How can you disavow Dark Arts? This is the Dark Arts.

I think two ideas from the field of security are relevant here.

1) In order to design good security, one must be willing and able to think like a criminal.

2) Security through obscurity generally doesn't work.

Applied to the current discussion this suggests that:

• in order to be able to successfully defend against the Dark Arts one must be able to think like a Dark Artist.
• Attempting to reduce the use of the Dark Arts by attempting to quarantine knowledge about them isn't going to work.

Also, maybe if more people understood the methods by which politicians and marketers manipulated them, they'd be less taken in by them.