No, but if one's country does 10x the shitty things, they don't get to single out the other country as "evil".

>If all you've got is whataboutism, you are literally trying to defend indefensible behavior by pointing out instances of other countries engaging in indefensible behavior.

And if you don't see things in perspective and weight them, then you single out some "indefensible behavior", and ignore other because its by the side one happens to belong too.

Countries, like humans, aren't perfect. But we don't get to pick and chose what's indefensible pointing to single person for what many do. Especially if we always conveniently point to the other person.

I don't give two shits whether or not some other country (including my own) has engaged in the same shitty behavior that some other country that I'm currently worried about is currently engaged in. Shitty behavior is shitty behavior no matter who's doing it, and I have zero tolerance for it.

If Russia has mysterious patterns of Putin's political opponents getting imprisoned or murdered on a regular basis, the fact that some American politicians may have done something similarly shitty at some point had absolutely zero affect on me. Yeah, it's just as shitty when America does it. What's your fucking point? I'm speaking out as a human being, not as an American calling out Russia. Accusations of hypocrisy mean nothing to me, or anyone in this debate (I would hope at least). I don't complain about Russia because I think America is better, I complain about Russia because Putin is one of the most colossal fucking assholes in the entire fucking world right now.

Saying "shitty behavior is shitty, doesn't matter who is doing it" is meaningful if indeed those proclaiming don't in practice restrict their criticism to a single party. If people critique many times as much with much worse language X compared to their critique of Y (especially if Y does worse to begin with), then it shows the opposite: that some shitty behavior is more excused than others.

Especially if the result of one kind of critique is just some tame protesting in the media and/or the streets ("Stop Bush's war", "Obama didn't do what he promised", "Trump is this and that", etc.), whereas the other criticism is aligned with and brings with it a whole military machine, sanctions against the country, diplomatic pressure, etc.

I think Putin is way more intelligent, capable, and ambitious than Duterte for example, and Duterte certainly fits into the "psychopathic authoritarian monster" stereotype far more obviously than Putin does. But Putin in the long term can do far more damage to the world at large. Duterte is a cartoon, and as awful as he is, I don't think he has ambitions beyond his own borders. Putin most definitely has such ambitions, and the ability to achieve them. And of course, in a selfish sense I'm extra worried about him because he's clearly hostile to my country, and the values and ideals that I hold, as well as the values and ideals that my country holds (at least on paper, even if it doesn't always do a great job of representing them).