I don’t think the comparison is to complaining about very bad things happening elsewhere, it’s more like “we’ve got it so much easier than our forebears, why do people still complain about misspellings on the internet? They should be grateful they have an internet.”
One fallacy is that the person who says sort of thing fails to realize that complaining about complaining is still complaining.
Though people have complained about stuff that isn’t perfect now even when the imperfect stuff was less imperfect than things had previously been pretty much as far back as we have records, so complaining about that isn’t necessarily an instance of the thing being complained about.
Said less obscurely: if we assign the label kvetching to complaining about things even in the face of continual improvement, complaining about kvetching is not necessarily kvetching, since kvetching has continued unabated for generations.
I don’t think the comparison is to complaining about very bad things happening elsewhere, it’s more like “we’ve got it so much easier than our forebears, why do people still complain about misspellings on the internet? They should be grateful they have an internet.”
One fallacy is that the person who says sort of thing fails to realize that complaining about complaining is still complaining.
Though people have complained about stuff that isn’t perfect now even when the imperfect stuff was less imperfect than things had previously been pretty much as far back as we have records, so complaining about that isn’t necessarily an instance of the thing being complained about.
Said less obscurely: if we assign the label kvetching to complaining about things even in the face of continual improvement, complaining about kvetching is not necessarily kvetching, since kvetching has continued unabated for generations.