Indeed, the closer you look, the more unconvincing the idea of its imminent demise appears.
It depends on metaphysical assumptions about the nature of mind (soul) that are philosophically unconvincing, involving obscure ideas that are plainly at odds with our everyday experience and observations concerning the relationship between mind and body.
There is something unconvincing about the idea that we can stop Al Qaeda just by making Afghanistan a friendlier place — it has other options.
Whether the Web is making us smarter or dumber, isn't there something just unconvincing about the idea that an occult "span" in the brain makes certain cultural objects more compelling than others?
It is bizarrely unconvincing as an idea of upper-middle-class London in the 1930s - I think Ishiguro will find that society beauties did not say 'pardon' then and do not now - and the inadequacy can be pinned down to the narrator's voice, and his choice of verbs, as much as the details.
When an idea is unconvincing and won't work, why do you need washing powder?!
When I said it won't wash I meant his idea is unconvincing and won't work.
They said that they were planning to vote, not because Russia is threatened by would-be enemies — they thought that idea strange and unconvincing, and hadn't really paid the letter much attention until I brought it up.
So far, so familiar, you might say, bickering politicians with some good ideas and some unconvincing ones.
But after setting up that proviso and providing the requisite awkward (and unconvincing) sex scene, the movie drops the idea and moves on to oddly chaste masturbating-into-a-cup scenes.
His quest is interesting, but so far unconvincing: to somehow combine a New Labour idea of choice and "empowerment" with the kind of social-democratic oomph that Blair and Brown respectively despised and mislaid.
