Originally Posted by
ramAnag
Sorry GP, I think all you’re doing is moving onto the safer ground of semantics as regards what is ‘knowledge’.
If I follow your reasoning above I would only have an opinion on four MP’s because I have only ever met, and conversed with, four MP’s, and history would be a complete waste of time with nothing to teach us because, of course, we haven’t met people from the past.
To an extent it is true to say that ‘history is written by the winners’ as it is true to say that what we know of current individuals we learn through (and via which maybe very different) the media.
My ‘knowledge’...of characters from General Haig to Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela to Boris Johnson is then formed by a combination of biography, historical account, media interview and media reporting. I won’t always be right, but I’ll back myself to be bright enough to be able to sort the wheat from the chaff as far as those accounts are concerned.
That’s what we, as human beings do, even with the people we think we know, and indeed with the contributors on here, very few - if any - of whom have actually met each other, but most of whom would be able to venture an opinion on who they’d actually be happy to spend time or see eye to eye with.