The downvotes hint at a general awareness by users that whataboutism is a playground debate technique on par with, “I know you are, but what am I?”.
If a point is valid in a vacuum but has no bearing on the topic, it absolutely should get a negative reaction.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 22 hours ago
no actually i disagree with that.
imagine you develop a new medication (let’s call it Medius just to give it a latin-sounding name) and you give it out to 100 patients suffering from a certain disease. Shortly after, 30 of these people die.
Now certainly critics can say your medicine is dogshit because it killed 30 people. You might respond “well normally around 80% of people suffering of that disease die” but that would be whataboutism … just because they die without your medicine doesn’t justify that some people die when you give them your medicine.
You see?
Honytawk@discuss.tchncs.de 12 hours ago
No we don’t see, because that isn’t whataboutism.
Whataboutism would be saying that even though your medicine killed 30 people, your competitors medicine killed 50 people so yours isn’t that bad.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 8 hours ago
it depends on what your baseline is, in other words what do you consider the case of “no treatment at all”
like you argue that some political system killed so and so many people so the system is bad; compared to the baseline of no political system at all.
the question is whether that’s a meaningful baseline. like, what does “no political system” actually mean? is there even such a thing as “no political system”? some would argue that everything is political, therefore there cannot be a society without politics.
and then there is the question, if you say that there definitely is a hypothetical society without a political system, why have we never seen one? where is the real-world example?
sukhmel@programming.dev 9 hours ago
And the medicine is for common cold