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| Great question, June. If you can answer my question I'll try to answer your "How does one decide
when enough is enough?"... "How much fun is too much fun?" First tho, I don't think I have ever decapitated anyone - but I have often felt close to being decapitated myself - and those events have been the most profound learning experiences of my life. Finding one's arguments frail, and personally feeling vulnerable, is an incredibly powerful basis for change. I think the problem really is an assumption that a dichotomy exists and one should exist and one should not. Sometimes rapid fire, "bare fist" argumentation exposes flaws that might take weeks, months, or years to surface in gentle debate. Some people can handle deep, perhaps even personal, criticism, without feeling offense. I think Obama's personal response to Palin's ill-conceived attacks are a great example. But it would be foolhardy to assume that Obama didn't have provocateurs taking care of her as she deserved to be taken care of. Not having a bloody hand doesn't mean that a bloodletting didn't occur. Some other people cannot handle any criticism at all. Like the sorting hat at Hogwarts, people tend to get sorted to their comfort zone. Sadly, that often means an abundance of meaningless and unearned mutual appreciation on polite fora and an abundance of meaningless and well-earned slander on argumentative fora. Occasionally those who prefer delicacy and politeness interact with those who prefer bare fists - but it usually doesn't persist very long. The more delicately inclined pick up their marbles and give up (which is a shame because the strength of their ideas alone might withstand the crucible) and except for Monty Python, it is hard to have an extended, non-consensual, argument. Ideally, the vast hordes in the middle can tolerate a bit of both extremes, if only as onlookers, without feeling the need to defend, or attack, one side for any reason other than the strength of the ideas being advanced. We can, after all, reflect on the Inquisition - a period when too polite disagreement with unchallenged power, allowed the most disagreeable events to persist. Personally, my preference is to have people disagree with me, often quite vocally, impolitely, and even disagreeably. They help me clarify my thinking more, on balance, than those who try too hard to be polite. Being wrong (for me, at least) is a given. I don't find it particularly useful to be agreed with very often. I would rather correct an intellectual error in 5 minutes than 5 years and experience tells me that i tend not to learn the most important lessons, except when head meets baseball bat, sometimes very painfully. In my own passion - professional caregiver insurance risk - it has not been the agreeable people that have helped me advance my understanding. It has been the people who have asked the sharpest questions, sometimes outrageously and mis-informed, those who doubted my assumptions, and most vigorously disputed my results, even with cruel intention, that have helped me learn how to explain myself better. We have, here in the states, had a delightful odyssey of having a woefully incurious, ill-informed, and ideologically rigid, national leader surrounded by people too polite to tell him what a roaring idiot he is. I'd have preferred a far less polite Colin Powell in the White House briefing room. Sometimes bullies are defused by politeness and sometimes by the exercise of superior power. I'd like to think that both have a place at the table, and that in the end, the superior quality of ideas will win the day most of the time, and regardless of their presentation. You are, of course, encouraged to heartily, vociferously, and disagreeably disagree with me. :-) bear --- On Wed, 11/12/08, June Kikuchi <[log in to unmask]> wrote: From: June Kikuchi <[log in to unmask]> |