Whataboutism: What About Our Sanity?

“Whataboutism has swallowed rational discourse, & the effects are hard to overstate. It is everywhere. a metastasizing conversational abscess infecting our collective frontal lobe. It's a discursive technique that works by asserting false equivalence, obfuscating the topic at hand while also highlighting the hypocrisy of the opposition. It is dangerous because it implies that all actions, regardless of context, share a moral equivalency,” explained John Oliver in a recent skit on Donald Trump’s haphazard methodology. “And since nobody is perfect, all criticism is hypocritical, and everybody should do whatever they want.” If you succumb to a discursive spasm that allows for zero concessions and tramples objective appraisal, it becomes much easier to believe that your own ideology is correct and infallible and that the opposition’s opinions are illegitimate and mad, even inhuman."