No, you facilitate it, since the elite wants those hostilities to remain unabated.
> Don't be condescending, for you do not not what I do when I am
away from my keyboard. And nor should it matter.
Of course it does. The question is whether a person just types the type or lives the life.
> I am absolved of having to support any gay rights (or other)
struggle if I calculate that there is no likelihood of payback for my
cause (say "animal welfare")
But you can only know this with any certainty by supporting a struggle and seeing what you get in return. Otherwise you are just playing with theories which can be twisted to whatever outcome you desire.
> I can be easily bought off: the "elite" only need to offer me a better
deal than the gay activists do
If a person is capable of being bought off, a commitment to a struggle won't prevent it.
> without some predefined shared notion such as [at least]
"commitment" we are stuck with a bootstrapping problem (w.r.t
common action).
What about helping ending the oppression of other human beings?
> This argument is precisely analogous to the claim that a medical
doctor could not understand the etiology of a disease unless the
doctor personally experienced the disease.
Not at all. If you are not a gay man who has been threatened with violence then you cannot know what it feels like. You can know that such incidents occur, but you cannot know how it feels.
> Being able to thoroughly analyze a phenomenon and test causal
linkages is not dependent on having an immediate "personal"
experience.
But an analysis of a phenomenon is different from experiencing it.
> This assumption that a person cannot "know" something unless
they personally experience it is one of the most pernicious
misconceptions about knowledge that I come across as a college
prof.
You can have a some knowledge of it, but experience for me is also a good a path to knowledge and offers information unavailable from books and classrooms.
Brian