Plain People of Crooked Timber: can’t see why you’re drafting us in here so often after leaving us out in the cold for five years or whatever, we are busy people with our own lives and so on.
Me: but I love you and you’re the best!
Plain People of Crooked Timber: well if you’re going to resort to flattery, I suppose it’s alright but you should probably give it a rest for a bit after this.
Me: OK, is it immoral to convince people they hold immoral beliefs, despite knowing they may commit immoral actions as a result? Should I troll people into being bad people?
Plain People of Crooked Timber: those are daft questions and the answers are obviously yes and then no.
Me: OK, but hear me out. Anti-abortion believers’ stated views are that fertilised embryos are people (with souls) even when they haven’t implanted into the uterine wall. Blastocysts too. This entails regarding IVF as a grotesque parade of murder. Multiple embryos are produced, several implanted due to the staggering cost of a single round, and then the number often brought down via selective abortion since who wants to have triplets sweet Christ not to speak of quadruplets, and one is usually not thriving as much, so it’s easier to make a decision. Well, easy; I have never been in this position and many people probably find it far from easy, and perhaps even agonising, who am I to say, and I am deeply sorry for people in this difficult situation, which may be the worst of their lives. I retract the whole easy concept I am being ignorant and even unkind. BUT all of this is completely moral at every stage and every level and I am cheering on everyone who does this, best of luck, I hope this works for you and you have all the children you wish for. I love mine and everyone who wants children should be able to have them, just as people who don’t want children should be able to not have them.
The remainder lie forever in stasis like the astronauts of some commercial venture the Weyland-Yutani Corp has deemed unprofitable, or are destroyed, with fewer than five percent adopted by some other couple. I hope that changes if people want it to, I hope they all get used and people get to pay less for what is an unreasonably exorbitant procedure. Carry on! Also, if they were not used, kept in stasis, or discarded, that would also be moral and right and not murder under any conceivable definition of murder.
However irrational anti-abortion people are logically required to think this the murderiest string of murders ever, much worse than an ordinary abortion affecting usually only one or perhaps two alleged unborn people. Which, I must add, is totally fine and people should get abortions not only for life of the mother reasons, often emphasised, but also for the reason that they don’t want to be pregnant and have a child right then. This should be emphasised more. It is a great reason to have an abortion, maybe the best. Not wanting to be pregnant.
Now, I saw an anti-abortion nutcase on twitter trying to explain that if he and his fellows adopted or stated these anti-IVF views they would seem crazy (oh, so sad) and like opponents of a popular procedure done to create babies, their nominal goal in life. The word white is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that last sentence. So, he said, they should either learn to think of this in the proper light of its somehow not being murder (nice try, asshole) or shut up about it because it would make them look bad and undo the massive gains they have made. And then people came at him hard. And I was…well, one of those people. I checked his profile to see whether he was a Catholic of a very tedious sort, and yes, he was one of those who have somehow missed the literal entire point of Catholicism and think they know better than the Pope because he is too woke.
You know, Protestantism is RIGHT HERE if at any time you wish to just step away to Anglicanism or Episcopalianism and get all the good outfits and thuribles but not believe the Pope is…the Pope. Also our hymns are better, check it out. Anyway, as an alleged Catholic I advanced my views with the mystery of the sacred behind them, and browbeat him until he admitted it was murder. But is that wise?
What if I convince some morons that this is murder, in some deeply tragic way that makes libertarian bros who oppose abortion because (???) cry at night? Not really, it’s some weird control/punishment thing for them because liberal women won’t have sex with them and also shouldn’t be able to vote (???!!?!). Well, I would never say that to anyone who has gone through the procedure despite opposing abortion rights herself, because I am a jerk on the internet, not an actual monster and I’m very glad that worked out for her. Because every stage of this procedure is right and good and women should do whatever they want, even when they don’t think other women should be able to do what they want. But what if the result of this trolling is that more people say, “yeah, we should ban IVF” which would be very bad? I wouldn’t realistically be doing that as my nibbling around the edges with bad-faith trolling is unlikely to affect real-world policies.
But the whole point of trolling is to get people to see that their views are deeply contradictory and that they should either submit or ragequit and block you. So I would be spending my time trying to convince people to realise they are evil, and that seems wrong, even if it is tempting because they are idiots who are unable to think things through to a conclusion. So should I stop?
Plain People of Crooked Timber: we already said it was a daft question and that you should absolutely not do it. What was all this faffing about for and why are you going to drag us here and there to tell you things you know perfectly well yourself, honestly, look in your heart and you’ll see this is much worse than trolling bad-faith Learn Latin men who want to revive the Crusades and have the head of a white marble statue as their pfp. But never some Roman woman with a terrible, towering wig of curls that took some slave four hours to do. No, it’s Amor Patriae from 1777, honestly kind of sus.
Me: I didn’t think you would say sus, it’s unlike you.
Plain People of Crooked Timber: fine they’re dryshites.
Me: so I should just write my books and play Animal Crossing and never comment ever on the internet? I made a mosque on my island you know, a really great one, and then I felt obliged to make a church and temple as that’s the Singapore way of avoiding sectarian strife. Ruined temple: ok. Church is proving very difficult. I mean, I have a pulpit, but I guess I need designs for special panels of stained glass. I saw a portrait of Cromwell in the National Portrait gallery yesterday, he looked odious.
Plain People of Crooked Timber: would you stop giving out? Now you’re just trying to distract from the issue. Go onto Pinterest and get stained glass designs I don’t care if your design slots are full. Get rid of those tassels for the edge of carpets. You have both cross-island and up-island tassels to lay carpets each way it’s uncalled for. And you’re over-using the party-lights arch, give over.
Me: but it’s so–
Plain People of Crooked Timber: and don’t induce people to be evil.
Me: yeah ok, you’re right. [sighs and looks at phone]
{ 24 comments… read them below or add one }
Chet Murthy 09.05.24 at 8:09 am
Belle, we could take it further, perhaps? A famous feminist philosopher pointed out that if you’re really going to be consistent about saving lives, and little blastocysts are lives and all, hence women need to bear those babies to term, no ifs, no buts, no get-out-clause, then you gotta be consistent everywhere else. [which you’re doing with your argument about IVF].
Specifically, if women gotta be enslaved to save babby [sic], then everybody has to be enslaved to save those who need organ transplants. Everybody, and I mean everybody, needs to to be dragged into the hospital for histocompatibility testing, and if they match somebody who needs a liver, or bone marrow, they’ll need to be tied-down and get that stuff extracted. And if somebody needs a kidney, then they’ll be tied-down and one of their kidneys will be extracted. B/c if babby [sic] is precious, then so is every living human, and if women can be enslaved to save babby, then so can men to save those sick humans.
Honestly, I think that feminist was really onto something, b/c her thought experiment is far more up-close-and-personal to these gestation slavers, and hey, they might actually realize that the consequences of their odious beliefs will slap themselves right upside the head (causing them to pass out, which will make it easy to extract a kidney).
So why not troll ’em with that?
Also though, I think that restricting the audience for this trolling to just gestation slavers is missing the real win: the real audience is all those people who aren’t really sure, and showing them that being a gestation slaver means also no more IVF (and, haha, giving up their kidney, having their bone marrow extracted — OWowowowowOW). And I don’t think you’re trolling when you explain to those people.
When people fully understand the implications of gestation slavery (howsoever softly it’s sold), most recoil in horror. I think it’s great to make it plain. Like that William S. Burroughs line: “NAKED lunch–a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of the fork.”
John Q 09.05.24 at 9:00 am
Although the two ideas are logically unrelated, some prominent figures associated with Effective Altruism, have pushed the view that we don’t even need to wait for fertilisation – every potential life counts equally with those who are already born.
But it’s not just crazy EA types.Famous and well regarded philosophers like Parfit and Sidgwick have endorsed the view or at least claimed that it is the only coherent version of utilitarianism
Alison 09.05.24 at 9:50 am
I had a philosophy professor – an urbane Jesuit who also taught art history – who argued that all pregnant women should be compelled to take Thalidomide. His argument was that while causing severe birth defects, it also suppresses miscarriage, and therefore saves the life of babies who would not otherwise be born. I think he felt he was being amusing. I have never heard this argument made since (it may be our understanding of the action of Thalidomide has changed). I am pretty certain nobody on the anti-abortion side would agree with him… but should they ‘logically’? Should a responsible person even raise this issue?
Belle Waring 09.05.24 at 9:54 am
I guess I knew that about Parfit but he seems a bit lofty compared to these jokers. But what I’m hearing here is that as long as I pretend to follow my intuitions to their troubling conclusions I can troll in the service of evil all I want!
Separately, what kind of epic moron CONVERTS to Catholicism (a well known activity popular among depressed writers and, apparently, confused American right-wingers) but THEN decides the Pope isn’t infallible. What was the POINT? Why not just be a Protestant of a type with chasubles and gold censers and cathedrals and boy’s choirs and so on? Smells and bells? Or mope around being a boring Methodist, I don’t know. Some people are ethnically Jewish without being religiously Jewish; I am ethnically Episcopalian, baptised and confirmed in the church etc. If I wanted to convert to Catholicism it would be because I thought the Pope had the mainline to God, and quite secondarily because birettas and cardinals are cool, and that deal with the smoke badass, and St. Paul’s very nice and so on. It wouldn’t be so I could bitch about Pope Francis being woke. Honestly.
Pittsburgh Mike 09.05.24 at 10:17 am
This seems irrelevant to me, because I don’t care about tricking someone who believes a fertilized egg into admitting they’re inconsistent. It’s easy to poke holes in that argument.
The argument that a fertilized egg is deserving of the full protection of the bill of rights, as compared to, say a skin cell is sometimes based on genetic uniqueness.
But this is absurd. We don’t view identical twins as redundant, either of whom can be killed without cost or penalty just because there’s another one available.
And some day, we’ll have the technology to clone an entire individual from any cell in their body. At that point, the usual biological processes that replace old cells with newer ones would become mass murder on a scale never seen on earth — simply living would be akin to genocide.
The argument that an embryo is fully human could be based on the idea that it is a potential human being, who could be the next Einstein or Salk. But this is an argument for banning birth control and forcing people to have as many children as possible, I suppose on the hope that one of those people will figure out how the earth can support the resulting 20, 30 or 100 billion people.
IRL, most people believe there’s a qualitative difference between a fertilized egg and a fetus at 8 months. Somewhere between those points, most people believe is a time before which abortion is OK, and after which aborting a healthy fetus is immoral.
oldster 09.05.24 at 11:19 am
“… is it immoral to convince people they hold immoral beliefs, despite knowing they may commit immoral actions as a result….”
That’s only part of the story, though, and the rest of the story vindicates your trolling.
Option 1): forced birthers pretend not to oppose IVF, this makes them look slightly less repellent, thus helps their godking get elected; this leads to a catastrophic parade of immoral outcomes.
Option 2): Belle baits the forced birthers into admitting that they are committed to opposing IVF; their deep creepiness is made evident to the voting public; their godking loses the election; a whole parade of immoral outcomes is avoided; Belle is given a ticker-tape parade and proclaimed mater patriae for having killed the Catalinarians.
Clearly you should do Option 2. You are not trolling them in order to get them to do immoral things. You are trolling them in order to reduce the number of immoral things that happen, by forcing them to show their true creepy colors and thus keep them from getting elected. Easy decision, no quandary.
“ But the whole point of trolling is to get people to see that their views are deeply contradictory….”
I used to think so, but [Aristotle]’s treatise “On Trolling” persuaded me otherwise.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-american-philosophical-association/article/aristotle-on-trolling/540BB557C82186C33BFFB61E35A0B5B6
J, not that one 09.05.24 at 1:15 pm
The longer I was online, the more I became convinced that some kind of paradoxical effect was likely, something like this (speaking in the name of some online dude):
Plus, I was happier when I believed that if people were shown the consequences of their beliefs, they’d change their minds.
J, not that one 09.05.24 at 1:23 pm
I think the science is irrelevant for most pro-lifers. It comes down to “God put a baby in your tummy and it’s bad for you to do something about that.”
In 2007 or so? there was SARS in this part of the country and one church I know of continued taking communion from a shared cup. That was how they’d always done it, and God wasn’t going to allow anything bad to happen if they just continued doing common sense things.
It should have been obvious to anyone who got close enough to observe what was actually going on that different definitions of “human flourishing” and “social welfare” were in play. And that the religious people in these debates knew that perfectly well. The refusal to mask or implement social distancing should have been predictable from that point.
stevem johnson 09.05.24 at 3:02 pm
Started reading the OP with the my personal position that asking anti-abortion people (yes, that does include women,) to justify the moral goodness of unwanted children. I suppose it’s trolling to say that’s the real pro-life position too, not just that. As the discussion in the OP ascended to ever more rarefied literary and intellectual heights, though, lack of oxygen started to affect my thinking.
It began with delusions of reference, that the OP was telling me that I really an immoral person because of my comment in the conservative psychology thread was trolling joeyjoejoe. But this was okay, who am I to argue with authority?
But it didn’t stop there. As I asphyxiated, God appeared. He told me that yes, DNA is the soul and every unique genome is His creation. That’s why twins (or worse) don’t have complete souls, since they had to share. He explained that’s why there must an Evil Twin, who should be scapegoated.
He also directed that ectopic pregnancy was His judgment against the woman, His plan to release her from the vale of tears (He wasn’t forthcoming about whether it was to bring the target to paradise or Jell, sorry to disappoint the curious.) In the cases where one fetus absorbs another (He didn’t say how often that happens, but it does,) then the survivor is a cannibal. He didn’t say explicitly but He seemed to hint the cannibal would be punished in Hell.
He went on and said, yes, every failed implantation and every miscarriage was His judgment on the soul of the infant. He pointed out that these creatures could not be baptized before death, much less personally accept Jesus into his or her. He didn’t use the phrase “fetal damnation” but I couldn’t think of any other term? At any rate, He proudly announced the He, God, was the Great Abortionist. He pointed out that he’s killed more babies before the woman realized she might be pregnant (Did they think they were just having a bad period because it was late?)
Now this revelation could be attributed to hypoxia, but just because there’s an alternative rational explanation and this conflicts with my philosophical/scientific materialism, doesn’t mean I have to reject this Gospel, no? It’s not like I can’t rely on doctors instead of prayer a la Christian Science just to be logically consistent? When God Himself tells you, you listen…or else.
My apologies to joeyjoejoe.
Belle Waring 09.05.24 at 3:14 pm
oldster: exactly! They are deranged maniacs and once ineluctable internal forces (i.e., the states into which I have argued them) cause them to parade their deranged mania through the streets people will say, gosh, they seem like deranged maniacs, I wouldn’t want them in charge of everything, and then only the relentless march of fifty more years of the Roberts Court will stand between us and reproductive rights.
oldster 09.05.24 at 3:18 pm
I thought your answer to the Roberts Court was, “vixerunt”?
stevem johnson 09.05.24 at 3:31 pm
Followed the link oldster@6 kindly provided…
“And this [Socratic irony] is not trolling but the contrary, exhortation and truth-telling—even if the citizens get very annoyed.” If I recall correctly the first legal premise of truth as defense against charges of slander, libel and sedition was in the notorious Sedition Act of 1798. But, again if I remember correctly/my forgotten source was correct, no defendant in the subsequent cases even attempted this defense? So I’m not at all sure that any disagreeable person can legitimately claim to defy the conventional opinion on the specious grounds the disagreement is “true.”
” For every community of speakers holds certain goods in common, and with them the conversation [dialegesthai] as an end in itself; and the troll is one who seeks to damage it from within.” The observation that the conversation is the common good is correct, especially for the internet which is hardly anything other than the conversation. Of its nature, then, collegial conversation is thus the art which achieves that good. The notion that the dialegesthai could be a false one, where a mere faction of speakers indulge each other in untrue judgments and congratulate each other on their ignorance and their lack of virtue, while calling it virtue? That their conversation is aimed indirectly at other factions who are not welcome?
That needs to be demonstrated. If the internet conversation is merely a faction, then a Socrates is not a troll, but a prophet. But if the internet conversation is in truth the agora of the polity, then Socrates should drink the hemlock for poisoning the youth. (Or be banned by the owner of the website.)
Joking aside, kudos to Rachel Barney.
notGoodenough 09.05.24 at 3:44 pm
@ Belle Waring
Hmmm…
somebody who remembers that american catholics get, per capita, the same number of abortions as other americans 09.05.24 at 3:55 pm
J, not that one, has the right of it in #8. I would add that anti abortion religious people get abortions at essentially the same rate as anyone else in America. So, specifically, their position is about the baby in YOUR tummy. not the one in theirs, or their kid’s. thus, its right for sad white couples who they’re friends with to use IVF but wrong for others to do it. there is no hypocrisy to expose because there is no principle at work other than power and force. there’s nothing to expose. they believe the cops should let them through the ob-gyn checkpoint at the new mexico border, but haul the liberals in the subaru behind them out and smash their faces in with truncheons.
Doug Muir 09.05.24 at 4:18 pm
Cromwell looks odious in part because he literally told the guy to paint him as he was, “warts and all”, and not clean it up and make him look some mixture of studly, kindly, all-knowing wise, and just A Good Dude To Have In Charge Of Things.
Also, Cromwell was by the standards of then and there a relatively moderate and tolerant dude. Like, he was fine with different sorts of Protestants, Jews, and even Catholics as long as they weren’t making trouble. Yeah he’d smash a stained glass window okay true. But basically he was a Congregationalist and — given a couple of centuries to sit and think — those guys would evolve into some of the most chill and liberal Protestants around. There’s a direct evolutionary line from Cromwell to Abigail Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Amy Klobuchar.
Cromwell maybe less odious than he looks, is my point here. Thank you.
Doug M.
oldster 09.05.24 at 4:40 pm
Barney’s translation is accurate, so far as I’m able to judge, but it does take licenses here and there. E.g., the addition of the copula to “‘Trolls not to be fed’” — I do not see what justifies that departure from the original text. On the whole I find it somewhat florid, and would prefer a more austere rendering of the Greek.
As to its contents, I think that you (SJ) have not taken one or two points. The conversation is one end in itself, but not the end in itself — that’s what Aristotle means by saying, “…certain goods in common, and with them the conversation [dialegesthai] as an end in itself.” The primary end for an online community will be something more determinate and first order, e.g. workers’ rights, electoral victory for one’s party, passing abortion-rights legislation, etc..
But determinate communities, rather than the internet as a whole, are also the proper object of the troll. To connect this to another part of the Corpus Aristotelicum, “troll” is a term from the category of relatives, since every troll is a troll with respect to some community or communities which themselves are individuated by their ends. Belle is a troll relative to the pro-life board that she torments; she is not a troll in every community she frequents.
Whether someone is a troll at CT, then, can only be determined by first identifying the ends of the CT community, and then seeing whether the person intends to advance those ends or to impede them, surreptitiously, under the guise of cooperation.
As the ends of the CT community become ever more etiolated, more fragmented and unfocused, it becomes harder to say of any comment whether it is a contribution to the communal end or an exercise in trolling.
Perhaps even Belle’s posts here are a form of trolling? Far be it from me to make that charge. I’m just asking questions.
Ray Vinmad 09.05.24 at 6:41 pm
Oh, you don’t need PROTESTANTISM. The quick fix for Catholics is simply to ignore everything about this. Or outright reject it. 50% of Catholics in the USA are pro-choice. Openly! Or just be SPAIN where at least 50% of the country is Catholic (but very few belong to any other religion), and there’s no ‘pro-life movement’ to speak of. (Unfortunately, you might have to go through a long series of Medieval horrors and then Catholic dictatorship to achieve this result.)
Brad DeLong 09.05.24 at 6:57 pm
How about the 3 billion souls a decade in all the fertilized ova that never implant in the uterine lining, and whom St. Augustine damns to hell for eternity for never having grown ears to hear the word of Christ?
steven t johnson 09.05.24 at 7:43 pm
oldster@16 is correct that I did not take into account the specific aim of the online community. Reminded of this, I realize that I don’t think of most online communities as determinate. The point didn’t pierce because I see etiolated, fragmented and unfocused as the typical on-line community. That I think is why it is so difficult for the members of the typical community to identify trolls easily enough to simply dismiss them. The more the community is in fact focused on a single issue, the less opportunity for trolling. A blog on, say Roman numismatics or African land tenure patterns or Civil War uniforms and insignia, the fewer trolls…I think.
But then, I reflect again, and realize possibly the biggest online community with a determinate aim is Wikipedia.
Oh, my, I’m in over my head. Forget I said anything, except about enjoying Rachel Barney’s article.
J, not that one 09.05.24 at 8:11 pm
I wouldn’t estimate the percentage of religious people who approve of IVF at 100%.
I would estimate the percentage of people who have no idea how many of their friends wouldn’t have kids if they hadn’t undergone fertility treatments as very high; many of those same people probably strongly disapprove of people never having children. They just don’t know. It’s a scientific marvel, isn’t it? It must be very rare.
Just as most people have no idea how frequent unplanned pregnancy is or what the causes are, how frequent miscarriage is or what the causes are, how frequent medically dangerous pregnancies are or how many of those would end in “death in childbirth” or really every think about how much less frequent that is nowadays.
SusanC 09.05.24 at 9:05 pm
The whole western tradition of philosophy seems shot through with guys making up ridiculous positions which it would be Unfortunate if the reader actually believed.
So, ok, executing philosophers for corrupting the youth of Athens has a certain precedent to it, but the whole tradition is based on not my fault if someone believed me…
It is just so much fun to explain to missionaries that the Last Judgement already happened and we are currently in hell.
Just remember to reign in your enthusiasm when you’re the patient in a psych evaluation, and in response to a standard question do not answer “Oh, you mean like in Philip K Dick’s VALIS” ans proceed to explain.
JPL 09.05.24 at 11:48 pm
A few days ago I was listening to Kendrick Lamar’s recent music, and I was reminded of The Last Poets, so I went back and listened to tracks like “The white man’s got a God complex”, and it seemed as relevant now as it was back then. The intellectual toolkit of the conventional European male, especially, has not progressed, essentially, in the past 35,000 years or so; previous Abrahamic holy men tried religion, as have others in other places, but it hasn’t taken. Trying to introduce the notion of logical consistency into mythical thought is probably a mug’s game. But if these myths had been constructed mainly by women, and the deity had been seen as female, we might have avoided toxic ideas like that an essential property of the deity is omnipotence. That’s a contradiction to the notion of ‘deity’ right there, and it should be explicitly dropped from conventional “wisdom”. We currently puzzle over the question of why so many people identify, in the esoteric sense, with a man like Trump, who exemplifies all the properties they hate, but see in themselves, but apparently a lot of people are in pretty bad shape intellectually.
Abortion policy should be determined by the understanding of the relevant scientific and medical fields, together with the best understanding we have of the relevant ethical (not “moral”, which contains an element of “social dominance”) principles, but overcoming the influence of conventional mythical thought can probably best be achieved not by trying to rationally persuade Trump cultist types, but, as with Thurgood Marshall’s strategy with civil rights, changing the laws that are accepted as “the laws of the land”, with respect to which all residents are equivalent. For Belle, it’s not really a fair match-up; I would suggest activism instead. Or, better yet, poetry.
politicalfootball 09.06.24 at 3:40 pm
Back in the day, you had to actually troll people in person. An anti-abortion guy once disagreed with my assertion that shooting abortion doctors was the logical result of his ideology. We explored this idea in predictable ways, and he eventually arrived at the conclusion that assassinating Hitler would have been wrong. Demanding logical consistency does not necessarily lead us to a desirable result.
Peter T 09.07.24 at 12:21 pm
Doug Muir @15
Those who had to choose between Connacht and Hell disagree on Cromwell’s tolerance.