Ian said to Matt:
...(4) Once we have open accusations of motivated deliberate (weasely)
misrepresentation, we have that topic on the table ... and I simply believe it
is worth pausing to fix the lost trust, before returning to the contentious
point(s). I do accuse dmb of not taking this point seriously - ...
After Matt had said:
"Straw men have nothing to do with sincerity. The trouble is that accusing
others of _deploying one as a trick_ implies that they are knowingly being
malicious, are being insincere." ... I would think a straw man is something
built, and usually over time. Can we not get somebody wrong without thereby
building a straw man? ... I still can't help but think that attributions of the
straw-man fallacy create more emotional hay than they do in helping clear the
landscape of misapprehensions (excuse my mixed metaphors). Too many fires are
lit from the remains, which just adds to our heat problem and obscures our
vision.
dmb says:
To say that accusations cause mistrust is a little like saying that arrests
cause crime. I mean, if the accusation is not unfounded, then it is the
straw-man maker that has destroyed trust. It's not accusations of evasion that
causes mistrust, it's the evasive weasel-wordy behavior that destroys trust.
These tactics are not part of an honest or sincere conversation and I sincerely
believe that it is wrong NOT to complain about them. The decent thing to do
when making such a charge, of course, is to be very specific and explicit about
the behavior that's drawing the charge, to show the foundation of the
accusation. That's certainly what I tried to do when I accused Steve of
inventing a straw man. He didn't have to wonder where I got the idea and he had
every opportunity to address the charge in very concrete terms. And did he make
any effort to restore trust or repair the conversation? No. He just kept
creating more fictions with which to abuse me. It seems way out of whack to
construe my complaints as the problem rather than the antics that drew the
complaints in first place.
Well, after one of the most outrageous cases (wherein Steve edited things to
make it appear that I was responding to a post from Marsha that I'd never even
seen) he did apologize, sort of. He did not admit to being manipulative or
dishonest, justifying this fancy editing trick with some vague notion about
what he assumed. As an exercise in fair-mindedness imagine the shoe is on the
other foot and Steve was accusing me of exactly the same things for exactly the
same reasons. (Good exercise for party politics too.) What if I edited Steve's
posts to make it look like he was responding to things that he hadn't read.
What if I altered Steve's criticism of Marsha so that it looked like my
criticism of Steve and then accused him of evading the criticism. Imagine that
when Steve complains about it, I do not address his complaints, I just call him
a dick and keep going with it. If I did to Steve what Steve has been doing to
me, you'd be positively apoplectic over it. Marsha's head wou
ld explode.
Moq_Discuss mailing list
Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
Archives:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
http://moq.org/md/archives.html
