| donathos said: ... I disagree. I don't think holding something up as "the best" means necessarily denigrating anything else. When Miss Rhode Island wins the pageant, that doesn't mean you think Miss Arizona is ugly. ... I suspect that really we're arguing about comparison as such--that you feel it doesn't hold to compare unlike things, while I would argue that comparison only makes sense because things are unlike. ... |
The bad similitude with the beauty pageant somehow cuts it to the heart of the issue I have with the original statement.
It's not about evaluating the quality of a single term of comparison - that's perfectly legit, it's about dismissing the value of diversity.
"Nintendo makes the best games" would be akin to "caucasian girls are the most beautiful". It's such a large generalization that you either think that
a) the person making the statement is generalizing a limited experience to ethnic types (induction)
or
b) his very personal tastes match so much the caucasian ethnic type, that a girl belonging to an ethnicity will sincerely always look the most beautiful to him (deduction)
If at the same time the same person tells me that no, he actually has a great deal of experience with girls of any ethnicity, thank you - excluding a) - then it must imply b) or in other words that however beautiful an Innuit girl is, he will prefer a beautiful caucasian girl. Here's where I say that I respect his tastes, but it must mean that he doesn't appreciate the peculiarities of Innuit girls, what makes them different from his preferred type.
As for comparison in itself being the real issue, the subject is intriguing. But basically what I'm saying is that to compare unlike things you have to find some common criteria. The more different they are, the more abstract and relieved from the actual, detailed reality these criteria become. In the end you can express such an evaluation and justify it in the terms of such vague criteria, but at the price of losing all the intrinsic value of what doesn't fit them.
