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by aeon_ai 20 days ago
Sometimes what is kind is not true.
3 comments

Can you give an example? I think any truth can be expressed inoffensively.
Kindness implies “truth conveyed about another” as the context.

Sometimes, that truth is only heard when delivered with truth as the goal, not kindness.

The poster you are responding to is an idiot. Clean that up for me.
Poster seems to believe that a good heuristics to evaluate the truthfulness of a statement is how challenging it is to your worldview or feelings. It intuitively makes sense to the social part of the brain since living among other humans constrains our discourse and prevent us from sharing what we feel is the truth yet the logical error seems to be that any discourse that does not respect the feelings/worldview of a given audience is more truthful.

It doesn't help that people generally advance the "only truth hurts" argument after they receive pushback on a statement trying to inflict their "truth" to others and rarely to share the experience of changing their own mind after by accepting a truth that is emotionally costly for the self

I implied no universal, nor that one need disregard the feelings or worldview of another.

Only that, yes, sometimes we allow our fear of upsetting another to impede our willingness to communicate clearly - especially (and more often than not) when we care about them.

Explain that oral and anal sex is immoral regardless of the genders involved. Without offending anyone of course
How is that a truth?
How is any of the ideological points in the culture war.. a truth?

What I said is a truth claim of orthodoxy and catholicism.

Any moral system has a set of axioms, you may not agree with them or how they got to be axioms but you can not contest their existence

No, you left out the bit about it being a claim of catholicism. You left out the relevant context, which was arguing out of bad faith. It would be easy to write it in the context of what a particular religion believes.
I don't see how it was in bad faith considering if you ask google "what moral system claims that oral and anal sex are immoral regardless of the genders involved" it immediately spits out catholicism. I'd say rather, you are arguing in bad faith, framing my reply as hiding something when it is very easy to find the context I had in mind.
That seems a bit.. specific for an axiom, don't you think?
It was the first thing that came to mind that I'm pretty sure would offend over 90% of Americans
That’s not my truth.
Truth also has a "left-leaning bias".