What about the US military's FB page? Didn't they cause thousands of innocent deaths in Iraq? I'm sure some Americans can somehow justify it, but I doubt the grieving Iraqi's will accept it.
I am always impressed at how effectively Facebook has convinced nearly everyone on both sides of the US partisan divide that Facebook is using censorship to attempt to crush their own side.
The details of the coup aren't understood or cared about that deeply by American discourse. But the idea that it's trivial and salutary to identify and ban "bad" or "dangerous" speech is decisively left-coded right now, in exactly the way similar impulses were right-coded during periods of rightwing political dominance (immediately post-9/11, parts of the Cold War, etc)
All these recent events involving censorship and left aligned tech companies eerily reminds me a passage the Unabomber wrote in his manifesto back in the 1990s.
"
Some leftists may seem to oppose technology, but they will oppose it only so long as they are outsiders and the technological system is controlled by non-leftists. If leftism ever becomes dominant in society, so that the technological system becomes a tool in the hands of leftists, they will enthusiastically use it and promote its growth. In doing this they will be repeating a pattern that leftism has shown again and again in the past. When the Bolsheviks in Russia were outsiders, they vigorously opposed censorship and the secret police, they advocated self-determination for ethnic minorities, and so forth; but as soon as they came into power themselves, they imposed a tighter censorship and created a more ruthless secret police than any that had existed under the tsars, and they oppressed ethnic minorities at least as much as the tsars had done. In the United States, a couple of decades ago when leftists were a minority in our universities, leftist professors were vigorous proponents of academic freedom, but today, in those of our universities where leftists have become dominant, they have shown themselves ready to take away from everyone else's academic freedom. (This is "political correctness.") The same will happen with leftists and technology: They will use it to oppress everyone else if they ever get it under their own control.
"
Exactly. I don't share the Unabomber's directional disdain for leftists, but most people are simply too dim to understand the concept that liberalism/illiberalism exists on an axis independent of leftism/rightism. If you're planning to burn down liberal norms for short-term partisan gains, you better understand the long view, but that's simply beyond the capacity of the majority of people.
To be clear, there are leftists and rightists that explicitly own the rejection of liberal values (Communists/tankies, racial essentialists like the "woke" and neo-Nazis, neoreactionaries). But the majority of these dynamics are driven by useful idiots who can't even grasp what's happening.
Not entirely sure why you're being downvoted—maybe some are reading your list of groups, seeing their own, and saying, "well they were right up until that part," and got offended—but you are correct that illiberalism exists on all sides of the political spectrum.
And of course when it does, the now-illiberal faction rationalizes it with some manner of, "liberalism, except when..."
The problem with liberalism is that—while it is the most sane mode of structural organization—it is extremely brittle in the face of illiberalism.
Liberalism—and its ancestors/influences—never ate itself, unlike illiberalism. But it does always fall to barbarism. It's like having an argument with an insane person: you may be right, but you'll never win that fight.
That is a seriously concerning weakness, because when liberalism is threatened, the default modes of self preservation are either: roll over and get beaten (as a matter of principal) or reject some (or all) liberalism in order to fight back. In either case, liberalism goes away.
I'm not sure that anyone has ever come up with a reasonable defense. (And maybe there is none.) Humanity seems to prefer pendula. The grass is always greener...
The difference is the Myanmar military was killing their own citizens.
A country's military firing live rounds on their own citizens with seemingly no remorse is different than a country's military committing violence in foreign countries.
I'm certainly not condoning either example of military force presented here, but the duty of the military should ultimately be to preserve their citizens. Killing its own citizens and then using social media to lie about it is something I don't think the US military has done.
Should Facebook then close Police departments pages? They're killing fellow citizens and they're doing that more than any other Police force in the west.
That's a decent point. To my argument though, the duty of the police sometimes does acceptably involve violence against citizens when necessary (although at present they are far too frequently forgetting the "when necessary" part).
Also, police departments are far more localized and I think hold much less clout than a national organization.
The US is inprisoning drug users en masse and forces them to provide labour. That does not directly kill people but prevents them from living it the way they want which is somewhat similar in effect, not to mention all the suicides or related gang violence. Not much different to be honest. Army let politicians get boatloads of cash from prison and pharma industry to keep up the war on citizens. Wake up.
Its removal should be actively encouraged amongst the SJWs. FB backing itself, and being backed into, corner after corner helps reveal the hypocrisy more quickly.
There is a slight difference though. Myanmar military took over the government. The US military is led by the president of the United States and only the Congress has the power to declare war.
Well, aminozuur is pointing out hypocrisy. Facebook is not applying the same rules to everyone. That is bad. That aside, my own views are similar to sep_field's... with the exception that I would silently prefer Facebook to go away, without explaining why I'd like that.
Given that “Whataboutism” really means “hypocrisy in a geopolitical context” I think the entire definition should be updated to reflect it as a very valid observation, instead of the assumption that it is a weak argument because in my experience it usually isnt, even during the height of the cold war the Soviet Union’s observations about the US were accurate.
The purpose is not to harm or pressure the Burmese military authorities -
Its to virtue signal to left-leaning activists in the USA and other Western Countries.
Technology companies have dug themselves into a hole of censorship and deplatforming, and they have no choice but to keep digging.