Track CNV
Answer in the room
Talking to people who disagree with you, or who have not decided, or who are your friends.
How to argue well
Three different jobs, one method for each. What to concede, what to leave alone, and why the person arguing with you is almost never the person you are persuading.
9 minKey arguments
The lines that work, grouped by the situation you are actually in, with the reasoning under each so you can rebuild the argument when somebody pushes.
9 minWhen a friend asks
A sincere question from somebody who likes you is not an argument, and answering it as though it were is how you lose the most persuadable person you will ever speak to.
11 minTalking with a disaffected Zionist
The hardest conversation on this site is not with an opponent. It is with somebody who agrees with you and cannot bear what it now costs to say so.
8 minTalking with progressives
You will not move anybody by attacking the framework they think in. You move them by showing that their own framework, applied consistently, already contains the answer.
9 minTalking with conservatives
This tradition already holds national self-determination, the rule of law and rules applied evenly. Most of the job is translation, and the register matters more than the argument does.
9 minTalking with centrists
You are not fighting a rival framework here. You are fighting the wish not to think about it, and the way through is to be the calmest and most specific person in the room.
9 minArguing with sympathy
Somebody describing a death has not made an argument, and answering it with one is the most common way a well briefed advocate loses a room.
9 minTalking to your children
There is no argument to win here and nobody to persuade, and the reflexes that serve you everywhere else on this site are the ones to put down.
9 minThe four concessions
Four sentences that cover every argument on this site, each with the sentence that turns it. What to concede, when, and the one thing you never concede.
5 minProtesting for Palestine without antisemitism
Written for somebody who marches for Palestine and does not want to be antisemitic. What four chants mean, where they come from, and what to chant instead.
8 min