Denouncing arguments as "whataboutisms" wasn't your idea. Now, every other guy on the internet is doing it, Stephen Colbert is doing it, people on the news are doing it, talk show hosts are doing it, etc. It's a mental worm spreading from susceptible mind to susceptible mind. That means you've been brainwashed.
Whataboutisming is a fallacy but it's still a very useful thought tool. Same as slippery slope, appeal to authority, etc.. Both are logical fallacies but both very often lead to very good conclusions. Pure logic takes tons of processing power and sometimes it takes fallacies to lower the processing power needed to reach what is more likely than not to be a valid conclusion. With no logical fallacies and a reliance on pure logic -- that is, without abstraction of abstraction --, our level of philosophy and understanding of the world around us would be stuck at the level of the wheel, constrained by the limited logical processing power of our human brains.
Example of a liberal -- but useful -- whataboutism: I'm a woman and I make $10/ hour. What about the man that makes $15/ hour doing my job? Logical fallacy.. but very useful conclusion! What if all conservatives just started yelling "WHATABOUTISM!!" at the gender pay gap or racism and thinking that makes them super smart?
Imagine it's 1860 and some black guy is like "I'm a slave. What about the white guy that's not a slave?" And conservatives just ridiculed him with "WHATABOUTISM!!!"
To actually reason on why he should be a free man with pure logic would take like a philisophy PhD education with knowledge of all the Greek guys and the classics on ideas of intrinsic human rights and the nature of human sentience.. but a dude with a 5th grade education can reach the same conclusion in 10 seconds using useful logical fallacies.
I'm not even defending that other guy. I just don't like when I see a million people repeating the same thing like a cult or they're part of a gigantic hive mind. It's like they're all a part of the Borg.
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