| | I had a few thoughts on the topic of this latest troll, and thought I'd see if we could find some value here.
I didn't think an actual argument with this person made sense. When his conclusions are so far off from reality, I think it's a fair assumption that there's a problem with his methodology. Here's a guy claiming to be pro-freedom and championing Hitler and the Soviet Union. Do you think he arrived at these conclusions through a minor mistake in reasoning? Or maybe a factual error somewhere along the way drove him to it? I don't think so. You can't be that consistently wrong through errors. So what's the point of arguing factual errors with him? There's much bigger issues.
I would have preferred to see people analyze the errors in his approach. Consider it a Phil Coates style game. There's a lot there. Very fertile ground. I think we can learn a lot from someone like this, if we approach it correctly. Let me provide a couple examples.
First, I think I've got a new criterion to determine if someone is rationalizing. A person makes up their mind on a topic (i.e., the US is the most evil regime ever known to man), and systematically interprets all events to somehow prove that conclusions. The method varies per event, and there's no attempt to be consistent, except it showing all blame goes to the US. It fits with the overall analysis of rationalizations because it starts with a conclusions, and then searches for premises to support it. But instead of looking for real reasons to support it, even weak ones, it blatantly violates logic and reason to find premises. And since logic and reason aren't needed, it's able to more consistently find the premises, since anything can count.
A second thing we could learn is on the nature of moral responsibility. Let me give a different example first. Last night I decided to watch a little TV. It was late, so not much on. I saw a Star Trek Voyager show. The plot was slightly interesting. A long time ago, Earth sent out an unmanned ship with all of the knowledge and culture of mankind as a gesture of goodwill to whoever might be in space (before they could go to space). They called it "Friendship 1". It eventually made its way to a planet. The inhabitants used the knowledge to build advanced weapons, and pretty much destroyed themselves. A few thousand survivors, nuclear winter, stillborn births, horrible radiation scarring, etc. Voyager shows up, and some crew are taken hostage. It goes on for a bit, but there was an interesting premise. Since Earth sent the technology, they were responsible for destroying the planet. The survivors all blamed Earth. The crew kept admitting that they were responsible. The show finally ends with the crew making amends.
I want to ignore the collective guilt part, which was that they blamed the crew of the ship for what people had done hundreds of years before that. The part that was most telling about the ideology of the show was that nobody mentioned that it was the planet's inhabitants that actually started the nuclear war and killed each other. They were given access to advanced technology, and they used it to slaughter each other. But they weren't blamed. Those who actually did the killing were never mentioned. It was if a force of nature had been initiated with "Friendship 1", and it naturally ended the way it did. All of the individual choices along the way, including the one to kill a planet full of people, were ignored.
I see the exact same line of reasoning throughout this troll's posts. When some group murders another group, they're not blamed. They aren't held morally responsible. Instead, the only group responsible is the US, and so every connection, no matter how tenuous, is proof. Here's a guy saying that poor Hitler only wanted to exile the jews, not kill them, and only got stuck doing that when the neighboring countries waged war. As if mere forced relocation is fine. As if there was no choice about getting rid of them, and it was only the means that were up for debate.
What theory of moral responsibility did the troll use? Was he consistent? Did he apply it to everyone equally? What's a proper moral theory of responsibility, and how would it apply to some of these cases? What other mistakes in reasoning did he make along the way?
In other words, what else can we learn from this?
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