We should ask a German, they put a noun to everything.
I was thinking the same thing recently, reading a New York Times review panel on Hamilton. Someone said they didn't focus enough on slavery, and that the casual mentioning of Sally Hemings was tasteless. I posed the same thought: If Sally hadn't been mentioned at all, they wouldn't have commented on the lack of focus on her. If they didn't make a point of being a multiracial cast, or had lyrics condemning slavery, would there have been so much criticism for the magnitude of their condemnation?
This phenomenon of "talking about something, then being attacked for not caring/knowing enough" seems to be happening more and more online.
Seems related to the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics:
"The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster."
Slightly - and that's an interesting article to be sure. The difference between that article and the Hamilton or "you don't know enough about Moloch" examples is that the article shows conditional assistance to a problem, where the two above examples have no quid pro quo. Hamilton sheds some light on something, and someone was inaccurate in a literary analysis.
I think people like to see the poor helped unconditionally, or with conditions that help them. In the PETA example, it seems to outsiders that a political agenda is being forced on them. PETA may counter they are improving lives by showing the benefits of veganism.
In the wifi example, it looks like exploitation of the desperate, though it isn't any more debasing than swinging a sign around for a furniture store.
And in the Uber example, that just looks shitty because they're a hugely wealthy company... though I don't know how much of the surge pricing goes to the driver.
I was thinking the same thing recently, reading a New York Times review panel on Hamilton. Someone said they didn't focus enough on slavery, and that the casual mentioning of Sally Hemings was tasteless. I posed the same thought: If Sally hadn't been mentioned at all, they wouldn't have commented on the lack of focus on her. If they didn't make a point of being a multiracial cast, or had lyrics condemning slavery, would there have been so much criticism for the magnitude of their condemnation?
This phenomenon of "talking about something, then being attacked for not caring/knowing enough" seems to be happening more and more online.