Seeing the absolute claim like that prompted me to think of a whole list of real world counter-examples
That is something I find a standard but rather annoying geek conversational failure. You could simply have answered your own question:
Are you using ‘never’ in a figurative sense here?
with “yes”. But “figurative” does not really capture it. All apparently absolute generalisations are relative to their context. Are there substantial exceptions relevant to the context?
Now, on further consideration I might indeed revise my original statement, but not in any of the directions you explore. Feeling bad—that is, having feelings that one does not want—is useful to precisely this extent: it informs you that something is wrong; that there is a conflict somewhere. The useful response to this is find where the conflict is and do something about it. Nothing else is useful about the feeling.
For a start, making people feel bad is useful in nearly all cases in which breaking someone’s finger is useful.
Days since someone used torture to illustrate an argument: 0.
I would write “seldom” instead of “never”.
I prefer to write “never” instead of “seldom”. “Seldom” and other such qualifiers too easily protect what one is saying behind a fog of vagueness. It allows one to move one’s soldiers around like the pieces of a sliding-block puzzle, so that wherever the enemy attacks, one can say “Ha! Fooled you! Never said that! Nobody there! Try again!”
That is something I find a standard but rather annoying geek conversational failure. You could simply have answered your own question:
with “yes”. But “figurative” does not really capture it. All apparently absolute generalisations are relative to their context. Are there substantial exceptions relevant to the context?
Now, on further consideration I might indeed revise my original statement, but not in any of the directions you explore. Feeling bad—that is, having feelings that one does not want—is useful to precisely this extent: it informs you that something is wrong; that there is a conflict somewhere. The useful response to this is find where the conflict is and do something about it. Nothing else is useful about the feeling.
Days since someone used torture to illustrate an argument: 0.
I prefer to write “never” instead of “seldom”. “Seldom” and other such qualifiers too easily protect what one is saying behind a fog of vagueness. It allows one to move one’s soldiers around like the pieces of a sliding-block puzzle, so that wherever the enemy attacks, one can say “Ha! Fooled you! Never said that! Nobody there! Try again!”