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Point well made, rhetorically and otherwise.  Content ("what one says") and process ("how one says it") are not fully independent of one another.  There is meaning for the hearer in both, and the two may complement or conflict (among other possibilities).  

If one  speaks "AS IF YOU ARE RIGHT" (me, in this case I presume), it may indeed create an abyss (between us) even if the content is "rightness seems to me not to be possible in any case, including this one" (which it is and on which we seem to agree).   And yes, it is a productive abyss.  I orginally wrote for the preceding "rightness is not possible in any case ..." and then replaced it with "rightness seems to me not to be possible ...".  An old dog can learn new tricks.

Beyond that, I think there are two more general issues highlighted by all this, one having to do with the writer/speaker and the other with the reader/listener/responder.  Both are, of course, separately and jointly, responsible for creating meaning in both content and process realms.  For the writer/speaker the issue is how to tell a story in a way that is as accessible as possible to readers/listeners/responders.  "Academic" writing developed, I suspect, as an effort to do this most efficiently for the widest possible audience.  My own rhetorical style is a modification of that, aimed at getting beyond a purely "academic" audience, but clearly can be read/heard as tarred by the "academic" brush.  Perhaps there is no general purpose rhetoric?  One needs always to use different rhetorics for different audiences?  And perhaps to accept as well an inevitable conflict between telling a story compellingly and having it rejected simply because it is compellingly told ("as if you are right")?

For the reader/listener/responder, the issue, it seems to me, is how to find in a story that which is most useful to oneself.  It is not to decide whether to believe the story, nor even to be sure one understands the story in the terms that the writer/speaker "intended," but rather to make oneself as open to the story as possible, to maximize the likelihood that one will be altered by it.  What one then wants to avoid, it seems to me, is premature rejection of stories, one the grounds either of rhetoric or content.

All of this is closely related to, and referred to in, a recent (and continuing) conversation on Rorty, non-foundationalism, and story telling: possibilities and problems that you're more than welcome to join.  So yes, "the wonder of the internet is in keeping conversations open indefinitely" and in opening new ones; thanks for contributions to that.  One never knows when or where something said might be useful.  More than happy to "continue our own conversations" here as well, in ways that don't "sound antagonistic".  With a shared interest in non-violence "understood not as the avoidance of conflict and associated disruption, but rather as a commitment to the nurturing of new understandings/stories, individually and collectively."