This is thread drift, but so what?

That's what you could call a specious analogy, mouse. If you wanted a more plausible analogy involving a bank manager you could have him (or her) giving a loan to someone with a small business one day, and then refusing a kloan to what looked like a similar customer the following day.

Pretty well any opinion you give is to some extent a simplified an approximation of what you really believe, and that's where the contradictions come from. You say "I can't stand modern music" (or whatever), and then the next day you find yourself listening to some, and liking it. The truth was that you couldn't stand the modern music you'd heard before, but this was different.

Or maybe it was that the music had jarred with the mood you had that day, and that mood has passed, and the simplification was that when you said "I" you meant "the I that is standing here today, which won't be quite the same as the I that'll be here tomorrow, because things will have happened to change me".

Actually it's not thread drift, because that's the same as Fionn was saying anout how the person who gets killed all those years later really isn't the same person as the person who committed the crime (even assuming that they actually got the right person). In a way it's like killing a son to get vengeance on the father - and of course, that is what happens in some cultures. The rest of the world sees this as shocking and barbaric. That's how capital punishment as practised in places like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, and China and the USA and a few other countries seems to a lot of people already.