===============
It makes no sense to expend adversarial 'resources' on allies in the struggle precisely when we need to direct our communication/knowledge/collective action at the Bushies. It's not about me being faint of heart/mind at all. It's just a waste of adrenaline, afaic, in cyberspace, when you wouldn't behave that way towards Justin or anyone else on this list whom you've never met in bio-eco-space. Additionally, what's the problem with addressing the pitfalls of male aggressiveness? Calling it sex baiting unnecessarily closes off discussion of a very serious problem that's hundreds of thousands of years old precisely by drawing on adversarial communication to avoid metacommunication about adversariality and aggression.
[from an interview with Deborah Tannen --I used to deliver stuff to her house in the '90's, she was on one of my routes]]
http://www.newdimensions.org/online-journal/articles/agreeing-to-disagree.html
MT: Why do you think that we've come to use the war metaphor? It really permeates our whole society- from news to sports, you'll find the battle metaphor.
DT: It's closely related to our emphasis on the division between self and society, the individual self at war with society, whereas many other cultures see the self as inseparable from the network of society. It's related to the history of our universities going back to the medieval university, which was a seminary. It grew out of the religious framework in which the early monks were warrior monks, Christian soldiers, and the universities were set up in this way. They were seminaries, but they were set up on a military model. And the fact that it was all-male was definitely a factor; they took men out of their homes, and put them in this isolated environment; they had a secret language, Latin; they read about military exploits, and they had to learn to dispute publicly. It was not a search for knowledge, it was honing your disputation skills so that you could publicly defend a thesis and attack a thesis. This is the history of our intellectual tradition. The Western tradition has placed a lot of emphasis on oral disputation. This is different from the Chinese and other Asian traditions, which would have found oral disputation quite unbecoming a sage....What I am questioning in this book and calling into question is the use of ritual, automatic, knee-jerk use of debate formats, setting everything up as a war when it really is not called for and not appropriate. Any issue that you want to discuss you get a debate going. That means you're going to get the most polarized views you can, get people that you know are really good at shouting at each other and encourage them to shout each other down, because you think it makes a more lively show.
MT: There is also this idea of having "balance," so if you have one view then you automatically have to have an opposing view in order to have balance, when in point of fact sometimes there isn't even an opposing view; or one is made up.
DT: It grows out of a very laudable desire of print journalists to be fair. But if it's over-applied, often it means you don't even allow any idea to get developed, to live for a moment, before you find someone else to oppose it. It causes people to feel cynical. People end up feeling, "I don't know what to believe. I read this, and then immediately I read that critics say it's not true."
It's similar to what happens with people's cynicism about politics. There is so much of what I call the "ethic of aggression"-among journalists, as well as in many other fields. In this book I show the thread that runs through all our great institutions-journalism, politics, law and academia. This ethic of aggression encourages journalists to constantly attack people in public life. Now, I would never say that journalists should not be adversarial toward people in public life who are committing wrongdoing. But, my concern is the assumption that only the exposure of wrongdoing is worth writing about. The result is that people end up feeling more cynical about their public leaders than the journalists themselves feel.