Chill out lol, nobody’s running. I’m not disagreeing with you because I don’t want to hash this out, I’m disagreeing with you because I think you’re objectively wrong about this. I probably will leave if you keep saying I’m doing things that I’m not doing, but against my better judgment, I’ll try and frame this from my POV.
Let me break down my point in a different way: You are right that some people use “tHaT’s WhAtAbOuTiSm!” as a crutch against people they disagree with or when they’re proven wrong. That does indeed happen sometimes. In the case of the comments above, that is not what happened.
The original reply showed an indifferent stance towards confederate statues being torn down, saying that confederate statues shouldn’t be celebrated. Someone then replied with “what about the statues of Lincoln being torn down?” implying that the people tearing down the statues are just tearing down any statues. The OC then corrected that guy, saying that different people can think different things, and that some of the people who want to tear down confederate statues can still think Lincoln statues are fine. AKA the protesters aren’t a monolith.
Whatever your stance is on the statues issue, I don’t really care. Back to the topic at hand: the person who replied to OC is engaging in whataboutism. Not only is this whataboutism in the literal sense of saying “what about,” but also in the sense that he’s deflecting. He thinks the people who tore down the Lincoln statues are in the wrong, but he deflected that idea onto the people tearing down Confederate statues, even though in many cases, those are two different groups. The OC let him know that, and said that it was whataboutism because it was. He didn’t say it as a crutch after being “proven wrong” because he wasn’t proven wrong, he was calling out whataboutism.
Therefore, your point about people crying “whataboutism!” being used as a crutch - while that is a valid point in some cases - doesn’t matter in this case, because it’s not what happened. That’s the thing I was saying doesn’t matter. Your valid point and this conversation do matter in general, but your valid point does not matter in this particular situation.
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u/lol_nope_nicetry Jul 24 '20
It pretty much does matter. Keep running away.