Time to dust off the Whataboutism Is Bad speech again: but don't glaze over yet, because I might say something new. Not only is it still as rhetorically fallacious as it has ever been to treat complaints about third parties like they are responsive to first order concerns, but also (wake up! here comes the new part!) the deeper problem with whataboutism is that it assumes people can't consistently object to both.

I don't expect this to persuade, to be clear. I don't believe that people engaging in whataboutism are unable to understand why it's wrong so much as they have a different approach to language that detaches it from accountability to any sort of conceptual coherence that people are normally searching for when testing integrity of arguments; commenting on it is more about revealing a difference in which background values inform the way you choose to communicate.