virus: In That Special Way, a polemic

Tim Rhodes (proftim@speakeasy.org)
Wed, 3 Feb 1999 02:32:50 -0800

Something has bothered me alot lately. I notice it often in conversations with my friends and others, and also on mailing lists such as this one. And it worries me. Not in small part because I fear I may fall into the same habit at times.

There is a certain tone that people often adopt when trying to be both gentle and persuasive, and usually behind a good cause, which nevertheless sets off all my "bullshit detectors" even when I know the speaker is both (A) sincere and (B) wholy and completely right. [1] The sad thing is that I am not alone in this. If it were just my bells and whistles being triggered and no one elses I could live with it. But I've sat idly by many a time as someone in the conversation has moved into this particular cadence and watched as all their listener's eyes glaze over and the immune response kicked in, deflecting everything usefull they had to say.

Is it actually possible to be positive, kind-hearted, persuasive and thoughful without sounding like a new-age, tree-hugging, born-again, pansy-assed git? And if so, how does one go about it?

-Prof. Tim

[1] As an aside, I suspect this factor is what has kept me from being able to take NLP, or the users of it, very seriously in actual practice.