[MD] Straw Men and the Primacy of Trust

[david buchanan]

Ian said to Matt:
...(4) Once we have open accusations of motivated deliberate (weasely) misrepresentation, we have that topic on the table ... and I simply believe it is worth pausing to fix the lost trust, before returning to the contentious point(s). I do accuse dmb of not taking this point seriously - ...

After Matt had said:
"Straw men have nothing to do with sincerity.  The trouble is that accusing others of _deploying one as a trick_ implies that they are knowingly being malicious, are being insincere."  ... I would think a straw man is something built, and usually over time.  Can we not get somebody wrong without thereby building a straw man? ... I still can't help but think that attributions of the straw-man fallacy create more emotional hay than they do in helping clear the landscape of misapprehensions (excuse my mixed metaphors).  Too many fires are lit from the remains, which just adds to our heat problem and obscures our vision.



dmb says:
To say that accusations cause mistrust is a little like saying that arrests cause crime. I mean, if the accusation is not unfounded, then it is the straw-man maker that has destroyed trust. It's not accusations of evasion that causes mistrust, it's the evasive weasel-wordy behavior that destroys trust. These tactics are not part of an honest or sincere conversation and I sincerely believe that it is wrong NOT to complain about them. The decent thing to do when making such a charge, of course, is to be very specific and explicit about the behavior that's drawing the charge, to show the foundation of the accusation. That's certainly what I tried to do when I accused Steve of inventing a straw man. He didn't have to wonder where I got the idea and he had every opportunity to address the charge in very concrete terms. And did he make any effort to restore trust or repair the conversation? No. He just kept creating more fictions with which to abuse me. It seems way out of whack to construe my complaints as the problem rather than the antics that drew the complaints in first place. 

Well, after one of the most outrageous cases (wherein Steve edited things to make it appear that I was responding to a post from Marsha that I'd never even seen) he did apologize, sort of. He did not admit to being manipulative or dishonest, justifying this fancy editing trick with some vague notion about what he assumed. As an exercise in fair-mindedness imagine the shoe is on the other foot and Steve was accusing me of exactly the same things for exactly the same reasons. (Good exercise for party politics too.) What if I edited Steve's posts to make it look like he was responding to things that he hadn't read. What if I altered Steve's criticism of Marsha so that it looked like my criticism of Steve and then accused him of evading the criticism. Imagine that when Steve complains about it, I do not address his complaints, I just call him a dick and keep going with it. If I did to Steve what Steve has been doing to me, you'd be positively apoplectic over it. Marsha's head would explode.