GenZedong

Trump can be a traitor and Hunter Biden a coke head, both of these things can be true. Bringing up Hunter’s coke problem every fucking time Trump’s crimes get mentioned is whataboutism.

I understand that this is just an example you made to explain the concept, but the things people here say that are called whattaboutisms rarely fit your description. Most often, you'll have someone bring up involvement of a western country (usually burgerland) in causing a problem that is being pinned on the designated bad country of the week. This isn't an attempt to derail the conversation: this is an attempt to get to the root of the issue.

And relying on calling out fallacies to shut down a point is just the fallacist's fallacy in the flesh; so do any of you ever have an actual point to make? Or are you just another bad-faith hypocrite? Because that sounds a lot like "every time we make up an atrocity only to get called out for an actual atrocity we committed, we're gonna shriek 'whataboutism'"; and that's all the intellectual honesty of a child caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

There's a point your making, but even you fail to understand it. A proper logic fallacy would be to apply a moral approach to a topic where it is originally supposed to realist/technical approach. An example of this would be the discussion of the ukraine war, by stating that ukraine cannot and will never win is a realist approach to a major geopolitical situation, and the continuing the war is only to the detriment of ukranian, and russian lives to a war which had been decided since day 1. The true 'whataboutism' is when liberals apply a moral aspect and deviate the conversation by stating "ukraine experiences (uninformative and unbacked knowledge) genocide by the russians" or "ukraine is fighting for their life wouldn't you do the same?" That's whataboutism, as its shifting the tone of the conversation from an actual depiction of ukraine, to the enlightened image ukraine has of fighting barbaric invaders who want to destroy their culture (P.S. again bullshit since russia only wants the russian-speaking areas which have been trying to secede only for the ukranian army to continue to discriminate and maim them). There's no logic backing them here, every analysis, every professional paper, and every person with a thinking brain can properly decipher that ukraine can never win, even the liberals who know this try to deviate from the conservation into a moral issue, for them its to successfully gear the conversation into good vs evil one, so that they can deny the logic but still resemble a well-reasoned argument. That's logic fallacy.