Glen writes:

< When you see an insidious threat like Richard Spencer and even though he's 
not physically attacking you at the moment, you *think* he's inciting violence 
in some of his less refined flock, so you sucker punch Spencer during an 
interview. >

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a great question for Mark Zuckerberg when she 
asked if Facebook thought it would be ok if a democratic candidate purchased 
advertisements that claimed certain Republican adversaries had voted for the 
Green New Deal.

Or, why shouldn't civil rights organizations (secretly) hire private 
investigators and tee-up sufficiently-plausible criminal networks for the FBI 
to investigate via anonymous reporters?

Punching Spencer just suggests a lack of self control.   A better way to 
approach the problem would be to create a situation in which he was arrested or 
died in some embarrassing way such that his supporters would want to forget 
about him.

In both situations, putting aside the legal risks, I think this subversive 
approach violates some deeply ingrained notion of fairness.   I can't see an 
explanation why it isn't happening all the time other than self-censoring.   
Because if it were happening all the time, then folks like Spencer would be 
absent from the world.

Marcus





________________________________
From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> on behalf of glen∈ℂ 
<geprope...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, October 28, 2019 8:16 AM
To: friam@redfish.com <friam@redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] MoNA

Well, that's a reasonable heuristic. But there are complications. A good 
example might be the "preemptive strike", when you perceive a slow-growing 
threat, some of which may have a noisy signal prone to misinterpretation. 
(Thinking Iraq invasion.) E.g. our home grown domestic terrorists like Richard 
Spencer, the source of the "punching nazis" meme. When you see an insidious 
threat like Richard Spencer and even though he's not physically attacking you 
at the moment, you *think* he's inciting violence in some of his less refined 
flock, so you sucker punch Spencer during an interview.

Is that sucker punch an ethical use of violence?

The MoNA work was supposed to indicate that there is a stable classification 
for deciding such things (by software assisted decision making). They posit 5 
axes that seem to be stable:

- Care or Harm
- Fairness or Cheating
- Loyalty or Betrayal
- Authority or Subversion
- Purity or Desecration

I believe I can couch the Spencer sucker punch on either side of each of those 
axes, at will. That makes them look, to me, like rhetorical methods ... not 
moral intuitions. E.g. fairness vs. cheating. It's obviously cheating to sucker 
punch someone. Yet, it's obviously cheating for Spencer to cite "free speech" 
and maintain plausible deniability while inciting race- and class-based 
violence in his flock. Hence sucker punching him is a *more* honest, more fair, 
counter to his insidious rhetoric. So, whose being more fair or more cheating? 
The sucker puncher or the crypto-nazi? I honestly don't know.

On 10/27/19 11:35 AM, Gillian Densmore wrote:
> It's not that deep. Someone is (physically) attacking you for some bonkers 
> reason? It's fine (and even encouraged some say) to some how deffend your 
> self. So there you go- a not all that deep example

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