Whatever. I posted an opinion I still hold - that people can contribute to this thread without posting a timeline.
Sometimes I think some prefer this thread to be an echo chamber......
This is a strawman position, based (I am almost certain) on an underlying wish to agitate against a particular group of people than a sincere wish to advance the debate.
Suppose I went on (say) a cricket Ashes series thread (England vs Australia test cricket, for the uninitiated
), in the middle of the last Ashes series, when England were already 2-0 down. Suppose that most people on the thread were arguing that Australia were definitely going to win the series, and that it might very well be a whitewash (which indeed, in the event, it was).
Suppose that I threw my hat into the ring and posted a comment that simply said: "I don't think Australia are going to win the series. I think England are going to win the next three matches and take the Ashes". Now, it would at that point be
entirely reasonable for a "pro-Australia" participant to say to me: "Why do you think that? What are your reasons? Do you think that England are going to change their batting lineup substantially? Do you think they are going to find a better way to take 20 Australian wickets in the match?"
Of course it would be my prerogative to simply lob in the unsupported post that I thought England were going to win the next three tests and retain the Ashes.
Of course I would be under zero obligation to justify my opinion. And
of course I would be entirely on-topic at all times. But it would be entirely reasonable and logical for those who believed in the "pro-Australia" position to
ask me to support my point of view.
And so it is in the Knox/Sollecito thread here. If people write posts on this thread that either naysay others' opinions, or make active claims in another area, it's perfectly appropriate for people to ask those posters to support and justify the factors that are necessary to underpin their opinions. In our case, it's essentially impossible to hold either an overarching view on the case (i.e. did Knox/Sollecito participate or not) or even individual elements (e.g. was there a clean-up or not) without being able to construct an underlying/underpinning narrative of the whole event. And the most critical part of that narrative is a coherent narrative that also fits all the known evidence.
In short, if somebody cannot posit an underlying narrative to underpin their position, then it's highly likely that they cannot have thought about the issue deeply or rationally enough to come to a properly-informed point of view. And
of course people can decline to expose their narrative to the light, or to say that they don't even have one. But if that's the case, then I think that others are entitled to draw certain inferences from that refusal.
And, frankly, it's more than a little tiring to see the same old characters popping in from time to time with a snipe that's wholly related to a meta-discussion of the dynamics of this thread, rather than any actual attempt to engage in the debate that is the real topic of the thread. It's also very revealing. But if that's what floats some people's boats, then so be it.
Myself, I'm just off to a thread discussing the minimum wage, but not to make any contribution to the debate about whether the minimum wage works in practice, how/if it should be modified, what the level of the wage should be, etc. No, I am popping in there merely to make observations on how certain posters within the thread are acting. That's how I get
my kicks
