soddingusername:setharooni:the word of the day is whataboutismI’m gonna call bullshit on this. You c

soddingusername:setharooni:the word of the day is whataboutismI’m gonna call bullshit on this. You can’t condemn people for being violent authoritarian racists, to pick an example out of the air, when you’re guilty of condoning the exact same thing.Condoning? The US media is CONDONING violence in Chicago by not talking about it(which btw It Totally Is. How would Prosobiec even know about it if it wasn’t? His claims about the media are not reality)? By not giving national coverage to every shooting in the United States, the media is Condoning them?? Right now, somewhere, a 7-11 is being robbed and, because neither you nor I are talking specifically about that discrete event, we are guilty of declaring it morally acceptable??? Every single bad thing ever done in the history of Forever that any individual is not discussing every instant of their lives, they, by implication, consider Just???? That, I have to say, is a New Argument in the annals of Moral Philosophy, at the very least :|But yeah, the point of the post you’re responding to is that this sort of thing is a change of subject. If a person robs an ATM machine and, when taken to trial, they defend themselves by saying “well the Austro-Hungarian Empire stole land from Poland in the Partition of 1772, and nobody ever took THEM to trial for theft” that would not be considered exculpatory. If someone threw a baseball through your window and you rushed out to yell at them, and they responded, “well, there’s a whole mess of kids right over there playing baseball on that field, so how is what I did wrong?” you would not be mollified. THIS conversation, is not about THAT. THIS conversation is about THIS. So when someone in THIS conversation, who doesn’t want to be in THIS conversation because they know deep down that their “side” is wrong yet are too caught up in their factional-identity to deal with it, they bring up THAT conversation to change the subject. THAT isn’t an appropriate response to THIS. THAT, by definition, doesn’t have anything to do with THIS; with what is being discussed. It’s a distraction thrown out to avoid uncomfortable self-examination, and muddy the moral waters by drawing equivalence between events that aren’t the same.So it’s also an act of equivocation. A violent mob of authoritarian racists marching through a town, to pull an example from the air, is not the same thing as a private individual shooting another private individual for private reasons in a another town hundreds of miles away. One, the mob is not an individual: it is many people, organized, sharing both motivation and behavior. Two, their motivations are different: the mob is formally political, with an agenda it is pursuing and a message it wishes to convey which it is choosing to pursue and convey through violence. The motivations for those shootings are all unknown; any one of them may be formally political, or personal, or commercial, or any of a host of other motivations. What can accurately be said about the motivations of those shootings is that, while they may be similar, they are not the same. And, to be more specific and speak to your “exact same thing”, those shootings, presumably, were not all motivated by “violent authoritarian racism”. Which brings us to the third major distinction: that the mob’s violence is a communal and social and political act, whereas those shootings(though perhaps not all of them) are personal and individual acts. The mob came to be violent. It came to intimidate. It came to have a confrontation. It came to get in a fight. It’s purpose was to say, as it declared in its own words, “We’re here, this place belongs to us, you don’t belong here, we won’t be removed, we’ll fight you for this place”, which they then did. As a communal act, moral culpability for it, if perhaps not legal, was also communal: the organizers organized it to be violent, the “leaders” of each group brought their people there with the understanding and expectation it would be violent and so, though they themselves may not have participated directly in violent acts, they bear a portion of responsibility for those acts of violence their mob brought with it. Now maybe some of these Chicago shootings were also “social” acts undertaken as part of a social identity; we can’t know until each is investigated because each was a discrete and separate event. Unlike the acts of violence committed by this mob, which were all committed by affiliated individuals, in service of the same objective, in continuity with each other, at the same event, justified by the same philosophies. Shootings in Chicago and a violent mob marching through Charlottesville are not the same thing, so bringing up the former when discussing the later is not appropriate or arguing in good-faith.And lastly, just because I’m a completionist, there’s the fact that Prosobiec’s whataboutism is insincere emotional manipulation, which people ought to just ignore on principal. Prosobiec doesn’t give a Shit about violence in Chicago; all it is to him is a red herring to smack people in the face with. Prosobiec is a Right-Wing Provocateur and Propagandist. By his own admission. To quote him from that article:“As a journalist, I use all the tools at my disposal”—mostly YouTube, Periscope, and Twitter—“to seek the truth and disseminate the truth. That’s the purpose of journalism, right? At the same time, I also do what I call 4-D journalism, meaning that I’m willing to break the fourth wall. I’m willing to walk into an anti-Trump march and start chanting anti-Clinton stuff—to make something happen, and then cover what happens. So, activism tactics mixed with traditional journalism tactics.” So he “mixes activism tactics with traditional journalism tactics”, and “makes things happen” so he can report on them as “truth”. I’m not going to look into this guy’s twitter history or anything, but I feel rather confident that, if I did, I’d find all sorts of derogatory claims made about the city of Chicago, it’s “Politics” and “Those People” who live there. He doesn’t give a goddamn about crime in Chicago, and he doesn’t give a goddamn about its victims, so the only reason he would even have for bringing it up is as, in his words, an “activism tactic”. In other words, he knows his interlocutors actually care about the issue and might get upset by having it mentioned, which he won’t because he doesn’t, and that might give him an edge in the argument. It might also, given that the argument is happening in a social space, distract people away from the real issue, helping his cause. Like I said: insincere emotional manipulation. So why take it seriously? Why take HIM seriously? Why treat it as, or call it anything other than, what is it: a cheap, mean-spirited attempt to avoid a discussion he doesn’t want to have, because he’s too morally bankrupt to accept that “his side” has problems it needs to face? -- source link

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