It certainly seems to lead to some weird possible conclusions. From LHoD’s posted quote:
It seems to me that, by this logic, if you had the chance to save either a baby or an adult from a fire, but not both, you should save the adult. That seems completely counterintuitive to me.
No, it really doesn’t.
History says it does.
I’m pretty sure that the Nazis didn’t get their ideas by reading Peter Singer.
Yeah, no it doesn’t.
Singer, you gotta remember, is a hardcore vegan. He thinks killing a mouse is a terribly unethical act. So when he suggests that sometimes killing an infant isn’t as bad as killing a grown-ass adult–when he even seems to suggest that sometimes it’s not as bad as killing a grown-ass adult mouse–that’s what you gotta remember. He’s a dude that thinks killing a grown-ass adult mouse is terrible.
If you try to adopt his relative value of evil without adopting his benchmark, you end up saying, “I think killing mice is fine, and he’s saying killing a baby isn’t as bad as killing a mouse, MONSTER!” But that leaves out a crucial detail of his argument.
When I read his business about when infanticide is okay, it’s got a very important caveat: it’s okay when you’re planning on denying the infant lifesaving care anyway. In these circumstances, mainstream medical care apparently allows you to give the infant a slow death by dehydration, and Singer says it’d be better to give the infant a quick, painless death instead.
It’s an appalling thing to contemplate, but it’s very different from reading some sort of eugenic infanticide into his words.
I will note that I don’t necessarily trust my intuition on these things. At least not blindly. My intuition on abortion is pretty much the same as on infanticide: It is wrong. I got into some kerfuffles about this when I was younger. Then I realized that everyone around me seemed to hold the opposite view. My intuition hasn’t really changed, but I recognize that maybe, just maybe, lots and lots and lots of people, whose opinions on other matters I respect and readily agree with, might have a point. So I’ve stopped flying off the handle about it.
The entire second half of your post is a nice summation of what normal intelligent people do. Which brings us back to how our thread topic handles her kerfluffles.
That is the sense one gets, isn’t it? Whatever is going on, it’s not a cultural thing. Or, even if you take all possible cultural factors into account, it’s not about that. It’s a seemingly complete lack of empathy thing, combined with an anger and bitterness thing. I don’t think **ZPG **has said a nice thing to me or anyone else in the entire thread. Or, for that matter, ever. Or shown any concern or consideration for anyone else’s viewpoint. Never mind feelings.
She gives me the total creeps. I’m still not sure if it’s a case of troll, or nuttier than a squirrel’s breakfast. Or both. Even if she’s making things up facts-wise, I’m not sure that you can invent a personality that abrasive and chilling. It’s like something out of a horror movie.
I hope it’s all an act, otherwise I’m honestly worried that she might be a danger to herself and others.
So, yeah. Fascinating.
No, don’t do this. Don’t back down from your shtitch of never, ever backing off the craziness. You need to keep on your argument that the person would have been better dead and that you would gladly be the one who killed them with your bare hands.
You’ve hit the trolls’ dilemma, where you have reached the inevitable end where you have said something so completely horrorific that people will now simply ignore you and refuse to engage. Which is the worst thing you can imagine for your boring life as a white wallflower still living with in her mother’s home somewhere in an unnamed suburb.
Nice story about the whole Roma thing and the killing fields. You had a lot of people going.
I only took you off my ignore list because of the recent threads. You’re back on since you are a troll, or less likely so batshit crazy that you need your meds adjusted.
Just because others don’t require the same investigation to understand her doesn’t mean they’re at fault.
Pretty much, it was when you found sympathy in infanticide that you lost me. Sorry.
I can see engaging in trolls or crazy people, but you have to watch it because no one knows how much you actually sympathize and how much you are just jerking his/her chain to find out more.
I’m very sorry that you got that impression. I really don’t have any sympathy whatsoever for infanticide. If it’s not too much trouble, could you point to what I said that gave you the idea? I mean, if it was something specific, and not just the whole discussion? Just so I might know how not to bollix up so much in the future.
I should add to that: It’s not just a matter of chain-yanking, though. I really do mean it when I say that I am willing to set my intuition aside and try to wrap my head around a viewpoint I don’t understand or agree with. If, at the end of that, I come to the conclusion that the viewpoint is, indeed, whack-a-doodle, then all the better, as I have a better understanding of why and how it is whack-a-doodle. But I won’t instantly pelt tomatoes at someone just because they hold an unpopular viewpoint. Not that I’m about to defend Hitler any day soon, though. Sometimes, whack-a-doodle is just whack-a-doodle. And sometimes, a possible troll turns out to be, indeed, a troll.
Maybe I should be more considerate of the feelings of innocent bystanders, though. Considering feelings is, famously, not my strongest side. I’ll admit that.
Man, we have so much in common, you don’t even know. I get shit all the time for trying to give people the benefit of a doubt, or connect to them as human. I have a tough time seeing people as all good or all bad, and that’s generally a good thing but honestly sometimes I don’t know if I’m too far to that extreme. And lacking the ability to trust my own judgment about such things, I kind of have to take my social cues from the majority.
But you gotta lay off people for being offended. Her comments can be characterized as personal attacks on the character and quality of some of us as people. She thinks any child would be better off dead than adopted by me, and she makes this judgment without having a fucking clue about me. As someone who has felt compelled to adopt for as long as i can remember, and who due to a number of factors cannot realistically conceive a child, the fuck am I supposed to do with that?
What I mostly do with it is ignore it. But I can’t blame others for being disgusted and offended.
Point taken. Although, to say one thing in my defense, I guess I didn’t realize that people were taking any of her wackiness personally.
In fact, I didn’t realize that until this very moment. People are taking that kind of wackiness personally? She’s actually hurting people’s feelings? OK, I’ll keep that in mind. It’s another thing I don’t intuitively grok, but I will make a note of it.
I mean, if I met **ZPG **in person, and she’s anything IRL like she comes across on this board, I would certainly be worried about getting slapped with a rape charge for looking at her the wrong way, or possibly being murdered. I would worry about my legal and physical safety. She scares the crap out of me. But I can’t imagine a single thing that she could ever say that I could possibly find offensive on a personal, emotional level, up to and including (hypothetically) “I would rather kill my infant than let you - you, MB, specifically - adopt him/her”. How can you not just laugh at something like that?
But, if mileage on that front is variable, I’ll take that into consideration. So, thanks. That’s an interesting fact all by itself. I mostly thought that all the piling on I’ve been seeing was just for shits and giggles.
To continue, just to be clear on this:
Again, it’s not because I agree with the wackiness. I guess it works a bit like this: Hitler is the most despicable person ever, right? Hitler could fuck up my life real good. I’m disgusted and outraged by things Hitler did. I find Hitler terrifying and monstrous. But if Hitler tried to insult me, how could I possibly take that personally? He’s Hitler. He’s a nutcase. He hates everybody.
Can one catch delusion?
Pile-on?
For a pit thread concerning a poster with a great number of very unsavoury views there was barely a trickle of criticism. I, for one, waited and waited for you to finish your bizarre experiment – I think others did too.
The end never came, I just lost patience.
Fair enough. It did go on too long. Og only knows where I might have ended up without the reality checks. I do appreciate the rescue operation.
I am a bit disappointed that she didn’t turn out to be literally living in a parallel universe, communicating through an interdimensional portal. There could have been a Nobel Prize in there for us. Just another troll is so mundane and boring by comparison.
I guess it was a long shot, though.
Oh, one more thing in my defense:
I hadn’t actually had any dealings with **ZPG **until relatively recently. I don’t read or pay attention to everything on the boards. I understand now that some of you have been around this block before, but I hadn’t. Or, to the extent that I had, I was just vaguely paying attention. Going into this thing, I thought we were dealing with handshake rape, arcane wedding customs, and someone hilariously freaking out upon realizing that teenagers were having sex. That’s whack-a-doodle, but relatively harmless whack-a-doodle. At least potentially harmless.
I didn’t know about the anti-adoption, infanticide and murdering stuff. And I certainly didn’t know how nutty it would get. That is weapons-grade, someone might actually end up killed, are-you-out-of-your-fucking-*mind *level whack-a-doodle.
I guess it was a slippery slope from the one kind of whack-a-doodle to the other. There’s no way I would have started this conversation if I had any clue where it would end up.
And yet, even after that you were posting to the effect of “wait, hold on now, let’s listen to what she has to say,” and chastising people who HAVE been around the block with her many times for telling you it’s only going to get worse. Not sure I get what you’re after here.
Yeah, it got out of hand. I didn’t realize what was going on.
Damn it. This might actually be bad. It’s a level of whack-a-doodle way above my pay grade, and I was still playing around. Yeah. That should not have happened. I’ll need to look into that.
