Are you Happy? flowchart
I like that. The only quibble I have is that there should be another arrow from Change Something back to Are You Happy?
This is the shit that cracks me up about you, ivn. What do you have against beards? Balding fatties, whatever, but what is up with the shots at beards? Weren’t you the one who was on about “neck beards” or something of the sort?
What you seem to be saying is that you don’t post to this board as a human being, but as something else called a ‘message boarder,’ to which an entirely different standard of expectation and behavior applies. This, of course, assumes that your response to “real world” pathetic depression is something other than to ask who cares. It’s an interesting admission. I’m not deluded, though; I’m not shocked that such an approach might exist, but it does strike me as… suboptimal. I also wonder whether you apply that kind of standard to any other kind of interaction at all. People on the train – closer to people or to message boarders? On the phone? Cashiers at the grocery store?
For my part, I tend to try to read a message board as a series of messages put there by human beings for the purpose of interacting like human beings. Like, the “OP” has a face, and a place where he or she lives, and farts and pees and has a mother. Every message boarder being a human being, it follows as a pretty logical next step that I should give a shit what effect my posts might have on him. All that is is the absence of sociopathy.
It also makes for a pretty neat definition of a troll, from my perspective. As long as other posters don’t violate the assumption that we’re all acting like our actual human manifestations to some extent, we’re all on the same page. We’re interacting like people. Trolls are here to interact like something else. It strikes me that this is a shitty assumption on my part, though. I don’t think you’re a troll, and yet you’re admitting to a perspective that I can’t imagine you’d cop to in real life (one that is diametrically opposed, I mean; not just a difference of degree or bombast). I wonder which is the more common on this board.
Agreed!
First of all, you are not the first to call me a troll. I’m starting to wonder if I am one.
Message boarding, for me, means I agree to a set of circumstances that are different from real life. I agree to admit to myself, that there is no way in the world for me to know if a poster that claims to be a 19 year old blond female student, is really a 50 year old fat, bald beardie (that cracks me up, too, MOL).
So I dont’ really care that much if blondie is really beardie. I am willing to ‘board’ with him as if he is her. I’m not going to go out of my way to pin him down on who he is, and if he posts about his period or whatever, I will chime in with my own viewpoint. Who cares. We are just ‘messageboarding’…I don’t need to know if he really is blondie with a period in order to get in on the conversation.
Most of all, I don’t want to feel as if something I said while ‘messageboarding’ caused someone to jump off a freakin’ bridge. Especially when I am doing an activity where I have no clue if the person I am talking to is suicidal beardie, or pms blondie. Fuck that…I’m not doing it. I’m not taking that weight on myself. If it makes me a troll, then answer my riddles three.
I called you a troll?
Anyway, whether you acknowledge taking the weight on or not, you’re doing so. Disclaiming the real-world significance of your actions doesn’t actually negate them.
The reality is that it might. You don’t want to feel that way, none of us do, but it just very well might. It’s one thing to call someone’s political beliefs into question, it’s another to poke someone who intimates that they are horribly depressed. There are levels of empathy here. I generally assume that ivn1188 has the stones to take what he dishes out. So he’s a fun target, he has placed himself in the position of target and has more or less asked for it, pretty forthrightly. I would be really surprised, shocked and dismayed if I heard that the back and forths with him had triggered anything like that. Would it be our fault if he did that? No, it wouldn’t be, as we were just playing the game largely by the rules he agreed to.
Mookieblaylock on the other hand didn’t ask for derision, didn’t come to the Pit to be derided, and people here are being mean. He said he goes to the Doctor. So how is this any different from saying, “You should be cured of your Myasthenia Gravis already you fucking dipshit!”? The reality is for the most part crybabies are either wired that way, or they have been traumatized or otherwise have learned that this behavior helps them in some way. So, you can be sympathetic or not, but if you are going to poke people who are on the edge, it’s very possible that your words could inspire them to hurt themselves.
Would that make you responsible? No, it wouldn’t, but you do have a choice as to whether you want to be a positive role in that person’s life or a negative one. You make that decision on a day to day basis.
I don’t think you’re a troll in general, I can’t recall ever being overly offended by anything you’ve said in the past, and I have read your posts and do recognize you as someone I have more than once paid attention to.
But…the letter of the law around here is no so much that you can’t ‘be’ a troll, so much as you can’t be honest about it. I think this thread violates the ‘don’t be a jerk’ rule, but I also think this thread needs to be had. The jerks can defend their right to be a jerk, and everyone else can say their piece on that as well. As someone who has not infrequently been a jerk, I think it’s a healthy part of the message boarding experience.
From one ACTUAL human being to another. I hope your weekend has treated you well. 
You guys are referring to the fallacy of the false dichotomy. The law of the excluded middle is just a reformulation of the law of non-contradiction (or vice versa):
LoNC: ~(A & ~A)
LoEM: A v ~A
Well, people use “law of the excluded middle” to mean one thing (the truth of A v ~A, as you say), and “fallacy of the excluded middle” to mean another thing (what’s also known as the fallacy of the false dichotomy, as you say).
Logicians don’t.
shrugs. I’m a logician and I see no problem with it. It’s just names, and they’re definitely all in demonstrated use.
I’m a logician too. shrugs
Glad we’re agreed, then. 
At most we agree we’re both logicians.
And that we shrug!
As for the issue on which we apparently disagree, what’s the harm in allowing people to describe in ordinary language a fallacy which is naturally described as excluding a middle as “the fallacy of the excluded middle”, particularly given that people have been doing it for ages?
Well, whatever. I can’t imagine anything fruitful coming from carrying this on. If you think people should stop speaking that way and I don’t, we’re left at that.
I guess there is no chance you guys could meet…uh…something like…uhhh…“halfway”
Well, there is the possibility of confusion and perhaps even equivocation. I like to be unambiguous when talking about logical principles. Yes, I knew what was intended, but the pedant in me prefers less obfuscating language.
Have you seen that test on Facebook, Which Logical System Are you?? It’s pretty funny.
In any case, I return the reader to his/her regularly scheduled rant.
That possibility has been excluded.
