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Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

Nothing is erased by other things, luckily. We just have to live with complexity. That's not to say nothing overshadows other things, but if one deed canceled another there would be nearly no deeds.

If you zero out everyone who ever worked for a filthy oil company, pharma, held bad beliefs, buys or sells harmful products, etc... there isn't much that's decent in the world.

High standards is a good thing, and we should strive to live our ideals but there is a gulf between our ideals and our present reality. "To hell with reality" is not a viable perspective.

If you are reborn born a pharaoh's prince tomorrow, is the only moral path fratricide?

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Excellent comment;

from The Gulag Archipelago,

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.

But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

I laugh when I see so called progressives acting the same as puritanical early Americans in their infantile understanding of humanity.

Great quote.

Leonard Cohen's Anthem is about something similar:

Ah, the wars they will be fought again / The holy dove, she will be caught again / Bought and sold, and bought again / The dove is never free

Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering. / There is a crack, a crack in everything / That's how the light gets

George Martin quotes a William Faulkner all the time about fictional subject matter. “The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.”

It's why his fantasy stories have that gritty realism. The knights of Gondor riding against the evil horde of Sauron meme becomes parody. Good and evil is more subtle, cuts through the heart of every human being... regularly. The fantasy element is just about scale. It might be a choice between being kinda jerky and nice. Most people can be both. Novels get into a character's head. Stories where good and evil is a conflict within that head feel more real, because that's what it's like inside our heads.

There is actual objective good though, and objective evil.

Did you see the video of the chinese man beating Uygur children that were "given" to him because their parents were harvested off to whatever the fuck the chinese government are going to do to those parents.

As a father of three daughters, I would personally kill that motherfucker for what he did to those three little girls.

My actions would be an objectively GOOD thing for humanity by killing that piece of shit. His actions were objectively EVIL and if anyone can watch that video and think there is *anything* ok with it, then they are also objectively EVIL.

Thank you for this response. I logged in for the first time in a long time just to thank you!

thanks

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