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Realistically speaking, people will continue to have promiscuous dangerous sex and to use intravenous drugs. The reason is simple: those things feel good. In order to make a major dent in the rates of either of those two things, you would need massive social change that, realistically speaking, could only come from some kind of massive shift in consciousness that, let's be real, is not going to happen - or it would require massive government intervention that would bring its own host of problems. For the latter, you'd basically need the entire US to become like Singapore, and let's face it, probably all but the most ardent social conservatives would hate that once they saw the downsides of having such a massively interventionist government.
Even if one somehow got rid of those things, the fact would remain that the deadliest diseases in human history were not caused by either promiscuous sex or drug use, so it would not even do much to address the overall issue of disease.
Uh, what skin off the back of upstanding citizens is it to just let them die?
It's bad karma.
You start dividing humanity into 'upstanding citizens worthy of life' and 'sub-humans whose life and well-being is not worth any efforts', sooner or later someone will put you into the second category.
Pretty much everyone here has had the experience:
The point of that poem is that when anyone, left or right, starts narrowing the category of 'human beings who deserve to live', they don't stop, and they are likely to end up narrowing it to exclude you. I personally believe that it is morally wrong to have a category of 'human lives that don't matter' (if any exception exists, it is only those who are currently, wilfully harming others and refuse to stop), but even if you do not share this belief, the existence of such a category is not in your self-interest.
The point is false though. Lots of groups have stopped. Pretty much every group has stopped short of omnicide, including the Nazis.
The point of SteveAgain's response is that sometime it's us or them. And sometimes it's us or them for no apparent reason. There's no apparent reason why the situation seems to be that either the "gay communists" get oppressed or the straight cis white men do, but it does seem to be the case.
They didn't stop, they were stopped, at great cost. If they had been stopped sooner, the cost would have been less; if they had not been stopped in 1945, they would have kept going.
Or, we agree to resist oppression by anyone, gay or straight, black or white, red or blue, man or woman, against anyone else, while maintaining the distinction between the individual perpetrators and those who happen to share characteristics with them.
It's a nice thought, but I've spent too long watching oppression against straight whites defined as "anti-oppression" and resistance defined as "oppression". Human biology and psychology just doesn't work like that, and neither does it deal well with serious moral / status / resource conflicts. There is no way to make a system where everyone gets what they want AND nobody is oppressed.
For example, my existence as a misgenderer oppresses trans people, and their attempts to force me to use their preferred pronouns oppresses me. You, the all-powerful tyrant king, can of course swoop down and force us to play nice, but then you're oppressing both of us. Likewise economics, if you want to switch away from the culture war.
Yes, oppressors tend to lie about what they are doing.
Which is why degrowth is a very bad idea.
Only because some people want to oppress others.
Misgendering isn't something you are, it's something you do, to other people.
A policy of "Thou shalt use the exact pronouns specified; using they/them for a nonbinary person who prefers ze/zir is a banworthy/firable offence"? I would agree with you. "They/them for everybody", or "he/him for male-presenting/identified, she/her for female-presenting/identified, they/them for androgynous/non-binary" ought to be considered an acceptable compromise.
A policy of "If Alice and Barbara are equally female-presenting, both identify as female, and both have stated a preference for she/her, you do not refer to Alice as he/him, or as they/them while referring to Barbara as she/her, merely because Alice happened to be born with a dangly bit" is not oppression, because it is not oppression for Alice's genitals to be none of your business.
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