Re: Agenda Denial Was: tone policing

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Sep 10, 2019 at 2:22 PM Ted Lemon <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Sep 10, 2019, at 2:05 PM, Keith Moore <[e-mail]>
> wrote:
>
> Tone policing not exactly unknown in IETF but the strategy of poisoning a
> debate by being disruptive is much more common.
>
> So is accusing well-intended people of bad intention.
>
> This is an example of tone-policing as a form of agenda denial.  Because
> Phil used the term “poisoning,” this gave Keith an opportunity to respond
> to what Phil had said as if it were an accusation, and not merely a factual
> observation.  And so now we are talking about Phil attacking Keith, instead
> of talking about how to have good discussions in the IETF.
>

I was not directly responding to Keith's example. Rather, having been
forced to spend a horrific amount of time over the past 9 months performing
analyses of these techniques used to intentionally poison political
discourse, I was pointing out that the term 'tone policing' is part of a
wider set of strategies.

One of the other issues that I think a lot of people, if not most of us
need to pay attention to is not assuming that if someone disagrees with us,
it is because the other person is ignorant of the facts and if only they
had the same knowledge and experience as us, they would understand.

On two occasions today, I made a fairly extended argument citing specific
facts and experience, only for someone to respond with words to the effect
of 'you need to do more research'.

I will just point out that this approach shows a breathtaking degree of
arrogance. Particularly when I happen to mention that I literally wrote a
book on the topic in question.