[MD] S/O and Morality

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Platt]
In pursuing that moral goal, personal attacks should be shunned.

[Arlo]
The underlying question is, when social level rhetoric is used to 
assault intellectual patterns, is it immoral to finally combine 
intellectual response with a counter social-level attack? Or, in 
short, when one is assaulted with social-level anti-intellectualism 
is a solely intellectual response adequate? My answer, is no. Or to 
say it proverbially, one must fight fire with fire.

The more aggressive social-level anti-intellectualism becomes, as in 
the case of repeated distortions and misdirection of intellectual 
responses and the repetition of socal-level assaults, one has to 
couple the intellectual-level replies with a social-level 
condemnation of the assault and rhetorical devices being used. And 
those who continually rely on social-level anti-intellectual 
rhetorical trickery, deception and distortion should not be surprised 
when an intellectual response is finally coupled with a condemnation 
of those tactics as "moronic".

The Buddha may take the high road and meet such ongoing, despicable 
assaults with non-response, but for mere humans one finally has call 
a spade a spade. This may indeed be lowering oneself to the level of 
those who wield such tactics in the first place, but in the face of 
such anti-intellectualism there is little other recourse, I'm afraid.