Moments of Permanence - On differences in oppression, derailment, and the hierarchies of hurt

From: tevriel.livejournal.com Date: April 6th, 2009 01:11 am (UTC) Re: sorry for the tl;dr reply, but this journal is the natural habitat of teal deer (Link)

It's okay, thinking it through as I comment is how my comments end up so long. *g* And I like discussing things with interested people.

The linguistics element... well, I'm a History/Linguistics double major, does it show? ;)

You make a good point about it making it difficult for people to move outside that belief. It does brush up against something my brother-out-law pointed out more than once - often the problem in arguments is that people are operating on different base assumptions, and the argument will get nowhere until they (or a mediator) can identify the point of disconnect between their assumptions. Once you find that you can try to lead people by stages to your own point of view.

He argued, somewhat convincingly, that what the RaceFail discussion needed was not a moderator but a mediator. The problem is, people who tried to step in placing themselves as the Neutral Observer were generally victim to the exact same faults, and were trying to be moderators instead. The mediator needs to be someone who's not declaring "bad behaviour on both sides", who's not making any value judgements at all, just breaking down people's arguments until they find the assumptions on which they're based with which the other side disagrees.

Most participants in RaceFail would have agreed instantly with, say, "All people deserve equal respect." But that's a very broad assumption point, and there are a lot of ramifications of that which, patently, did not provoke agreement.

Sadly, people who are good at that kind of mediation are rare, and even rarer are people who'd be able to do it successfully in an emotionally-charged subject like this one, and I'm not sure it's even possible to do it on the internet.

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