How Much You Talk About An Issue Doesn't Need To Be Proportional To Its Importance

Journalists can talk about things other than the biggest issue in the world

I’ve talked recently about the debate between Jesse Singal and Lance from the Serfs. The debate was mostly about the efficacy of gender-affirming care, but Lance didn’t really know much about the efficacy of gender-affirming care (which made it weird that he agreed to do the debate, and approached it with the consistent affectation of a smug teacher putting down an arrogant child). For this reason, the debate mostly involved Lance trotting out standard leftist grievances with Singal.

One of Lance’s big complaints was that Jesse was obsessed with this issue. Pretty weird, huh? Pretty weird to be so obsessed with trans people. Yikes, not a good look, not a good look chief.¹

The complaint, to be precise, was that Jesse talks about the low quality of studies on gender affirming care when there are much bigger issues in the world. He hasn’t talked, for instance, about other kinds of medical procedures being performed on minors. Nor has he talked about the Syrian civil war! Why is he so OBSESSED with trans kids when the Syrian civil war is much worse? He hasn’t said one word about the An Lushan rebellion which ended the Tang dynasty between 618 and 907 and killed about 13 million people. His SILENCE on the end of the Tang dynasty is DEAFENING!

Similarly, a common complaint about those who talk about the war in Gaza is that their outrage is selective. They never talk about the Syrian civil war or the Saudi assault on Yemen (thankfully now over). They only talk about Israel. Pretty weird, huh? Pretty sus. Not a good look!

This complaint was encapsulated pretty well by Hen Mazzig.

(See Scott’s very convincing reply).

Across both sides of the political spectrum, this complaint is ubiquitous. Why do you talk about this rather than that? Why don’t you talk about issue X, when issue Y is vastly more important? The presumed inference is that the reason people talk about X is because of nefarious motives: antisemitism, transphobia, delight in wickedness as such!

I think this is a completely ridiculous charge! You don’t need to talk about issues proportional to how important they are.

Tuberculosis is pretty bad. It kills more than a million people every year. It’s way more important than the war in Gaza, gender-affirming care, or pretty much everything that anyone talks about. Does this mean that anyone who talks about anything other than tuberculosis is ethically compromised?

I think wild animal suffering is the worst thing in the world by far and that all the world’s other misery is a rounding error compared to it. Does this mean that I sin in every moment that I don’t talk about wild animal suffering?

Heart disease is vastly worse than nearly all the problems anyone usually discusses. It kills around 20 million people a year. Does one act wrongly if they talk about bad arguments in legal philosophy, when heart disease is way more important?

There’s just no reason to think that how much you should talk about a problem has to be proportional to its importance. The reason people talk about subjects is generally that they find them interesting—or in some other way the topics draw them in. Choices to cover various topics are only occasionally influenced by the importance of the topic.

One thing that often draws people into being interested in a topic is: the topic being controversial. Everyone is opposed to tuberculosis. Tuberculosis polls at 0%! Every American is opposed to Syrian massacres of the Druze (if they know about it). Every American is against Iran hanging teenagers from cranes! People are drawn to controversy, those topics aren’t actually controversial, and so they attract fewer listeners.

Contrast that with gender-affirming care being given to minors or the war in Gaza. These are both issues of major public controversy! So it’s no surprise that people spend way more time discussing them than heart disease.

Also, while showing someone is a hypocrite doesn’t automatically show they’re wrong, it’s worth saying: the people raising this complaint are always giant hypocrites. Lance, for instance, took considerable umbrage at Jesse writing critically about studies on gender-affirming care being given to minors, when the world has vastly more important issues. Here are the topics Lance covers on his YouTube channel:

Now, I’m no expert, but I would think that if surgeries given to minors with long-lasting effects are such a non-issue as to not be worth discussing, then one should not devote nearly an hour to discussing the alleged “chud” failure to “cancel Superman for being ‘woke.’” If you ranked the top 10,000 global issues, somehow I suspect that would not make the list. Lance is rather like a circus clown criticizing a brain surgeon, on grounds that he shouldn’t be performing brain surgery when heart surgeries save more lives.

In fact, every one of Lance’s videos seems to be about topics vastly less important than the one that Lance criticized Jesse for covering.² Now, perhaps Jesse is wrong about his position. But it’s not like the topic he’s discussing is completely unimportant. It’s not like he’s discussing some totally irrelevant topic like, oh I don’t know, alleged Zionist fury about the new Superman movie.

Hen Mazzig’s recent Tweets have largely been about violent attacks on Jews in London. Now, violent attacks on Jews in London are bad of course, but they’re nowhere near the world’s most pressing problem. Certainly they matter vastly less than what China is doing to the Uighurs.

Hen Mazzig mostly talks about issues affecting Jews. He talks about Israel, antisemitism in the west, and terrible and antisemitic things said at pro-Palestine protests. And that’s fine! It’s fine to mostly talk about one particular issue that you care about. But if you do that, you can’t criticize other people for talking a great deal about their pet issue, and not adequately discussing Syrian Jihadist attacks on the Druze!

Now, as I said before, the fact that someone is a hypocrite doesn’t mean they’re wrong. But if no one who professes a standard meets it, that says something about the extremity of the standard. In practice, it’s nearly impossible to remain interesting while only talking about the world’s most pressing problems. I think I spend an unusual amount of time talking about important subjects, but even in my case, I don’t usually write about the biggest problems in the world. Despite my nigh-unprecedented love of the good³, I have yet to seriously discuss heart disease on this blog.

In practice, no one actually dedicates coverage to problems in the world proportional to how important they are. Instead, it’s just a cheap mud-slinging tactic used to indict the motives of the other side. It’s bullshit in the purest sense of the word⁴—purely a bad faith debaters trick, never turned inward, never applied to the people one agrees with.

It’s valuable to talk about things that matter. I think people should do it more. But it’s not some minimal prerequisite to permissible speech. It’s perfectly alright to talk about issues even if you recognize those aren’t the most important issues in the world. In practice, no one actually performs this detailed calculation of an issue’s importance before discussing it. It is beyond ludicrous to suspect someone of nefarious intent for failing to meet a standard pulled out of thin air that has been met by roughly zero people in all of human history.

1. A bit of context to those who do not spend much time online: this weird phraseology is typical of the Twitter sneer that is Lance’s native tongue.

2. With the possible exception of the one about Nick Fuentes’s world collapsing, assuming that the video is unusually literal and there is, unbeknownst to me, a supermassive black hole in the center of the Earth about to collapse the world.

3. Not to mention my understated humility!

4. Metaphorical bullshit that is. If bullshit is used literally, well, other things in the world are far purer concentrations of it.