We Gave The Moon VD

Is gossip always harmful?

Once in a comic book store in LA I read a comic in which the leading scientists of Earth come up with a plan to give the moon VD. Everyone enthusiastically gets behind the project, and an Apollo project of sorts is instituted to build a space prostitute and send her to the moon to give the moon VD. Ultimately, they are successful, and the final frame is everyone on Earth in big crowds cheering, "we gave the moon VD!"

For the past week a lot of people have been passing around the twitter interaction in which Richard Dawkins is asked if he would touch a poop etc. and subjectively it has not stopped being funny. It seems to be an instance in which the net joy of talking bad behind someone's back vastly exceeds the harm caused thereby, which I expect is minimal. (Is this the case? Are there subtle but serous harms I am not seeing in the Dawkins case?)

I propose that the Dawkins troll is a member of the class "We gave the moon VD!" and that this class tends to be joy-producing and not very harmful. This is not to say that gossip outside this class IS harmful; just that this subset is likely to be safe.