Lead by example

Politics
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This is a really good article that talks about the history of the term. It’s not new.

Whataboutism adds a twist to tu quoque by directing its energies into establishing an equivalence between two or more disparate actions, thereby defaming the accuser with the insinuation that their priorities are backwards. The CNN correspondent Jill Dougherty, in a 2016 article about allegations of Russian doping during the Olympics, defined whataboutism in terms of a more familiar English idiom:

There’s another attitude toward doping allegations that many Russians seem to share, what used to be called in the Soviet Union " whataboutism ," in other words, “who are you to call the kettle black?”
—Jill Dougherty, CNN.com , 24 July 2016

The association of whataboutism with the Soviet Union began during the Cold War. As the regimes of Josef Stalin and his successors were criticized by the West for human rights atrocities, the Soviet propaganda machine would be ready with a comeback alleging atrocities of equal reprehensibility for which the West was guilty.

The weaknesses of whataboutism—which dictates that no one must get away with an attack on the Kremlin’s abuses without tossing a few bricks at South Africa, no one must indict the Cuban police State without castigating President Park, no one must mention Irak, Libya or the PLO without having a bash at Israel, &c. – have been canvassed in this column before.
—Michael Bernard, The Age (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia), 17 Jun. 1978

And probably the real meat of the whole term:

The tactic behind whataboutism has been around for a long time. Rhetoricians generally consider it to be a form of tu quoque , which means “you too” in Latin and involves charging your accuser with whatever it is you’ve just been accused of rather than refuting the truth of the accusation made against you. Tu quoque is considered to be a logical fallacy, because whether or not the original accuser is likewise guilty of an offense has no bearing on the truth value of the original accusation.

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I can understand your reluctance to embrace the nuance of the fallacy because then the tingle is gone.

Call it what you want. Find a phrase in latin to defend your position. Heck… make it Swahili, Arabic, and Navaho to give it the import of ancient wisdom. But all that was done was a check on the intellectual honesty of a complaint about Trump.
Tu quoque! :rofl: We should rename it the “To Queequeg” fallacy… since almost all who declare the intellectual honesty check to be a fallacy eventually go down with their ship, clinging to one of the masts of their position.

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No, what was done was an attempt at distracting from a perceived failure of Trump by alluding to a perceived failure of Obama.

Whether the original complaint is “intellectually honest” would be a distraction away from whether it’s true/valid. It questions the motives of the person making the statement, rather than addressing the validity of the statement, which completely avoids discussing the original topic in the first place-aka “logical fallacy.” What you describe is a “check on intellectual honesty” is ad hominem.

The earliest known uses of “whatabout”/ “whataboutism” describe the use of the term exactly as I have cited from Merriam-Webster (which cites the history of the uses of the term).

The association of whataboutism with the Soviet Union began during the Cold War. As the regimes of Josef Stalin and his successors were criticized by the West for human rights atrocities, the Soviet propaganda machine would be ready with a comeback alleging atrocities of equal reprehensibility for which the West was guilty.

The weaknesses of whataboutism—which dictates that no one must get away with an attack on the Kremlin’s abuses without tossing a few bricks at South Africa, no one must indict the Cuban police State without castigating President Park, no one must mention Irak, Libya or the PLO without having a bash at Israel, &c. – have been canvassed in this column before.
—Michael Bernard, The Age (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia), 17 Jun. 1978

The term “whatabout” to describe the tactic had been used a few years earlier (from Wiki):

I would not suggest such a thing were it not for the Whatabouts. These are the people who answer every condemnation of the Provisional I.R.A. with an argument to prove the greater immorality of the “enemy”, and therefore the justice of the Provisionals’ cause: “What about Bloody Sunday, internment, torture, force feeding, army intimidation?”. Every call to stop is answered in the same way: “What about the Treaty of Limerick; the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921; Lenadoon?”. Neither is the Church immune: “The Catholic Church has never supported the national cause. What about Papal sanction for the Norman invasion; condemnation of the Fenians by Moriarty; Parnell?”

— Sean O’Conaill, “Letter to Editor”, The Irish Times , 30 Jan 1974

And both uses are directly in line with how I have described the term being used. Not as a “check on intellectual honesty” but as a distraction or deflection.

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276

consider this exchange:

Person A: Trump is a bad leader.
Person B: That’s not true because we know that Obama was a bad leader.

See… THAT is a tu quoque fallacy. It is an attempt to disprove the assertion of Person A.

Now consider this exchange:

Person A: Trump is a bad leader.
Person B: Interesting that you would complain now, Obama did the same thing and I didn’t read your complaints about him

See… That is NOT a tu quoque fallacy. The exchange, per se, is not attempting to disprove Person A’s assertion. It is attempting to ascertain the intellectual honesty of Person A. There may be other attempts to disprove the assertion through the use of facts about Trump’s leadership. But the second basic exchange above is not attempting to disprove Person A’s assertion. It is not a tu quoque fallacy. :rofl:

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Not lib thinkers.

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Good post. Except: politics.

That is up to the people who elected to decide.

So how is “he’s acting like Obama” anything but a hypocritical defense?

I can see your point. On some topics (golf) it is correct. On others, using the same tools is not. If Trump is writing a lot of EOs and I complained about Obama doing it, it could be hypocrisy. Unless Trump is writing most of them to cancel Obama’s. That is how the mechanism works.

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Yeah, they pretty well told us that before, during, and after the election, and have been reminding everyone of that for years, including coming from Trump himself. There’s no guesswork involved.

I generally agree, but I think it depends on the nature of the complaint.

“I don’t like that Obama used EOs so much” followed by “So what if Trump uses a lot of EOs, Obama did too” would be whataboutism. It doesn’t attempt to refute Trump’s “overuse” of them-it simply justifies his use of so many of them by likening it to Obama’s use of them.

“I found many Obama EOs to be abuses of his authority, but don’t generally view most of Trump’s use of EOs to be the same” would not be “whataboutism.” This does not attempt to distract from Trump’s use of EOs. It simply states one doesn’t think they were similar to Obama’s use.

I don’t disagree that there are plenty of times people try to use “whataboutism” too broadly, or when it is not valid.

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You are relying on Merriam Webster ? The company is going to redefine racism to accommodate the views of extreme racists. The result will be that the absence of equal opportunity will not be a metric of racism but that the lack of equal outcomes will be evidence of racism.
What can I say ! I’m afraid I cannot accept their definitions of tu quoque.

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And the same true of Obama after Bush. I’m not sure what your complaint is.

Except as I said, it takes an EO to undo an EO.

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Good for her for reaching out, getting involved, caring - and doing it the right way.

She’s wrong.

And they are idiots.

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Wasn’t a complaint-simply stating that "Trump was elected to be better than Obama or “not do the things Obama did” is a large part of what he ran on, and a large part of why many here have vocally stated they supported him. “The people who elected” him that you mentioned DID decide that.

That’s one of the examples that is not whataboutism, as I described in my second example:

Supporting Trump’s use of an EO to undo an Obama EO one saw as an abuse of authority would not be “whataboutism.” I completely agree with you on that.

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In my view, some of it he has done well. Others he is a hypocrite. Just like all of them.

Ok.

Ok.

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I provided an example of the dictionary’s mistake in redefining racism…You just saved me from the Hannity Iron Maiden. Thanks.

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wrong. There are 5:

American Indian or Alaska Native
Asian
Black or African American
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander
White

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Cite your source.

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Hard to tell if there’s a difference in the minds of those that use “lib” as a pejorative and throw everyone who disagrees with Trump into under that same blanket.

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Not really. Lib was here before Trump and will be after he’s gone.

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Here are two sources:

  1. 8th grade social studies class.
  2. Any employment application.
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Exactly. From our own U.S. Census Bureau.
https://www.census.gov/mso/www/training/pdf/race-ethnicity-onepager.pdf

image

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Since you need help.
https://www.census.gov/mso/www/training/pdf/race-ethnicity-onepager.pdf