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4:46pm February 24, 2012

How I can and can’t communicate.

[This isn’t just about the recent discussion. It’s a lot of things that have come into my head over a long period of time. But the eugenic abortion discussion certainly set it off.]

The vast majority of my communication is an attempt to look at something, whether inside or out of me, and describe it as closely as possible to make visible things that are often invisible. When I do this, my concentration is fully absorbed in the thing I am trying to describe, trying to make clear as much detail as I possibly can. I have pretty close to no attention left to spare on thinking up how to affect or manipulate readers. It really surprised me when I learned that in most conversations, people are constantly tracking each others’ responses, anticipating, and adjusting. I can’t do that. I don’t have the brain space left to spare.

I also don’t do “proper” intellectual debates. As in, there’s a whole set of unwritten rules on how to have certain conversations on the Internet. I don’t play by those rules. Can’t. Don’t want to.

There’s a lot of well-off white Western male nondisabled academic influence on that style of conversation. Even when it’s being used by people who don’t fit those descriptions – it’s still the source of the structure. I reject that structure because when you think from within that structure I don’t, can’t, exist. And I’ve given up trying to distort my entire being into the shapes required by that sort of thinking and communicating.

For most people, trying to debate without emotions is trying to force a sterility on ourselves that isn’t supposed to be there. Some of us can fake it better than others but it forces them to be mental contortionists and it’s not good for them. Emotion has a strong role to play in ethical discussions.

Asking me not to “appeal to emotions” is asking me to put my life and my soul aside and replace them with an inadequate kind of thinking. Reason has its place, but for me, as for most people, reason is intertwined with emotion. I can’t put one aside without putting the other aside.

When an issue pertains to people’s direct experiences of the world, then people will react based on our experiences. But the experiences of marginalized groups often contain a lot of real-life-acquired wisdom lacking in those outside of them. You can’t just ask a disabled person not to bring their emotional experiences of disability into a discussion that has to do with disability.(*) Or you can, but it’s rarely a good idea. And it’s a terrible idea not to listen to us, or to selectively listen only to those of us who confirm your biases. Because our emotions and intuition are reactions to situations, guides to when something dangerous is sneaking towards us between the lines. They show us ideas that “look fair and feel foul”. We have to rely on things like this to survive. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with this, nor with bringing our feelings and intuition into discussions about us.

And that’s besides just the academic-y elitism of forcing a very particular kind of debating style into this kind of discussion. Ensuring that people unfamiliar with or unable to use this style are at a disadvantage. And there’s just this really icky “better than you” thing that goes on when people doing this on the Internet meet people not doing it. It’s why I’ve never felt welcome in the skeptic community even when I’ve aligned with them on some things. There’s a place in the world for that sort of thing but that doesn’t make it superior for everything. And it never makes the people doing it superior. But that’s how they make it sound. (Worse, they tend to operate from an extremely specific set of biases and never notice even when critiquing bias in others.)

If you want to talk to someone willing to set their feelings aside in a discussion about whether a class of people should be born or not, go talk to someone else. You won’t find it here. Same if you want someone who won’t make what you’re calling “emotional appeals” (despite that I don’t usually write to appeal to anything). Go somewhere else, I’m not the person you want.

There’s also some conditions where I can’t have a meaningful conversation.

I can’t have a meaningful conversation if you nitpick language until because I used the word “someone” you’re sure you know what I mean by that. And attach huge chunks of ideology (what I call mental widgets) to that one word. I don’t do widgets and I can’t handle what some friends call language dickery.

I also can’t really have a meaningful conversation when someone really can’t see that I’m outside of all of the belief systems referenced in the conversation. Because it’s as if someone has built structures out of Tinker Toys. And every time I say something that’s outside the structure, or in the spaces between the rods, they attach my beliefs to the nearest rod and assume the structure the rod is attached to represents my thoughts. This is frustrating on both sides and goes nowhere.

The person also has to actually be interested in communicating. Understanding. Not standing there with a weapon looking for the nearest opening in my defenses. I’m not masochistic enough to want to do that unless it seriously matters for some reason. Oh and if the person is doing this for sport, then I get really pissed, especially if it’s at the expense of an issue that actually matters.

And last but not least. There’s three articles that explain things better than I could ever paraphrase right now. Both in terms of the language barriers that come up in communication for people like me (especially the nitpicking language shit), and the idea-structure thing that just gets assumed it’s there for everybody.

So here they are: “Disambiguation Post: On Language Dickery”, “Politics, Ethics, and Mental Widgets”, and “The Fireworks Are Interesting”. I would strongly recommend that anyone having these sorts of communication problems with me, read them.

I really wish I had something to link to about how the “stop appealing to emotion” thing, and everything that goes with it, affects marginalized people in general. But I don’t. I just know I’ve read virtually identical complaints about it from disabled people, women, people of color, and just about every other group out there.

The bottom line is that I can’t, seriously can’t, have genuine conversations when someone is trying to pull my feet off the ground into the air, probe me for weaknesses, expect me to contort myself into a painful shape, or any of the other things I described. And it has to be an actual conversation, for the sake of exchanging information. I’ve long ago learned that I just can’t do it any other way.

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(*) And yes, some disabled people pull this crap on each other. Disabled people are extremely varied and some heavily agree with mainstream ways of thinking about us. Categories and words are not perfect. And within the world of disability there are all kinds of invisible shifting hierarchies that allow some people to do this to people who are, temporarily or permanently, beneath them.