Well said. Now just waiting for the obligatory idiotic 'whataboutism' accusation.
I wonder if most people who use the term as an argument know this, or are aware of how it got into their lexicon.
Not only does the term imply one supports one side over the other (in this case Russian trolls), the term implicitly accuses one of being an actual Russian agent..
> Lexicographers date the first appearance of the variant whataboutism to the 1990s,[1][4] while other historians state that during the Cold War Western officials referred to the Soviet and Russian propaganda strategy by that term.[7]
Like when Israel is singled out for things that many or most other countries do to a greater extent. Countries should be judged as countries and compared to others facing similar situations, not singled out in a vacuum. And this leads to navel gazing that prevents the solution to the actual problems, because the solutions involve more than one country.
Or some feminists in the USA for instance drawing people's attenton to male avatars being default on social networks instead of focusing on honor killings and caste based rapes around the world and so on. Attention and outrage is a finite resource and whataboutism arguments squander it.
This is a classic logical fallacy in debate, but a wonderully effective way to give the impression you refuted something.
Also, what is "conceers commentary" that I was supposed to give?
Who said I was refuting some specific problem? The point I was making was about the use of "whataboutism" to simply dismiss "but in the USA you lynch negroes" as an empty tu quoque.
I am saying that navel gazing has a cost -- it diverts attention and resources from where they are most needed. Israel and Feminists were just examples. There are tons. BLM for example focuses only on shootings of Black people by police, but those constitute only 5% of all shootings of Black people. It is common to focus on mass shootings, but those constitute less than 2% of all shootings. And so all the attention and resources are spent on preventing at most 2% of the actual problem: shootings.
Sometimes the navel gazing is by opponents who single out a group for special thrashing.
Often the navel gazing is exacerbated by critics belonging to the group themselves, because for various reasons they want to hold it to a higher standard. Noam Chomsky criticizes the USA more because he lives in it. Lots of Jews actually criticize Israel because they believe it is special and should do better. Many feminists feel other countries just are so far behind that they won't respond to their message. It's a form of soft racism also, saying those other countries arre just not as enlightened as the ones you criticize.
My point is - regardless of the motivation, using "whataboutism" to dismiss arguments can be dangerous because it gives cover to navel gazing and perpetuates problems for decades which could have been solved if people ordered offenders by their severity and prioritized them.
And anyways... Yea that's the point. You launched a arguments about 'whataboutisms,' or 'navel gazings.' This is what is called "straw man arguments." You assumed that what I said is equivalent to your straw man argument, and then defeated the straw man.