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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29323 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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nobody holds their principles so highly that they won't discard them to safeguard their 2 year old child.

I absolutely hold my principles that highly. For example, if someone told me "you have to murder this other child or I'll kill your child", I wouldn't do that even if that meant my own child died (though I sure as hell would try to kill the attacker before that happened). Sometimes you have to uphold your principles no matter the cost to yourself or others. To do otherwise means you didn't actually have principles.

Now, if you said "most people don't actually hold the principles they claim to hold", I would absolutely agree with you. But there do exist people who live by inviolable principles, even if most people don't.

If you mean that in principle, you shouldn't do that, I will not disagree with you.

If you mean that in practice, you wouldn't do that, I will not believe you.

I mean that in practice I wouldn't do that. Believe me or don't, it makes no difference to me.

then why write the comment claiming you would do it in the first place?

What? I said I wouldn't kill a child to save my child.

if you don't care if people believe you, why would you post the comment in the first place?

Because I wanted to weigh in on the discussion? What kind of question is that. There's no contradiction here: I wanted to participate in the discussion, and if someone calls me a liar I'm not going to allow that to bother me.

except the weight of your comment (I care so much about my principles, I would let my kid die to uphold them) in the first place relies on people believing you

if you don't care about them believing you, why post in the first place?

my point is you do care otherwise you wouldn't be doing this

You're wrong. If someone doesn't believe me, I don't care. I have no way of proving my sincerity to them, and I'm not going to waste my time or energy worrying about what they think. It's entirely outside my control.

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