I think you're allowed to bring in your own issues if it's useful to the discussion and potentially helps people understand the similarities.

Where it's not okay is when people play the "poor me I am worse off" game, which isn't actually useful discussion. :-)

You're right about the choosing your fights though. It's easier to just ignore the idiots that to acknowledge them at all... The difficulty is that totally ignoring the problem doesn't make the problem go away. And when you see friends ignore the problem, that feels really bad.