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Notes -
I know very similar things have been said in parallel responses a number of times already, but really, you have answered your own question in the last paragraph. The world is a terrible place! This story is outrageous, but so is the life story of every single one of a million of starving orphans in the Third World, any random child of a single mother having a severe case of Münchhausen syndrome by proxy, or lone elderly person caught up in one of those Floridan elderly care scams where the local judge and state-appointed legal guardians are in cahoots, or anyone working in a Bangladeshi sweatshop. It turns out we don't actually care for all these horrible fates if they don't directly intersect with ours, and we surely wouldn't even have the capacity to if we actually tried.
Whether accurate or not, the pitch of the toxoplasma stories is that their contents, and our allocating a share of mind-space to having a stance on them, will have a real material impact on our lives. What is the pitch for caring about the Pelicot case, over caring about any of the other myriad of outrageous tragedies including the ones I listed above?
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