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There's got to be a name for when someone complains about a tiny expenditure, and compares it with an unrelated huge societal issue. You can criticize anything this way: we're delivering mail while people starve. We're giving people parking tickets while killer asteroids go undetected.


It is the fallacy of relative privation, or appeal to worse problems:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation


Prime example, I recently had someone on Twitter literally tell me that by supporting NASA I must want children to die.

https://twitter.com/NASA_SLS/status/401818661931208704

"I love space exploration, but the expenditure simply cannot be justified when kids die for lack of clean water"

"But as we're discussing children's lives only someone lacking a moral compass would consider it an issue here"


Opportunity costs are a real thing. It's a legitimate argument. See using dead children as a unit of currency:

http://www.raikoth.net/deadchild.html




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