Pratique du Shadowing: “But you did it first!”: A defense of the whataboutism - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec la vidéo

My son has reached the age where he's realised that I am a ridiculous, total hypocrite.

Half of the time I'll say one thing and I'll do another thing entirely.

Sorry son, you can't drink that, that's beer.

But how come you can drink it, dad?

Right son, it's time for bedtime now please.

But how come you get to stay up late and watch TV and read books and do all of this fun stuff?

In other words, my son has reached the great age of whataboutisms.

It's an age that we never really grow out of.

because from schoolyard debates all the way up to congress arguments humans are masters of the whataboutism

which is when instead of answering a question

or an issue somebody accuses the other person of doing the same

or a similar thing so for example if somebody says people

so often kill in the name of religion the whataboutism says yeah

but stalinism and nazism kill just as many if somebody called Hannah says, well, cheating is wrong.

A whataboutism would say, well, Hannah, didn't you cheat on your ex-partner with your co-worker?

Whataboutism is a deflection, it's obfuscation and it's distraction.

It's considered an informal fallacy in philosophy.

It's an incorrect way to debate and does not deal in the truth of the matter, but is rather a kind of ad hominem attack.

But how true is that?

Is whataboutism always a bad kind of argument.

Today we explore just that question.

The big problem with whataboutisms is that it does not address the actual issues it seeks to.

It raises tangential and often irrelevant issues as well.

It seeks to deliberately distract from the issue at hand.

It's a kind of red herring.

A whataboutism is almost always an emotionally charged and personal attack.

As such, it's designed to move attention away from the issue and onto something much safer, and so that the original and often more awkward question gets ignored.

When we accuse Hannah of having had an affair, we make it about her and her misdeeds, and not about the issue of the morality of cheating.

The philosophy gets thrown out of the window and what we get instead is a kind of character trial.

In 2013 the future Prime Minister of the UK Boris Johnson

wrote an article describing something known as the dead cat strategy in politics.

The dead cat strategy is a kind of media manipulation where you say something

so incredible and something so eye-catching that the media

and people have to talk about it rather than the story that you want to hide.

For example, suppose a politician wants to keep hidden some personal scandal in their life.

And so they say, what about this new policy?

Instead, they announce a foreign policy decision, a highly controversial new direction.

They're going to invade a country.

They're going to ban certain nationalities from coming in.

In his book Psychopolitics, Byung Chow Han argues that modern power does not suppress or silence questions.

It seeks to distract.

It seeks to seduce us with an information overload and

so the dead cat strategy is a powerful mixture of a red herring, a whataboutism and lots of noise.

It buries the story under a flashing neon sign that says I want you to look here instead.

But the problem is that the dead cat strategy is really hard to do anything about.

It's still something that media strategists and spin doctors exploit to this day

because a whataboutism amounts to saying look over there and it's really difficult not to look where somebody is pointing.

Politicians, logicians and debaters often dislike whataboutisms because they are similar to another fallacy known as the ad hominem.

This is where a speaker attacks the person or the source of an argument instead of the argument itself.

For example, if a journalist for China Daily ran a piece saying that the Chinese are the best at table tennis, the ad hominem would say,

well, of course you would say that because you are owned by the Chinese government.

In terms of whataboutisms, asking about Hannah's personal infidelity, a personal attack on herself, is a way of avoiding the issue of polyamory.

And so this is a fair criticism of whataboutism.

But the whataboutism doesn't always have to be a logical fallacy.

Done properly, it can be a legitimate way to argue.

And here I would argue there are three ways we can use a whataboutism.

The first is to point out an inconsistency in somebody's argument.

Suppose, for example, that somebody says that it is wrong to take in Syrian refugees and that we shouldn't do it.

And somebody else whatabouts them by saying, well, how come you are okay with taking in Ukrainian refugees?

That's a legitimate counterpoint and a good argument.

It points at a flaw or at least a shortcoming in their rationale.

What are the underlying arguments or values that make a Syrian different from a Ukrainian?

It might be of course that the whataboutism can be addressed but that's a simple matter for rational and good debate.

The whataboutism in this instance has served the purpose of cutting us to the heart of the actual issue.

And the second is to highlight common factors.

If we return to our opening example of religious and atheistic evil, it might be

that the whataboutism serves as a function to force the speakers to both recognize a common

and underlying factor to both sides of the argument.

If, for example, the atheist points out the evil of religious believers and the religious believer points out the evil of atheists, it might be that the two can,

at least in an ideal philosophical world, come to see unwavering dogmatic adherence to ideology as the dangerous commonality,

and especially when it comes at the expense of human life.

It's a good way to identify the philosophically relevant factors of an argument, and so in this case, a whataboutism is a kind of data collection.

It pulls together various examples, thought experiments, and case studies, and it asks, what is it that is good or bad about all of these things?

And finally it allows us to clarify positions.

In the case of Hannah the whataboutism might clarify and establish her position on things.

If Hannah seeks to defend her infidelity by for example saying

that her husband was absent or perhaps even abusive it means

that she can adapt her position to be more nuanced and to be clearer.

She can say something like well okay cheating is wrong unless x or y.

When we call out a person for inconsistency it invites them to adapt and to grow in their beliefs.

There is a time and a place for a whataboutism.

This is not to say that they are always a good argument

or that they are always a helpful device but we can definitely isolate a few moments where they can be used well.

It might even be that sometimes we ought to use more whataboutisms.

Qu'est-ce que la technique du Shadowing ?

Le Shadowing est une technique d'apprentissage des langues fondée sur la science, développée à l'origine pour la formation des interprètes professionnels. Le principe est simple mais puissant : vous écoutez de l'anglais natif et le répétez immédiatement à voix haute — comme une ombre suivant le locuteur avec un décalage de 1 à 2 secondes. Les recherches montrent une amélioration significative de la précision de la prononciation, de l'intonation, du rythme, des liaisons, de la compréhension orale et de la fluidité.

Pratique du Shadowing: “But you did it first!”: A defense of the whataboutism - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec la vidéo

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Qu'est-ce que la technique du Shadowing ?