Why do we keep talking past each other?

Well, the mods here are currently allowing screeching, ad hominem attacks if the person ranting and raving is a self-appointed guardian of racialist political correctness, so you certainly can’t have that conversation here… unless you are willing to ignore more than a few voices.

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Another reason we talk past one another. Hyperbole without humility.

I am always ready to believe that the fault in a breakdown of communication is mine, in fact I just got criticized for that stance during the most recent medievalist-flaming episode. How much more should I humble myself to you? What else can I do to demonstrate my humility? Is groveling appropriate? Is groveling necessary for certain types of people, and pride forbidden?

Furthermore, I don’t think that my previous post was at all hyperbolic. Is it necessary that I post examples, when you’ve been part of several such conversations yourself? Do you really not see this happening?

It’s no limbo. It’s just that when you point out a behavior (screeching, ad hominem attacks) in a person. well, that’s fair enough. Some people screech. We can work together to make it all more harmonious, and identify behavior that isn’t okay and act to change it. Yeah, we can do that.

But, when you point out in the same sentence that the behavior is coming from a (self-appointed guardian of racialist political correctness), well that’s not an actual person is it? That’s a caricature and a character assasination.

You can’t really insult someones character while trying to draw their attention to their behavior, because you’re asking them to pay attention to two things at once. It’s really like derailing your own complaint, and it always escalates conflict. Always.

So, to clarify my sentiment, Hyperbole (the character assasination, black and white thinking, four letter words) without humility (admitting often I screw it up too, here’s a second chance, friend!) is another reason we talk past other.

I hope answered you, I appreciate you asking my opinion.

It is necessary for you to admit maybe I’m ahead of you and also there is a mirror on the wall.

Othertimes it’s the other way round?

You want to be right and someone else wrong? Then that’s a competition, not a conversation. Sometimes it’s you. Sometimes me.

I tend not to namecall or assign value to the character of people I know only through text messages and message boards. I don’t know these people, how can I speak to their character?

If I say someone is driving trollies, i am describng behavior only. Not their soul. If someone -is- driving trollies they will take it as a comment directed at their person. After a pattern is established I may go so far as to say someone -is- disruptive, or -is- harrassing someone else.

if it’s never you, or in a black and white sense not you -now- then we’re still talking past one another. See why I think that is so? That’s the topic, rigght?

I think we all screw up all the time, and we should be careful about what rules we hold others to.

But really, do go looking for some examples of me character assassinating (rather than describing behavior). It’s not my thing. I’m open to such a review, absolutely. I do it regularly myself, by all means help.

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I think you frame these things in very absolutist terms.

We aren’t a society. We are many societies. I think it’s not so tricky to understand, but many can’t or won’t accept it.

Do they? Many people tend to generalize. You are doing the same thing here yourself. The very idea of “everybody” is a tyrannical, absolute thing. How could anybody know how “everybody” is? Yet, so many seem to feel as though they do, or that they should. I think it’s a semantic trap where it’s much easier to use all-or-nothing terms, but then people get confused when reality doesn’t fit these apparently common-sense expectations. It’s just lazy thinking and speech to not accept that some people are a certain way, or many people. Some might dismiss this as nitpicking, but I think the difference in conceptual framing is quite significant to how people represent and solve problems.

[quote=“Shane_Simmons, post:65, topic:44368”]
But there’s this narrative now, that it’s not about justice[/quote]

Which is only one possible narrative.

Why do you assume that it’s so polar? Not only are there in-betweens about everything, these in-betweens tend to be more numerous and more accurate than the lazy attempts to frame them in absolute terms. My guess is that most people are conditioned to “solve” social problems by having emotional outbursts. Since most people feel so strongly, it tends to be difficult for them to think clearly and make decisions. So people complain about the same problems recurring throughout time.

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Edit: Replying to @AcerPlatanoides, post 74, but somehow the reply tag got eaten. Oh, it’s back!

Having just read a few pages of your comment history, I’m happy to acknowledge that you personally do not engage in direct character assassination, and only very rarely do you indulge in ad hominem argument (such as the ‘turd in the punchbowl’ line you directed at me, when I did not throw such an item myself but rather objected to the dismissal of the earlier poster’s point due to said fecal matter).

I hope that my own comment history can withstand such scrutiny, and I admire your restraint.

Also, I apologize for misremembering who used the genetic fallacy to deride stoicism during the same pile-on - it was not you, and your comment was far more reasonable. I wish I’d responded to that, it would have bearing now. I got trolled hard in there, and I suppose I have only myself to blame.

But I disagree that “self-appointed guardian of racialist political correctness” is a caricature. I really meant that as an thoroughly objective evaluation of displayed behavior by several people. Can you explain why it is incorrect in context? What am I missing?

I was talking about situations like… um… how about this one? This isn’t racialist, it’s gendered, but nonetheless this kind of target-seeking is a standard behavior here now. And in fact this person is actually one of the more reasonable ones, I could placate her fairly easily by explaining that I only meant precisely what I actually said. Which is a strange thing, isn’t it? That I have to tell people my quotes are actually quotes, and not special purpose “scare quotes”, and that we have to include disclaimers if we use words that have more than one possible interpretation, making sure that we leave no surface area available for attack, and that people have to say, “no, I didn’t mean what you’d really like me to mean, I actually meant what I actually said” if they don’t want to end up as conversational piñatas.

Sure, no problem. You are often more informed and frequently better spoken than I am. And I’d be lying if I said I’ve never been publicly wrong. I respect people who show me that I have a wrong idea, because then I can fix it. They did me a huge favor!

I hate that kind of conversation. I would prefer to be illuminated, enlightened - not chastised, held up as an object of scorn, purposely denigrated - if I have a choice. I like to learn new things, which is why I should probably stop reading everything but Mark’s “maker*” posts and Xeni’s space posts, I guess.

*not scare quotes. Mark uses that word, I do not, I am quoting him, thus quotes.

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and be accused of tone policing…

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Can we get rid of the snark, please?

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Dude, I like your style. Flat out. No worries.

Just that addressing someones character is an insult. And the response you get will always be to the insult, and not about the behavior.

Since you (I assume, as I do) only think such things because of their behavior, perhaps if they modify their behavior - my own opinion of them might change. Which, to them should be a non-event. I certainly don’t change my behavior because someone insults me.

However, if someone says hey, ‘this thing you said there… it was rude and here is why I think so’ I am a lot more likely to listen than if they append ‘you asshole’ to the end of the same sentence.

So, ‘self appointed…correctness’ = asshole in this context. Again, totally in my opinion.

Yeah, that is rough. That said, it is a question. I say ignore it or just name the behavior. In that case, cherrypicking. “I think that question takes one sentence of my response, which was really focused on XX, out of context, could you expand on your critique of my overall point, or accept that you’ve misunderstood me?” or something like that.

Being wrong is my favorite thing. It’s the only time I learn, and I like learning. Thanks again for the thoughtful response.

Well thanks. You’re frequently more grounded than I am. It all works out.

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I wonder what would happen if I just started flagging those to the mods and putting “target seeking” in the reason for flagging…

Thanks for your considered response. My current strategy is to completely avoid the discussion links for certain topics!

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That’s “target-seeking”? Saying “your comment is on the thing that is the problem” and asking whether you’re suggesting the underlying assumption is valid?

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I’m probably the one responsible for the “genetic fallacy” you’re referring to. I don’t think I was really committing that fallacy, but arguably I could have made my point in a way that didn’t sound so much like the genetic fallacy: by arguing that there’s an ongoing pattern of people in power arguing for “tone policing”.

This wasn’t meant to be an attack on you. You had, after all, referred to Marcus Aurelius’s stoicism while making it clear you had reservations about subscribing to it.

This going to sound, just, so flippant but I really feel there is some kind of neurochemical barrier to speaking cogently with those out with our in-group, however tenuous that differentiation might be.

We have so many people fighting so many different corners, even disagreeing over how to fight the same ones, the atomisation of any issue seems a forgone conclusion in most circumstances. Fatigue sets in, we incorrectly pattern match based on previous negative experiences, trip over our own criticism and pour high-octane pride on the fire. Surely we, the fighters for change, deserve that indulgence.

And that’s leaving confirmation bias and fallacies up the hee-haw to one side.

So anyway, to flippancy.

The most striking example I am smitten by is the precipitous drop in Football (soccer) hooliganism (just read ‘violence’, lol) when MDMA came on the scene.

I’ve read personal accounts from rival supporters, getting together for a prematch drink and singing songs instead of getting together for a knife-fight. Bloody hugging one another and swapping scarves instead of the traditional lacerations.

I’m not calling for E in the tap water or anything but perhaps some kind of large scale pharmacological intervention really is what it would take to dissolve those insidious boundaries. Better health, a more complete understanding of each and every individuals neurochemical needs could do it but that there boundary dissolution at least gets the ball rolling.

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I think “out with our in-group” is the fundamental problem. Seems all living things rely on distinguishing me/us from not me/them. When you’re all intellectually advanced and smart, like a human, you extend the line beyond the cell wall, beyond the species, to the tribe, to the occupation, to the race, to the class, to the religion, to the politics, to the sports team. The trick will be to extend recognition of inclusion to all humankind, then all life.

It can be a courageous thing to identify yourself with anything who isn’t you. (My partner is the person I most closely identify wth, but it’s not complete.) Some philosophers suggest that it can be done with reflection, meditation, discourse. I do like your neurochemical approach; along with reflection, it’s the one I’ve relied on mostly.

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Dialectic, like enlightenment, is impossible but we must do it anyway.

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http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/Graham's_Hierarchy_of_Disagreement-en.svg

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See? We are better than YouTube!

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That was a very mild example. In that case there was no stripping of context and the response was phrased as a query instead of an accusation. And also the person doing it has a history of being willing to have a real two-way conversation.

But there’s this recurring conversational pattern (and it happens two or three times in that discussion, as I recall) where a person takes part of what someone says (quite often plucking a line completely out of context) and says “so you’re saying THIS HORRIBLE THING I WANT TO SPEAK AGAINST?”.

If this only happened occasionally I’d hesitate to call it target-seeking… but look at what’s going on here! The mods peel away truly offensive posts that are made by people who might deserve to be rhetorically scourged, so people who want to vent their spleens are seeking targets among whomsoever is left. I have no idea if this is conscious behavior or not.

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Why do we keep talking past each other?

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