Re:Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who expos...
by tmuir on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @01:07AM
(#16626184)
I guess I've become hardened by the general principle underlying this tactic of debate. There are plenty of people who employ it as their singular or at least favored tactic to nearly every debate, and don't for one second convince me of their good faith. It is especially common to see with respect to Hillary Clinton. It is nearly universally used as discussion ender. If the whatabouter can change the subject to their debater's hypocrisy, nearly any reasonable question can be simply ignored wholesale, by repeatedly bringing up the false equivalency over and over.
So you can blame the countless people employing this tactic maliciously, including the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, for any disproportionate skepticism I apply to its use.
Well, it must not be that bad if it doesn't bother you when "your side" does it.
What if... and try to stick with me here, because this is a pretty radical thought here in 2018... what if both sides are doing a despicable thing, and rather than argue with each other about "whataboutism" we should resist both of them?
(In this particular case, I don't think that the campaigns did the exact same things... I think they've been doing all they can possibly get away with for a very long time. So it gets worse every campaign not necessarily because anybody is worse than ever before, but because especially in this century, every four years "all they can possibly get away with" has been growing like gangbusters.)