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A comment on The war on disinformation is a war on dissent. Parent comment

Re:The war on disinformation is a war on dissent by stjohnswarts on Sunday February 07, 2021 @01:21PM (#26056865)
Sure, we'll probably never know, but his actions speak louder than his words and he has dedicated his life to public service and doing his best to serve it unlike the right wing media, Trump, and others that try to villainize him. They split illegal immigrant families up for months (some to never reconnect again), have no issue with allegations of multiple rapes by their presidential candidate, "pro life" but kick the kids to the curb after birth, constantly in bed with Russian troll theories, and it goes on. Why can't anyone look at the bigger picture at their "whataboutism" when the picture was a not-too-smart grifter became President tried to take over our country with an insurrection while they try to turn Fauci into evil incarnate.
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Re:The war on disinformation is a war on dissent by geebee on Sunday February 07, 2021 @01:53PM (#26057125)
Ah, whataboutism. It's not a magical word. You can't say "wingardium whatabousa", wave your wand, and make all your own hypocricies disappear.

To me - and this is my own standard, not a set of rules - whataboutism a fallacy is specifically used to avoid acknowledging a problem by derailing the discussion.

If a person fully and thoroughly acknowledges a problem, and does not minimize the importance of that problem, then it is not whataboutism to point out the hypocrisy of the other side during the analysis - especially if someone denies or minimizes the existence of bias from the other side.

In short, an article like this from The Atlantic (including a reference to an early pandemic NYTimes article that claimed advocating for travel bans was racist) is not whataboutism. These are not just reasonable but important observations:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/03/what-...

And lastly, while I agree with you about much of Trump and right wing media, I was pretty aghast with the times, WaPo, and other media outlets (this link also from The Atlantic). To be fair the National Review also got this wrong at first.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/media-must...

As an aside, The Atlantic is an interesting publication - it is a very left leaning, but has a number of writers who are absolutely willing to go straight at the left when they feel it is behaving hypocritically.

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