There are two kinds of evil: the passive, and the active.
“Clearly, it seems to me that Hillary Clinton is: a) a liar and an amoral scoundrel who ought to be serving jail time; or b) an upstanding woman of the highest character and virtue and a paragon of honesty.”
I’ve seen that one-step-forward-two-steps-back syntax too many times in written and verbal statements. If something seems to be to a person, then it isn’t clear at all to him, regardless of the subject matter He is confessing that he isn’t quite sure what it is he is pronouncing judgment on. We can thank a long line of philosophers – for example, Rene Descartes – for making that contradiction of certainty-cum-doubt ubiquitous as a bad thinking habit, and as a repeated element in common language. We can also cite David Hume and John Dewey, among others.
It’s a far more grievous error than speakers and writers, in making comparisons, saying different than and not different from. Different than means absolutely nothing. As a conjunction, than is not synonymous with the preposition from.
It seems to me is also symptomatic of a lack of courage and resolve to be forthright in one’s statements. It’s a woozy approximation that is supposed to stand in for rock-solid certainty. It’s cowardly. It’s a half-full/half-empty glass of nothing. It’s like Michael Moore substituting for Cary Grant, or Rosie O’Donnell for Audrey Hepburn.