You should be surprised. It can't.
The important extraction from that premise, is that the opinions of essentially all people on such a subject are worthless, unless you happen to specifically know the person and value their opinion accordingly.
One of the mass delusions that is very popular today - and particularly destructive - is to treat everyone's opinions on all things as having some great value and their feelings as being the most important thing to consider. We live in hyper irrational times.
> All of us are just one quote away from having our entire lives reduced to "good" or "bad"!
Reduced by whom? Who cares. That's the correct response to such a reduction by opinions of people that do not matter to you.
A stranger on the Internets said my life is bad. Comeon. Who cares. It's meaningless garbage and a waste of precious time to consider such things.
Pretty hard to be worse that that.
In healthy people, that is.
West had a game-breaking advantage over the SU. It could've threatened Soviets with that power. Instead it folded and gave them everything they wanted.
Presumably West wouldn't even need to drop the bombs - just use the threat for negotiations.
Hell, even James Webb was on the chopping block until NASA administration pushed back on the cancel culture nonsense from Scientific American.
"That's not activism" - President Obama: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM
I wonder how much this modern tendency to want perfect people and flat history can be related to things like the popularity of comic book films. People seem to really be craving simple absolute black and white fables with cardboard villains fighting superheroes these days.
Accusation was not even direct, it was James Webb's complicitness for LGBTQ issues 70+ years ago!:
> James Webb. Prescod-Weinstein and other critics argue that Webb was complicit in the discrimination of LGBTQ employees in the ’40s, ‘50s and ‘60s — both as undersecretary in the U.S. Department of State and as the top administrator at NASA.
Response from NASA:
> “NASA’s History Office conducted an exhaustive search through currently accessible archives on James Webb and his career,” NASA spokeswoman Karen Fox said in a statement to The Post. “They also talked to experts who previously researched this topic extensively.
> “NASA found no evidence at this point that warrants changing the name of the James Webb Space Telescope,” Fox added.
I despise these people (Scientific American). At this point, I will never see Scientific American magazine in the same light - it is completely derailed.
If the U.S. approached every death with the horror we reserve for our own we'd lose every war we ever fought.
this is something that I've thought about for a long time
I would say that if you delve deep enough that everybody, including every great person has had issues (some more and some less) and these have to been seen in the context of the time. But even if say for example Eistain was an evil person (I doubt it) or Chirchill a rasict person etc... should this matter?
Should this distract from their achievement and contribution to human society??
My gut feeeling says not but I can't logically piece it together in my head
These same circuits get used for dealing with things that are unrelated to survival but still produce results the same way. When e.g. propaganda is used people learn that they can weild power this way, which they believe they need for survival.
And mostly we err into this mode when our biochemistry isn't at 100%. It is simply irrationality spilling over.