this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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Ah yes. Whataboutism. Suppose a robber acts in defense of a person about to be robbed. That may or may not make them a hypocrite, but it certainly doesn't make them wrong.
Or would you say it would somehow be more right for the robber to stand back and allow the robbery "because they're in no position to point fingers"?
If anything it would be more a 'tu quoque' fallacy than whataboutism, because the latter tries to shift the attention to an unrelated topic, whereas here it is occupying land both times.
It certainly weakens the criticism, because the robber in your example might do the right thing, but if they really opposed robbing, surely they wouldn't do it themselves? As you said, it makes them a hypocrite, and makes you question their motive for measuring two cases with a different yardstick.
OOP smells like a pro-putin propaganda account. Someone else doing something bad doesn't make your own acts of murder any more justifiable, especially when you're murdering someone completely different than the wrongdoer.