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by smeej
587 days ago
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Commentary has its place, but it's in the context of primary sources. It can't stand on its own. And there's a vast quality chasm between expert commentary and mainstream news commentator commentary. I can't speak to everyone's experience, but I have never been to an event later reported in the news where the news report corresponded to what I witnessed enough for me to believe the reporter was even there. And anymore, they aren't. They're trying to synthesize observations from dozens of different people, who themselves may or may not have been there, and doing it so fast they don't have a chance to verify whether they were. It's like a giant game of "telephone," but it's presented as though it's all fact. In the specific example of the law, I was specifically saying, "[Politician] approved the change of a law from saying X to saying Y," so the text of the law before and after the politician's approval was the specific issue in question. I can see why there would be lots of situations where expert legal commentary would be important to understanding the impact of the change, but in this case, my brother was trying to say that politician hadn't changed the law at all, which just plain wasn't true. |
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And there’s a good chance that he rejects evidence to the contrary, or if finally faced with evidence beyond refute, it changes nothing, right?
One possible explanation for stuff like this is that you’re dealing with someone that has an anti-realist meta-ethic, which is not so unusual, but what is new is the blurred boundary between factual questions and ethical questions. Something like “Fair election?” would seem to be a clear and concrete question about the world, but the answer you’d get is always for a different question, and so it amounts to boo or hurrah. Even asking a simpler question about a specific policy changing or staying the same cannot untangle the discourse if that question is perceived as too close to an ethical one.
See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressivism , https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotivism , https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-cognitivism , etc.