Did 'whataboutism' key your car or something?[1] It's a reasonably well-defined term but it is seeing a bit of popularity and mildly tedious abuse. At the same time, we've lived with the tedium of much more common forum verbal tics - 'straw man', 'ad hominem', 'argument from authority' and this hasn't (I think quite sensibly) merited multiple lengthy moderator encyclicals.
[1] Obviously, if that's what happened, I'm with you completely. Whataboutism should be fucking killed. No trial, no jury, straight to execution.
You asked Dan and not me but let me take this opportunity to cheerlead intrusive moderation of "ad hominem" and "argument from authority" as well, both of which are also invariably markers of dumb, polluting arguments.
Well since we're all here, can you expand on what you mean by ad hominem? It's a classical term of course and I know the literal meaning, but at times find it slippery to pin down, and (same thing) people have subtly different interpretations.
... and to say that most instances in which ad-hom is invoked on HN result in stupid debates about whether an argument is (a) actually ad-hom and (b) fallaciously ad-hom (a subtlety most invokers on HN don't really grok).
I think we already have a culture that rejects personalized arguments, and "ad hominem", which gets deployed because people have long ago pulled it out of one of those Internet "fallacy lists", virtually always just clouds discussions. It's certainly more corrosive than "whataboutism".
Honestly, I think it's possible that all "canned" fallacy arguments --- ad hom, whataboutism, argument from authority, straw-man --- basically contravene the "principle of charity" guideline, and that it'd be worth having the guidelines ask people not to deploy pre-canned responses to other people's arguments. You can make the "this is a fallacious ad hominem" argument, if you really know what you're talking about, without using the words "ad hominem", and that'll always be a better comment.
Sorry I didn't see this sooner, but thanks for the excellent reply. It's a really good point about canned responses, and this is gold:
You can make the "this is a fallacious ad hominem" argument, if you really know what you're talking about, without using the words "ad hominem", and that'll always be a better comment.
I may have been wrong to interpret this comment as whataboutism, but whataboutism isn't just some petty logical fallacy to invoke in internet arguments, but a well-established political tactic employed by governments of the world to justify their actions. It's on a different class of rhetoric than the others in this list.
Soviet Russia invoked it all the time to justify their actions, as does Trump and currently China. Whataboutism is a favourite tactic of oppressive regimes, "practically a national ideology".
Nobody is denying that these canned arguments don't refer back to real things; they're just saying that they devolve into canned arguments and superficial, thought-destroying comparisons that degrade the site.
On "whataboutism", there's no debate to have; if you follow Dan and Scott's moderation comments, appeals to "whataboutism" have been verboten on the site for awhile now.
[1] Obviously, if that's what happened, I'm with you completely. Whataboutism should be fucking killed. No trial, no jury, straight to execution.