Re: "Zuck" mail?

[Rich Kulawiec <rsk () gsp org>]

On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 03:16:38PM -0500, Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu wrote:
> Letting your dog crap on your neighbor's lawn is not OK.
>
> Dumping your nuclear power plant's waste on your neighbor's lawn
> is also not OK.
>
> But they're certainly *not* the same amount of "not OK" (unless maybe your
> dog's name is Clifford and he had burritos for lunch).  And saying that they're
> in fact the same amount of "not OK" prohibits any sort of sane discussion on
> the matter.

I think you've over-interpreted my remarks/labelling.  Applying the
same label to two people/groups doesn't mean that they're equivalent,
or that I (or anyone else) considers them equivalent.

Nor does it mean that it's the *only* label I might apply to them.
Unsurprisingly, people who think it's alright to viciously abuse the
entire Internet via spam often have other unsavory characteristics,
some of which would take considerable time to enumerate, and some
of which would earn much less gentle labels (at least from me).

And once we've done that, once we've cataloged the extent of their
activities, *then* we're faced with the ethical/philosophical task
of trying to weigh them in context, and I don't think that's a
straightforward exercise at all.  Who is worse?  A spammer who abused
50 million people, or a phisher who swindled one?  Or a phisher
who stole and used 88,500 credit card credentials or a kiddie porn seller
who abused three children?  And so on.  The problem here is insoluble,
because it depends on our own moral sensibilities and the weight we
assign to offenses against them; and it's further complicated by
the incredible differences in scale of some forms of abuse.

I don't think I possess the ethical calculus to compute which is worse.
I don't think you do either, for all values of {you}.  I don't think it
exists.  (I note in passing that legal statutes are an attempt to create
it out of rough consensus, but they're clearly inadequate.  If they were
otherwise, then the corporate officers of Bank of America would currently
be rotting in prison and numerous others would not; surely the
former have done far, FAR more damage to society, *and are still doing it*,
c.f. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/business/22lockout.html?_r=1&ref=business for just one tiny snippet of their 
activities.)

So I prefer to skip the endless and pointless debate over "just how
bad" and just say "bad".  Hence: "spammer filth", because it correctly
recognizes that they're spammers, and expresses in some small way my
profound contempt for them *because* they're spammers.

---rsk
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