No, Just No
Jun. 18th, 2009 10:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amadiIt seems that in the midst of any controversial discussion, if anyone dares to make any critique of an argument's presentation, rather than its content, that critique is now being immediately labeled a Tone Argument, called derailing, and the critic is shouted down until they apologize and shut up.
I'm left wondering, when someone makes a big public Statement Of Controversial Stuff, with which all right-thinking, progressive and good people are meant to agree, when and where can someone point out the flaws in the statement? It seems that even if you say something like "I was with you until you said X, because my experience of that is very different than yours," implying that they've overgeneralized, perhaps, you're just wrong, wrong, wrong.
Where is the middle ground now?
I'm left wondering, when someone makes a big public Statement Of Controversial Stuff, with which all right-thinking, progressive and good people are meant to agree, when and where can someone point out the flaws in the statement? It seems that even if you say something like "I was with you until you said X, because my experience of that is very different than yours," implying that they've overgeneralized, perhaps, you're just wrong, wrong, wrong.
Where is the middle ground now?
no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 04:08 am (UTC)I feel like there actually isn't a way to tell the difference, when critiquing presentation, between a deliberate derail and someone saying they would have said something differently. To me, the actual solution to that problem, for someone who is genuinely interested in addressing the issue at hand, is to take the issue back to their own space and talk about it with the presentation changes they feel are appropriate for the subject.
For the second case, I feel like you just need to argue it out, making your case about life or whatever.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 07:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 02:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 03:40 pm (UTC)Probably in large part because I know in my case, bringing my thoughts back to my own space isn't going to garner me very much attention because my own circle of readership is small. I'm only going to get a lot of response to something if someone does a dog-siccing link to my post. (Which they'd probably still label as a tone argument with an inherent load of presumptions about me.)
no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 04:28 am (UTC)But that doesn't seem to be what you're suggesting, not from how your second paragraph reads. It looks more like you're saying that people can agree with an eventual point even if they disagree with the way the person got to that point.
The problem with the Tone Argument is that it's meant to invalidate the main point without actually having any substantive reason for the invalidation. A person who already disagrees with the main point will feel justified in discounting the main point because they feel as if they're being attacked, regardless of whether any such attack exists -- many people nowadays consider disagreement itself to be a personal attack.
So if one's point in criticizing an argument's presentation is not to invalidate the main point, that's something one can be very clear about. "I strongly agree with you that sheep are for hugging, not for eating, but I think there are better ways to argue the case than by saying people who eat sheep are soul-killing weevils", for instance. ^_^ One can't really be accused of making the Tone Argument when one is agreeing with the person's main point (although one can still be accused, maybe even rightly, of attempting to tell a person that they don't have the right to have emotional reaction X, depending on how it's phrased).
I suppose for me it boils down to a question of how important it is to clear up the presentation problems with the person in question vs. how important it is just to have my own say. Really thinking about it, I think I'm a lot more likely to speak up to someone I know, if it's something important, but if it's not someone I know or if the argument's not vitally important to get out there, I'll just go back to my own journal. I think that's where your middle ground is -- taking an argument back to your own turf and making your point there is always an option and never, IMO, derailing, because it's starting a completely new conversation while leaving the original one intact and on-topic.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 05:59 am (UTC)Except that I see two things happen here, a lot of the time. One is where someone is superficially agreeing in order to give their Tone Argument more legitimacy, i.e. concern trolling. And it sounds just like your sheep example, and is a deliberate derail, and is precisely why so many people are really preemptive and peremptory about the tone argument, whereever it appears.
The other is where someone has, in their own mind, looked at everything and found that they agree with all of it (or at least can disagree with nothing) except some minor point, but in order to feel like engaging they only feel like they can argue, so they make a Big Argument about the minor point and suck conversational energy to this thing that neither they nor the OP necessarily care about all that much. This is an accidental derail, but it means that instead of talking hugs vs. barbeque, people get into a protracted discussion of the proper percentage of each fiber in an angora/wool blend.
I know a lot of times, the prior relationship matters, but also, there's a question of audience. Is this a journal where the OP encourages robust discussion? Is it a comm for X kind of people having a disagreement about X things? Are the Y people allowed in this X comm? Is it locked or unlocked?
I think a lot of things are possible with someone who knows you that aren't possible with someone who doesn't.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 07:27 am (UTC)Person to their Affinity Group: This issue which affects our group really bothers me and up with this I will not put and we need to tell (people outside our group) to shove this thing up their asses.
Other member of Affinity Group: Um, okay, yeah, this sucks, but is "shove it up their asses" really a useful way to engage the people doing this?
Ten other members: Tone argument! Tone argument!
One other person: Hmm, I kinda agreed. "Shove it" doesn't really get a point across.
Those ten others: Derail! Derail! You two need to apologize.
If you're having a conversation within a group specifically about how to engage people outside the group, especially about a problematic thing, then at some point, there has to be some discussion about how to best craft that engagement.
The problem, I think, is that a lot of people are posting what looks like a conversation about engagement which is, in fact, never intended to be that conversation at all, but is merely a rant that they want people to agree and pat them on the back for. There's a lack of good faith happening in too many corners.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 02:48 pm (UTC)And because of the Tone Argument, you can't add in the "how do we engage" piece to an ongoing discussion of "about what do we engage."
I guess I don't actually see why it's a problem that a discussion about "how to engage" has to be separate from other conversations about engagement. Conversation in a discourse group has all sorts of mini-Godwin's Laws, where everyone knows that "If the subject is P and I bring up Q, I will cause an explosion that ends the conversation. So, if I want to talk about Q, I need to start that as a separate conversation explicitly about Q."
I don't see it as a lack of good faith, in part because, in the specific case of the Tone Argument, the kind of critique you just posited usually isn't germane to the matter at hand. "Shove it up their asses doesn't work" isn't useful because the OP is not, currently, telling Not!Affinity Group people to shove things up their asses, at least in the scenario you describe.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 03:21 pm (UTC)*nodnod* That makes sense to me. I think to some extent, people don't want to make it a separate conversation because they know it won't get the kind of attention that the original argument was getting (and here I am thinking of a commenter in your journal back during Racefail who really, really wanted the argument to be about her experiences with size fail, and no matter how many times people said "We're trying to discuss racefail; if you want to stay on topic, we'll talk about that, but we're not interested in size fail," she just kept saying "MY SIZE FAIL STORIES, LISTEN TO THEM" and eventually decided she was being silenced because no one wanted to talk about it. Could she have started a thread in her own journal? Sure, and it would have been on-topic and not derailing -- but there wouldn't have been so many people to [not] listen to her).
Regarding the scenario
no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 03:57 pm (UTC)No, but the OP is rallying people with "Not!Affinity group says that they're going to keep barbequing sheep until someone pries their grill tongs out of their cold, dead hands, and that's not right! Let's go tell them to shove that up their asses!" So the sheep huggers, being committed to seeing sheep not end up on grills agree, it's not right, but the "let's go tell them" part is where it falls apart.
To me, it seems reasonable to be able to say "shouldn't we maybe tell them why it's bad to grill sheep, rather than just telling them to shove it?" or "um, is 'shove it' going to influence people, really, or just make them angry?" If the apparent goal is to get people convinced about the rightness of the pro-sheep/anti-grilling stance, then a discussion about how to get there has to happen some time. But apparently that time is never in the place where people are being exhorted to action, it's somewhere and sometime and someplace other. And always other. Strategy discussion happens somewhere in the aether. And don't dare bring it into someone's righteous screed.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 05:05 pm (UTC)That's … not how these discussions actually work. One or two people may do a literal tongs up butt post, but three or four people will do lengthy explications of the evils of bbq or the fluffiness of sheep or the environmental evils of charcoal or whatever the issues are, and five or six people will link their flist to all of that discussion and the conversation spirals outward in a bunch of different trajectories.
But I also feel like, if you want to talk about strategy, and you feel like no one is going to hear you when you do because your incoming circle is small, then you ask someone with more juice than you to link to you. Or you find a comm that is germane to the topic and post there. Or, hell, you ask the person who is having the discussion to which you are reacting badly if they would ETA with a link to your post. There are ways to make noise if you want to be heard.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 11:15 pm (UTC)Framing statement examples:
"Please note, I am ranting and don't actually want to discuss whether 'shove it up their asses' is the most effective communication style."
or
"Please note, I posted this specifically because I am curious what other people think about the most effective way to engage Not!Affinity Group to achieve [goal]. I am not, however, claiming that other kinds of communications are bad."
no subject
Date: 2009-06-20 12:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 03:25 pm (UTC)Oh, heck, I hadn't even thought of that, but you're 100% right there.
in order to feel like engaging they only feel like they can argue, so they make a Big Argument about the minor point and suck conversational energy to this thing that neither they nor the OP necessarily care about all that much.
That's another good point. I think it's harder for me to call that one because I'm never quite sure what's going on when someone does that, and it's really easy for me to get sucked into the other argument, but yeah, discussing the proper percentage of fiber, or the equivalent, very frustrating.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 07:53 am (UTC)See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. That's the sort of comment that keeps getting called out as a tone argument and unacceptable. As soon as someone says "better way(s) to argue the case" or "maybe another way to say this" or "more convincing phrasing that will be more readily taken on" or anything to the effect of "I don't think this argument will be persuasive to people who don't already agree" everything stops dead and the thread gets derailed, ironically, by people screaming derailing.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 03:15 pm (UTC)Well -- by definition, it is a tone argument. It doesn't argue the original point -- in fact, it has little to do with the original point. It simply says "I don't like your tone", whether you're agreeing or not (and I think
and the thread gets derailed, ironically, by people screaming derailing.
But is that the derailment, really? Or is the derailment happening at the precise moment when someone tries to shift focus off the main point of the argument to the tiny details of how the argument's being related? Essentially, is the argument about how you should argue a point still on-topic, or is it primarily a way to open a completely different topic? Because I can't really think of a way that it can be on-topic. I can think of ways it can be non-malicious for sure -- but I don't see how it can not be derailing.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 03:34 pm (UTC)So to me, you do have to have a tone discussion as part of a larger strategy discussion, if you're honestly trying to organize a response to something. You have to decide, amongst the group of anti-sheep barbequers, how to face the people with the grills and the tongs and convince them that sheep are for hugging.
But more and more often what I -- and clearly other people -- are reading as a "let's discuss how to make our case" call for a real discussion is not. It's a rant that's meant only to be agreed with (even though it might be flat out dead wrong or offensive in some ways) and as soon as someone starts treating it like what it appears to be and starts making suggestions for improvement to the message, they're suddenly the bad guy.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 03:59 pm (UTC)That doesn't mean people won't disagree on what the appropriate tone is, of course! ^_^ I mean, some people really do think the appropriate course of action is to yell at people to get their support. So you may be stuck between a rock and a hard place there.
But in a general argument or observation post, I think it's extremely valuable to keep people on topic and call out derailing when it starts to happen -- a few weeks ago I was making a point that musical artists of color had been shortchanged throughout history, and people started arguing whether one white artist really fit into a genre that he's known for or not. Discussing that white artist' oeuvre was not the point of my post, and I quickly stopped replying to commenters who had nothing to say about the suppression and mistreatment of artists of color but were happy to argue with me that [white artist] was more famous for [genre X] than [genre Y]. If you can't point out that someone's derailing your post, then how can you ever have a discussion about the topic you are actually trying to discuss?
no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 06:06 am (UTC)I don't know why it's like this, but it is frustrating, because they've basically shut everyone else down before they start, so what they call a discussion is actually a brown-nosing session.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 06:24 am (UTC)I think part of the problem is that you are assuming that "what they call a discussion" is really what's most desirable here. A lot of times, privileged people with their assumptions about what is appropriate (or not) for "a discussion" can be pretty oppressive against people who are speaking up and talking -- at personal risk -- about the effects of that very privilege they lack.
Tone Arguments, as well as statements like yours about "brown-nosing sessions" (which sounds awful butthurt, don't you think?), are a way of controlling and pre-empting the discussion to protect and defend privilege and suppress minority points of view.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 06:34 am (UTC)I'm not sure how you went from me saying I was talking about discussions where I was not in a position of greater privilege than the people holding/involved in the discussion, to insisting I'm oppressing people with their lack of privilege. That's a very impressive leap of completely turning my comment around.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 06:45 am (UTC)(frozen) no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 07:05 am (UTC)And you wrote six sentences, in two posts, about that one sentence from me -- and you ignored the other three sentences and every point I made in there, because you didn't like that I didn't like your privilege-flaunting.
So, how about it? What do you think of my statement that complaints about "brown-nosing sessions" are ways to suppress discussions by people without privilege? Especially when such complaints don't address the fact that reassurance is necessary due to the pressure beating on down on the oppressed person. Did you want to talk about that any?
(Meanwhile, white men are privileged in discussions on queer issues, and you're not doing yourself any favors by pretending this isn't the case and that you don't possess any privilege in queer discussions because you're queer. I hope that's not what you're doing, and if I misread you, I do hope you'll take the opportunity to restate what you're actually saying here.)
(frozen) no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 07:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 06:19 am (UTC)When someone comes in and says, "look, I agree with you, but if you had said this nicer then more people would agree with you" then it's a Tone Argument.
Sometimes those arguments are worth having, but 99% of the time it's just someone deciding, hey, I am going show that I am the nice and reasonable one not like you uppity, angry person.
It's not hard to tell the difference. For starters, if they're not disagreeing with actual argument but are instead concerned about the emotional state and/or hurt feelings of the oppressors but not of the oppressed? Then yeah, it's derailing.
If someone goes "hey, I am on your side, but our side has to be nicer lest we discredit ourselves!" they are just making a Tone Argument, because they could just be nice and friendly when they bring up the issue next time. Most of these people who are "on your side" never actually do bring up the issue, of course, and spend much more time attacking those people who do than actually dealing with whatever upset the original poster in the first place.
So if, say,
The solution is to play Good Cop, Bad Cop -- not Good Kid, Bad Kid. Good Cop, Bad Cop involves working as allies together, one being ostensibly "nice" and getting what both sides want with the Bad Cop as the threat. "I don't fully agree with
If the Good Cop does that, then hey, some good can come of it. It's a pincer movement, and it's a fair strategy for converting people to "our side," whatever that may be in context.
But if the Good Cop is actually playing Good Kid, Bad Kid? Then she turns around and goes "wah, you be nicer!" and spends a lot of time attacking the Bad Kid, to impress the people in power -- mommy and daddy, or privileged folks -- so that she can "look better." This promotes the Good Kid at the expense of not just the person cast as Bad Kid, but also harms the cause that the ostensible Good Kid should be promoting.
I saw, on that
If this has nothing to do with
no subject
Date: 2009-06-19 07:43 am (UTC)It's not hard to tell the difference. For starters, if they're not disagreeing with actual argument but are instead concerned about the emotional state and/or hurt feelings of the oppressors but not of the oppressed? Then yeah, it's derailing.
And I'd agree with you except that I don't think saying "you know, people are not going to respond well to this" is being concerned with the feelings of the oppressors as much as wanting to be effective.
That no one responds well to an attack is one of the few universal human truths. So when someone puts forth a statement and claims that they want to get a point across to people who are likely to be hostile to it from jump, and the way that they're proposing to go about sharing the idea is going to meet hostility with hostility, isn't it worthwhile to point that out if you honestly believe that the person is trying to craft a winning argument?
Everyone wants desperately to hold onto their anger. And that's fine, anger is a great motivator. It's a better fuel than just about any emotion. But it's a horrible convincer. And most people really do know that. They just really hate to be reminded.