In the mindset of the modern centrist, where every societal act must be transactional, Occam’s razor slices away any other explanation: You don’t hurt yourself for the sake of someone else—you believe yourself capable of it in the abstract, to be sure, but only because that belief, too, is transactional, the reward being a superficial moral ablution. But to see someone—a soldier in the world’s most powerful military—do this outside of the abstract, in service of very real principles and in honor of the very real dead and dying, presents to a vacuously liberal worldview the ethical equivalent
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