Every time I read a complaint about having to do the dishes or working a dumb job, I like to imagine the complainer making their case to the kids who work 16 hour days to make their clothes.
Every time I read a complaint about having to do the dishes or working a dumb job, I like to imagine the complainer making their case to the kids who work 16 hour days to make their clothes.
I end up explaining this a lot:
Just because something ‘more X’ exists, it does not mean things that are ‘less X’ cease to exist. If someone else has been murdered somewhere in the world, it doesn’t mean non-consentual gropings are to be ignored. If your older sibling was given three slices of pizza, it does not mean you will starve with your two slices. The fact that we have a concept of a googleplex as a number does not mean the number one is meaningless.
Whether something is good or bad, it remains good or bad, regardless of its scale.
And complaining about things, though annoying, is the best form of feedback we can hope for. If something is wrong, no feedback leads to the continuation of the thing being wrong. If people complain, something can be done to fix the issue. If people take direct action to end the problem, that’s usually violence.
By diminishing people’s ability to complain, you are advocating for either ignorance of harm or violence.
No one’s diminishing. A critique of dumb complaints is also a complaint. Are you diminishing their ability to complain? Welcome to complaining.
Diminishing is, I admit, a rough word choice. I actually tried thinking of something else but couldn’t quite find the right word. It’s… Perhaps denormalizing? Demoralizing? Diminutizing? Denaturing? I’m still trying but can’t quite land it.
Perhaps I can find a way to talk you around the perimeter and you can get an idea what I mean. Complaining serves a purpose in making a problem known so that it can be addressed. Complaining about others complaining doesn’t directly diminish their ability to complain in that they haven’t been physically or coercively stopped from complaining, but it does delegitimate their complaints, which is not inherently bad (some complaints are dumb) but when the delegitimation is carried out based on some broad class like ethnicity/nationality/etc. rather than the legitimacy of the particular complaint, that reads like prejudice, of which I’m generally not in favor.