As a Canadian who generally fits this category, i am fairly privileged, have all my basic needs met and some security for the future under status quo conditions. I have my struggles, but they have not so much to with marginalization or oppression. But it depends on who you are. Indigenous women are still going missing, racists are still gonna racist, billionaires are still exploiting people struggling with food and housing security, etc. same goes for the USA. For millions of Americans who are upper-middle/upper class, heteronormative, and white, life is continuing on just fine, feeling safe and experiencing a government that functions as well as it ever has from their perspective. They're too busy living their lives to get caught up in the "noise of angry squabbling of childish politicians". Maybe expenses have gone up, but they can still sustain all their expectations out of life. He'll you can imagine there are a not insignificant proportion of the Russian population are like this.
Soleos
Why do I have to care about sports in order to care about trans folks who care about sports?
Do I have to care about every last hobby or fandom before I can weigh in on the justice of whether black people or gay people or poor people should be allowed to participate?
Current best practice AFAIK is exactly this. Gender care includes psychiatric/mental health, and occupational (ish) therapy that leads up to surgery after a lot of care. Gender dysphoria, like many things has an internal and external layer where society sets expectations and acts on us based on our gender expression in ways that can be quite brutal. Some folks may end up enby or smth or find something acceptable without surgery, which has its downsides. However none of this should preclude surgery as an option, as evidence has shown it is a highly effective treatment in our current context.
This is the biomedical view that focuses on dysfunction and suffering of the individual and addressing that dysfunction. There is a more philosophical/existential view worth understanding to balance the biomedical view. It is one that acknowledges that we are who we are and we develop the way we develop. If we are to flourish as humans and as a society, it must be through compassion for each others' experiences as human subjects struggling to figure ourselves and each other out. Imposing one's worldview on others by force is to treat humans as objects through manipulation. That's mistaken and harmful. Compassion doesn't mean you don't stand up to bullies or you don't resist injustice or you don't fight back in self defense. It means you're always seeking to humanize rather than dominate. This can mean supporting trans folks in accessing care or it can mean helping them to consider all their options.
Huh, well critics have been calling for pride to reflect its protest roots more than the corporate party it's become. It may well have to be a protest now.
That does not make sense. What does "harm" mean to you? Less good is not "potential harm". To put it another way, let's assume you and I are completely independent and I have to moral responsibility to give you money. If I chose to not give you any money, you would not be harmed. If I gifted you $100, you would not be harmed. If I gifted you $20 you would not be harmed because I did not gift you $100.
I'm sorry, I don't quite understand. What is the potential harm in the comic?
I see, thanks for clarifying! I agree with all of that. I wouldn't even say it's a cynical view, rather a realpolitik view. USAID was started and continued as a way to develop soft power and counter Soviet influence in the world.
In the narrow sense of independent individuals/states, you are correct. A country does not have a responsibility to run foreign aid programs. However, once you do, you enter into a agreement that involves some responsibility because now others are relying on you to fulfill your commitment.
Put simply, say you want to climb up a ladder and need someone to help, say, keep their finger on a button that prevents the ladder from toppling over. I have no responsibility to help you. However, to be nice I agree to help you. I press the button down and you climb up. Now say I change my mind and I want to go do something else. I now have a responsibility to tell you so you can safely come down and find another solution. What the US is doing now is shouting up at you while you're on the ladder and saying "hey, I changed my mind. Sorry, but I actually have no responsibility to help you out"
Heh it's a fun "gotcha" kind of modification. Alas, it misunderstands the thought experiment. They're not changing the emotional valence. They are removing a fundamental aspect of a dilemma: harm. One of the purposes of the trolley problem is to provoke the thinker into questioning what they believe about moral responsibility and (in)action.
The real world uses gender neutral pronouns all the time, all over the world.
This is actually how it's supposed to play out. I can't speak for how MAGA folks felt, but getting arrested is part of the civil disobedience. You make your protest in a way that peacefully violates the law and the arrest draws attention to what you're saying and conviction behind it. The cops do their job. Sure they might have just ejected him from the building, but they only detained him for a few hours and there's no evidence of police brutality.