#Ampersand the Baby-Eater can have saved a cat from a tree once. the baby eating doesn't mean he didn't save that cat

[sukimas]

there's a fun type of category error i see a lot where the premise is "because this person/institution did a good thing one time, they are definitionally good" no matter what they've done since then. you see the opposite- "because this person/institution did a bad thing one time, they are definitionally bad"- fairly often, and people have developed defenses against it, but i think that people have a difficult time with both still and that's why you get things like "JKR has always been exactly as much of a virulent transphobe and antisemite as she is currently and it's obvious to anyone who reads the books" for a negative example or "the only reason why anyone on earth is free is because of the U.S. military" (courtesy of prager u).

the common sense way to go about analyzing both of these things is "well JKR is funding hate groups right now, but at the time she wrote her books she was not and donating much of her money to actually positive institutions. we don't need to say that she always had the power and did the harm that she currently does in order to mitigate the harm she is causing right now." and "the U.S. military (or at minimum U.S. government bonds and military production donating to the soviets through lend-lease) won wwii, and things would have been quite bad for the residents of the majority of western countries for a while had they not done that, but before and after that event they did a lot of war crimes (and even during that event they did a lot of war crimes, though i'd argue on net the least crimes against humanity of any of the major powers of that war) and they generally aren't a force for peace right now, so their past helpful deeds are not something we need to address at the moment."

but there's a missing mood for both of these things! that's weird! it's like acknowledging that someone can do both good and bad things and that we need to address the things, not the person, is a common sense concept we all accept in psychology class, but once we go out into the world we all forget it. i also don't think that this is an internet culture thing- it's common among irl social groups too- so i have to wonder if it's just a quirk of human psychology that we can't grapple with