[def_true_false]

They had a bunch of plain clothes operatives follow a guy onto a public flight, fake a bomb threat and scramble jets to get the plane to land?

All this whataboutism isn't really bringing much to the discussion here...

What next, the West can't complain about human rights violations in HK or Mongolia just because US police shot some dude (again)?

[nyolfen]

“whataboutism” is a thought-terminating cliche — it’s a directly analogous situation that shows that there are no principles or rule-based order, only power. you have the power to get away with doing this, or you don’t; lofty rhetoric is a propaganda measure

[w0de0]

“Whataboutism” gets my goat because:

* It generally has no context. Yes, the West did something similar. It does not follow that the West will engage in the same type of systemic evil, that argument must be made on its own.

* Whataboutism often implies that naughty behavior is ok; that the hypocrisy of the West is justification for some further evil. One is at best making the argument that everyone is evil so just do it

* It consistently assumes the ignorance of particularly Americans - that if you just tell the dumb American that his government did something bad too, the scales will fall from their eyes, they will accept everything is evil and meaningless, and they will stop criticizing you

* the West is just plain better, on the historical record, at admitting and correcting hypocrisy. It’s a kind of meta-hypocrisy for these countries that never actually implement a liberal system to do such a great job of helping us improve ours, by pointing out flaws we’re secure enough to fix and they’re not.

Moreover, whataboutism does not prove that only power exists. Much the opposite: it proves that, at least in the West, moral norms can have force. Else why would Easterners bother with it?