{"id":3766,"date":"2019-09-25T13:12:52","date_gmt":"2019-09-25T18:12:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/?p=3766"},"modified":"2019-09-25T13:12:54","modified_gmt":"2019-09-25T18:12:54","slug":"what-does-this-mean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2019\/09\/25\/what-does-this-mean\/","title":{"rendered":"What does this mean??"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.huffpost.com\/entry\/a-message-to-women-from-a_b_958859\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gaslighting<\/a> <\/strong>is\n a term often used by mental health professionals (I am not one) to \ndescribe manipulative behavior used to confuse people into thinking \ntheir reactions are so far off base that they\u2019re crazy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The term comes from the 1944 MGM film, <em>Gaslight<\/em>, starring \nIngrid Bergman. Bergman\u2019s husband in the film, played by Charles Boyer, \nwants to get his hands on her jewelry. He realizes he can accomplish \nthis by having her certified as insane and hauled off to a mental \ninstitution. To pull off this task, he intentionally sets the gaslights \nin their home to flicker off and on, and every time Bergman\u2019s character \nreacts to it, he tells her she\u2019s just seeing things. In this setting, a \ngaslighter is someone who presents false information to alter the \nvictim\u2019s perception of him or herself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.merriam-webster.com\/words-at-play\/whataboutism-origin-meaning\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>Whataboutism<\/strong><\/a>\n gives a clue to its meaning in its name. It is not merely the changing \nof a subject (&#8220;What about the economy?&#8221;) to deflect away from an earlier\n subject as a political strategy; it\u2019s essentially a reversal of \naccusation, arguing that an opponent is guilty of an offense just as \negregious or worse than what the original party was accused of doing, \nhowever unconnected the offenses may be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The tactic behind <em>whataboutism<\/em> has been around for a long time. Rhetoricians generally consider it to be a form of <em>tu quoque,<\/em>\n which means &#8220;you too&#8221; in Latin and involves charging your accuser with \nwhatever it is you&#8217;ve just been accused of rather than refuting the \ntruth of the accusation made against you. <em>Tu quoque<\/em> is \nconsidered to be a logical fallacy, because whether or not the original \naccuser is likewise guilty of an offense has no bearing on the truth \nvalue of the original accusation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Whataboutism adds a twist to <em>tu quoque<\/em> by directing its \nenergies into establishing an equivalence between two or more disparate \nactions, thereby defaming the accuser with the insinuation that their \npriorities are backward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gaslighting is a term often used by mental health professionals (I am not one) to describe manipulative behavior used to confuse people into thinking their reactions are so far off base that they\u2019re crazy. The term comes from the 1944 MGM film, Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman. Bergman\u2019s husband in the film, played by Charles Boyer, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3766"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3766"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3767,"href":"https:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3766\/revisions\/3767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charleswmoore.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}