The Notion of “Trolling” in Ancient Sanskrit
languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu
languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu
Two non-technical (somewhat accessible to the general public) sources I've found are:
1. The book “Religions, Reasons, and Gods” by the late John Clayton has many interesting essays that touch on the vāda tradition. One of his interesting points is that the goal of dialogue need not be consensus or establishing common ground, but simply the “clarification of defensible difference”: understanding the other party better, and coming to shared understanding of what our differences are. Some of it is also touched on in his lecture here: http://www.bu.edu/religion/mar25-98/
2. Elaborating on the jalpa/vitaṇḍa mentioned in this article, the nyāya tradition recognized a long list of logical fallacies and poor arguments that were grounds for losing a (formal) debate. A list I've found is in the paper “Twenty-Two Ways to Lose a Debate” (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10781-009-9083-y) which also carries out some comparison with the ideas of Grice.
Which at least in the case of Jain philosophy, with 3 basic truth values true, false, and unassertable, so really these traditions are not necessarily dialectic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaina_seven-valued_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekantavada
This prefix dia- in turn may indeed be cognate with bi or di-, but at any rate the “di” in “dialectic” does not directly refer to “two”. What you've read may be a later re-analysis / false etymology.
My own pet peeve is people saying the same thing about 'dialogue', which is also 'dia-logue', not 'di-alogue'.
Which makes sense, it doesn't need to be a back formation or slight pun - it's already different from dia 'across'/'between' (like diameter) talking, it's specifically not that.
Unless someone prefaces their statements with a disclaimer (like "just for the sake of the argument"), I will assume in good faith they believe their own statements. Any later claim to the contrary leaves me with the following choice to make: were they lying then, or are they lying now.
A lot of the time this can take the shape of "have you considered...?" or "what if...?", so there is a built in hypothetical.
I frequently make points to taste test them without being married to them, but I'm not going to lose sleep if someone wants to get worked up over whether or not it was genuine.
A lack of acknowledgement when these biases are discovered, is a compelling reason to eject from a discussion. Discussion is one tool to convert beliefs to truths. Sometimes the beliefs changed are ill-recieved, but it your own or another's.
> It matters when one of your goals is to determine what the people around you believe.
What people say is some of the lowest fidelity information to use when trying to assess what people believe.
Actions >>> Words
That is perhaps an unusually... mechanical... way of conversing.
Human conversation can be a playful dance when contextual grey areas of shared and individual intent and information are explored. Most people do this implicitly, without need for explicit disclaimers — indeed, explicitness extinguishes much of the pleasure of the dance.
In other words, many people talk with others for the sheer pleasure of conversation, as opposed to a simple exchange of facts. This conversation-as-pleasure naturally leaks even into specific conversations that are indeed largely about the exchange of facts, because many people are accustomed to, familiar with, and enjoy the dance.
That's great when it's mutually understood, but just like a real dance you should solicit someone's agreement to participate beforehand.
"it should not matter"
The notion that these conversations are free is an idea held by a very small group. Most people have reasonable reasons for assuming that the conversation has a cost and therefore you have a motivation for proposing a particular point of view. Some people find conversations emotionally draining, some people perceive every conversation as a risk to one's political capital, other people feel that any time invested in a conversation is a cost that should be recouped at other points, other people are keenly aware of the meta message sent by one's words and therefore the impact on the relationship of those who participate in the conversation. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that most people will assume that a person advancing a viewpoint also believes in that viewpoint, and since that perception is wide spread, if you refuse to acknowledge it with a comment such as "for the sake of argument" then ask yourself why you feel those 5 words cost you more than the 500 or 5,000 other words that you'd like to invest in the conversation.
The point being made is if it's a substantive point it doesn't matter how much the speaker identifies with it, the valid point has been made to you and it is to be considered. Hence it should not matter provided you are sticking to the facts. It seems you have made this into a personal insult about whether or not your transactional view of the costs of speaking are being respected. That is to shoot the messenger.
The person is doing you a favor by pointing out valid concerns even if they don't agree with them.
But if the discussion actually influence real-world decisions then it matters a great deal what people actually believe.
I really don't understand why more people are not getting this.
It can be plenty consequential in the real world, I said from the start of this thread that someone could be arguing a popular opinion that nobody in the room happens to hold.
This happens all the time in silicon valley as an example: a bunch of educated, comparatively wealthy, mostly white men make decisions. Maybe they are not very in touch with the opinions of the vast majority of humans who fall outside that category. What I am advocating for this case is the ability to have empathy for those who are unlike you, step outside your biases and adopt an argument that is not your own. This is a good skill. People are falling over themselves trying to call that lying and universally bad or nearly so.
With parenting - I see no issues. And I do use such an approach, but my spouse, I believe, trusts me.
So... It looks like the problem is - when the debate is used to judge world view of the person to decide if one would like to trust them - such "devil advocate" arguments are harmful. I believe it is just one possible use of the discussion, but I will keep in mind that and try to avoid arguing from some other perspective if I see the person is trying to figure out if they want to trust me or not.
Relatedly too, getting called in a lot to play Devil's Advocate by other people for sides/opinions that you do hold and care about can be an indicator that those people do not value your opinion and think you may be in the Devil's employ already. While they may not mean harm by it, it can be important to realize the emotional investment you are putting into the work will not be returned in how it is perceived, you might not be well enough "compensated" for that work, and should maybe renegotiate terms (or stop agreeing to it).
It's the whole "I'm just asking the question" phenomena, and I see it a lot with people who claim to be centrists but are more accurately described as right wing reactionaries. It allows them to seed the discussion with bullshit, without having to defend any of it.
Today. the mechanics of internet forums works such that on average, the safe milquetoast post gets the most points, so it devolves into a popularity contest of who gets the most Internet points, especially when the person is not anonymous.
In the city state of Athens there were no such things as 'lawyers' to represent you. If you had a legal problem and it was brought up to court (typically consisting of dozens, sometimes hundreds of judges) you argued your case yourself. Those who were better orators had a better chance of winning, so the nobility and rich often went to schools where they practiced rhetoric.
This obviously meant having to argue over the dumbest and inane things possible, some of these discourses we've managed to preserve over the millennia.
Shane Parrish of Farnam Street and Sam Harris recently sat down and chatted,in part, about this need. Highly recommend giving a listen.[0]
But I wonder about the unintended consequences of this. How many 'opinions' are out there in the world purely to cause pain? What portion of opinions that are shared on social media or the news actual opinions from those people, vs crafted statements of trolling themselves?
When you take the 'other side' for practice, is there really a valid [1] other side to take? I find often that the other side is based on logical fallacies and is not, at its base, a valid argument. I wonder if you are creating distance between you and others while you test out the opinions of propagandists? How valid [1 again] really are all these opinions?
[1] Okay here we go with this. I am indeed calling some opinions "invalid". What I mean is, I do not think it is a valid opinion to cause harm to minorities on purpose. I think this is cruel and amounts to a crime in our society. But you will find people advocating it loudly on social media and TV - and their arguments are based on treating humans cruelly for no reason other than the cruelty and other various logical fallacies.
If you are to take stances that you don't agree with, please check them logically first before putting those arguments out there in the world. Some things are better understood without trying to understand 'the other side', simply because it is not going to be based in logic and has no possible outcome of being 'understood'.
However, if they have a known position and they make arguments clearly outside those boundaries, and then /show that they return to their usual position after/, it is much more feasible to believe that they are indeed merely testing their own position thoroughly, as any reasoning person should.
You know, some could make the argument that in order to satisfy the second demand of your sentence here, one has to indulge in the first.
I don't know if I would, but maybe that's the point ;)
Secondly is the matter of epistemological framework; some people seem stuck with a particular way of finding information about the world which intentionally or not is constructed to dismiss critical engagement.
The most controversial topics of political philosophy are very interesting to me because it can be hard to find a view which is internally consistent. I'm emotionally upset when I can't arrive at such a view. To hold a view I can't justify is a horrible feeling. The kind of topics I'm talking about are issues of freedom of speech (pornography, hate speech, censorship, debate, the notion of harm and the validity of the harm principle), economics (the labour theory of value, tendency for the rate of profit to fall, objectivity or subjectivity of value, various historical arguments), social psychology (ideology in society and the flattening of culture, totalitarianism of the market, the experience of other sexualities e.g. the adult My Little Pony fan community and the Japanese lolicon phenomenon), and the nature of work (the meaning of consent and coercion, free will, the phenomenon of "bullshit jobs"). In the face of these issues, I find that it's hard to spend any energy on talking about such banalities as vim vs emacs or FOSS.
As with science, we have to accept that we can simultaneously hold two theories to be "true" even when they don't square with each other. To do otherwise is an exercise in frustration. Or extremism, if you choose to discard all philosophies that do not fit with your preferred one.
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/a-foolish-consistency-is-t...
It's strange that you think trolling is some subversive and venerable reaction to censorship, when anonymously commenting on websites is a nearly effortless act that incurs neither a cost nor risk.
Does this mean you are "often" right?
> ERWIN:Could you perhaps tell about bringing back A Broader View with its sequel, the new sequel? Because I think that’s very interesting. CLARK:Well, that was fun to do. The play readers group in 1987 decided to renew the play-reading party, which was one of the great traditions of the fifties and early sixties. And Bob Oliver asked me if I’d dust of f A Broader View. Well, I looked at it and I thought of updating it. But the shift in the twenty years had been so much that updating was impossible; it’s just a period piece or nothing. So we had to do it unchanged. And then I felt honor bound to write a sequel to it, which is called Troll’s Progress. The theme of it is that the essential Caltech never changes. It’s firmly founded on terror. [Laughter] And no froufrou can disguise that fact. And people who play together pray together, twitch together, stay together. Anyway, that theme allowed for a number of wisecracks, and I like to think the dialogue is rather funny. The kids who did it were tremendous. The undergraduates, of course, we know are stars.
> ERWIN:What was the origin of the troll?
> CLARK:Well, that goes back into Caltech history. And it’s probably Caltech’s only contribution to American culture. [Laughter] If you have to ask the meaning of the word, you’ll never understand what it means. But to put you sort of in the framework—that’s discussed, incidentally, in the dialogue of Beautiful Beckman there’s a segment on that. But a troll is a very high-voltage nerd. It used to be he lived “under DuBridge.” The kid that never sees the light of day, really, he’s so busy with his books. There are apprentice trolls at other schools, but ours are an order of magnitude more trollish. People who are compulsive and pathological students are much more so here. > ERWIN:Somewhere you referred to this as a “random troll.”
> CLARK:Oh, that’s the worst thing you can be called. You see, it means you’re just like a number; you have no personality. You might as well be a computer—nothing to distinguish. Oh, man, when you’re a random troll, you’re beyond the pale. [Laughter]
> ERWIN:In A Broader View, you called the Caltech undergrad “intellectually brilliant, emotionally immature, culturally deprived, and socially gauche.” And then, immediately afterward, I believe you gave the Caltech professor the identical description. That brings us to the point of what the shows were for underneath it all.
Source: http://oralhistories.library.caltech.edu/95/1/OH_Clark_K.pdf
I'd try to find references for this but Google has fucked the search of Usenet archives.
There's this, which uses both meanings
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/net-abuse-faq/troll-faq/
---begin
Defining troll, flames and crossposts ============================================
From the Jargon file ( http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/T/troll.html ):
troll v., n.
1. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames; or, the post itself. Derives from the phrase "trolling for newbies" which in turn comes from mainstream "trolling", a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite. The well- constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it. See also YHBT.
2. An individual who chronically trolls in sense 1; regularly posts specious arguments, flames or personal attacks to a newsgroup, discussion list, or in email for no other purpose than to annoy someone or disrupt a discussion. Trolls are recognizable by the fact that they have no real interest in learning about the topic at hand - they simply want to utter flame bait. Like the ugly creatures they are named after, they exhibit no redeeming characteristics, and as such, they are recognized as a lower form of life on the net, as in, "Oh, ignore him, he's just a troll." Compare kook.
3. [Berkeley] Computer lab monitor. A popular campus job for CS students. Duties include helping newbies and ensuring that lab policies are followed. Probably so-called because it involves lurking in dark cavelike corners.
Some people claim that the troll (sense 1) is properly a narrower category than flame bait, that a troll is categorized by containing some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial. See also Troll-O-Meter.
The use of `troll' in either sense is a live metaphor that readily produces elaborations and combining forms. For example, one not infrequently sees the warning "Do not feed the troll" as part of a follow-up to troll postings.
This is why I'm certain it started out as 'trawling'. The conversion to 'troll' was a result of misspelling or misunderstanding the spoken word. Or perhaps just standard punning - one who trawls is a troll.
"trawling for opinions" is a well-known and still often used phrase.
I'd still guess that it comes from the phrase "trawling for opinions" - everyone has heard of that phrase and knows what a "fishing trawler" is.
The first type I called "obstructors". If I (our my department) proposed something, the obstructors always had a dozen or more compelling reasons why the proposal was impractical, infeasible , or otherwise without merit.
The other type, I called them "enablers" might have some initial objections, but they would typically work with me (or us) to overcome the objections so that we could get what we wanted.
In the second case, it was "Vada". After a while I learned that the best way to achieve an outcome was simply to avoid ever engaging with the people whose style was "Vitanda".
Of course at the time (1980's and 90's) I did not think of them as Trolls - just as jerks who didn't want to do anything that created work for themselves.
Sounds very much like what in the West is called the Socrattic method championed by Socrates... who used to ask questions until he proved that his opponent was an idiot who did not know what they were talking about.
This article is as much about the etymology of a modern term as about a concept from Sanskrit philosophical texts.
But this is probably named this way because the names of Ancient Indian works of literature, especially obscure ones like Nyaya Sutra, are not well known in the west, whereas "Sanskrit" almost immediately contextualizes the post to Ancient South Asia for most readers, even though the language in which it is composed is a bit beside the point, which is that an ancient society sort of identified "trolling".
"Here, the person who employs vitaṇḍa has no position of one’s own, and does not attempt to defend any thesis. A person may even adopt a viewpoint that is opposed to one's own for the sake of vitaṇḍa."
I think people mostly misuse the word trolling, a troll's final goal is to disrupt and incite reactions often times for the lulz. To me (you may very well disagree) anybody claiming that trolling is used to achieve something is wrong. It may have consequences but if they are intended it's just manipulation of opinions.
I also have my doubt about the motivation given to trolls, I believe they target people that are "weak" to trolling because their propension to react help the troll reach his goal faster. i believe this is a reason why trolling it can quickly become harassment or at least be perceived as such.
I used to like being a troll as a teenager and my first reaction when reading an opinion that looks absurd is to wonder if the author is trolling. This first reaction is slowly shifting to "who does this statement serves" since organisations of all sizes have weaponized internet to spread such opinions.
It reads like a joke at first, but is well worth your sustained attention.
> Simply by asking them what their position is, or what they propose to debate, they are forced into a quandary: if they propose something, then they have to defend it, and can be argued with; if they do not propose anything, then they may be asked to exit the debate. This may be easier said than done, but it may also help stop a troll once in a while!
Be sure to read the linked posts
"The toll of the trolls" (5/25/19)
"Eristic argument" (4/6/19)
I'm not as sophisticated as some of you but it seems as if those with more experience in these matters wouldn't find it easy to be sucked into discussions with a troll. Could there be a master troll or two here which you have fallen for?
Sure, he gets people RAGEing like a great troll, but at least ostensibly he’s doing more the 2nd type of argument described in the article, but with kind of a backdrop that precise intellectual beliefs are really hard to specify or maintain. It’s like dialectic but it’s not Hegelian; he wants to return to some central question and doesn’t necessarily see that thesis/antithesis climb as crucial, he just finds problems with the premises and wants to find better ones (Hegel’s whole thing was a bit more nuanced than that).
Re: article, trolling initially meant trying to get a rise out of people. It’s not so much you won’t admit you’re wrong or you’re eristically tearing everything down, it’s that you’re pretending to play the argument game (or some other game, like “art criticism” or “testimonial”) but in fact you’re fucking with people of varying levels of specificity.
3 types of arguments - vaada, vivaada, and vittanda vaada.
However, I think this definition is narrow and only encapsulates part of the modern definition of 'trolling'. Today, 'trolling' is used as a weapon of war, not only in debate with other individual people. Trolling is as much a mechanism of creating emotional trauma among a large population as it is a mechanism for 'debating' in bad faith.
Modern trolls will post violent content, often based on lies, in order to get an emotional rise out of a population. This is a large-scale effect that wastes huge amounts of people's time and energy, as they 'debate' with these soldiers of war whose task at hand is to create unnecessary emotional pain and waste the time of their enemy.
Yes, trolling is also happening on a more individual 'debate' level still, but narrowing our notion of trolling down to these ancient definitions is doing a major disservice to our modern understanding of how language is used in debate.
I agree with the assessment but I never connected trolling and trauma, because my personal concept of trolling is essentially a continual escalation of reductio ad absurdum. In that sense it's not really trolling or sarcasm, it's more of a way of livening up overly-serious conversations.
I should probably not refer to that as trolling as the intention isn't to fuck people off, gaslight them, traumatise them...but to soften the mood.
I note that "doctrine" was also an important element of the definitions offered and regret that we do not question our doctrine (and its sources) enough even now.
Perhaps this was not present in older societies (and other countries today) because people were not as touchy feely as the current generations...
And I'm not trolling. I seriously think modern western societies are too snow-flakey and touchy feely for their own good. It's like going out in life expecting padded roads, walls, and everything, lest you ever get hurt...
And that's despite older societies having it much harder, and having much more difficult problems to be "traumatized" with...
People forget that in those older societies, people were killed, jailed and fined for holding certain beliefs. People were literally burnt at the stake, witch hunts were something more serious than a twitter mob complaining, intellectuals wrote lengthy arguments about the immorality of certain views; for christ sake, "Marge & Itchy and Scratchy" is almost 30 years old.
So yeah, I hold the opinion that people who think today's society is more easily offended than past generations are either too disconnected to what past generations really were, or is shocked to find themselves on the receiving end.
I have relatives who went through those things -- and other modern tragedies today. I have befriended, talked to, and interviewed people jailed and tortured for decades for their beliefs. Even family killed by previous regimes.
So, it's not like I don't know that people "were killed, jailed and fined for holding certain beliefs".
I do know however that people that had those things happen to them in real-time history and in their full horror, were much more resilient, courageous, and could even shrug them off.
The touchy feely, safe-space demanding people today, who get discouraged or hysterical for 1/1000th the offense done to them, are a regression and an insult to those people (whose actual sacrifices and efforts gave the rights to the snowflakes of today).
And still, social sensitivities can be quite complex. My dad, a man who accepted a rain of bullets as just one more of the life's hardships, can get quite uncomfortable to the point of refusing to eat, if you insist on passing the salt on his hand instead of leaving it on the table near him, and I just picked one of the weirder but he and a lot of people have some petty stuff that causes them great offense.
With the examples I gave on GP, my point was not that people endured hardships, but that people who offended societies sensibilities were harshly punished. If you think that society that got so offended by stuff like blasphemy, sexual preferences, and failing to follow caste systems or even other weird social customs, are more courageous or have a tougher skin, then we have a different definition of courage.
And I say this without making a moral judgement, maybe severe punishment from deviancy served as a societal glue that allowed to thrive despite the material hardships, or perhaps a case can be made on the pathological aspect of having real hardships and still devoting so much time on irrelevant stuff. Still my point is that I don't think people got any less offended than nowdays, and perhaps watching today's punishments on the offenders, maybe that's one indicator where we are getting better.
This is wildly untrue and outrageously offensive. Do you really think this? What evidence do you have for this? Today's youth are experiencing their own valid forms of discrimination, hate and violence fed by trolls and you are no judge of their pain. And why are you doing this whataboutism with the past anyway? What do you have to gain from saying lambasting those who suffer and whom with you share so little you can surely hardly understand their circumstance?
> The touchy feely, safe-space demanding people today, who get discouraged or hysterical for 1/1000th the offense done to them,
Who are these people? Do they really exist? I think you have made up, invented an enemy towards which you are directing these statements.
> are a regression and an insult to those people (whose actual sacrifices and efforts gave the rights to the snowflakes of today).
How on earth? Everyone I know today who cares to improve society is trying to avoid the atrocities of the past. Positing that reasonable discourse, backed by facts and logic, with an avoidance of 'trolling' and bad-faith acting, is a direct attempt to reduce the suffering and pain of the future so that we can avoid such horrible things from the past from happening again.
Your callous dismissal of today's youth looking to improve the world by reducing the spread of hatred and violence is exactly the kind of thing that enabled such horrid violence in the past.
We can see history rhyming. We can see the genocides being committed around the world, fed and enabled by trolls, and we are trying to stop it from happening. We are trying to slow down the intentional suffering hoist upon minorities today by reducing the online vitriol and hatred that creates such physical horror.
Oh no, it's definitely true.
If not, can you give me a modern equivalent to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weary_Dunlop ? Prisoner of War under the Japanese for three years, suffering horrific conditions.
After the war "Dunlop forgave his captors and turned his energies to the task of healing and building."
This is wildly true, and 100% not offensive.
I've talked to such people, I'm in a country with actual historical scars and full of people that went through extreme hardships, I've interviewed dozens of them people, I've read tons of historical accounts, interviews, and so on.
>Today's youth are experiencing their own valid forms of discrimination, hate and violence fed by trolls and you are no judge of their pain
Well, I can be the judge of their pain (it's a free universe), and I can tell you that their pain of "discrimination, hate, and violence caused by trolls" is nothing compared to war, civil war, dictatorship, genocide, torture, and so on (all of which experienced numerous times in the last 100 years in my country).
It's a sad state of affairs that this has to even be spelt out, or that people think someone being called names by online trolls, or harassed at school for being X, or whatever, is as serious and as important as those kinds of events.
Perhaps there's a case to be made for exposing people to controversial or offensive ideas in a controlled environment to prepare for encountering them in an uncontrolled environment - in fact, this is frequently called a "safe space" and ridiculed by people who believe that modern societies are too "snow-flakey"!
But that's certainly not what internet trolls are doing.
Nobody is doing any of this and I am perfectly happy to dismiss such ridiculous claims.
This is not real. This is not physical. Nobody is machine gunning down people at the mexico border.
You you are the one who is engaging in trolling and lies by spreading such a message around.
The United States has committed some soft of genocide or another since the days of the Native Americans. That's not touchy feely.
Crying about this or that opinion being published, or whether a coworker can make or not make a comment, or what group is the more victimized for BS offenses (where usually the crying is made white middle/upper middle class self-appointed spokepersons) is.
And I'm not talking about the "children in cages" either. This is obviously not a kind of "touchy feely" issue.
Plus, the "children in cages" has been going on since forever one way or another. My people were hunted by the KKK back in the 20s and 30s for not being white enough. I've written (in other places) about the Mexican immigrants fueling the California agricultural sector, and how they're exploited and sent away when bosses are done with them (eg. the strawberry picking business).
Even the Wall is nothing new, there has been a wall, beatings, and killings at the border well before Trump. Now it's just fashionable to speak against it (because Trump), whereas under Obama 2 million could be deported and it was OK (and it didn't involve as many children imprisoned, so late night talk shows didn't feel the need to cover it).
Still, I'm not an American myself. But the hypocrisy is strong, as if all those "good souls" care about the "children in cages".
There are "children in cages" all over Europe, in camps for immigrants (where they're not allowed to leave):
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/10/life-in-italy-...
>Your ..... dismissal of the problems of youth....and use of .... to not finish...sentences makes it difficult to understand your point.
You could replace "..." with "." in my comment, and nothing would change of its point. Instead you've chose to point an inconsequential stylistic issue, and exaggerate it to death.
Let's make my point even clearer: aside from general economic prospects (college debt and so on), there are no serious "problems of youth" in 2019 in the USA in the white middle/upper middle-class population that cries about being "traumatized" the most. It literally never had been better trauma-wise, today when people cry the most about it, for anything and everything.
And I don't expect you to agree with this assessment. That's my opinion, it's a free universe.
I have absolutely never once in my life seen someone cry over an opinion being published. I have, however, seen hundreds of people complain about others 'crying', or 'literally shaking' but I have never seen it once happen and I have been looking. I honestly think such people do not exist. Can you cite any? This is surely not the cultural phenomenon you make it out to be.
> Plus, the "children in cages" has been going on since forever one way or another.
Something happening in the past does not make it okay to happen today. Are you suggesting that nobody should protest children being put in cages, simply because it has happened before? I don't understand. Since it has happened before, and it's awful, and it's happening again right now, don't you think we should stand up and stay that it should be stopped?
> Even the Wall is nothing new, there has been a wall, beatings, and killings at the border well before Trump.
Again, just because something isn't new doesn't have any bearing on it being bad or not. In fact I think it emphasizes how important these issues are. They persist and we must fight against them fully.
> Now it's just fashionable to speak against it (because Trump), whereas under Obama 2 million could be deported and it was OK (and it didn't involve as many children imprisoned, so late night talk shows didn't feel the need to cover it)
What are you talking about? Putting children in cages, family removals, etc of legal immigrants is completely different from deportations of illegal immigrants.
Are you suggesting nobody should speak out against these atrocities or try to avoid them happening in the first place, simply because they have happened before? I don't get it.
> There are "children in cages" all over Europe, in camps for immigrants (where they're not allowed to leave)
That sounds awful. Everyone should be protesting this everywhere. Everyone should aim to avoid the circumstances that allow this to happen: chief among them is trolling.
Well, I've seen then cry, demand it's unpublished, demand the person writing it is fired, and so on.
>I have, however, seen hundreds of people complain about others 'crying', or 'literally shaking' but I have never seen it once happen and I have been looking.
Well, perhaps not looking unbiased enough.
>Something happening in the past does not make it okay to happen today.
Which I didn't say in the first place. My point is that as an old thing this is not related to the recent touchy-feely behavior I spoke against. (Nor of course are the people kept in cages, or the people who complain about them, are complaining about touchy feely issues).
>Are you suggesting nobody should speak out against these atrocities or try to avoid them happening in the first place, simply because they have happened before? I don't get it.
No, there are two threads here: 1) tons of younger people today complain about touchy feely issues, and 2) most younger people complain about these serious issues only when it becomes fashionable (e.g. now under Trump or previously under Bush, not before under Obama or Clinton).
I argue that (1) the touchy feely issues should be dropped, and (2) the important issues should be complained all the time, not when it's in vogue.
>That sounds awful. Everyone should be protesting this everywhere. Everyone should aim to avoid the circumstances that allow this to happen: chief among them is trolling.
Trolling is nowhere in the list of things that "allow this to happen".
Capitalism, EU immigration policies, hypocrisy, exploitation, and other things are.
If I may add to this, the vāda usually composes of 3 parts. 1. Purva paksha. 2. Khandana 3. Uttara paksha.
Purva paksha which literally translates prior view is when the debater should talk from the opponent's perspective. This has to be confirmed by the opponent, which proves that the debater has understood the opponent's view point.
Then comes khandana, which is the actual opposing view point that the debater puts forward refuting the view point of the opponent.
The last is Uttara paksha, the opinion of the debater. (Or siddhānta as mentioned in this article)