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this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
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Ah, whataboutism, solving nothing since the dawn of time....
Whataboutism is when you change the subject. This is the same topic. Israel is invited, North Korea is invited, Azerbaijan is invited. The host doesn't get to pick who attends, no matter who you, personally, hate.
I mean it's not about personal hate. If the Olympic Games are about peaceful competition, you could exclude countries that don't adhere to that based on certain rules.
And yes, it is whataboutism. He was questioning Russia being part of it, he wasn't approving any of the other countries you listed. You can denounce Russia AND other countries. It's possible.
Coulda fooled me. If you wanted to, you could prune an awful lot of countries from the "peace pls" competition, but for some reason even the notion is only ever brought up in one or two particular cases.
And it's not whataboutism, whataboutism is a red herring, I'm making a pretty direct point. If it were, bringing up any comparison or precedent would be whataboutism.
Your argument can be roughly translated to "so whst about those other countries then? Shouldn't they need to be excluded as well?". The point is, no one is disagreeing with you, but you are distracting from the fact that Russia is one of those countries. I'm also unsure if you are intentionally doing it, but you are doing it.
You can do this in a different way: instead of "but what about those countries?" You can say "and if we look into Russia, we definitely need to also look into some of the other countries". This makes it less confrontational and you are agreeing with the premise that there is an issue which should be acted upon.
I can only assume you agree with the base point because Russia doing shady things in regards to the Olympic Games is pretty well documented, and penalizing them is a logical conclusion.
Yes, and the original question can be interpreted as either "why are warmongers not disinvited?" in which case, well, we all know Israel will never get booted, so there's your answer, or, "why is Russia, in particular, not disinvited?", which, seeing as the response was an immediate accusation of bad faith, I feel is more accurate. Hence the "personal dislike" take. I once heard the war in Ukraine described as the geopolitical equivalent of the Missing White Woman Syndrome: Off the top of my head, I can think of 4-5 other, let's say, nurembergy conflicts in the past four years (wow that's depressing), but for some reason none of them induce neither the level outrage, nor the hostility to anyone not sharing the level of outrage. Hell, I've seen Armenians leaving Nagorno-Karabah actually cheered, because "they deserve it for being Russian allies". I find the moral grandstanding to be despicably hollow.
Don't get me wrong, though, the Olympics are a joke.
And here's your problem. You are assuming this, even though he made it clesr thst he didn't appreciate how you assumed we are fine with all the other countries. Nobody said that, and we are not, so no, the first statement was more accurate. Which is also pretty logical, because we are talking about Russia this way BECAUSE of the warmongering, and not because "it's Russia".
And I'm pretty sure the bad faith accusation came specifically BECAUSE you are distracting from this with whataboutism.
It's like saying "we should get rid of Kim Jong Un" and someone else going "ok but what about Xi Jin Ping" - there's no reason to bring this up unless you wanna confront the original argument with distraction or a slippery slope argument.
If you agree, say it like I proposed to you. If you don't, because:
Maybe Russia was the point where people were fed up with it, maybe the media didn't report enough about the other conflicts, maybe ppl didn't have the energy to be outraged every time, ...
Don't attribute anything to malice that can be described through different means. The world is complex.
Maybe we could start with countries credibly accused of being currently in the act of committing genocides and work our way down?
We could. We aren't. That's my point.