I specifically said, no whataboutism please.

Please keep the tired trope of "whataboutism" off HN. It has become a cliché, used to cordon off discussion to what the original speaker wants to talk about—as if speaking first conferred some right to decide what is admissible. That's not how conversation works.

Comparables are often relevant, and looking for contradictions in what people argue or believe is a tool for shedding light on a situation. Somehow the word "whataboutism" became catchy enough that people started to believe in the right to exclude unwanted examples this way, but that's clearly a fallacy. If you can show how I'm applying a principle selectively in different cases, you've taught me something valuable. We need to stay open to that.

There's a subtler fallacy worth pointing out too: it doesn't follow that you're justifying the thing I'm against. That is, if you point out an inconsistency or some comparable example on my side of the argument, it doesn't follow that you're a communist or whatnot. Maybe you are, maybe not. Maybe we actually agree. All that follows is that you've found an inconsistency in me, and that's information I need.

When someone brings up an example that they think is relevant and you don't, the way to refute that is not with a garlic word, but to explain what the significant difference is. If there isn't a significant difference, maybe it's not irrelevant.

People do bring up irrelevancies, but that's rarer than it seems. More likely it's that they have a different perspective on what's relevant, as part of the original disagreement that needs hashing out in the first place. Cordoning off discussion doesn't help with that, and no party to a dispute gets the power to draw the lines of what's in and out for everybody. Indeed, that would amount to the power to impose one's view on the entire dispute.

And I wonder: if we could agree on what's relevant, perhaps by including everything we both really care about, how close that might get us to resolving our conflict itself.

What's a "garlic word"? I briefly tried looking it up. I can infer what you mean, I'm just curious if that was already an expression, drawn from somewhere else.

I made it up. Originally I wrote "magic pejorative" but that's more abstract.

The obvious suggestion for next time is allium verbum.

Did 'whataboutism' key your car or something?[1] It's a reasonably well-defined term but it is seeing a bit of popularity and mildly tedious abuse. At the same time, we've lived with the tedium of much more common forum verbal tics - 'straw man', 'ad hominem', 'argument from authority' and this hasn't (I think quite sensibly) merited multiple lengthy moderator encyclicals.

[1] Obviously, if that's what happened, I'm with you completely. Whataboutism should be fucking killed. No trial, no jury, straight to execution.

You asked Dan and not me but let me take this opportunity to cheerlead intrusive moderation of "ad hominem" and "argument from authority" as well, both of which are also invariably markers of dumb, polluting arguments.

Well since we're all here, can you expand on what you mean by ad hominem? It's a classical term of course and I know the literal meaning, but at times find it slippery to pin down, and (same thing) people have subtly different interpretations.

I can't do better than this post:

https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html

... and to say that most instances in which ad-hom is invoked on HN result in stupid debates about whether an argument is (a) actually ad-hom and (b) fallaciously ad-hom (a subtlety most invokers on HN don't really grok).

I think we already have a culture that rejects personalized arguments, and "ad hominem", which gets deployed because people have long ago pulled it out of one of those Internet "fallacy lists", virtually always just clouds discussions. It's certainly more corrosive than "whataboutism".

Honestly, I think it's possible that all "canned" fallacy arguments --- ad hom, whataboutism, argument from authority, straw-man --- basically contravene the "principle of charity" guideline, and that it'd be worth having the guidelines ask people not to deploy pre-canned responses to other people's arguments. You can make the "this is a fallacious ad hominem" argument, if you really know what you're talking about, without using the words "ad hominem", and that'll always be a better comment.

Optimize HN for better writing!

Sorry I didn't see this sooner, but thanks for the excellent reply. It's a really good point about canned responses, and this is gold:

You can make the "this is a fallacious ad hominem" argument, if you really know what you're talking about, without using the words "ad hominem", and that'll always be a better comment.

The real test is, are you prepared to sacrifice 'moving the goalposts' on this altar?

I wouldn't, but I'd sacrifice it to get rid of "argument from authority".

I may have been wrong to interpret this comment as whataboutism, but whataboutism isn't just some petty logical fallacy to invoke in internet arguments, but a well-established political tactic employed by governments of the world to justify their actions. It's on a different class of rhetoric than the others in this list.

Soviet Russia invoked it all the time to justify their actions, as does Trump and currently China. Whataboutism is a favourite tactic of oppressive regimes, "practically a national ideology".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Nobody is denying that these canned arguments don't refer back to real things; they're just saying that they devolve into canned arguments and superficial, thought-destroying comparisons that degrade the site.

On "whataboutism", there's no debate to have; if you follow Dan and Scott's moderation comments, appeals to "whataboutism" have been verboten on the site for awhile now.

There are two things to discuss. One is China right in what it's doing.(which most people would agree is wrong)

The second is why isn't the UN doing something, and clearly whether the UN regularly engages in this behavior is relevant. And here are a bunch of cases of human rights abuses that the UN hasn't tried very hard to solve and therefore maybe this isn't what the UN consistently does is relevant.

That’s not the sort of whataboutism you called out in your comment, because the parent isn’t justifying Chinese actions, but pointing out that the U.N. hasn’t acted in similar cases and so it’s not unreasonable to think that they wouldn’t act here.