Justifying Malice

The most often used tool to justify malice is the morality.  Last week a man named Jason decided he'd do a little experiment.

In a nutshell Jason did the following:

1. Steal a sexually explicit ad from another city
2. Post it on the Seattle CraigsList
3. Proceed to publish every response complete with photos and names an addresses of the responders.

But you already know this.

Everyone and their brother has been to Jason's site or others and read the names and emails from these men.

I refuse to read the site.  I live in Seattle.  If anyone I know is on there, I don't want to know.  It's just voyerism in a cloak of morality.

I can send you to this wired article which is right-on ... but is more interesting depressing for the comments.  A large number of them criticize Ryan and Kevin's position that it's wrong to knowingly harm innocent people.

For the record, I think it's wrong to knowingly harm innocent people.  I agree with Ryan Singel and Kevin Poulsen.

People in the comments justify Jason's malice with arguments that center around:

1. Responding to the ad removed their right to privacy
2. The men should be publicized because they weren't moral
3. The men should be publicized because they already had girlfriends
4. The men should be publicized because they were too trusting
5. The men should be publicized because they weren't savvy enough to know that someone might do something like this
6. The men should be publicized because they were pervy / pathetic / wrong
7. Jason was right because it's funny

Malice, in my mind, is never justified.  It is small and wrong.  You can rationalize anything.  But rationalizations are not justifications, they are attempt to excuse.

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Comments

[Dave]

This kind of malice is just another form of bullying. As we know from grade school, bullying begins then. By junior high, the bullied become savvy enough to bully or put down others, which only escalades in high school. By adulthood most people find this behaviour pathetic, but it still exists if you have ever had a malicious boss or been in a bar confrontation with a drunk sociopath (another reason to stay outta bars).

[Dave]

I guess I forgot to add that 90% of campaign ads are a type of malice/bullying which even though we are an electorate focused on the "issues" the ad people know how to get deep inside our "bullied" inner jnr high self and if the one guy can bully the other gal (or vice versa) we will follow like the jnr high crowd and follow who is the biggest bully/malicious person. It's more even in, say, a Senate race, but I bet you dollas to donuts people like to vote for the biggest fat ass take yer shorts down in front of girls bully cos it emits a weird, perverse sort of human political "power" which is just short of plain juvenile behaviour.