Apart from naming the author I didn’t feel it necessary to upbraid any single individual and make any specific point - it was a sweeping statement based on an overall feel of the whole comments thread.
If you don’t really have that genuine familiarity with a subject from close personal experience of it, and from your life having been affected by the dynamics of a thing, in this case English politics, to the extent that the history is a part of your experience also, then when you talk about that subject it is likely your inexperience will show. Unless that is, you are an exceptional writer and researcher, or actor say.
I sense from the way you have phrased your comment that you want to bring me down a peg or two and challenge my impertinence. However, I shall not sir, give you the satisfaction.
It is usually a good idea to point out at least some specific issues that you perceive as wrong. That’s the direction in which the overall discussion improvements lies.
In comparison, general chastisings don’t have much of an effect.
It might have an effect if it makes people honestly, and privately, assess whether they do know about a subject without someone having to personally criticize them publicly.
I’m not overly concerned about the direction of the overall discussion improvement.
Then you are doomed to eternal criticism of an unchanging status quo. Not exactly an enviable position.
As an outsider to UK politics, I would like to know what specific aspects in both the parent article and the discussions are wrong. If you have that information, please share.
Nope. Sorry. You’ll just have to accept my doom graciously. The terrible fate of my being reviled for refusing to back up my outrageous scattergun slur in a 6000 page essay in a comments thread, is a personal humiliation I will have to bear for an eternity that is only relevant within this comments thread’s continuum.
Obviously the 6000 page essay is a made up thing, so they wouldn’t be able to read it anyway. I already said I felt this sense of naivety around this subject, and there’s nothing wrong with that in itself as long as people don’t pretend they understand it more intimately - the naivety I am picking up on comes from a lack of a direct experience of the political reality that by default brings with it an historical understanding. An itemized list is not really congruent with the feeling I am describing.
What’s “direct experience of the political reality”? Is there even a single actor who has it complete? Where are the thresholds - being in the House of Lords, living in London, in England, in the Commonwealth?
How can we recognize those with “direct experience of the political reality” from those with only indirect one or none at all? Is there a certification body of experts, with exams and a diploma in a cheap plastic frame?
I’m talking about the kind of direct experience of a situation, that might be, at times, so acute as to put you in fear for your life for instance, the kind of direct experience that might involve very intense emotions about this or that political paradigm and also increase one’s need to gain knowledge about it in order to survive, and in order to understand one’s own history.
If someone has that kind of experience and reads writing by people who - though they may be somewhat versed in the subject - also seem to lack the same visceral sense of these things, they are going to notice.
Not everything can be itemized and there are things I am not willing to share in a forum like this as a rule anyway.
How can you distinguish between those with direct experience of a political reality and those who are, say, commentators who perhaps have less experience of being subject to such a political reality? I don’t know if there is a system for dis as to how that can be universally applied. I find the thing tends to work out that people who have had direct experience of something can gauge whether a person who is talking about it has the same depth of experience of it.
Quite a wishy-washy argument. Somewhat similar to the intelligence service heads’ “if you’d know what I know” family of statements.
Did not help me, and presumably anybody else, to be any wiser about the situation.
Also, such deep visceral-level experience can make you prone to emotional instead of rational reactions, and blind you instead of opening your eyes more. It is a double-edged sword.
so according to you direct communication is impossible?
and even if it were, you wouldn’t give out that kind of information anyway, presumably.
i guess old hands like you can just tell while all of us outsiders are being misled by the perspectives of other outsiders whose perspectives couldn’t possibly be of value because . . . why? they aren’t insiders? if you’re going to argue that another’s opinion or perspective isn’t useful or accurate it generally requires a more specific explanation of what is lacking.
presumably this means that you’re packing it in because someone didn’t just take your word for it and bow to your superior knowledge. arguing from superior knowledge generally works best if you actually make a good faith effort to demonstrate that knowledge and take active steps to enlighten and inform the conversation with that knowledge.
He’s four, so TV doesn’t really sway me yet. When he’s older, and hopelessly compromised by the brainwashing of centrally designed popular culture, I’ll probably give in.
This is the classic problem with terrorists. You have to keep alert and not only spot but also stop them every time they try an attack… if they succeed even ONCE, they’ve won.
It’s especially bad when the individual terrorists are protected by a regime unwilling to remove them.
