We're up against a semantic or rhetorical impasse.

Generalized impressions of bad conditions do not contain any truth that an individual van deal with, and delivering them with rhetorical passion and histrionic exclamations merely makes the communication even worse. WHat seems to work better is clear propositions stated as accurately as possible.

The inability or unwillingness to deconstruct the general into the particular, or at least into the accurate, means that the dialogue will forever be off on tangents which are doomed to grow further and further apart.

Even though this seems like neurotic or willful obstinacy, and even though it leads to reciprocal slanders, it is possible that it just a codification problem, with perfectly reasonable viewpoints at either end separated by a fundamental difference in metaphor. IT doesn't look that way from either end, of course, but it still might be the nature of this strange rhetorical foofaraw.


A