Thread:Mediawatcher/@comment-3581997-20150607031351/@comment-3581997-20150701213806

That is the danger of black-and-white-views though that you need to internalize when you take them up. Here are two little stories

Long ago there was a bunch of people who saw the world in black and white, they were called Christians. They had women burned alive for the crime of learning to read which was a form of witchcraft, they stole land from the heretical Muslims and they murdered countless Jews, who of-course killed Jesus. Then as education hit Europe people started to see that reading was not witchcraft, that Muslims just called God by another name and that the story about the Jews killing Jesus was actually made-up. To this day most religious Christians either stick to their guns and actually say that all those policies hold up or cherry-pick the good things as being part of Christianity and ignore the bad things like they never happened. No one is sorry about any of it since "God was on their side, thus making none of that actually wrong". The irony of this is that because Christians were/are unwilling to forgive other people for their "mistakes", they can't bring themselves to admit they were wrong about those mistakes occurring in the first place.

In modern era hard-core judges need to temper their sentence. There was a New York judge back in 97 who sentenced drug traffickers to jail for hundreds of years to show a no-nonsense-policy towards crime. She was shot and nearly killed by the brother of a young-man who was working off a 200 year sentence for carrying one ounce of pot in the back of his car. The shooter pleaded guilty to the crime when caught because with the judge on the bench he knew he would be locked away for centuries anyway, he claimed there was no point to not shooting her, since murder was on-par with owning a joint. Thing is, the courts saw that the judge's sentences were destroying the justice system, they had to let the shooter off with a 10-15 year sentence because otherwise the jury would never convict him and the judge's job would have been called for. The District Attorney at the time said "When judges come down hard-on petty crimes it leave nowhere to go for the serious ones and forces hard choices on the rest of us."

The black-and-white-view sound good on it's face, it allows you to hold tight to your standards and shield yourself from being corrupted by outside influences. But if you aren't omniscient, the fact is there are always new factors to take in, so closing yourself off to them can turn you into the bad-guy if you don't maintain an objective view of your own morals.