Agreed.
Taking a slightly different tangent, though: whataboutism has been an important word of late.
Jeremy Scahill had some sensible things to say about it in the first twenty minutes of this (transcript at link):
The way I see it, whataboutism is deployed in two ways. One of them is dodgy, the other not so much.
The first is to use it as a deflection. “You say that X is bad, but Y is bad too, so ignore X’s badness”. The reasons why this is dodgy are fairly obvious.
The second is to use it as deflation. “You say that X is better than Y because of Z, but Z is common to both X and Y”. Personally, I don’t see that as an invalid argument.
It may still be the case that X is better than Y, but the existence of Z does not establish that difference if Z is shared. Which may, at times, lead to a discussion of “your Z is worse than mine”, which is not always invalid. Or it may lead to “yes, Z is shared, but Q is unique to one side, and Q is important”.
TLDR of that: whataboutism is a dodgy rhetorical tactic when used for deflection, but not all arguments that are labeled as whataboutism deserve to be ignored.
(I’ll quit with the off-topic rambling here, though; if anyone wants to continue, we should probably spin off a thread)
