This seems to be dominating my thinking and conversation today. So it’s going to dominate my posting too.
I am so sick of every issue in the world – from the question of league v union, the question of musical taste, through to the question of morality and “evil” – being turned into a murky pot of subjectivity where claiming objective knowledge of an absolute is frowned upon.
You can’t even call Hitler evil anymore.
Things just are. They either are, or they aren’t. The question of which game you prefer (league, or union) is subjective. The question of which game is better is objective.
Signing up for an “objective” assessment requires pretty clear terms of reference. Which is almost impossible because of this desire to be “relative” in all things.
Comments
That depends. What do you use to measure the term ‘comment’? There are certain posts here that I wouldn’t rate as genuine ‘comments’. This whole criterion is so subjective that… blah, blah…
Chris: I don’t think Nathan ever suggested I was confused over your stance, but rather that your confusion over his stance was also making me confused :P
Either way, it was his stance I was confused about.
Nathan: Those points you laid out sound pretty good to me. But I still don’t think you can really say “X sport is the best” unless you are using specific parameters to measure it, like you suggested in your list of points you were making. So for example, “Rugby league is the best at keeping the ball moving” or “Tennis is the best at developing hand-eye coordination” (I don’t know if that’s true, I’m just making things up). You can’t really say “Rugby League is the best because the ball is in motion more” or something similar. I personally believe that comment to be true, but I recognise that’s a subjective comment – that just because the ball is in motion more makes it a better sport. Sport is all about the enjoyment of the people watching/participating, and people enjoy different things; their taste is subjective.
So we could say “Rugby League is the best at keeping the ball moving”, but we couldn’t say “Rugby League is the best because it keeps the ball moving” because that might not be what all spectators/players are after.