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saintfireyesterday at 4:25 PM3 repliesview on HN

Is it revelatory that human beings having a quality you admire aren't the ideal person you projected them to be?

I'd reckon you'd be hard pressed to find a single person that matches every quality/belief you imagined them to have.


Replies

fhdkweigyesterday at 5:16 PM

Fred Rogers was the same kind, thoughtful person in everyday life as he was when he acted on his show. You can watch the congressional tapes of him testifying on increased funding to PBS and also testifying on not making VCRs illegal.

ryandrakeyesterday at 4:40 PM

I don’t think this is about nit picking some small detail that causes them to fail a quality/belief checklist. It’s not like finding out your hero picks his nose or doesn’t like chocolate ice cream. When someone goes mask-off as MAGA, they are revealing fundamental core beliefs and values that totally flip the kind of person you might have thought they were.

I have friends and family who I never thought had a hateful, cruel, or belligerent bone in their bodies, suddenly start acting like totally different people, in the span of a few years. This isn’t me holding them to some purity checklist!

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kelnosyesterday at 8:55 PM

That's a little bit of a false dichotomy, though. I agree that it would be rare, even impossible, to find people who match every quality I imagined they had.

But some of those failings are forgivable, others are not.

Getting genuinely confused about pronouns sometimes: forgivable.

Being a loud, public MAGA homophobe transphobe: not forgivable.