Assange, to the best of my knowledge, is a hero of integrity and disloyalty, and an icon of fearless progressivism. The persecution of Assange is part and parcel with the patterns that have lead to the enslavement of the American leadership to terrorism, misery, and incompetence. Assange is a defender of the true law, that of integrity itself, and part of civilization’s bulwark against criminality.
Assange is not a criminal. His crime was defending that which underlies all progress mankind has ever achieved: truth.
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That is a fascinating idea, user! That is authentically novel thought to me. It doesn’t align well with my intuitions, but I don’t truly know if it’s true or false.
Personally, I’m a pacifist, and I would never get bored and casually murder anyone. On the other hand, the nearest to murderism defenses that I’ve ever heard (ignoring the lies and/or shattered psyches of bigots) have been about how murderable uploaded people would be. One of those came from a “transhumanist”! She was defending a bizarre ethical model which prized quality of life but disregarded murder.
Insults seem like they might actually be important, but I’m pretty sure rape more commonly traumatizes people into permanent open or concealed hostility. Been there, never forgave the perpetrator. The interesting grey area is “beat up”. I honestly don’t know if a non-zero robot assault rate would strengthen or weaken the position of robot citizens.
I think one of the best arguments against enabling such behavior is that it would lead to intense conservative biasing to society, as people with unpopular ideas seem a likely target for optimizing a minimally violent strategy. It would make robots into replacements for the occasionally sociopathic and dishonest “community defenders” of existing humanity. All new ideas start out unknown, so this would with robotic efficiency hinder all new ideas.
That said, in terms of maximizing the humanity of robosapien citizens, self-defense pacifism could work wonders, as programming robots to have finite pacifism would give them verisimilitude without horrible cultural distortion potentials.