unrelated examples that used similar words. That's called a "strawman". The scenarios you refuted were not the ones I presented, you changed them in fundamental ways to justify your opinion.
I am not interested in this conversation. I repeat, my whole point was specifically the hypocrisy of the comment I responded to. I find arguing about the definition of pointlessness to be even more pointless than anything else.
If you don’t care then stop posting about it.