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Someone can be and asshole and still be right. It will be harder to convince other people to go along with you if you are an asshole, but that doesn't mean you

by jandrese 10mo ago

Someone can be and asshole and still be right. It will be harder to convince other people to go along with you if you are an asshole, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't call out wrongdoing when you see it.

maxglute 10mo ago
Something less effective about ass holes doing wrong things complaining about other assholes doing wrong things, a while insisting they're not assholes. Ultimately the "damage" isn't being called out as a hypocritic asshole, it's the world realize there's nothing wrong with said wrong things. Although to some that's not damage but nature healing.
ngruhn 10mo ago
But you're word doesn't really have weight, if you did the same thing 10min ago.
- glenstein 10mo ago
  Which is a fair charge of ethical character, but not of truth. What makes whataboutism a fallacious rhetorical move is not that it fails to identify someone's ethical shortcomings, but that it tries to substitute them for subject matter. The logic of whataboutism is fascinating, because as long as someone is deemed a bad enough actor, their statements have the effect of dynamically rewriting reality in real time to be the opposite of whatever Bad Actor says. Which, to my mind, gives them too much power. It's simpler to just believe in objective reality, believe that language works roughly according to a correspondence theory of truth and that statements are or are not legitimate on account of their corresponding to reality, which isn't something you can determine based on character alone. But I admit on some level this might be a misunderstanding of whataboutism, because it's holding it to a standard of intellectual consistency that it's not aspiring to.
  - pandaman 10mo ago
    A "whataboutism" defense only works in an argument that goes like this: A:"You should stop doing X because X is wrong and evil and you are wrong and evil if you continue doing X!" B:"But you beat your wife." Where X != "beating one's wife". Here the B's argument is: "But you do X yourself!". This is not an attack on moral character but a direct refutation of A's argument. If A really thought X is wrong and evil then A would not be doing X. And if A really considers itself wrong and evil then it should be figuring a way to stop doing X first, or, at least, concurrently with demanding that from B. Either way, A is not very persuasive.

maxglute 10mo ago

Something less effective about ass holes doing wrong things complaining about other assholes doing wrong things, a while insisting they're not assholes. Ultimately the "damage" isn't being called out as a hypocritic asshole, it's the world realize there's nothing wrong with said wrong things. Although to some that's not damage but nature healing.

ngruhn 10mo ago

But you're word doesn't really have weight, if you did the same thing 10min ago.

glenstein 10mo ago
Which is a fair charge of ethical character, but not of truth. What makes whataboutism a fallacious rhetorical move is not that it fails to identify someone's ethical shortcomings, but that it tries to substitute them for subject matter. The logic of whataboutism is fascinating, because as long as someone is deemed a bad enough actor, their statements have the effect of dynamically rewriting reality in real time to be the opposite of whatever Bad Actor says. Which, to my mind, gives them too much power. It's simpler to just believe in objective reality, believe that language works roughly according to a correspondence theory of truth and that statements are or are not legitimate on account of their corresponding to reality, which isn't something you can determine based on character alone. But I admit on some level this might be a misunderstanding of whataboutism, because it's holding it to a standard of intellectual consistency that it's not aspiring to.
- pandaman 10mo ago
  A "whataboutism" defense only works in an argument that goes like this: A:"You should stop doing X because X is wrong and evil and you are wrong and evil if you continue doing X!" B:"But you beat your wife." Where X != "beating one's wife". Here the B's argument is: "But you do X yourself!". This is not an attack on moral character but a direct refutation of A's argument. If A really thought X is wrong and evil then A would not be doing X. And if A really considers itself wrong and evil then it should be figuring a way to stop doing X first, or, at least, concurrently with demanding that from B. Either way, A is not very persuasive.