You are not entitled to your opinion

[ciphergoth]

• You Are Never Entitled to Your Opinion
  
• Sorry, but you are not entitled to your opinion
  
• Why You Are Not Entitled To Your Opinion

You are, I think, entitled to the right to hold and express any opinion without being shut down by the State for doing so; that is where the entitlement ends.

[Poll #1410915]
(edit: removed Harlan Ellison quote, which doesn't really express what I'm getting at here)

Comments

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

It's often used as social WD-40, and I think is possibly useful, sometimes, in that.

From my experience, if it's used as a conversational "safeword" - "Look, I'm getting bored/threatened/unhappy in this conversation" - I'd quite often respect it, and it's useful to have it there for that purpose. It's a way of people backing out of a conversation without revealing weakness as they would if they just said "Look, you're making me feel bad", or escalating the conflict by saying "Would you shut the fuck up, you're pissing me off."

There are other ways to achieve the same thing, possibly better ones, but you can't really expect everyone to use your preferred conversational codes.

In the political arena or the public eye - that's a different kettle of fish. But as a way of making sure a friendly discussion doesn't turn into a violent argument with an evening-ruining blast radius, I'm prepared to tolerate it.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I'd prefer to use some formulation of "let's agree to disagree" on that one, which has its own problems but I think carries less poisonous baggage. Obviously not everyone will choose the same wording as me, but I do what I can to persuade people not to choose the brain poison.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

I think the worst one I heard (in a debate about the existance of God, funnily enough) was, "There is more than one sort of truth". No, really, there's not.

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

Erm, yes there is. There's conditional truth and universal truth and subjective truth. There's logical certainty and there's "extremely likely on the basis of the evidence". These are all quite different, all perfectly valid definitions of truth, and most importantly all useful.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing that valkyriekaren meant that the different sorts of truth could safely contradict each other, and that really doesn't make sense.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Yes, this is exactly what I meant - the individual was trying to claim that 'There is a God' and 'There is no God' were statements that could coexist because they were talking about different 'truths', which was completely meaningless.

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

Ah, fair enough. I wonder if they were mangling the argument (which I may be about to express poorly myself) that it's equally (in)valid to say that God exists and that God doesn't exist, because God isn't the sort of object to which a quality like existence can apply.

But I agree that "there are different kinds of truth such that both a statement and its negation are true" is bunk.

[wight1984.livejournal.com]

When I hear it said, it is typically to suggest that 'truth' doesn't exist outside of subjective belief, so simply believing something makes it 'true for them' and hence they can't be said to be incorrect. Bugs me a lot :oP

[devilgate.livejournal.com]

Oh, they're entitled to their opinion.

:-)

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

I agree - I'd prefer that too. "I'm entitled to my opinion" is, apart from anything else, more confrontational and more likely to escalate.

I guess you could ask people if they mean "let's agree to disagree".