Don’t you even CARE about women’s issues? – VSD(3.1)

Verbal Self-Defense is even more important among friends than against enemies.

Take a minute and imagine the rest of the conversation…

If we want to learn how to avoid internal pie wars–and how to fight the external ones effectively–we need to better understand how we use language.

I actually went back and checked the early stuff– NO person actually made an attack like this.  However, IF a person had cause to interpret the original diary as an attack, this is the flavor of attack that would have been perceived…..

And now we get to the reason this is a new diary.

Had a complaint been posed as a verbal attack in the “Don’t you even CARE about…” format, it would break down thusly:
    mode: Blamer.  
    presuppositions:
    * You don’t care about women’s issues.
    * You should care about them; you’re rotten not to.
    * Therefore, you should feel terrible about this.

Two kinds of responses were suggested earlier
    Leveler mode: “No. Why?”
    Computer mode: some kind of technical query relating to the presuppositions

In this case, it could have been a question about why “women’s issues” should be more important than something else.

Kos responded as though to a complaint–but he ignored every rule in the book for effective self-defense. His response might be paraphrased as “Why should I care?”

Those who have read earlier diaries know that a basic truth of verbal interaction is “that which you feed, grows.” A response in either leveler mode or computer mode would not have fed the argument.

But kos instead shifted into blamer mode and  went on the attack.

Note: cool down, everybody–this is not a rehash of the original arguments. I’m going to snip liberally, because I want people to think about the form of the interaction, not its contents.

In one sentence, kos wrapped his main point into a presupposition and added an irresistible bait:

“I find such … knee-jerk reactions, to be tedious at best….”

The bait words were “tedious, etc.” A lot of piscine kossaks swallowed them. Unfortunately, in responding to the bait, they let the presupposition alone.

Others responded to the attack itself. Next thing you know, mud (and smellier stuff) was flying faster than the original pies.

But nobody followed the rules!

1. Identify the mode
2. Identify the presupposition(s)
3. Respond in NEUTRAL Computer mode TO THE PRESUPPOSITION ONLY
4. Stay in Computer mode.
1. mode: blamer
2. presuppositions (“knee-jerk reaction” implies…what?):

    a) the response to the ad was reflex, not thought out
    b) the “offense” was trivial (the tap of a rubber hammer) and
    c) the response was way out of proportion to the trigger.

Step 3, then, requires a decision–which presupposition to respond to.

We could have chosen a) — but most of us recognized that the negative reactions to the pie ad WERE reflexive. There isn’t much point in arguing with a truthful remark.

If we chose b) we would have had to tell kos that the pie ad itself was offensive to us–and many of us did not find it so.

Which leaves us with c)–and unless we find a better metaphor than “knee-tapping”, we aren’t going to get very far.

We need to find a metaphor where a thoughtless but not ill-intentioned action will trigger a strong response that takes the first person by surprise.

How about a slap on the back?

Under normal circumstances, even if the slap is uncomfortable, it is taken in good part.

There is one exception, however…. If the person slapped has some sort of injury.  

A bad sunburn, dislocated shoulder or upper-arm injury would all earn the clueless back-slapper a royal dressing down.

Given such a sunburn, a reflex reaction to a slap on the back might range from a punch in the nose to a clobber over the head with any weapon at hand.

And that was kos’ mistake–he failed to recognize that a sizeable portion of his audience had been burned. People reacted, not to kos’ intent in posting the ad, but to its effect on them! I think it’s fair to say kos is not a sadist, and he would not deliberately hit a sunburned friend on a very sore back.

Had kos followed the rules for verbal self-defense, the pie wars would have quickly died out.  But when he buried his real concern in a presupposition, and framed it as an attack, several bad things happened.

1. His misperception of the protesters was not addressed.
2. Many people who correctly perceived the protests then perceived kos’ response to be an unjustified attack. This is where the whole “respect” them was coming from.
3. Finally, no one YET really knows what was actually going on inside kos’ head, to cause him to interpret the protests against the ad as an attack on kos, personally.

Which leads me to my final points:

• We REALLY are ignorant about Verbal Self-Defense
• Our ignorance is HURTING us and our cause
• Fixing our ignorance is easy, and IMPORTANT TO DO QUICKLY!