Not always, sometimes it’s just an acknowledgement of insurmountable facts. Pointing out the inability of a particular engine to overcome the laws of thermodynamics to output more energy than is input is not useful criticism. Pointing out the mortality of individuals is not useful criticism. Those shortcomings are specific, but unless there’s some alternative that doesn’t have those shortcomings, those aren’t useful observations, they’re pointless complaints.
youre wrong.
if we’re talking about the input requirements of some engine to drive its load and those don’t match then “yells in thermodynamics” is an incredibly useful criticism.
if we’re talking about a project that relies on one person then discussing their mortality is an incredibly useful criticism.
in this case, the thing we’re talking about is markets and the comment youre accusing of being a pointless complaint is
I, a socialist, hate markets. They are simplistic and functional artifacts of the available way to pass information.
which is an absolutely useful criticism. relying on markets to pass information is a holdover from before we had better methods to do so. the most profitable companies now use data outside the marketplace to make decisions to the point of developing enormous networks to collect, store, parse, interpret and disseminate that information. Cybersyn, the socialist version of this technology, allowed such powerful subversion of american plots against Chile that the only alternative was a fascist military coup.
so it’s not a pointless complaint, but an accurate distillation of criticism most recently offered up to the american public eye as the book The Peoples Republic of Walmart.
My response was to the implicit irony of
The ole can have criticism without perfect solutions response. Cool, how useless and pointless of you.
Everything else is opinion, and I’m not really invested in opinions.
Your response was:
I’m confused, isn’t criticism without alternatives itself useless and pointless?
It was refuted in detail.
I quoted the top level comment for context to show that your response was wrong not just in general, but in this particular instance.
