Especially during these times of general anxiety which is founded in a very serious threat of massive loss of life, the one thing that is absolutely certain about the kind of questions which are being asked to rhetoric is that "what about 'such and such'?" will make an inevitable appearance. I don't want to diminish the responsibility to ask powerful people what they intend to do with said power and for whose benefit they wield it but I do find the question of "what about 'such and such'?" to be both tiresome and fruitless.
The idea of 'whataboutism' is not exactly a new device but it has been reframed afresh for our times by both the rise of the internet which means that normal people actually can ask questions to power; as well as the fact that that same internet has meant that the whole news cycle has been sped up to a pace which is beyond people's willingness to consider ideas separately.
I won't say that people don't have the ability to process multiple ideas in concert with each other but there is a very strong desire for instant gratification that people have, which results in a whataboutism type question being asked; with no real desire or curiosity to find out what the answer is.
Whataboutism isn't the exclusive domain of leftist or rightist politics; nor is it the domain of libertarian or authoritarian politics either. I think that it is like the foil of a badly trained fencer who only knows how to thrust in the hope of landing a point without realising that their opponent will parry it away with ease. Therein lies the problem. With a thrust of a whataboutism type question which has no intent and no purpose beyond point scoring, all simple parries and deflections ensure that any real issue is never addressed.
A 'whataboutism' type question is like setting up the simplest of plays which anyone versed in the art of the parry, then gets to take the advantage for free. They are even more pointless in an era when the people in power are actually coached in the art of deflection, as a necessary skill to their arsenal of rhetoric. To think that there aren't professional coaches whose job it is to make speakers more competent in the art of not saying anything at all, is naive at best and negligent at worst.
Perhaps it is my own internal prejudices running overtime but whenever I hear a whataboutism type question, I tend to assume that the person asking such a question is stupid. I choose to define 'stupidity' as the result of deliberate action which stems from choices as opposed to the actual intelligence of a person. People who are less intelligent have just as much capacity for bravery, kindness, affection, loyalty, and all of the hard and difficult aspects of character; as much as anyone else. Stupidity on the other hand, is almost always the result of choice which is backed by selfishness and degrees of unkindness and cruelty which is really just selfishness wearing a different jacket.
The problem that I really have with a whataboutism type question is that it must invariably assume that someone can not hold more than one idea at the same time. I know that is a sweeping generalisation but it is based upon another sweeping generalisation stemming from my perceptions that virtually every whataboutism type question has nothing to do with the original thing in question. That isn't to say that ideas aren't orthagonal and share various areas of the type that Mr Venn might draw his eponymous diagram of but more often than not, I find that the circles of ideas don't even touch. Bringing up the issue of Personal Protective Equipment of domestic nurses when someone is talking about the actions of a foreign government in relation to land rights and invasion, is irrelevant.
I will admit that I have a tendency to be rather indirect and this may come from a latent desire to be polite but whataboutism type questions annoy me probably more than they should because I am too stupid to hold multiple ideas at the same time. If someone is giving a discourse on a particular subject, then I naturally expect that the questions which are asked, have to do with said subject. If a politician starts a new chain of discussion, I do not think that asking about some other thing helps the discourse.
To that end, I really hate the morning zoo approach to press conferences when some politician makes an announcement and the press pack wants to ask a bunch of questions that have nothing to do with the thing whatsoever. The questions that they ask might very well be legitimate but more often than not, they tend to be vehicles for abuse by proxy.
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