Comment by pfannkuchen

Hmm I suppose that’s fair. Another commenter did seem to understand what I’m saying, but he may have a more similar background to myself.

Coming out sideways is a common phrase in psychology land, or at least this is my impression. It refers to when a feeling cannot be expressed directly due to repression, and so the feeling comes out a different way. For example instead of feeling crushing shame about being wrong (due to past experiences of being shamed when wrong), a person gets angry at the person suggesting they are wrong, even though they are actually wrong and it wouldn’t be a big deal at that time to just admit it.

Moral programming I thought was self explanatory. Where do you think morality comes from? Different groups in space and time have had different moralities, and children have whatever morality they are consistently exposed to growing up. It does get complicated if they are exposed to multiple moralities simultaneously, they are still programmed but it is more of an RNG in that case (e.g. Christianity at home but progressivism at school, the apparently socially dominant flavor typically wins but not always). Our current moral programming includes a lot of aspects about race and nationalism, and so people have difficulty thinking clearly in this area and sometimes when they internally disagree with the morality they are still unable to express that disagreement directly and so it comes out sideways as awkwardly critiquing some specific language in the constitution or whatever is happening this week about it.