Capitol Hearings: Competing Narratives

[Dill]

(07-31-2021, 08:05 PM)hollodero Wrote: I mean, you debated here with distincly "other-side people" for a long time now, about impeachments and then some. Did you never feel how inherently in vain all these efforts were? Do you think that is because carefully crafted counter-narratives weren't all that bad, and if they were just a little worse you'd have had more success? Because I don't. I think it has nothing to do with them at all, as stated before many times.

Starting from the bottom of your post: 

How are we measuring “vain”? Rather differently, I think. I don’t usually expect someone in this forum to “convert.” That’s not a realistic standard or my daily goal. Most of my argument/interrogation here is in research/diagnostic mode, trying to figure what and how the other side actually thinks, what their sources really are, and are not, looking for patterns. Info I could not get from books or Hannity or newspaper articles.
 
And even if people don’t agree with my take on some hot issue, I do find that often, “the other side” does not have a comparable response, an effective rebuttal. If someone decides I “can’t be reasoned with,” and turns tail without that rebuttal, I don’t see that my efforts were in vain, even by the narrow metric of “individual persuasion.” And there is a collective effect here, as well, as I am not the only one here rebutting disinformation. So a penumbra of effects here, some positive, around our individual and collective discourses that go quite beyond the individual persuasion in the moment. Discourse with someone like yourself, who demonstrates above average knowledge of issues and plays by the rules, is (for my part) less agonistic and more about “testing” ideas. So in your case, if I’ve failed to at least give you pause, that becomes a diagnostic moment, where I look for answers—what’s missing in his picture of events that I could supply; have I missed something that he sees? (E.g., some of my comments above about impeachment and diplomacy do frame the problem as explaining foreign policy “right” to the other side, and THEN they will get it. My lapse was to leave it at that.)
 
The ”vain effort” that concerns me at the moment is my inability to persuade my fellow amateur social scientists, that (to use a family systems metaphor) the “dysfunctional family” of RWM, politicians, base, and faux independents ought to be the focus of our analyses as a total structure, not the individual family members who, regardless of progress here, are always going to revert to toxic politics/behaviors when they leave our forum-clinic to go back home, where everyone is still tip-toeing around the abusive father, while mom and older siblings enforce accommodation for survival, united against the doctors and social services and other "outsiders".