Why’s it got to be organic? Is he a dirty hippy?
I see you’re finally getting tired of this.
Makes him seem more like the concerned middle class parent that wants only the best, but was so distracted by his schedule that he couldn’t keep up with the kid. The dirty hippies get their onions out of their dirty backyard gardens.
ZPG, you’re doing a parody of someone you know and hate, but also have a morbid fixation on, right?
You’re wearing a proverbial skin suit. At least, I hope it’s just proverbial.
IMO these accusations of trolling are misplaced. And this gets to the point I was making earlier in citing Peter Singer, although I was not as explicit about it as I might have been.
Basically, many people have a whole lot more confidence than they should in that things which they believe in strongly are completely compelling, such that no rational person could possibly believe otherwise. (And they dismiss radically different beliefs in other eras as being primitive believes that have been refuted and which can longer come back now that we’ve progressed past that point.) But I don’t think that’s warranted. Especially on matters of ethics and morality, there is enormous capacity for great variation in belief system.
So no matter how wacky someone’s belief system seems to you, that in and of itself is not a reason to assume they’re faking it. They might just have a radically different belief system than yours.
Go there at your own risk, dude.
I’m not sure what you mean with that.
But to be clear, what I’ve said has no bearing on whether a person with such beliefs is morally acceptable. It just means that they might genuinely believe in that system without being insane, and might be completely rational once you accept a few core premises.
You do realize that “What White People Like” is intended as satire, right?
One thing you don’t seem to understand is that one major part of the pro-choice movement is that a woman should have control of her own body. It’s not just about whether or not you want to be a parent. To a person who is truely pro-CHOICE, forcing an abortion on someone is just as abhorent as denying them that option, because it denies them the control of their body. (Forget arguing whether it’s a life or not: if an adult could somehow manage shrink themself and crawl up inside my body, I think I should have the right to expel said person, even if it would cause their death)
And that’s why most pro-choicers who are so disgusted with the idea of infanticide. I support abortion rights whole-heartedly. But once that kid is out of your body, it’s a separate person. It may not have the same, fully developed mind of an adult, but it’s still a separate person now. You’re no longer an “incubator”, as you put it.
And if you don’t get it, then you’re a fucking psychopath. I don’t give a shit WHERE you come from, or what circumstances you’ve been in.
A troll doesn’t have to be faking it to be a troll. By the board’s definition, it’s sufficient to be deliberately pissing people off.
If you are seriously suggesting that murdering a pregnant woman to prevent her from giving birth is anywhere in the realm of rational, I really don’t know what to tell you.
Stuff like Singer is one of the reasons I dropped philosophy as a major. People will ‘‘rationalize’’ themselves to completely inhumane conclusions. Rationality is not the end-all and be-all of being human. In fact given the whole of evolution, its a relatively recent part of human development, and I’m willing to bet it’s the more primitive parts of us that lead to any ethical conclusions at all. Rationality is just a tool we use in an attempt to make our world more ordered and predictable. You can build a rational framework for just about any terrible position.
See if you can follow my logic:
- Condoning murder as an acceptable alternative to adoption is sociopathic.
- If ZPG is sincere in her beliefs, she is sociopathic.
- If ZPG is not sincere in her beliefs, she is sociopathic.
Once you accept that she’s sincere in these beliefs, then there’s no reason to assume she’s deliberately trying to antagonize anyone. The mere fact that she strongly holds to these beliefs would be a reason for her to post them here.
ISTM that these two paragraphs contradict each other.
I’m just saying this (no joking now, dead serious here): At this stage of the thread, Poe’s Law doesn’t even begin to describe the state of affairs. But you’ve read the thread. If you’re horsing around, that’s your choice. But you know what happens now.
So what? Are you going to ignore my point? Or nitpick it to fucking death? My argument isn’t rationally driven, it’s emotionally driven, and that’s what it means to be human.
Fucking philosophers. 
That’s fine with me, but I personally happen to be interested in rational discussion, so I’m going to stick to that.
What’s a bit odd is that you yourself were also discussing what is or isn’t rational, and when called on contradicting yourself suddenly retreated into saying that you yourself weren’t being rationally driven.
So to elucidate my point, since you don’t seem inclined to address it, you’ve contradicted yourself. In your first paragraph you insisted that ZPGZ’s position couldn’t possibly be in the realm of rational thought. In your next paragraph you went on to say that anything could be rationalized - apparently including ZPGZ’s position - but that being rational was overrated anyway.
In response to the contradiction being pointed out, you then went on to say that you yourself weren’t being rational either. Which is fine, I suppose, but doesn’t happen to interest me.
Speaking for myself, I’m not ready to throw Peter Singer out with the bathwater yet. I would be up for a GD thread, with GD rules applying, rather than Pit rules. I said earlier that the Nazis didn’t got their ideas by reading Peter Singer. I don’t think **ZPG **did either. At least not beyond the bits she seemed to co-opt from what we talked about earlier. To be honest, I would be surprised if she had even heard the name before that.
Or, maybe I should put it like this: Reading Peter Singer doesn’t automatically turn you into a Nazi. As already noted upthread, if you read the argument another way, and you’re not sociopathic, it may turn you into a hardcore vegan humanist.
My understanding right now of how that might work is basically this: For the purpose of debate, let’s assume that babies and non-reasoning animals are equivalent. Well, I’m sure as fuck not killing babies. But maybe that could mean that I also shouldn’t kill non-reasoning animals. Or, at least, if I do, I’m being speciesist. And then it comes down to how OK I am with speciesism. (To state my personal beliefs for the record: I am, as of now, not a vegan. I am cool with speciesism, although I’m not dogmatic on that point. And I am firmly against baby-killing.)
Reading Peter Singer most likely won’t turn you into ZPG, either. And we’re talking to **ZPG **in this thread, not Peter Singer.
Personally, if a house is on fire, and I have a choice of rescuing a baby or an adult, I’m still choosing the baby. And not just because of knee-jerk emotionalism, either. I think that there are damned good arguments for choosing that way, including logical ones. (Which is probably not a controversial statement.)
I do think GD would be a better forum for that debate. Your mileage on that may, of course, vary.
ZPGZ trolling is brilliant and entertaining from a Marquis de Sade perspective. Your trolling is boring and tedious.
I’m not entirely convinced my two statements were contradictory. Trying to break down my own thought process here, I’m pretty sure what I meant to communicate was, ‘‘ZPG’s positions are not anywhere in the realm of rational. Even if they were…rationality is not the end-all and be-all of human existence.’’ So apologies for communicating unclearly. My main point is that there’s no conceivable excuse for landing at such a position, whether you do it from your gut or your cerebral cortex.
I wasn’t retreating from anything. I found your response both frustrating and confusing so I conceded your point in a snarky way.
FTR, there’s good evidence to support the theory that all ethical positions are emotionally driven, not rationally driven, and I find that evidence compelling enough to believe. So I actually believe, based on the evidence, that is impossible to be purely rational, unless your brain is dysfunctional. It’s like free will, this grand illusion of rationality, so I take anyone claiming to be purely rational with a huge grain of salt… including myself. So if someone says to me, ‘‘That argument is not rational,’’ I’m going to assume by default that they are right. I assumed you were right.
In retrospect, I’m not so sure.
This is a total tangent but if the illusion of free will is some kind of primitive brain function, as has been theorized, do we have any documented neurological cases where this function was broken? If not, it kind of pokes holes in that theory. (Unlike free will, I am absolutely certain there are documented cases where brain damage has caused the emotional-rational link to be broken, and the result is often disastrous. People can’t make decisions, even basic decisions like scheduling appointments, without emotional instinct.)
Is anyone, at this point, still not convinced that debating with **ZPG **is feeding the troll? Even after taking part in the thread? Whatever her motivations, beliefs, ideas whatever, really are, doesn’t matter. It’s her debating style. Talking to this fruit loop is equivalent to feeding the troll, for all practical purposes.
As far as I’m concerned, that is enough to call her a troll.
I mean, feed the troll if you want. It seems to be a popular pastime for many people, so go right ahead. Just be aware that you’re feeding a troll.
Maybe she should get her own custom title, instead of “guest”. Like this:
ZPG Zealot
Troll
I wish they were neatly labeled like that.
I like talking to Fotheringay-Phipps. He makes me examine my own assumptions.
The only problem is my dialog style can be really disconcerting to hyper-rational people because I can’t separate emotion and reason in my worldview much less from the way I argue. They’re used to seeing a purely emotional argument, and dismissing it, or seeing a purely rational argument, and taking it seriously, but they don’t really know how to interpret an emotional argument backed up by evidence or reason.
And I am not even claiming I’m always right or reasonable. The one thing I know for certain is that I know nothing for certain. But damn, we have to draw lines somewhere. I feel like infanticide is setting the bar pretty low.
Quit this bullshit. Trying to goad her after you say that you don’t care that she doesn’t want to respond makes it clear that you are lying. Spice Weasel may not see how to defend your allegations, but I can.
Guess what? RATIONALIZATIONS ARE NOT RATIONAL. A rationalizations is an after-the-fact use of pseudorational statements to justify an opinion someone did not come into rationally. You can rationalize anything, but it doesn’t make it rational.
So, no. There was no contradiction. Your little habit of finding contradictions rather than addressing the actual argument isn’t going to work this time. For once, it’s really easy to unpack where you went off the rails.
Oh, and you aren’t even talking about rationality. You’re talking about logic. Rational just means “reasonable.” If you accept an irrational premise, then you aren’t being rational. A deluded person can be logical, but they are not rational if they have irrational premises.
ZPG’s premises are irrational. They do not come from any rational mind. They are either, as I suspect, processes of deluded thinking and a different way of looking at truth, or just flat out trolling. She is not being rational.