this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
1179 points (95.2% liked)
Political Memes
5484 readers
2330 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That's interesting. Why does that standard change so much in the context of presidential candidates compared to every other situation?
Like, if someone was criticizing, say, Fidel Castro, and instead of addressing it I brought up the problems with the Batista regime that he opposed, would that be whataboutism? Just as in a presidential election, there were two realistic possibilities, either Batista stays in power or he's overthrown. So if it's valid to divert from criticism of Biden towards problems with his most realistic alternative, Trump, then why would it not be valid to do the same thing with Castro and Batista, or any number of similar cases?
We are talking about a stance of two presidential candidates, the context matter when talking whataboutism.
In this case, the stance of both candidates on Israel is part of their political platform and we're in the presidential campaign.
Whataboutism would be Republicans defending Trump on its criminal charge by talking about Hillary's emails. Those two things are unrelated.
Understood. So as long as I'm talking about the same metric, I'm allowed to bring up how things were before a socialist government came to power and that's not whataboutism.
When Castro and Batista will be running candidates, we can ask them their stance on Israel and give them cute nicknames, but until then, we can debate the stance of Biden and Trump, the two running candidates and compare their platform.
Is that hard to grasp?
Not at all. I'm just trying to establish the rules governing whataboutism, because it sometimes seems to me like there's a double standard.