After my dad died, we found the love letters

I see good points from both Wolf and Scanlon, but I don't fully agree with either. To express myself crudely, I might say that I think "feelings" ("emotions") can be either rational or irrational. That is, logic and emotions are orthogonal concepts, and in fact we must perform logic within some domain, which may involve emotions. So I embrace emotions as one domain in the exercise of logic, but that gives rise to "logical beliefs based on emotions" and "illogical beliefs based on emotions".

If someone believes a friend is worthy of blame for something, but does not consider their friend to have caused an injury as Scanlon says, then Wolf says this is indeed blame, part of a valuable notion of blame. But I don't tend to consider emotional-logical beliefs to convey blame or praise, because really they are just reflecting reality. I wouldn't praise a friend for having the sense to pour a thirsty person water anymore than I would praise the water for having the sense to obey gravity when poured. But lack of praise isn't the same as determining whether to feel or express, say, gratitude or pleasure. I believe that all deeds should be judged as they are, and others should express themselves about those deeds accordingly. That the friend has done something blameworthy is just to say that the friend should be blamed (in my opinion, which I recognize is contentious). But blaming the friend does not require a specific response, and the response may be quite amicable. In this sense, I think blame and praise are useful when they logically correspond personal responses with logical judgements, but they reduce to dull logical exercises.

Illogical beliefs rooted in emotion are where blame becomes dangerous. Case in point: this overall thread. I think it's fair to say that some comments are combative. Still, something illogical is merely illogical, and also dull in the end.

I think the real challenge, and point of interest, is dealing with human beliefs in practice, where the presence of logic (or lack thereof) in a comment is highly subjective, ambiguous, not obvious, not formally coherent or perhaps not even informally coherent.... This is a good example of human "messiness" but also human "value". Especially when discussing beliefs rooted in "emotions", with blame being a prominent category, things aren't so easy to judge.

Somehow related, I had to go through my father in-law papers after his death, and I have seen papers that probably were not meant to be seen ever. I am now part of this secret. The weird part is that I feel that I cannot talk about it to anyone in the universe. For the first time in my life, I feel the burden of keeping secret until I die. There is no therapy for it. Now, I understand how some people when tragedy strikes, have to bury it deep, to the point where they forget about it, as it is too painful to even think of it. I am at a point where I do not want to impair (drunk, high) myself and reveal the secret. I thought my life was simple, but man some unfortunate events can flip entire lives... I was a firm believer that talking the truth/facts was the best solution, and now I realize that some things better stay buried as it would generate more pain than anything.

So, some papers might not be good to keep, as you never know what it could unleash after you pass away (and that can happen anytime).

But I don't think you meant it that way.

For anyone reading that wasn't around it was very much an irrational hysteria. The bigots latched on to it to spread fear and justify their dehumanization of gay people. There were people that tried to bring reason and science to the conversation but they were drowned out by the panic/bigotry.

There was no good reason for the AIDS phobia in the 80s.

I don't, which is why I didn't say that. I said:

> as far as the essay mentions, the father never said he was gay.