Friday, February 12, 2021

Friday Smirk

 


A topical J&M for our delectation today. I can't help but think, when I hear people in the media banging on about "pronouns", that such "problems", if indeed they are problems, are at most "1st world problems". What I mean by this is that in large swathes of the non-1st world we still have poverty, hunger, slavery, violence, child abuse, premature death, torture, crime, addiction, exploitation and so on. Such things are rare (not completely unknown though) to most people in the 1st world and therefore perhaps obscured from most of our consciousness most of the time. 

I hate "whataboutary" and am not oblivious to the fact that this comment is essentially that, but at some point we have to attribute resources and emotional energy to things in order to address them, even if it's just in conversation or debate and it strikes me that, Maslow go it right, our basic needs are physical/biological in nature and trump psychological ones. Therefore, subject to intent of course, someone using a pronoun that isn't a "preferred one" is quite a small problem in comparison to the other examples listed.

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