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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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Yeah it's a tough thing to distinguish and you may be right. What about game theoretically punishing someone out of a sense of duty without the personal aspect of revenge? Like 'there but for the grace of God go I', I'm a soldier and you're a soldier on the opposing side who I hold no personal animus towards but who I'm going to try and kill for what your country did to mine.

That's definitely not personal revenge, it's just war - i guess maybe it's revenge in the national sense - it makes sense to say "Azerbaijan's revenge against Armenia". But that's just a matter of 'what you think revenge means', either way I don't think that soldier's 'forgiving' the enemy soldiers he's calling artillery on in any important sense.

Perhaps anger driven by a desire for justice provides psychological padding against the shock of doing deliberate harm to another? Depictions of people who approach war and criminal justice coldly and unemotionally are not generally positive; one may describe them as "detached," and that phrasing suggests an "attachment" that is broken or missing.