Hrefna (DHC)
A note: I firmly believe in giving people an "out" in public conversations and discourse. A way to save face and go "you know what, I done fraked that one up."
This means I often post things that are "softened." Because arguing with things tends to get people to double down.
I'm also southern and from the deep south to boot, so not doing it would take conscious effort :p
But. It should not be conflated with my feelings, which are often much stronger, though generally still fairly nuanced.
novatorine 🏴🏳️⚧️
"A note: I firmly believe in giving people an "out" in public conversations and discourse. A way to save face and go "you know what, I done fraked that one up.""
This is an interesting point. One of the recurring insights of one of my favorite scifi series is that if you don't give someone a means to surrender or back down or retreat then don't be surprised if they fight tooth and nail to the last breath, because you haven't given them another option. While those books talk about it in the context of military strategy, I think it holds true in conversations as well: if you want to actually be able to convince someone — which you definitely don't always want to bother trying to do, for instance in the case of fascists or bigots or narcissists — then you need to offer them a route by which they can admit you are right and *be* convinced (so, not tell them they're irredeemably evil or whatever), perhaps even while saving some amount of face.
novatorine 🏴🏳️⚧️
@hrefna Red Rising. I highly, highly, wholeheartedly recommend it, it's seriously amazing. It deals with a lot of themes of revolution, leadership, social class, compromise, with a ton of Dune style realpolitik. The second trilogy (which is actually gonna be four books) especially, because it gets a lot more mature and complex with its examination of the characters and themes.
The only reservation I have about it is that it does use the fridging trope once as the inciting incident in the first boom, but it goes on to have multiple incredibly strong women with tons of agency and independence from the men so like, I think it more than makes up for it.
Hrefna (DHC)
@anarchopunk_girl Yup. Exactly.
It's really important in a union-building context, which is part of my background here: if you don't give people a way to gracefully back down, they never will.
Also comes up in transformative justice conversations.
Out of curiosity, which series?
novatorine 🏴🏳️⚧️
@KatS @hrefna I would not at all be surprised if Pierce Brown was having Darrow paraphrase Sun Tzu lol, it would fit. I'm just uncultured lmao
Kat S
@anarchopunk_girl @hrefna This idea is given some space in Sun Tzu's The Art Of War, which may be where the author got it from.
Paraphrased from memory: when laying siege to a castle, always leave the occupants a visible, safe way to leave. If they see no way out, they will fight to the death.
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.