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well, none of them are wrong in principle.
but in principle there's also no basis to choose between them: all turns on the question of what material/evidence you present and how you use it.
and argument would center as much on the information presented and the way inferences are drawn as on the conclusion--because in that sort of argument, the work is done in the logical machinery and not in the conclusion.
so the structure of the argument and the information provided to support it are fair game.
here's why i say this: there ARE better and worse ways to use information about the social world as the basis for political argument.
there IS coherence and there IS incoherence and even at the level of debate ABOUT policy or actions there are ways to distinguish the coherent from the incoherent that are NOT reducible to one's party-line views.
and this is the case without it following that therefore anyone has access to an unproblematic truth about the world--it aint like that--what we have are arguments about the world---->so these arguments matter.
this is the case in building analytic arguments in a historical context, and it is the case in building political arguments.
within these arguments, there are areas that can be evaluated: the information brought to bear; the way that information is interpreted; the pattern into which it is inserted; the consequences of that pattern transposed into political action.
the political is a type of argument from correspondence to information about the world.
politics IS NOT a type of argument that can be reduced to a matter of simple opinion.
i see attempts to reduce political argument to a matter of simple opinion to itself be a political argument--either as an unacceptable naive view of the political or as a view of politics centered on undermining politics itself. so i fundamentally do not accept the tendency to close oneself off in a particular information stream and then to defend that self-enclosure by saying "well its all just opinion man." it'd be better to argue outright "my political position is that there are no political positions, only opinions." and from there "my opinion cannot be subjected to criticism because in the end what matters is not its coherence, not its correspondence to the world, but my ownership of that opinion, which is like a lawn ornament. politics is like alot of lawn ornaments..."
but if you're going to do that, you might as well also own the consequences: "so therefore there is no possibility of coherent political action. everything must remain as it is because all information is mutually exclusive. information is problematic: only the real is rational."
but if you really believed that, then i dont understand why you'd participate in political debate at all.
why would it be important to you to advance arguments whose only grounds is opinion in a political context, given that the reduction of politics to opinion amounts to the erasure of politics itself? you'd be better posting about your car in another place.
"you want information about the vehicle?"
"nope, information is a problem."
"why's that?"
"dont need it. i only need to go look at my vehicle. i just went and looked at it. it's pretty nice."
so in my view the political is a particular type of argument.
there are procedures involved with making these arguments, and these procedures are public knowledge and not all such procedures are equal simply because they exist. there are rules which shape selecting and handling information, there are rules as to logic and there are rules that enable you to derive outcomes from political logic.
in the end, though, there is a question of desirability of outcomes--once you isolate a pattern and apply it to an information base and by doing that extract a sense of consequences, it is entirely possible that one could present those consequences and that different people holding different political views will not agree on their desirability.
for example, i have a hard time imagining how anyone possessing any real information could support the neoliberal policies of the imf/world bank/related development banks in the southern hemisphere. debates about this generally oppose folk who are committed to the metaphysics of capitalist markets to folk who have researched the consequences of neoliberal actions on the ground. if it is in fact the case that politics is simply a matter of opinion, it would follow that there'd be no grounds for challenging the flight into metaphysics of a neoliberal. and there'd be no grounds for a neoliberal to say anything about the social and political consequences of neoliberal policy.
there'd be no point in any of this.
intellectual self-disempowerment is in a sense more creepy and ugly than political self-disempowerment in the world because the intellectual self-disempowerment is a gratuitous act.
the reduction of politics to a space of opinion is an act of intellectual disempowerment.
personally, i want no part of it.
the typical argument between conservatives and others really involves the question of who gets to control the frame of reference on a particular topic.
if you can control the frame of reference, then you can impose coherence on your arguments/procedures.
so political arguments--which can be won or lost--are won or lost at the level of imposing a frame of reference THEN asserting a sequene of interpretive procedures.
to my mind, that's how political argument works. it works this way in the outside world, and it works in micro-manner in our collective political fishbowl.
the real problem with all this lay in the simple fact that the frame of reference operates as axiomatic. it is presupposed by arguments, and political positions can be distinguished one from the other on the basis of which frame of reference each tries to impose.
i like to think of this little fishbowl as a kind of democratic space.
in a democratic space, simple opinion means nothing--what matters is your ability to argue that opinion as a political position.
of course this isn't really a democratic space because it isn't connected to any deliberation--and these debates are not themselves deliberation because they do not issue into any action, real or potential.
so things can dissolve.
so things do dissolve.
but that's just my opinion, man.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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