Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Whataboutism and the Establishments

Whataboutism is the quick raising of irrelevancies, often of the those guys also do terrible acts variety.

Examples:
Person one: Putin is a terrible leader.
Person two: What about Saudi leaders? They are more evil than Putin. Every ruler on Earth is terrible.

Person three: I can't believe Jarad Kushner is permitted in the White House.
Person four: Al Sharpton was permitted in the Obama White House.

Whataboutism infuriates establishment individuals more than expected because they don't want us to see or hear anything that contradicts poorly reasoned establishment political beliefs. Hence, their efforts to obtain total domination of mass media and all other major institutions. Even total institutional domination is not enough for them: they resort to totalitarian speech restrictions.

Seldom able to recognize and articulate the existence of logical fallacies, the shout of whataboutism is their way of saying some claims are unfair or irrelevant. Note how they are blind to the straw person, ad hominem, and other irrelevancies they bombard the rest of us with.

Masters of confirmation bias, they would prefer we talk about only their favored issues, framed in mythical ways.

How should we deal with poorly reasoned establishment narratives without resorting to irrelevancies: "Okay, let's argue about your issue. Then let's talk about other issues thousands of times more because other issues are thousands of times more important--dysgenics, migration, militarism, self-determination, et cetera."

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