[cabirum]

"Whataboutism" is not a valid refutation in most contexts.

It's more of a chant, a mantra, a trigger word you are conditioned to bring up when some kind of obvious hypocrisy or double standard is being pointed out that you cannot otherwise refute.

[edit] Also, "whataboutism" the word, sounds like from 2ndgrader vocabulary

[danielheath]

It's not a refutation. You aren't replying to an attempt to refute something.

You're replying to an expression of shock at the behavior on display (specifically, people claiming - in a thread about Chinese torture camps - that we should not talk about them, because we weren't talking about American torture camps, so it would be hypocritical to talk about the Chinese ones).

I'm generally in agreement that this isn't great behavior.

Complaining that a word sounds childish while displaying your ignorance of its meaning is not the slam dunk you think it is.

[cabirum]

A post about Chinese torture camps makes an impression that torture camps are exclusively a Chinese thing. It would be fair to mention other countries involved in similar behavior.

The post could have been "torture camps are bad" piece. It is instead focuses on "China is bad" propaganda

[danielheath]

> A post about Chinese torture camps makes an impression that torture camps are exclusively a Chinese thing.

Yes, to an audience who have read nothing else on the topic. The people here for this discussion are - by definition - people who read about and/or discuss these topics.

As a discussion thread for a news story (and not, say a textbook for an introduction to world powers and their deeds), discussing tangentially-related events draws diminishing returns.

"Torture camps are bad" is an essay you could ask a high-schooler to write. It's neither news nor informative.

"We are obtaining new evidence that the government of China is running torture camps" manages to be both news and informative.

"US government runs torture camps" is neither news (has something changed?) nor informative (it's been well known for years).

Publishing a comparative treatment of national misdeeds might also manage to be informative; statistical modeling of the harms done by various governments, for instance.

[Zababa]

> A post about Chinese torture camps makes an impression that torture camps are exclusively a Chinese thing.

I don't think it does, and I don't think it's a good idea to attribute meaning when there is no one if you want to keep an open, good faith debate. At any point in time there are lots of terrible things being done in the world, to a various degree and to a various number of people. You can't talk about all of them every time you want to talk about one of them.

[tablespoon]

> A post about Chinese torture camps makes an impression that torture camps are exclusively a Chinese thing.

No it doesn't.

> It would be fair to mention other countries involved in similar behavior.

That would be exceedingly impractical. Must every discussion anything contain mention of every thing someone things is similar? No of course not, that's pure distraction.

How fair do you think it is to the Uyghurs that any discussion of their plight must turn into an obsessive digression about the US?

[adventured]

The insanity of an emotionally out of control mob of people pretending it's not a radically greater moral crime to torture millions of innocent people, than it is to torture a thousand people.

It's the scale difference between the US blowing up a wedding party by accident as a moral crime and Russia raping and murdering their way through Bucha or Mariupol. The emotionalist mob would proclaim they're the same thing.

[danielheath]

Describing the US attacks on wedding parties as "a one time accident" rather than "our targets often spent years in hiding before finally coming into the open for a wedding, so we ended up bombing hundreds of weddings and calling them legitimate operations" is... ahistorical, to put it kindly.

No, it's not the same scale of evil as wiping out a city, but... pretending it's less than it was is an ugly look.

[cabirum]

As if the wedding party incident was a single, isolated case. True, the scale of destruction in Iraq, Afganistan and dozen other countries is nothing like Ukraine military shelled and shot their own civilians then staged a photo-op.

[adventured]

> True, the scale of destruction in Iraq, Afganistan and dozen other countries is nothing like Ukraine military shelled and shot their own civilians then staged a photo-op.

Now we know what you are. I reference the on-going vast war crimes of Russia in Ukraine, and you talk about it being a self-inflicted, pretend photo-op.

The scale of destruction in Afghanistan? This is how I know you're flailing. The US spent an epic amount of money attempting to build in Afghanistan. The US paid for more schools and hospitals to be built in Afghanistan than the rest of the world combined fifty times over throughout all of Afghanistan's history.

Now Afghanistan is ruled by the Taliban, which was their situation before the US went in. The Taliban are promptly tearing down civilization, instead of trying to build it up.

[cabirum]

"What" you are, right.

> US spent an epic amount of money attempting to build in Afghanistan

I wonder where all this money end up, then.

It really shows how the US failed in the Afganistan -- when the Afgan people prefer the Taliban over US occupation.

Btw, did you know Taliban banned poppy cultivation and opium production promptly after the US evac? Why did drug trade flourished under the US rule? (dont bother, I know the "approved" answer is that there was nothing else for the population to do)