In Reply to: You hit the nail right on the head posted by Thinker on August 10, 2004 at 08:18:56:
Thinker, you picked an appropriate nick, because you sure do know how to think. Thanks for the comment on relativistic attitudes. Although I instinctively knew this, I also need to watch being too outrageous in that regard because I know those attitudes will trigger BBCs to become defensive.
I may have gotten a little too "touchy feely" in my earlier comments about sharing personal information, but I've found that have a certain amount of context about the personal experience someone is speaking out of helps me handle the other person's defensiveness and even avoid giving another the person offense altogether.
An example of what I mean: Acheik and I really aren't that far apart in some of our views about the Iraqi War. Nevertheless, we started to trigger each other's defenses during a heated discussion. So we took some time offline to get to know more about personal experiences that had contributed to our views. Well, that's a girly thing to do, but I believe reasonable people hold differing views for very good reasons, and differing life experiences are one of the major reasons people get emotionally reactive when they differ.
Still, all the context information in the world doesn't change the core issue when someone's responses on a topic are essentially an attempt to shut down all conversation. I'm still trying to figure out how to discern the difference between communication that is overbearing and rigidly controlling versus communication that is defensive and reasonably reactive. This series of posts on the problem are really helpful to me.