I think trolling also requires a fair amount of callousness towards the harm/pain etc you’re inflicting through your stunt. I prefer, when possible, to engage in something like civil disobedience, where you can show your commitment to your cause by being willing to accept suffering for yourself (jail, beatings, etc) rather than demonstrating the strength of your opinion through your willingness to hurt others.
This requires that you only use such techniques to criticize people who can hurt you, though. What about people who can’t hurt you, but who can hurt someone else — for instance, their own children? How would you apply this principle to, say, anti-vaccinationists? Provoke them by illicitly vaccinating their children without their consent, thus risking jail for battery? Doesn’t sound like a very good idea to me.
palladias seemed to be asserting that trolling people who are wrong was morally inferior to civil disobedience:
I prefer, when possible, to engage in something like civil disobedience, where you can show your commitment to your cause by being willing to accept suffering for yourself (jail, beatings, etc) rather than demonstrating the strength of your opinion through your willingness to hurt others.
My question was whether this generalizes to cases where we might choose to make someone who is wrong look ridiculous in public, to discredit their cause (e.g. by trolling them) but where we could not rightfully oppose them using civil disobedience, because the matter at hand involved a third party (e.g. the child of an antivaccinationist).
This requires that you only use such techniques to criticize people who can hurt you, though. What about people who can’t hurt you, but who can hurt someone else — for instance, their own children? How would you apply this principle to, say, anti-vaccinationists? Provoke them by illicitly vaccinating their children without their consent, thus risking jail for battery? Doesn’t sound like a very good idea to me.
That’s not trolling, that’s battery at least.
Uh, that’s what I said.
In that case, I don’t understand the comparison you’re making in the grandparent.
palladias seemed to be asserting that trolling people who are wrong was morally inferior to civil disobedience:
My question was whether this generalizes to cases where we might choose to make someone who is wrong look ridiculous in public, to discredit their cause (e.g. by trolling them) but where we could not rightfully oppose them using civil disobedience, because the matter at hand involved a third party (e.g. the child of an antivaccinationist).