I went to college with a guy I'll call K.  K was a master of argumentification.  I'm serious; you could start a discussion with K taking the position that the sky was generally blue if it wasn't cloudy out, and twenty hard hectoring minutes later, K would have you admitting that most if not all the time when you actually checked, it was kind of yellow, with pink polka dots.

How did he do this?  He learned verbal kung fu from his own mentor, a woman whose initials were C.K.  Here are the techniques C.K. taught K, which served him so well in his relentless pursuit of complete and utter dominance of any argument or disagreement he might ever find himself embroiled in:

* Interrupt your opponent constantly.  This ruins their train of thought and often gets them mad; when they're mad, they can't argue as well.  If they try to interrupt  you, stop them and firmly tell them that it's unbelievably rude to interrupt someone when they're speaking and if they'll just allow you to finish your thought, then you'll allow them to talk.

* Never qualify your opinion by saying things like "I believe" or "it seems to me".  State your subjective opinions and/or hypothetical theories as objective fact.  Insist that your opponent use qualifiers constantly when stating their own subjective feelings. 

* Make stuff up.  State your made up stuff authoritatively, without qualification.  Be bold.  Remember, people will swallow a big lie as easily as a small one, sometimes more so.

* Never admit you're wrong about anything.  If your opponent successfully refutes something you've said, change the subject and dive back in. 

* Never really give your opponent time to say anything.  The harder they try, the faster and louder you talk.  The substance of your argument doesn't really matter; if you can talk faster and louder than them, eventually they'll get tired of trying and give in.

* Never agree to disagree.  If your opponent suggests this, just shrug, roll your eyes, and say something like "whatever", and then toss in, a second later, when they think it's settled, "but you know I'm right". 

* If things are going badly for you, interject a complete non sequiter.  Something like "Sure, you say that now, but would you be so quick if it was your own mother?"  or "Hey, I drive an American car, buddy".  When this shuts them up for a moment in complete bewilderment, steam roller over them again. 

* If your opponent catches you in a lie, or calls you on any of the above tactics, deny it.  Say you have no idea what they're talking about, but you're trying to argue ideas, not take cheap shots at debating techniques.  Ask them sweetly if they give up now. 

K was an expert with these techniques; the only time in my life I ever heard him admit he'd lost an argument with me was six months after the argument, when we were having another argument about whether or not he'd ever lost an argument with me.  He pointed out the previous argument -- I'd created a character with the last name Gallery, he'd snorted and said that was a ridiculous name and nobody in real life was actually named Gallery, at which point, I'd opened the Syracuse phone book and found three pages of people named Gallery -- and after pointing out the argument, he told me "See, there.  You were right and I was wrong."  When I said "You never admitted you were wrong, you just closed the phone book and changed the subject!"  he snapped "Well, it was pretty obvious you were right, I don't see why I had to say so."

Good as K was, though, he was just a welterweight.  His mentor, C.K., was the heavyweight champion of the world at these things.  I once won a Trivial Pursuit game in which she was one of the other players, but it turned out the card with the answer to the winning question had a misprint on it, and identified the Hulk's secret identity as Steve Rogers.  Everyone at the table was a comics fan, so they knew my answer of "Robert Bruce Banner" was correct, but C.K. argued for twenty minutes that the rules explicitly stated that the answer on the card was to be considered correct, and by the time she was done, half the people playing weren't sure whether I'd actually won the game or not... or at least, that's what they said, as they were all tired of arguing about it.  Which is an integral part of the Way of the K.

I bring this up because it seems to me that The Way Of The K is very much evident in today's political discourse, especially among conservative pundits.  I think both K and C.K. would be especially proud of the way conservative media figures always insist on controlling the venue; people like Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh never debate anyone about anything if they can't control their opponent's microphone.  That's a worthy addition to the Way of the K... never let your opponent say a word if you can't shut them up whenever you want, and especially never debate them in front of an audience that isn't already sympathetic to you and hostile to them. 

And I can only imagine they'd both be in awe of the simple yet brilliant concept of carrying a loaded weapon to the argument.  Sure, you don't ever even have to refer to it while you're talking, but it's not like your unarmed opponent isn't going to be aware of the death machine you're wearing on your hip... and it isn't like the presumption that if you're crazy enough to wear it, you may well be crazy enough to use it, won't throw him or her off their game a little. 

 Maybe political discourse has always been an in  your face, win at any cost, take no prisoners sort of thing, and I just got exposed to it early, in a different context.  And perhaps there's simply no way people of passionately opposed views can remain civil when discussing such things. 

I can't help but feel, though, that civility would be to the benefit of the liberal/progressive agenda, if we could just get everybody involved in a conversation to behave that way.

And, honest to God, it really does seem to me that we could all start out by agreeing to leave the guns home when we're heading out to a political event.

 

 

Not that I, or anyone else, ever claimed otherwise...

Daniel Keys Moran's latest comment threads point me to this driveling idiocy, which, given the source, surprises me not at all with either of those two qualities. In that first mentioned comment thread, I respond thusly:

As for entitlement issues, and Neil Gaiman:

It's interesting that Gaiman opens that essay complaining because American Airlines won't provide him with what he considers to be a necessary tool to facilitate his writing while on one of their flights, at a price he thinks is reasonable. American Airlines provides him with a service (getting him from point A to point B within an acceptable time frame) for a price he's willing to pay. Gaiman seems to feel there's a contract between him and AA, that they will also, for the price of his ticket, facilitate his word processing while he's in their care, just like, apparently, all the other airlines he normally flies with do. But, as he points out later on in an entirely different context, the contract doesn't exist. His sense that they should give him this thing that he wants cheaply, that is not part of the service they render, is, er, hm, what should we call it... oh, yeah... an 'entitlement issue'.

Then he goes on to say this, in re: the astonishingly lazy George R.R. Martin:

You're complaining about George doing other things than writing the books you want to read as if your buying the first book in the series was a contract with him: that you would pay over your ten dollars, and George for his part would spend every waking hour until the series was done, writing the rest of the books for you.

No such contract existed. You were paying your ten dollars for the book you were reading, and I assume that you enjoyed it because you want to know what happens next.

Yeah. We want to know what happens next. And the author isn't telling us. Know what he's doing instead? He's taking the money we've paid him to tell us this story and he's spending it doing pretty much every other thing in the world except what we're paying him to do, which is, finish the story.

There is a contract. When you pay your money to the storyteller in the marketplace, the contract is, he tells you a story. Now, I'm willing to accept that when I toss a shekel in his upturned turban, maybe I won't LIKE the story, but unless the motherfucker dies before he chokes out the ending, at the very least, I believe that the implicit contract betwixt him and me that came into existence when he said "I'll tell you a story for a shekel, my good man" and I said, "Very well, here is your shekel, prate onward, o scribe", encompasses him telling me the ENTIRE story. Not just half or two thirds of it, at which point, he'll decide it's much much more important for him to watch a Giants' game, or go off to some storyteller's convention where people will kiss his ass for a week or so, or head back into his hotel, where he can sign a lot of merchandising and film contracts regarding the half or 2/3s of a story I've paid him to tell me and that he hasn't finished yet.

I'm not paying for a book, I'm paying for a STORY. He hasn't finished the story yet. And sure, if it's a long story he's entitled to breaks and meal time and some rest & recreation, but when I keep coming back to the marketplace looking for him to pick up where he left off and he's still over by the fountain under an awning watching the Punch & Judy show while good looking matched Swedish twins put butter on his toes, and it's pretty obvious that the operators of the Punch and Judy show and the good looking Swedish twins are both being sponsored by my shekel, I'm going to start feeling a little bit put upon, a little bit aggravated, a little bit as if someone is failing to live up to their end of the unstated contract.

But there is a contract, and the contract is this: You start a story, you finish it, and if you're having trouble finishing it, you at least show that you're making an effort to do so, that your contract with me is a priority for you, that it matters, that it's important.

You want to break that story down into increments and charge me for each increment, that's fine, but I want to see that you're making progress. I want to see good faith. And if I don't, I'm going to scream my head off about it, and why? Because that's really all I can do. If the storyteller is indeed so feckless and faithless that, while continuing to take my shekels through all his merchandising contracts and such, he still puts every other thing in his life ahead of continuing to tell me the story I'm paying for, well, there's not much I can do, except scream my head off, which I'm going to do.

This is one of those things where you're either a paying audience member or a story teller. If you're one, you simply have no sympathy for the POV of the other. I can understand this, vaguely; there are only six people in the world who have read my first novel UNIVERSAL MAINTENANCE, but I regularly hear from all six of them, wondering when I'm going to write the sequel. And I tell them all the same thing: when someone wants to pay me a realistic amount of money to set aside a year or so of my finite lifespan to turn out that sequel, I'll write it. Which I think is fair.

George R.R. Martin has been fairly compensated for not only the entire projected SONG OF ICE AND FIRE series, but, most likely, at this point, for every single other thing he's ever written in his life, and, most likely, he's been compensated at a pretty high rate for every football game he's ever going to watch again before he dies, too.... all of it, out of the coin that has been generated by A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE... a story that he has, as yet, to finish. The contract is for the story, not the increments of the story. If he can't finish it, he can at least keep working on it. He can show us it's a priority for him.

Or he can start issuing refund checks.

And if he can't do that, or he chooses not to do that, then, at the very least, while he's living in the million dollar home the Ice and Fire fans bought for him, watching football on the big screen high density TV the Ice and Fire fans bought for him, jetting to various exotic foreign lands using tickets that his Ice and Fire fans bought for him, and staying at hotels that his Ice and Fire fans are paying for, and going to cons to receive the adulation of his Ice and Fire fans, when we ask him "say, George, when's the next Ice and Fire book coming out", he could not whine and shriek and stamp his feet and wave his arms and cry like a giant fucking grey haired baby and call all of us names because, you know, we've given him millions of dollars for this story and he doesn't even want to bother pretending he's actually working on finishing it.

There is a contract. There is. I'm sorry if other authors of serial fiction out there take all this personally and find it all very inconvenient, but there is. And it's not for the book, it's for the story. You start a story, you need to at least make a pretty game attempt at finishing it. George R.R. Martin not only wants to cop out on his contract, but he also demands universal respect, admiration, and adulation from his fans while he takes our money with one hand and flips us off with the other.

Beyond all that, let me say this: Nobody, not one single Ice and Fire fan, has ever assumed that George R.R. Martin is our bitch. That's a straw man, and an egregiously dishonest, ludicrously stupid one, at that. We just think George R.R. Martin undertook to tell us a story, and he's fucking off, on our dime. And it pisses us off.

Or at least, it pisses me off.

Here endeth the lesson.

It's not exactly succinct, and given that nobody reads this blog any more, it's not going to inspire any fawning sycophant to record a catchy little You Tube ditty, but, still, I think it's much more cogent than the entirely self serving nonsense it refutes.

* * *

Brief recap, for those who aren't sf/fantasy geeks like me:  George R.R. Martin is a prolific author of fantasy and science fiction who, until 1996, had enjoyed only middling success in the genre, having had many books published over the course of the previous decades, most of which were pretty good, but none brilliant, and all of which were out of print by '96, when A GAME OF THRONES came out and became an instant bestselling fantasy classic.

A GAME OF THRONES, alas, was merely the first in a projected trilogy.  However, the next book, A CLASH OF KINGS, came out in 1998, and these are big books, so two years was about right.  And the book after that, A STORM OF SWORDS, came out in 2000. 

However, by this time the story had gotten out of control, with Martin adding dozens of new characters and plotlines with each subsequent volume, and the projected trilogy had grown from three books to four, then to five, then to six.  But, still, if he could keep kicking them out every two years, and they maintained the same quality as the first three, well, okay, so we'd all have to wait another six years to get the complete series, but it would be worth it.

Then  5 years went by, and people started to get antsy, wondering when the next projected book, A DANCE WITH DRAGONS, would come out, and Martin became increasingly more harried and less courteous with each such inquiry, until finally he was banning people from his blog comments threads and cursing them out in the blog itself for even having the temerity to ask.  And in 2005, we got a new book, and it was called a A FEAST FOR CROWS, and it was half of the promised A DANCE WITH DRAGONS... Martin hadn't been able to finish it, but the volume had grown uncontrollably anyway, so he divided the next installment in two and published the first half, while the volume with all the really cool characters that everyone was really interested in anyway has yet to appear.

Martin's fans were not pleased with this at the time, and we have grown more vociferous in our displeasure in the subsequent four years, as Martin has grown surlier and more truculent and more exasperated and the eventual completion of A DANCE WITH DRAGONS seems to recede further and further beyond the event horizon with each passing day.

And so a controversy has grown up, with a loud contingent of Ice and Fire fans feeling that Martin is not holding up his end of some nebulous 'deal' or compact between him and his audience, while another faction, whom I shall refer to most of the time as 'the asskissers', continues to reassure poor Mr. Martin that they will continue to be patient, they still love him, they eagerly await the next book but nonetheless he can take all the time he wants, they'll wait. 

This last faction is supported and embraced by every other professional author in the world, apparently, all of whom seem to feel it would be a bad idea to allow fans to feel like they are entitled to any kind of consideration at all from those whose works and lifestyles said fans support, regardless of circumstance. 

So that's why I wrote the above essay.

And it's here because I don't get much time to write these days, it's some of my better writing, I'm sure that out there among the political junkies (like me) there are at least a few sf/fantasy geeks who might be interested, and a lot more people read my work here than do on my blogspot page.

Okay?