"combative collegiality"

[sandhawke]

In an article in in the Aug 2009 issue of Psychology Today, I read this paragraph about [White House chief of staff] Rahm Emanuel's family:

The center of the Emanuel universe was the family dinner table, a boisterous place where all the meaningful issue of the day were hotly debated. While Rahm has called the verbal combat that took place there

Comments

[trom]

I don't know about normal, but the alternative is the kind where you are just trying to convince the other person of your rightness.

[jacflash]

And where one is attached to, even identified with, one's position and unlikely to abandon it on the basis of mere reason.

[redheadedmuse]

You and I do that all the time, love.

I'm glad to have a term for it, because I often find myself saying "sandhawke and I were fighting about [health care, trans rights, some weird linguistic thing] the other day and..." when I realize that I mean something different from what most people mean when I say that, and have to clarify that we were not, in fact, angry at each other.

I don't know how strange that is. It was normal in my house growing up, and seems normal to me with you, but there aren't many other people who will do it with me.

I see this in at least three different groups

[drwex]

Jews do it, for sure.

Geeks do it.

And researchers do it.

Which makes me... y'know, doomed.

Re: I see this in at least three different groups

[quietann]

/splortle

[dbang]

Oh, is that a Jewish thing?

I thought it was just my weirdass family....

[maebeth]

Its totally how I grew up. sometimes we were so explicit as to choose particular sides. "No wait, mom, I want to be against it today." But most of the time we just all jumped in.

We did it about every topic, but I remember being shocked ot learn that that is not what everyone else did after church. Everything we heard in worship, and learned in Sunday school was subject to scrutiny and analysis.