Combating Gentrification

[Cinemachinery]

I always considered "control troll" to be someone who pretends to care about some issue while in reality attempting to undermine it through loaded questions and such.

Ah, ok. Really, this is more a gripe about millennials than anything else. It wasn't really meant to address a particular issue or anyone on the forum - I'd imagine a lot of these people are involved in one way or another. Activism is a lot of different things.

[OpiateOfTheMasses]

The thing that irks me about these are those people that "care" about everything... for five minutes. Whatever's shoved in front of their faces as being the latest fashionable thing that they're told is important to them, they will jump up and down about how important it is to the planet and about how everyone else should stop what they're doing and fix it. They'll probably be able to reel off the top three or five bullet points as to why it's important too, but have little to no understanding of the background or be able to address any of the wider points surrounding it.

And a week later someone else (quite possibly a celebrity) will tell them that something else is now the biggest problem on the planet and that will now be the entire focus of our campaign warrior's attention...

Things like world hunger are a problem, but there aren't any quick or easy solutions and frankly as the global population continues to grow at an unsustainable rate and as climate change means that the way we produce food will have to change, me shouting that we should re-distribute the food we currently have on the planet isn't really going to make much of a difference in the long term. So I'll leave it to people that know what they're doing. Of course I care about people going hungry, I'm just not going to pretend that I have any sort of clue as to how to solve it in the long term and short term solutions have never particularly interested me as there may be unintended consequences and they could (in fact) make things worse.

So I support campaigns for GM foods and research into climate change and hope that the clever people involved can come up with the solutions.

In summary, there are almost never simple solutions to complex problems. But people don't want to hear that. People don't like complex solutions because they're difficult to understand, often a bit messy and generally don't give them exactly the answer they wanted. So they just accept whatever simple solution is offered regardless of whether or not it'll work or has undesirable side effects... But to make it work you have to spend the time and effort to build and understand the complex solution.