This may seems silly, but like the unfortunate taco truck company I linked to in another post, twitter can be extremely quick to hang people and companies who don’t comply. Say this were to catch on and start a trend for software developers to be pressured into taking a firm political affiliation. So don’t get into the habit of using “whataboutism” as a complete rebuttal.Īnyways, regarding Notepad++ being political, I’m not a fan of it myself since I personally don’t want my text editor to be an endorsement of a political view. So, I’m tempted to call a simple rebuttal that says nothing more than “whataboutism” a “whataboutism callout fallacy” because such a rebuttal can be rhetorically weak in and of itself. Just saying “whataboutism” is not really sufficient and doesn’t really have the same weight as calling out a “straw man” or “ad hominem”, which are more egregious instances of a weak argument in and of themselves. But other times there’s a perfectly valid point to be made about comparing the relative merits of differing viewpoints, which can enhance understanding and add important context to the original topic. Sometimes it’s used as a distraction away from the topic, and to be sure we see some very bad cases of this these days. A “whatabout” argument might be weak, but just labeling it as such does NOT imply that it is.

Don ho notepad++