whataboutism /ˌwɒtəˈbaʊtɪz(ə)m/ noun BRITISH the technique or practice of responding to an accusation or difficult question by making a counter-accusation or raising a different issue.

If that doesn't describe your post precisely then what does?

GP said X sucks. You respond by saying Y sucks too.

Concurring that X does indeed suck as well doesn't fundamentally change your statement.

I was not responding to an accusation or difficult question.

I was raising the fact that the same things happens nearby - and one might feel the same sickness over it. And maybe do something about it.

> I was not responding to an accusation or difficult question.

You're arguing based on technical details of the particular definition you chose here.

If I were to say well, ICE is indeed terrible, but innocent dogs in your local animal shelter are being abused and suffering and you can easily do something about it by adopting one - would you say that's not whataboutism because I was not responding to an accusation or difficult question?

I think this kind of statement captures the meaning of whataboutism perfectly.

Everybody knows that NC does not hold the monopoly on being terrible - actually no one does hold such monopoly and this makes your statement useless truism. It fits the definition of whataboutism perfectly.

I am not defending ICE, what they do is terrible, but it is not even remotely comparable to the scale and seriousness of human rights violation in NC torture camps.

Whataboutism: the art of reducing everything to a needle in a haystack. :-)

How is ICE even remotely comparable?

They put child prisoners in cages owned by for-profit prison companies

It's not comparable in scale. ICE does terrible things and these things need to stop. They need to stop now. At the same time, let's not create a false equivalence. The scale matters - killing one person is monstrous, but killing 1 million is in a completely different moral level.

What I'm trying to say is that the scale of repression of free will and thinking, torture, murder, impoverishment you observe in NK is simply incomparable, from any reasonable angle, to anything happening in western democracies (and to many other countries that aren't western democracies).

You rightly acknowledge that it's a difference in scale not in kind.