For Critical Examination... Those Who Seek To Practice Intellectual Honesty, Who Seek To Be Problem Solvers In A World Of Problems, & Who Seek To Walk In Integrity MUST Shun And Avoid The Deflective Philosophy and Tactic of "WhatAboutism." "For those of you unfamiliar with the term "whataboutism", it is the logical fallacy where someone tries to discredit another by claiming hypocrisy without actually refuting or disproving the other person's argument. For instance, if someone sees a problem and wants to fix it, someone else can immediately retort, "Well what about these other things? Are they not important too?" even though those other topics may not even be remotely relevant to the situation initially brought to question. One of the most obvious uses of whataboutism in recent times is when the current President of the United States made a statement about the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. When asked about why he hadn’t condemned in Charlottesville, Donald Trump in his rancor said, "What about the 'alt-left' that came charging at, as you say, the 'alt-right,' do they have any semblance of guilt?"" "Whataboutism is a cowardly tactic. As a psychology major, it’s infuriating to see how it actually works quite effectively in a conversation. It acts as a complete distraction by derailing the conversation into what the defendant wants to talk about instead. Even when you finally prove them wrong on their “what about” statement, they can simply whip up new ones in an endless cycle. It fails to recognize a problem that is occurring and fails to add new discussion into how we can resolve current problems. It solves nothing and gets the conversation nowhere. The sooner our politicians and news media personalities realize this, the sooner we will be able to hold truly meaningful conversations on policy." #WhatAboutism #KnowledgeIsPower #IgnoranceIsChoice #NoRightToRemainSilent https://www.instagram.com/p/BvMoI_plknw/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=tef582higako
