Is it time to re-evaluate the critical retort that says "well you couldn't do any better"?

I mean, seriously. It's a big internet, lots of one line zings. Lots of people sitting around just zinging people.

I know this is unthinkable, and we shouldn't have to be able to do better to criticise something, but on the other hand, isn't it becoming clear there is a correlation between sitting on your ass and not doing "any better" and lazily zinging things?

Or have I gone too far?

Truth bomb.

You used to be able to zing a ball in the street.

These days feral youths roam the internet, zinging the very life out of each other.

oh wait, are you suggesting bringing back "well you couldn't do any better"?

David Van Day in the 'phone booth last night.

I certainly couldn't have done any better.

He did quite well, didn't he? I missed it.

Um, this is a nice thread.

the person using it probably doesn't want to do what the person/work they're criticising does, so as a retort it's often moot and you might as well be saying 'i know you are but what am i'. a bit like accusing people of jealousy without specifying that they're jealous of a person's level of success but not jealous of what that person has done to achieve that (which ito won't have much value obv).

altho personally i would love to see darraghmac in goal for spurs

g00blar, YES.

x-post sometimes the person does want to be doing it, or may want to be doing it. In any case aren't there a lot of people now who spend a lot of time criticising things on the internet all day? What value does this bring to anything?

There's obviously a subjective difference in the standards of criticism of course, which is where it gets tricky. But there aren't that many astounding enlightening critiques on internet messageboards, are there?

Then why don't you try it you monkey. Oh wait.

I tend to assume this retort is almost exclusively confined to angry members of shit indie bands writing into the NME.

I agree, Garda. I agree so much that I e-mailed the BBC yesterday insisting they scrap Have Your Say (but I gave constructive suggestions too).

(or rather, redesign it, employing you in the process...)

omg stevem has actually reached the stage of writing emails of complaint already :o

this retort is rubbish because 90% of the time it is being made in the kneejerk "I should never be criticised" way DC describes above, so I would stop short of re-evaluating it but tack on a rider that people who do nothing but take the piss out of shit on the Internet should be encouraged to do things other than take the piss out of shit on the Internet from time to time

the general trend needs to swing pretty violently from "HAVE YOUR SAY! JOIN THE DEBATE! ABOUT EVERYTHING!" to "SHUT UP FOR FIVE FUCKING MINUTES, YOU ARE BASICALLY WORTHLESS"

i think it's all a question of whether you're bothered about the person doing the criticism- whether their experience/ability or effort in the field in question validates the criticism.

blueski- i've been fairly easy on gomes, but i half think i might be better than robinson. touche anyway!

lex i've been at it since birth

DJ Martian for NME Editor was a serious suggestion anyway

Steve is it true you are the only man ever to criticise his own mother for having an uncomfortable womb?

issue is maybe not so much "could you do this better" but "are you really that knowledgeable about this or are have pretty flashing links just conditioned you to weigh in on every single thing that happens despite you knowing nothing"

I respectfully withdraw this thread-premise's "Truth Bomb" designation.

Glans, yeah, or "do you have anything to say about this beyond 'x is crap'"

the general trend needs to swing pretty violently from "HAVE YOUR SAY! JOIN THE DEBATE! ABOUT EVERYTHING!" to "SHUT UP FOR FIVE FUCKING MINUTES, YOU ARE BASICALLY WORTHLESS"

epictetus bomb

that retort doesn't work because most of the time i can actually do better.

You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.

Samuel Johnson on the money. Thread premise is nonsense.

Yeah, but we can all zing a thread post, because we can all post to threads.. right?

caek...what if your trade is scolding?

doesn't scolding have any standards? WHO WILL SCOLD THE SCOLDERS

And who will stand up for the benighted scoldees? Hasn't anyone been watching Little Dorrit?

I do remember repeatedly shouting things along the lines of "how can you possibly talk about football when you manage the shittest team in the Premier League" at Ron Atkinson's ITV commentary, around the time he got Nottingham Forest relegated.

And look what happened to him.

scolder sounds like it should have something to do with x-files

cue standard quip about ron atkinson's crap vicar's speech at the prince's trust comedy thing the other saturday

Samuel Johnson on the money.

― caek, Thursday, November 27, 2008 1:06 PM (42 minutes ago)

this is advice for all time btw

doesn't scolding have any standards? WHO WILL SCOLD THE SCOLDERS

― Local Garda, Thursday, November 27, 2008 1:35 PM (58 minutes ago) Bookmark

Coastguard?

deep throat

xpost they already have a valuable job to do rescuing drug dealers.

It's more of a food chain of scolders really, with HYS as plankton.

If it's coastguards then HYS will be those two sitting on the beach.

I always think I could probably do better (than the thing I'm criticising) if I tried. It's half-hearted arrogance.

when is Chinese Jelocracy out?

December 31st, 2034!

Put it in yr diary!

Sometimes not doing anything IS doing any better.

You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.

Samuel Johnson on the money. Thread premise is nonsense.

I don't think Samuel meant a "you" that includes 14-year-old Youtube commenters. The opinions of people who are uninformed and unaccomplished tend to reflect their uninformed-ness and unaccomplished-ness.

People who are really good at something that involves creation from scratch -- artists, artisans, and craftspeople -- tend to have more interesting opinions, even if they're not an expert in that field. One of the things they figure out is that life is really short, and that getting really good at something involves sacrificing some of your mortality to that end. There's a mutual respect that a great woodworker and a great musician will instinctively share, even if they don't fully understand the nuances of each other's work, because they understand that sacrifice.

So it's not so much "could you do any better", as "can you do ANYTHING, really, or are you just another armchair schmuck who shoots his mouth off but never puts his balls on the line?"

artists, artisans, and craftspeople

There should have been an "among others" at the end of that, to include e.g. farmers.

funny that you're running with the 'creative' fields, when really the critical aspect is

People who are really good at something

Fair enough, though I don't think all "somethings" are equal in this regard, at least in terms of the amount of insight they're likely to give. I don't think you can equate a top-ranked World of Warcraft player with a great sculptor, for instance.

well, depending on if the criticism was of a sculpture, yeah.

that's not meant to be flippant, sorry- i mean that you've got to take what's being criticized into account, as well as the critic.

I don't even agree about the hierarchy of abilities...I suppose I just mean to point out how raw and simplistic opinion has become on the internet. When is there enough said for something to be valuable? When can we say one POV is more valuable than another? Obviously there's no scientific ranking system, but when would you personally say one POV is more valuable than another? Simply when you agree with it? There must be more...

who the POV comes from (an expert on the subject)
how the POV is backed up (reasoning and explanations with evidence, anecdotal or demonstrable)

blood out of a stone 19/20 tho

but who is an "expert"? how can there be evidence if people are talking about music or books or whatever?

The value is probably in the POV itself, i.e. if it makes you laugh or illuminates its subject or has something about it that makes you think it wasn''t a waste of your time to read then that's justification enough for you as a reader. The problem in tying that back to your original thought is that the laziest, most banal, witless grunt of a Youtube comment to you or me might have value to some other reader out there. People expressing their opinions on the web or anywhere else are doing many different things than just critiquing the thing they're commenting on. More often than not Having Your Say might be about bonding with like-minded strangers, confirming your own self-worth or just making rude noises to get a rise out of grown-ups.

I don't think Samuel Johnson was really thinking about "one artisan to another", by the way, although he was probably assuming that anybody who mattered shared a lot of values and education. The table gag, which I never get tired of quoting, is saying that anybody who makes use of an object is qualified to criticise it, whether the object be a table or a book or a Stereophonics single. The point is one doesn't have to be a craftsman, one judges from whether the object in question works for you.

People expressing their opinions on the web or anywhere else are doing many different things than just critiquing the thing they're commenting on.

Some of them, unwittingly though? I mean I don't think for a second that one opinion is valuable than another, I spend a lot of time fighting this, but I do wonder if there is a hierarchy in how people express opinions?

I it seems like someone posting say, "cunt" in response to a song or video on Youtube is worth less than many other possible responses?

I mean if all opinions are worth exactly the same then why do we express them in different ways? Or what is the point of doing so? Where does "information" enter into things?

I don't really know what I think about this, or have any convictions about it. I'm just interested to discuss it.

Is there such a thing as negative and positive energy, in this context?

There are values without being hierarchies, maybe. The value of a professional or informed critic to somebody who might want to choose what film to go see or what new album to buy is different than the value of somebody writing "lol more like Gordon Clown amirite?" on Have Your Say to somebody deciding which way to vote, but they're doing different things I think. It's not that the opinions are worth the same but one kind of opinion is a more or less honest or neutral attempt to impart information whereas the other is really a different kind of statement, which might be saying "I think everybody should vote this way" or "I'm not personally happy" or even "this is my team, up yours".

I don't think Samuel meant a "you" that includes 14-year-old Youtube commenters. The opinions of people who are uninformed and unaccomplished tend to reflect their uninformed-ness and unaccomplished-ness.

You're saying the opinions of idiots are not worth listening to. This is true, but it's not what we're getting at.

When can we say one POV is more valuable than another?

personal judgement call, each and every time.

let me rephrase then, when can we say one POV we disagree with is more valuable than one we agree with?

Don't have time to get into this just now, but:

one doesn't have to be a craftsman, one judges from whether the object in question works for you.

As soon as you start talking about things in terms of their use to you, you start drifting into an essentially consumption-oriented criticism (as opposed to a more reflective mode). That's fine for Consumer Reports, but it's a way of looking at things that is exceedingly limited at best, and it epitomizes a kind of bourgeois narcissism that gets very revolting, very quickly -- because you end up in a world in which everything, and everyone, is a mere object.

To put it differently, as soon as you're locating value (and critical reflection) purely in terms of use, then you're denying the subjectivity of the person, culture, and world that created the object in question. Music is just a mood-enhancing tool; art, just a nice thing to hang on the walls to get artsy girls; and so forth.

The Jonas Brothers really were terrible in the half-time of the Cowboys game this afternoon.

As soon as you start talking about things in terms of their use to you, you start drifting into an essentially consumption-oriented criticism (as opposed to a more reflective mode).

No. You recognise that art and speech have use values which differ from user to user. Dr Johnson's wonky table might be an art installation for the guy who created it, but for Johnson it's a nuisance that keeps spilling his coffee. Reflective values are great as long as you remember they're generally a high-falutin' way for a critic to say "I like A more than B" by claiming that A is somehow objectively better than B.

Noodle Vague OTM, but then that may only be because I agree with him.