Personal opinions - I AM RIGHT!

here's an interesting link for you...

"I could never do that, I have to say. If I like something, I'll always defend it as something "good". People often say "Am I wrong for liking this? I know it's crap, really". I don't understand that. I don't expect to convince anyone, but I'd never accept that my love of something is "wrong" because I'm in a minority, or because its widely considered to be bad form to like it, etc.

1) Things only exist in relation to the observer.
2) "Good" + "Bad" only exist in relation to the observer.
3) Therefor, "Good"+"Bad" are absolute when attached to something, since they only exist from an observers point of view.

Does that make sense? Am I repeating myself? Waaaaaa?

(I stand by my radical subjectivism still.)

Further explication of Ned joke: this is part of an issue that's been run through on very high levels over and over during the history of ILM. Everyone has a different take on it.

Johnny B: what you're saying isn't even as complicated as you're making it out to be. What you're saying is basically that when someone says "this is good" it should just be taken as given that that's an opinion -- since it can't really be anything else -- and that, just for the purpose of saving time, they shouldn't have to put a big "this is just my opinion" disclaimer in front of it.

What Mark gets at on the thread linked above is that "good" is a very big concept and includes a lot of different elements -- skill, importance, relevance, personal response, and a million others -- and that sometimes it's useful to be able to think about these things independently. This is especially true if you're writing about music, on this board or in print: if you want to communicate to others about music, you have to be able to go beyond your internal like/dislike meter and think about what specific things matter and work in any given piece of music, not to mention who they'll work for and why.

In other words, the problem with saying "this is rubbish (I don't need to point out that this is an opinion)" isn't that there's some objective reality in which it's not rubbish and therefore you are wrong -- it's that by limiting yourself to just that you're living in a very solipsistic world in which you're not going to have helpful communications with other people. The sort of radical subjectivity Ned, for instance, subscribes to is not at all incompatible with self-examination: you can have your opinion that something is rubbish, but if you're around others who disagree, the best way to have a productive conversation is to look at your opinion and figure out why you hold it -- which means both looking at the record and figuring out why it's rubbish and also looking at yourself and figuring out what causes you to think that.

Also, "American Girls" was a great single, good work dude.

I mean, I admit that even severe head-butting "Avril sux U R all gay" conversations do, weirdly, carry a lot of meaning, because they create lines about what different sides are ostensibly all about -- when anti-war and pro-war demonstrators in Chicago started shouting "killers" vs. "idiots" at one another they were still framing a particular debate and a particular way of looking at the issue (a really stupid frame, incidentally). Same goes for kids shouting about whether Fred Durst or Jonathan Davis is "gay."

But a "productive" conversaion, in my book, is one in which people aren't just thwapping their subjective good/bad opinions up against one another and deciding everyone else is insane -- it's one in which people can actually manuever around different aspects of good/bad, figure out what they do agree on about something, see it through one another's eyes a bit more clearly, and theoretically in the end get a truer picture of what the thing in question is, in all of its facets.

An "unproductive" conversation about music might go like this: I say "this record is great" / you say "this record sucks" / I say "but it's so fun" / you say "but it's so stupid" / I say "you are stupid" / you say "no your mama is stupid." The only things of value that conversation produces are (a) I like it and you don't, and (b) it has something to do with my thinking it's fun and your thinking it's stupid. A "productive" conversation might have us going on to talk about what we mean by "fun" and by "stupid," what different views and values we have that bring us to that point, and how those views and values might relate to other things beyond this particular record. This conversation is not going to bring us to any conclusive decision beyond the initial "I like it and you don't" -- chance are I'll still like it and you still won't. But the point of talking about it, hopefully, was to see deeper into all that other stuff. Because if we're not going to talk about that other stuff, there's hardly any point in our even talking, is there? We might as well just say "I like it, you don't, case closed, everyone shuts up now" -- and we never get to have the fun of actually discussing the important stuff beyond that.

and also c) you think oops is stupid and he thinks your mama's stupid, which is some pretty juicy information right there.

This conversation is not going to bring us to any conclusive decision beyond the initial "I like it and you don't" -- chance are I'll still like it and you still won't.

True in most cases, but not always- I've changed my mind about certain records after talking to very articulate fans of 'em on more than one occasion