What we have in protections and freedoms were purchased through a ton of hard work by prior generations: the liberty to slack and think that it just works ok is a nice side effect of the prior sweat.
Say you have 54 democrats in the senate, and a democratic president 4 democrats that had difficult races can abstain or vote against the bill while 50 democrats can vote for it, with the vice president being the tiebreaker.
And the only reason Democrats voted against it was a tactic to save face for their constituents back home.
Why in the world would you think some politicians are magically sincere while others are not just by the little letter in parenthesis after their name?
Hyper partisan people that think this way are the reason political discourse has gone to shit and everything turns into some childish red team vs blue team ideology. As you keep propagating this mindset, people on both sides keep turning up the volume on their echo chamber and we get the most partisan congress (on both sides) in a hundred years[1].
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/01/13/he...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/03/congress-sides-cable-a...
For JS 34 [1] Mitch McConnell (R, KY) limited debate to 10 minutes--I'm unclear from the transcript exactly how this was allowed. Richard Blumenthal (D, CT) offered resistance to limiting debate, and Kamala Harris (D, CA) and Patrick Leahy (D, VT) requested the role be called several times as a delaying tactic, but the limiting of debate went through.
Just prior to the vote, Brian Schatz (D, HI) offered some debate, but this is cosmetic given the known votes.
My read there is little to be gained by trying to legislate implementation power that has been ceded to the executive branch and the various agencies that are run by appointment, and therefore a costly filibuster and fight was not worth the time, effort and political mud.
[0] https://www.senate.gov/CRSpubs/577d2a5e-2b47-4045-95fa-a7639...
[1] https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/2017/03/23/sen...
Really interesting. Thanks for sharing.
In linguistics the illustrative analogy is that prescriptivism is akin to an anthropologist entering into a foreign culture and rather than simply observing, they instruct the members of this culture on how to cook, dress, cut their hair, etc. Most modern dictionaries (including the Oxford English dictionary) take a descriptive approach to the study of language.
By that argument, we should all just be able to say and write whatever we want however we want to, even if it's technically or factually incorrect, like Humpty Dumpty or Donald Trump.
Why bother hewing to "elitist" rules of grammar and accepted spellings, being that it's just prescriptivism?
How does one decide objectively if something is just plain wrong, or merely prescriptive?
Case in point: "premises". So many people treat this singular noun as a plural and use horrors like "on-premise", which is so utterly wrong that it is painful for me to look at. What's worse is that "premise" is a real word and an entirely different thing and is most definitely not the singular of "premises".
This word came about (as many English words do) as a corruption of the Latin "praemissus", meaning something like "the aforementioned", and was used often in legal agreements for properties, and so became a word in itself that meant "the property".
Now we are corrupting it yet again, this time without the excuse of it being a different language, on the basis that "I'll say it however I please." People I have mentioned this to have told me that it is so difficult to get people to use the right word that they've just gone with "on-prem".
Now readers can take this comment as the rant of a "grammar nazi" or a pedant, but it wasn't meant that way, and I'll respond in advance with this: why is it not ok to identify something that is wrong? Because it's mere nitpicking?
Maybe so - but that's how matters devolve, over the decades, back to widespread ignorance and intolerance: one little oversight at a time.
Sorry, I didn't mean to get on the soapbox - sometimes it's just frustrating for those of us who are perhaps overly detail-oriented. But the world needs "pedantic" people like us more than it likes to admit.
> write whatever we want
> however we want to
> being that it's just
> prescriptivism
> This word came about ... as a
> corruption ... without the excuse
> of it being a different language
I don't have an issue with every "error" on that page and I have no problem with style guidelines for writing, but the problem comes when the prescriptivists think that logic is on their side when they opine on subjective stylistic and dialectic issues. "Ice tea" is a perfect example. The author of that site argues that "iced tea is not literally made of ice, it simply is 'iced': has ice put into it.". Apparently he is unaware of English's enormous fondness for attributive nouns. By his reasoning, we should all be saying "appled pie", or "apple-infused pie", or something crazy like that.
I also have a more general problem with prescriptivism because frequently it is used to justify a certain type of racist and classist thought.
Apple is describing the type of pie. "ice" is not a type of tea.
No it's not. "Ice" or (more appropriately IMO) "iced" a state of tea. Find me 'ice' or 'iced' on this page: https://www.teasource.com/pages/types-of-tea
Nobody is making tea from ice. If they were, then you could call it 'ice tea'.
Ice algae are not made from ice, for example -- they are algae that are found in ice. The point is that in noun-noun compounding, the semantic relationship between the two nouns varies widely from case to case (far more widely than the distinction we are nitpicking over between "apple pie" and "ice(d) tea").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_algae
EDIT: one more example, is it also wrong to say "bubble tea"?
Which makes sense, because it's referring to a type of algae found in ice.
If there were a type of tea that only grew or were only found in ice, then it might make sense to call it 'ice tea'. However, that's not the case because it's regular tea that has been 'iced'.
The relationship between two nouns in a noun-noun compound is very flexible. Sometimes it means the head noun is made out of the attributive noun ("apple pie"), sometimes it means the head noun is found in the attributive noun ("ice algae"), sometimes it means something completely different (how about "ice axe"?). So, because that relationship is so flexible, it's just not absurd to consider that in the case of "ice tea" the relationship is that the head noun contains the attributive noun, as is exactly the case with "bubble tea" and many other NN compound examples.
And I will say again that the semantic relationship between "is made out of" and "contains" is so, so similar. Given the huge variety of acceptable semantic relationships between two nouns in a NN compound, it's really ridiculous to claim that "contains" is not acceptable whereas "is made out of" is, especially so when there are tons of examples of the "contains" relationship that staunch prescriptivists never object to (again, "bubble tea").
Apple pie:
- Pie found in apple(s)? Nope.
- Apple that is used to do something to pie! Hmm, no.
- Pie that is modified by an apple. No...
- Pie that is made with apple the primary ingredient? Yes
Ice algae:
- Algae found in ice? Bingo.
- Algae that is used to do something to ice? No.
- Algae that is modified by ice? Nope.
- Algae that is made with ice the primary ingredient? No again.
Ice axe:
- Axe found in ice? No.
- Axe that is used to do something to ice! Yes.
- Axe that is modified by ice? Definitely not.
- Axe that is made with ice the primary ingredient? No.
Finally...
Ice tea:
- Tea found in ice? No.
- Tea that is used to do something to ice? Not that I've heard of.
- Tea that is modified by ice? Mmm... it's not modified. It's still tea, only cold, not hot. Its temperature, a non-essential property of tea, has been modified. So wouldn't that be "iced tea", as in, "tea that is normally served hot but has been cooled down, namely, iced"?
- Tea that is made with ice the primary ingredient? No.
Bottom line: "ice tea" is ambiguous. "Iced tea" is not.
I regret I have honestly never heard of bubble tea (but I have heard of bubble gum), so I have no clue what it is, other than it has something to do with tea and bubble(s).
Is it tea with which one makes/blows bubbles?
Carbonated tea?
Tea served in a bubble?
Tea made from bubbles?
It's popular in Asia and Australia, and originates from Taiwan.
Also called boba tea or pearl tea.
That is the relationship... "contains". There are many other examples in English of that relationship in NN compounds, and I guarantee you use them unconsciously without a second thought. You are also not getting my point, please reread my last post.
> Bottom line: "ice tea" is ambiguous. "Iced tea" is not.
This is how I know you and others in this thread have not spent a lot of time thinking about language. When has ambiguity ever prevented humans from using and understanding language? If you look at any piece of writing deeply, it is filled with an unimaginable amount of nuanced ambiguity. That's exactly why NLP is so hard.
I think you are making an unwarranted assumption about me. I have indeed spent a great deal of time thinking about language; I just have different thoughts, or points of view, about it. I have been very interested in etymology for a long time.
I neither claimed that natural language was capable of being entirely unambiguous, nor that people cannot communicate in the face of ambiguity. In fact, ambiguity in language allows for great artistic expression: humor, poetry, and other word play. So I agree with you on that point.
But holy crap, do we have to make it harder than necessary to communicate, when we aren't deliberately playing with words?
Surely you agree that much of the misery, pain, and suffering in this world of ours is due to avoidable language-related misunderstandings?
My work in linguistics and NLP is strongly related to ambiguity, so I tend to see things in those terms and I do not see resolving ambiguity as an impediment to understanding language (for humans at least, but for computers it is an enormous problem). We'll agree to disagree!
Note that the prominent English dictionaries have usage panels that make judgements about whether the usage of a certain form of a word is sufficiently wide as their criteria for inclusion.
It's not that it is not ok to identify something as wrong, but you will need to accept that people will disagree with it, and that what is wrong to you now may very well have enough support in usage that the battle is already lost. When you then opt for comparisons to Trump, then it is not surprising that you get downvotes.
A lot of the "I'll say it however I please" is down to usage. I'll drag out my favourite example: "begs the question". It's my favourite because I didn't even know about the original meaning until I started seeing rants about how horrible the new meaning was. Do a search for it today, and the results are dominated by sites complaining about how awful the change is, and articles about it.
To date, I can recall only one instance where I've seen the original meaning used outside of such a rant. It's basically a lost battle, where people will often respond along the lines of "I'll say it however I please" for the simple reason that to most people the original meaning is entirely foreign because of its niche usage.
Usage panels, which often lags trends like this, for good reason, have in recent years started tipping towards the new usage for "begs the question", often marking the original form as "formal", because ultimately language is about communication, and you can not communicate effectively if you pretend the most common form doesn't exist. Here [1] is an article at Merriam Webster discussing the issue.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/beg-the-questi...
What I'm railing against is more that there appears to be little interest, in general, even to try to get things right. I see this not just in human language, but in business, software development, publishing, pretty much everywhere.
I'm really tired, so I'm not expressing myself as well as I should, so perhaps I should just wrap this up and get some sleep. An iPad is also not the best UI for writing on HN.
Thanks for your thoughtful and thought-provoking response.
Language is a means to an end. If my entire audience understands what I am saying, and is not put-off by how I say it, then I did, in fact, get things right.
You need to draw a line somewhere, or you will end up spending your life obsessing over unimportant details of what you write instead of actually communicating.
It may also happen that the one person who you felt was not "worth the trouble" turns out to be someone who will be very important to you one day, like a potential business partner or investor, and who interprets your misuse of language as ignorance.
There's a difference between obsessing over unimportant detail and being thorough, IMHO.
OMG u shuld see wat they do in germanny its so different their!
But at some point you do start to get diminishing returns, so there are practical limits to how worried one should be about pedants.
I didn't know that! Thanks!
However, I like tools in my arsenal that enable me to express myself precisely. Prescriptivist rants often open my eyes to subtle shades of possible meaning that I otherwise would not have seen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_in_the_United_State...
https://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/reference/cloture_motions/...
Also, it's not even applied to 50% of resolutions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Review_Act
Relevant section:
The law provides a procedure for expedited consideration in the Senate. If the committee to which a joint resolution is referred has not reported it out within 20 calendar days after referral, it may be discharged from further consideration by a written petition of 30 Members of the Senate, at which point the measure is placed on the calendar, and it is in order at any time for a Senator to move to proceed to the joint resolution.[7] If the Senate agrees to the motion to proceed, debate on the floor is limited to 10 hours and no amendments to the resolution or motions to proceed to other business are in order, and so the Senate may pass the joint resolution with a simple majority.[7] A joint resolution of disapproval meeting certain criteria cannot be filibustered.[8]
I haven't seen any reporting on a specific law that these rules were tied to, but I have seen references made to laws predating the public internet that mandate privacy on phone calls that.
roll
But the problem is more systemic. It's at the center of the culture of this society: it's the fact that MONEY (== DOMINATION) has been made the most central and culturally venerated value.
To change that, a lot of suffering will have to occur, because those who benefit from MONEY (== DOMINATION) will use exactly that to defend this (sick) cultural value by - you guessed it - dominating everybody who's against it. And for that, other sick things like mass surveillance technology, a militarized police force, perfectly controlled media, and pressure on your economic wellbeing and your physical and mental health will be used.
Active and rational political conversations would, in my mind, have mitigated a lot of the problems with money in politics. Gerrymandering would not be (as large as) a problem if the masses had not been asleep at the wheel.
It is an uphill fight from this point forward.
Upon what do you base this hypothesis? Because history shows otherwise. The oligarchy/aristocracy has always had disproportionate influence in the US. It has always been an uphill fight for the average citizen.
>I believe the British government forms the best model the world ever produced, and such has been its progress in the minds of the many, that this truth gradually gains ground. This government has for its object public strength and individual security. It is said with us to be unattainable. All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government.
-Alexander Hamilton, Farrand's Records of the Federal Convention, v. 1, p. 299.1787-06-19
When looking at the turnout over the years. The engagement has rarely been > 65%. Last time was 1904.
Your point is well taken though. I am not a political science expert. Just an IT person trying to make sense of it all.
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/p/pericles387116.h...
Your complaints about "people pontificating along party lines" do nothing but reveal your own biases when the vote is so starkly along party lines. In a case like this, the objective analysis is clearly that the Republicans are wrong and the Democrats are right.
I really hope hackers obtain records of every Republican Congresscritter's creepiest porn viewing.
The vote was along party lines. You are asking for non-partisan insight where there is literally none to be had. There are good guys and bad guys in this issue, and they wear uniforms to tell you who they are.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/12/02/2016-28...
At 73 pages, it's a doozy. I don't know exactly what the effects would have been, but one important thing to note that I did not see mentioned once in any of the reporting about this is that the rule has only been in effect for 84 days. So I wouldn't expect any changes to be too noticeable.
Also worth noting is that whatever restrictions on ISPs are removed by this, it doesn't guarantee that ISPs will start doing that thing immediately, if at all. I also haven't seen reporting on what past behavior ISPs have already engaged in that this rule would have stopped.
Paragraph 106 mandates that the information released should not be able to be de-identified, and third parties must be contractually obligated to not de-identify customers from the data.
Paragraph 117 says the clause must be transferable to third-parties all the way down the list, but a middle-man can hire a company in a different country to do the necessary work, outside the jurisdiction of the FCC.
Paragraph 115 says the ISP can share the IP address, and no other identifying data, and meet the requirements of de-identification. A clause to "revisit this topic later" is present. Damn right you better -- combined with other data sources from social media and search engines, I can trivially combine multiple data sources using the IP address and build a "personal profile" of your entire Internet usage, including those really unique "outlier" destinations.
Paragraph 143 says that no periodic reminder is required, so expect the "privacy notice" to be buried in a sea of required checkboxes at point-of-sale, and never seen again. There are provisions that it be available on a website and via other methods, etc., but "available" versus "easily found" are two different things.
Most of these rules will take effect in 12 months, not immediately. (The rule of preventing ISP services requiring you waive your privacy to provide service is 30 days (paragraph 295, § 64.2011), data security requirements in 90 days (§ 64.2005), and data breach notifications and requirements in 6 months (§ 64.2006).)
Isn't that just because the agency responsible changed from the FTC to the FCC?
Since both sides are astonishingly bad, I usually end up voting third party in races where there is one.
As someone who didn't vote, no, I would not have changed my decision given the outcome, and this "lesser of two evils" justification crap is exactly why. Enjoy your shitty country.
It sounds like you are the apathetic voter in this scenario.
Of course, the Democrats have themselves totally acceded to this scheme.
This is a common line used by leftists who are angry that Trump won and are looking for someone to blame. Third party voters make an easy target, and the left has long felt entitled to the support of third-party voters.
But this entitlement assumes that third party voters would otherwise have voted for Clinton, which is a pretty strong assumption that also doesn't really hold up against the polling data from late in the election. Johnson took more than half of the third-party vote, and had he not been running, most Johnson voters would either have voted Trump or not voted at all.
Trump didn't win because of the few voters who voted third party. He won because of the 63 million people who voted for him. If you want to blame someone for Trump's victory, blame them, not the 7 million who chose not to vote for Trump.
Effectively, in a first past the post electoral system, any vote that isn't for the major party that most closely aligns with your views is a vote that supports the views least aligned with your preference.
I do see some listed counterexamples to the "law", and also a note about occasional upsets where the parties get completely rearranged.
If both major parties suck, how do I ask for an upset? Is it by fuming quietly and voting for the lesser of the two evils, or by saying "no, fuck you both"? Or does the fact that any upset probably won't happen this election mean that it's part of "the long run" where per Keynes we're all dead, and so it doesn't actually matter?
Do the major parties just ignore any non-major-party vote, or do they analyze it to tweak their platforms for next time? (And, is this consistent over time and space? I'm hearing that it seems to be the case in the US now, but in the same breath I'm hearing that that's a recent localized disaster.)
The Wikipedia page is a tremendously short summary, and yes, doesn't go into depth about the implications of duverger's law.
I strongly suggest digging into the literature around it, which does bear out the thesis I states above.
If both parties suck equally and no party is more closely aligned to your preferences than another, I suggest you enter politics yourself. It's just made up of people not too different from yourself.
I've actually thought about that a bit, and don't think I'd enjoy it enough to consistently put in the time needed to ever really get good at it.
...what? Gary Johnson is himself a marijuana user who has long been am advocate of drug policy reform (not just for marijuana, but for other drugs as well).
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/qa-former-nm-gov-gary-jo...
When running for governor, Johnson campaigned on a platform of marijuana decriminalization and harm reduction for all other drugs. This was during the height of the Clinton-era anti-drug hysteria - you'd be hard pressed to find many other politicians who supported harm reduction at that point.
There are things to dislike about Johnson, but criticizing him on drug policy is really bizarre. He's been one of the strongest (if not the strongest) political advocate for abolishing the War on Drugs for over two decades - much more vocally so and for far longer than any other politician I can name offhand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Johnson#Governor_of_New_M...
Also, he didn't campaign on legalization. He gave a speech about it in his second term. Did he parole any non-violent drug offenders? Did he use the powers of his office?
No she doesn't, this is an absurd smear based on her attending a single event in Moscow.
Or that this election was so crazy that they decided not to vote in spite.
I vote 3rd-party in every contest I can. At this point, I'd vote for a puppy dog, if it wasn't a D or an R. It makes my wife, family, and friends mad, but I will not waste my vote on the status quo. I'm voting to send a signal that I want other options.
I believe that if we can get to the point of just having a 3rd party on the platform for a presidential debate, we can open the door to other parties having a non-negligible effect on the election process. Of course, that's the Election Commision's fear as well: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/09...
That's apparent in the US where elections results are influenced more by those with barely a high school education than by their more educated fellow citizens.
The most important qualification one needs to have, it seems, to be elected to the Texas Education Agency, is to be a "true conservation". That board practically decides what your children study in school.
And over here on HN, the policy is to not get into political discussions.
I get what you're saying, the idea is much older than Einstein but do you want to be right or do you want to be truthful and persuade?
At least nod the prior. "As Einstein's improvement on Plato's dictum says, ...".
By comparison, I was reading a paper on an alternative fuels process and found that its citations were all to 1990s and subsequent work.
This actively obscured the fact that the underlying concepts and idea dated from the 1960s, and excluded considerable significant prior research.
It would be ... like a study of evolutionary biology failing to credit Charles Darwin, and giving the impression, say, that the entire field grew out of recombinant DNA efforts of the 1970s.
The government is trying to reduce protections of civil liberties, the environment, etc.
Why?
Because the party in control of the legislative and executive branches are removing those protections.
Why?
Because it is in their best interest and because they promised to do so in their election campaigns.
Why?
A. Because their corporate sponsors want less regulation.
B. Because their supporters want less regulation.
Why?
Because less regulation means more profits (If you ignore the environmental and human costs).
And, because many Americans equate regulation with infringement of their personal freedom.
We need to stop assuming that bad things are happening because a few bad apples tricked roughly half the population to support them. They are making America great again. Look at any point in time before now in American history and you will find less civil liberty, more oppression of workers, and more destruction of the environment. It was promised. Its being delivered. And no one was fooled. It is straight up whathalf the population asked for.
This is completely false. Less regulations helps the status-quo as companies stop to need to be innovative. And it helps old-fashioned contaminating industries.
> Look at any point in time before now in American history and you will find less civil liberty, more oppression of workers, and more destruction of the environment. It was promised. Its being delivered.
Yes. That's it. And that's why so much powerful people want bad schools and worse education. If people knew how the world works, they will be less prone to populism.
> We need to stop assuming that bad things are happening because a few bad apples tricked roughly half the population to support them. They are making America great again. Look at any point in time before now in American history and you will find less civil liberty, more oppression of workers, and more destruction of the environment. It was promised. Its being delivered. And no one was fooled. It is straight up what half the population asked for.
You're correct by and large. I won't get into the remarks on the (effective) propaganda efforts Fox & crew have done. Much deception has happened there.
But, this specific bill is troublesome in part because the lawmakers often are very ignorant of what's going on, much like many of the senior judges in the US. This is one part generational divide, one part tech avoiding law, and one part lobbying. Some of that is avoidable by engagement, and if adult geeks had realized this in the 80s & 90s instead of disengaging from politics, the world would be different.
I oppose what the Republican Congress is doing.
Having said all of that, the FCC has no freaking business defining privacy. The system was terribly out of whack to have them do this in the first place. My support of their move and my opposition to what Congress is currently doing is simply because I'm trying to pick the lesser of two evils. It's not because there was simple good position/side and bad position/side. Wish that it were so simple.
Both political parties have screwed over privacy and anonymity online -- in terrible and huge ways. And the system is terribly corrupt. And....we should take action to make our political views clear.
My problem is that "let's take action" turns quickly into "Group X is in the pocket of political party Y"
And that's how we got here in the first place.
I would agree that the remit of Congress is to govern the people, by the people, and privacy falls under that umbrella. The executive branch should not be operating as an independent law-making body, as it has been.
I would gently suggest that when geeks look at politics, it's much like looking at a huge codebase written for decades - our reaction is that it's corrupt and needs a rewrite. I have learned through very careful study and hard experience that often there are good reasons for codebases to be "crufty", and similar with politics. Doesn't mean reform can't be done, but it means we have to work within the codebase, and with the current web of loyalties to some extent.
I specialize in helping large organizations of people change and become better, so I've been quite fortunate to have hands-on experience with these kinds of things.
For a good political person who can work contacts, there's always value. I would humbly posit that the system as a whole has overall attributes. I really don't like waving my hands around and saying "we're all going to die", but sometimes the Titanic actually is sinking. I'm sure those guys in the band had a hoot playing those last few songs, though.
So I understand and respect your opinion. Hopefully I'm able to see the tactical as well as strategic situation. Maybe not, but that's what great conversations are for. :)
Thanks again.
Democrats wouldn't apply this rule to search engines or email. Why? Because tech companies would flip out.
Democrats are free to vote ideology when it's a GOP ox that is going to get gored. And vice versa.
The culture has shifted and moved, but the "avoid politics, it's evil" mentality still hangs around, a lot.
If Hillary Clinton was president or if the Democrats had control of one chamber of Congress, this bill never would have passed.
Obviously there is significant disagreement on that issue.
> If Hillary Clinton was president or if the Democrats had control of one chamber of Congress, this bill never would have passed.
Yes, because the left is happy for government agencies run by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats to continually enlarge their regulatory domain. Other people consider that a bad idea in general.
And if that had happened, FCC regulations would control our privacy--after they would have taken effect, over a year from now--regulations which are not law and can be changed by unelected FCC bureaucrats who are unaccountable to the people.
I'm no fan of Congress, but it's definitely better for this to be controlled by federal law rather than an agency regulation.
Of course, there is something to be said for allowing people to screw up their own government irreparably and be forced to suffer the consequences.
I don't mean to exculpate the Rs or go "ruh ruh whatabout those bad Democrats". Lack of understanding of consequences and technology is a cross-party issue, and each party has performs their ignorance differently. I think that part of this is age, as well as the age of the vested interests.
Also, personally, I wish you'd have checked my comments. I am no GOP evangelist/apologist. I'm trying to hew to the truth and be fair.
"I'm trying to be fair" is exactly the problem with whataboutism.
But I think I'm done with this conversation. Thank you for your time.
Well... good. It did read a bit that way however. But you know, tone, text, internet, etc