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by dylan604
1599 days ago
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>Because there are differences in scale and severity. Is what has been said at the start of every slippery slope. "What I'm doing is okay because it's not nearly as bad as what someone else is doing." It's a weak person's answer. Call it what it is, and it's just wrong regardless of "level" or reason. |
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But furthermore, I never claimed that "what we're doing is ok" (it's not, Guantanamo is still bad obviously), rather I claimed that whataboutism is about CONTEXT. Bringing up tangentially related US issues in a debate about greater Chinese war crimes is a bad faith argument specifically because its purpose is to muddle discussion, confuse scale (less than 40 Gauntanamo prisoners vs 1,000,000+ prisoners in Xinjiang). The time and place for an argument makes a difference -- if you're talking about how bad the Germans are for the Holocaust, and I interject by talking about an event where an English Jew was murdered in 1935 by an anti-semite, are you not allowed to criticize me for derailing the conversation? I could say "anti-semitism is wrong at any level" or "the English do bad things to, why won't you acknowledge that", and I would be totally out of line because of the context of the discussion of the holocaust, because comparing some Englishman getting murdered to millions dying in death camps is dishonest.