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Comment by tmuir | Hacker News Reader

Ah yes, that old classic, whataboutism.

You'd have us believe Cambridge Analytica was some vendor the Trump Campaign used sparingly, had very loose connections with, and saw limited success with.

Yet Cambridge Analytica is a Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon outfit. Steve Bannon, the campaign manager, and senior adviser to the president. Or at least it was during the time period in question. Steve Bannon was THE integral player who essentially managed the creation of the tool.

Here's a video of Brad Parscale gushing about the software tool they were able to use to glean insights that lead them to spend heavily in the states that mattered, but we're not in the conventional wisdom.

https://youtu.be/_fFbVwuU8bM

While your at it, here's the story from the software developer turned whistle blower himself:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analy...

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According to ABC News, the Trump campaign considered using CA as a hedge bet in-case the RNC wouldn't share its data. The campaign ultimately rejected their bid for the general election [0].

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-campaign-phased-out-use-o...

As for the parent, people love to cry about whataboutism, but it is useful to see how people respond when something is done by their favored politician versus an opponent.

He didn't claim it wasn't affiliated with Trump, he said they didn't rely on it that much. And the appeal to 'whataboutism' is a complete non-sequitur, as there is no whataboutism in the parent comment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Claiming that Obama's campaigns were the true microtargeters, and that if we are angry at the actions of generic people, we must then be angry at Obama, because he did these very things. That is the Whataboutism, or tu quoque fallacy.

In lieu of anything to back that claim up, I'll just stick with Hutchins Razor, and reply "Nuh Uh."

> Claiming that Obama's campaigns were the true microtargeters, and that if we are angry at the actions of generic people, we must then be angry at Obama, because he did these very things. That is the Whataboutism, or tu quoque fallacy.

Obama's campaigns were pretty well known to be engaged in extensive microtargeting. Here:

https://www.mediavillage.com/article/how-data-and-micro-targ...

Accusations of "whataboutism" are becoming worse than the sin they are trying to prevent. It shouldn't be used as a way of just flushing away the fact that "your side" may also do bad things. It's especially bad when it is used like "A did this bad thing." "Well, Not-A did this bad thing too." "That's just whataboutism... what's important is that A did this bad thing."

Well, it must not be that bad if it doesn't bother you when "your side" does it.

What if... and try to stick with me here, because this is a pretty radical thought here in 2018... what if both sides are doing a despicable thing, and rather than argue with each other about "whataboutism" we should resist both of them?

(In this particular case, I don't think that the campaigns did the exact same things... I think they've been doing all they can possibly get away with for a very long time. So it gets worse every campaign not necessarily because anybody is worse than ever before, but because especially in this century, every four years "all they can possibly get away with" has been growing like gangbusters.)

I guess I've become hardened by the general principle underlying this tactic of debate. There are plenty of people who employ it as their singular or at least favored tactic to nearly every debate, and don't for one second convince me of their good faith. It is especially common to see with respect to Hillary Clinton. It is nearly universally used as discussion ender. If the whatabouter can change the subject to their debater's hypocrisy, nearly any reasonable question can be simply ignored wholesale, by repeatedly bringing up the false equivalency over and over.

So you can blame the countless people employing this tactic maliciously, including the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, for any disproportionate skepticism I apply to its use.

Text comes in forums that try to exonerate some evil by using the evils of another. If it didn't work it wouldn't be so common. It is a fair term to identify.

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