People like witty remarks and don’t like to see them deflated, even when the deflation is totally warranted. This is a big problem in debates, since someone can make a totally specious but well-timed criticism or remark, provoke laughter, and get the audience on their side even if the criticism is rebuked.
(Tangent, moderate spoiler warning:) I noticed that in myself while watching the movie “Silent Hill”. During the whole ‘witch hunts and self-justifying faith are bad mmmkay’ climactic rant it’s easy to forget that even the demon admits that the only reason the entire town hasn’t been mauled/raped to death by symbolic guilt-constructs is because of their “blind faith”. (And “God is not here”: so they could have had “blind faith” in toaster ovens and that’d have protected them from the demon too? Possible but rather unlikely.) But I guess if one is already applauding a biasedly-informed woman (she’s literally getting her scant info from the deceiver himself because apparently no one taught her that dealing with transhuman intelligences with unknown preferences is an insanely stupid idea) for helping deliver vengeance to an entire dismal, desperate town’s worth of people then it doesn’t cost ones conscience much to let ones epistemic standards slip a little as well.
(ETA: And as long as we’re being charitable, I can’t really blame Christabella for having the cop lady burned to death either. Whether Sybyll knew it or not she was clearly in league with the demon/devil. Burning her is even mildly charitable, giving her a chance to repent, much better than pronouncing her anathema and casting her out into guilt-hell to have her skin ripped off by Pyramid Head. And considering that in-universe the devil clearly exists it’s mildly hard to blame them for a premature demon-spawn burning now and then. (Come to think of it didn’t Dahlia implicitly admit that her daughter was demon spawn, by consenting to the burning? Wasn’t Christabella all ‘just name the father already’ and Dahlia was all ‘lol no thanks I’d rather the little girl burned’? Maybe Alessa really was a witch; she certainly was in league with the devil at a later point, and had a nasty need for vengeance to boot, and the evidence of her innocence that we have we got from the freaking devil herself.) But now we’re getting into politics.)
ETA2: And while I’m at it, Dagoth Ur was the good guy (not even just relatively good, actually good), Azura is clearly a manipulative bastard of epic proportions and “the Nerevarine” is just one of her pawns. Has anyone else compiled all the evidence for this already?
People like witty remarks and don’t like to see them deflated, even when the deflation is totally warranted. This is a big problem in debates, since someone can make a totally specious but well-timed criticism or remark, provoke laughter, and get the audience on their side even if the criticism is rebuked.
(Tangent, moderate spoiler warning:) I noticed that in myself while watching the movie “Silent Hill”. During the whole ‘witch hunts and self-justifying faith are bad mmmkay’ climactic rant it’s easy to forget that even the demon admits that the only reason the entire town hasn’t been mauled/raped to death by symbolic guilt-constructs is because of their “blind faith”. (And “God is not here”: so they could have had “blind faith” in toaster ovens and that’d have protected them from the demon too? Possible but rather unlikely.) But I guess if one is already applauding a biasedly-informed woman (she’s literally getting her scant info from the deceiver himself because apparently no one taught her that dealing with transhuman intelligences with unknown preferences is an insanely stupid idea) for helping deliver vengeance to an entire dismal, desperate town’s worth of people then it doesn’t cost ones conscience much to let ones epistemic standards slip a little as well.
(ETA: And as long as we’re being charitable, I can’t really blame Christabella for having the cop lady burned to death either. Whether Sybyll knew it or not she was clearly in league with the demon/devil. Burning her is even mildly charitable, giving her a chance to repent, much better than pronouncing her anathema and casting her out into guilt-hell to have her skin ripped off by Pyramid Head. And considering that in-universe the devil clearly exists it’s mildly hard to blame them for a premature demon-spawn burning now and then. (Come to think of it didn’t Dahlia implicitly admit that her daughter was demon spawn, by consenting to the burning? Wasn’t Christabella all ‘just name the father already’ and Dahlia was all ‘lol no thanks I’d rather the little girl burned’? Maybe Alessa really was a witch; she certainly was in league with the devil at a later point, and had a nasty need for vengeance to boot, and the evidence of her innocence that we have we got from the freaking devil herself.) But now we’re getting into politics.)
ETA2: And while I’m at it, Dagoth Ur was the good guy (not even just relatively good, actually good), Azura is clearly a manipulative bastard of epic proportions and “the Nerevarine” is just one of her pawns. Has anyone else compiled all the evidence for this already?