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Or: “Putin has a lot of nerve, criticizing the United States for spying on everyone’s email when Russia’s elections are rigged.”

This tactic is surprisingly advantageous, as long as nobody realizes that a triangle isn’t a square, an apple isn’t an orange, and mass surveillance isn’t electoral fraud. It’s also surprisingly adorable, revealing a sweetly naïve belief that somewhere out there is a person or government that is, in all important respects, morally unimpeachable.

But players with a slightly more sophisticated technique — usually employed after the first semester of Grade 10 and on the better foreign policy Twitter accounts — prefer to compare more-or-less-alike with more-or-less-alike: one actor shouldn’t criticize the actions of another actor if they’ve taken similar actions in the past, these players believe.

Such as: “Meghan says that her boyfriend drinks too much, but did you see how smashed she got at Rob’s party when his parents went to Florida last spring?”

Or: “America is criticizing slavery in Thailand’s fishing industry; this from the country built on the backs of slaves.”

People who make this maneuver may also struggle to understand how philosophers advance a particular position in one treatise and a different position in a later treatise; they may have trouble fathoming why a day that was sunny at 7 a.m. is overcast at noon; and they may ask themselves, with scant hope of ever finding an answer, how Prince became The Artist Formerly Known As Prince and then became obsolete. In other words, they may not fully grasp that as time trudges on, things change. People’s positions, standards, or ability to meet the positions and standards that they sincerely held all along, change — hopefully, even usually (though not necessarily) for the better. The same is true of governments and nations.