General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: So is every complaint about Obama wrong? Or some people just don't like to hear them? [View all]patrice
(47,992 posts)It may not be the complaints against Obama themselves that people are having problems with, but rather the manner in which claims are made. In my experience, here especially, discussion often does not get as far as substance, because the logical foundation of someone's predicate is so flawed that there just really isn't anything there worth critiquing: no foundation > no construct, only pieces of things. This problem is so common that perhaps people think criticism of PO is not permitted, when in fact, it's just a big majority of instances in which if we're going to talk about anything, we need to start with the same language.
We could go ahead and discuss about pieces of things if people want, as long as, again, we use the same language and thus witness to one another that pieces are pieces, probabilities, and not absolute knowledge, but when you want to begin with what makes a piece a piece and not a whole, many react to that defensively, as though you were telling them "You have said 0" which makes them defensive and they claim that your position is that every complaint is wrong, when in fact all you may be doing is trying to agree upon a common semantic set to discuss the topic at hand. Yes doing that does open one to critique of one's rational mind, but the principles upon which that critique is based are inherently a double-edged sword, the logical tools with which I might beat you about the head usually also applies to me too. If I can get you to use it, it becomes a discussion, not just of the relative arbitrary merits demerits of various pieces, but instead what we could use to hold those pieces together in order to construct what *WE* might refer to as approximate knowledge.
If that's too much to ask, we could always just play with the pieces of things (these various complaints) as long as we both recognize that that is what we are doing.