Criticism

I know, it is ironic, or moronic, to discuss criticisms on a website that is devoted to criticisms, but if one delved only into the world of the sensible, then one certainly would not exist, because as we all know existence is absurd.

That said, I know that I am a harsh critic in terms of most things, but are my criticisms valid. This is a notion that continually plagues me, while these feelings, ideas and opinions are my own that in of itself does not actually mean anything. They are simply an amalgamation of experiences coupled with impulses shooting across a brain that I as a human being assume is rational and intelligent, but that does not make it so. If that is the case, humans need to create an actual system of rating or criticizing things. I have always felt this way, but it was after reading Translation Criticism- Potentials and Limitations: Categories and Criteria for Translation Quality Assessment by Katharina Reiss that I really started to wonder about the entire concept of criticism and while generic criticism on a website like this is flawed at best. It is the professional critics that I have a deeper issue with and I have gone on record, when i was a much younger person, as saying professional critics are no more than 5th graders doing a book report and while retrospectively it does feel harsh and sounds like the kind of bitter remark that a writer who under a different pseudonym received some unflattering reviews, there is still some truth in it.

What qualifies a critic? In the old days they were simply journalists with almost no experience in their field, they were given a column to fill and fill it they did. They have given us odd systems such as thumbs, which is completely lacking nuance or logic and must have been designed with the most unintelligent viewers or readers in mind. There is that horrible 5 star which is also completely out of touch and is used more in the film and book industry when you are trying to prevent the releases from losing their selling power. I mean honestly 3 stars sounds ok but let us put that into a more modern out of 100 score and that means that score sits somewhere between 60 and 79. That is not an acceptable measure outside of having the ability to obscure garbage as something decent, which is what it is meant to do and that is why establishments that tend to use the star system are ones that have a high volume of garbage streaming in. Netflix (which has decent programs, but more garbage), hotels, so many seedy by the hour establishments out there. Medicaid and medicare systems, nursing homes, professional wrestling and out of touch film critics all use this system, because it is simple enough for an idiot to understand and vague enough to hide the trash. Modern film critics and systems IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic all use the one hundred system which gives some nuance to things and in this day and age we should expect our book critics to provide the same, there should be a metacritic section for novels, because I do not have the time to read every critic's 700-1000 word essay on why the author's "relentless flamboyance left me a little cold" that is a shout out to you Cal Revely-Calder. I mean reading all the critics reviews for a single book is akin to reading War and Peace and half of The Brothers Karamazov that is senseless, so I say write your local critic in your newspaper and tell them you want a decent rating system that actually reflects the work not simply a long essay that boils down to it is not as good as their first book.