Using a tool to help someone see that their thoughts or words are foolish isn't a bad thing. People are getting very emotional about this entire situation, which is understandable. But then they are getting on their internet soap boxes and saying things that don't make any real sense and they don't really believe. I was simply trying to make OP realize that his extremely harsh comments are just platitudes, by reminding OP that in very similar situations he basically did nothing.

> “People are getting very emotional”

People are reacting appropriately given the situation.

NameCheap operate an office in Kharkiv, a city which currently finds itself under Russian rocket attacks and indiscriminate shelling with cluster bombs, and you create an account to criticise the company for stopping operations in Russia and then imply people are overly emotional and foolish about this issue?

If I operated a business which had staff and operated in Kharkiv I would do exactly the same thing.

> Using a tool to help someone see that their thoughts or words are foolish isn't a bad thing.

That's not what you're doing. Whataboutism is a method of _stopping_ interrogation via deflection and redirection.

I think a lot of people that engage in whataboutism do actually think they're trying to start a discussion or analyze the situation more deeply. They just fail to see what their actually doing due to not being particularly skilled analysts (trying to be nice here...).

> he basically did nothing.

Unwarranted assumption

I don't even see how what I said applies to what you're saying. Stopping interrogation? I nor anyone else was not being interrogated. I did not deflect or redirect. I asked him if he felt the same way about what America did. Not to deflect, but to get him to realize that (unless he is the 0.01% that tried to do something real about Americas many weird wars) when countries went to crazy wars previously, he did not feel the same. Hopefully that makes him wonder why.... either he is a terrible person, or his main point is wrong.

I don't really have a dog in this particular fight, but you seem to be making a lot of assumptions off of a single emotional posting by this person.

> Using a tool to help someone see that their thoughts or words are foolish isn't a bad thing.

So what tool can we use to make you see that your whataboutism propaganda is shit? So far you haven't seemed able to get that, so any tips would be welcomed.

This is not whataboutism. I am in favor of strong sanctions again Russia, but saying that "Russian companies paid for death and destruction in Ukraine. I feel no empathy. This country should pay for every war crime they committed. There are no innocence in war. Silent complacency what brought it on." is blatantly false, and it becomes apparent when you reverse the narrative. Are all American companies responsible for/complacent with US war crimes?

Not all Russian companies wanted the war, not all companies are complacent, and they only financed it by contributing to the GDP of the country.

Is it fair to sanction them? No. Should we do it if it helps destabilizing Putin? Yes, absolutely, even more than we are doing now.

>Is it fair to sanction them? No. Should we do it if it helps destabilizing Putin? Yes, absolutely, even more than we are doing now.

As someone who was from a country where sanctions were supposed to destabilize our leader, it doesn't work, never did, never will. In the tough times people rally behind their leaders, just look at Zelensky or Boris Johnson right now.

> As someone who was from a country where sanctions were supposed to destabilize our leader, it doesn't work, never did, never will.

Did you rally behind your leader because of sanctions?

More importantly, what would you suggest, given your previous experience? Start an actual war to depose the leader (not always turning out great, and I'm assuming your country wasn't a nuclear superpower)? Leave everything as it is, let the leader invade neighbors with no repercussions?

Maybe not the leader, but around the country itself. Even people that were vehemently against the leader were deeply against "the West".

>Start an actual war to depose the leader (not always turning out great, and I'm assuming your country wasn't a nuclear superpower)? Leave everything as it is, let the leader invade neighbors with no repercussions?

I don't know, I am not a world leader but I know that those sanctions are not going to have the intended consequences, just about the opposite.

If I had to say something, I would recommend to let them battle em out, with substantial military aid to Ukraine. Throwing out common Russian people from universities and jobs across Europe is just going to feed a siege mentality and its plainly speaking, racist.

> Throwing out common Russian people from universities and jobs across Europe is just going to feed a siege mentality and its plainly speaking, racist.

where is this happening? who is advocating this?

Boris Johnson's popularity has completely and utterly sunk after a series of scandals that have exposed him as a lying, cheating, hypocrite. It's quite likely that he won't be allowed by his party to contest the next election. To say that he's popular and in particular popular as a rallying cry against international condemnation is utterly false. He's deeply disliked by a large chunk of the population.

Not true. When people get hungry, they eat their leaders....

Look at what happened to Ceaușescu... Putin risks to end up like him.

Not true.

Tell me, if Google banned you from all their services because you only lived somewhere and you were a "soft liberal", would you support Google in their decision or would you dig in and go the other way? Or in more simpler terms, take football fans, are they hungry at their ultras when they get fined for something or are they angry at UEFA?

All Europe is doing by these discrimination measures is creating a siege mentality among Russian citizens.

The “rally behind your leader” effect is only usually temporary.

These sanctions and moves spread an unambiguous and clear message which can’t be blocked by state news channels which is “no matter what your government says, nobody supports you”.

It's not temporary, or it depends on what time scale do you define "temporary".

>“no matter what your government says, nobody supports you”

Exactly my point, people at this point flock toward their country not against it. They develop this "so fuck 'em" mentality which would just enable wars to go on.

Those of UEFA and Google are silly, symbolic sanctions. What the EU and US are doing is trying to tank Russia's economy and seize/block the oligarchs' properties. Whether that works is left to be seen, but there are already large protests against the war, there might be more protests against the harsh economic conditions, and Putin cannot just arrest everyone.

But in any case, the whole point is that sanctions are unfair, as they will hit plenty of people that are not involved in the war in any way and do not support it. "We" use them because "we" believe that they work (I hope so, but you might be right of course, I'm no expert), not out of spite for a whole population.

I was using a personal anecdote what happens when some foreigners sanction "our" nation, so I used UEFA as an example. It's a similar mentality when it comes to other kinds of sanctions waged against "our" nation.

>not out of spite for a whole population

You may see it that way, but you and average Russian were consuming different media up to this point, and if we admit or not, media has an enormous influence on our worldview.

As many have said, this is not whataboutism. Western companies also paid (and keep paying) for death and destruction in Ukraine.

It’s not a wild stretch to say that the whole thing was financed through selling gas and oil to the West.

Google and Apple removed Russian opposition apps from their app stores and Facebook censored groups that they used to coordinate because, you know, “we have to comply with the laws of the country we operate in”. They also pay taxes in Russia.

Are you trying to hold Russian IT companies to a higher standard than SV giants?..

And Western companies are increasingly falling in line with sanctions by ceasing to do business with Russian customers or partners. So they are also being cut off from business as usual that benefits the Russian government – it's just that since they aren't based in Russia themselves it looks a little different.

Energy prices may soar soon for Western consumers and companies. BP and Shell may need to write off multi-billion-valued stakes in Russian gas companies. Air travel routes between Europe and Asia may be about to get a lot crappier. So there are many ways that companies and individuals outside Russia will also be paying a price to put the squeeze on Putin and his military in response to what they've done.

> This is whataboutism and it is so tired.

It really isn't. It's a short of counterfactual and it's actually quite useful in checking if you are morally/intellectually consistent. This strategy even has a name (some Bostrom thing that I can't remember right now).

it's not whataboutism. It's a very valid point. American power is imperial. Putin is imperial too. The amount of harm that the US committed cannot be forgotten. As I won't forget Putin.

imperial means empire. please tell me, what is the extent of the American Empire?

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_policy_i...

But it is not whataboutism when you are comparing two comparable things. You can't call any inconvinient information whataboutism...

This is not whataboutism and it is so tired. It's about the fact that this isn't about the human suffering caused by Russia, it's a conflict between major power - case in point, all of the previous instances of similar behaviour from multiple countries that went unpunished.

When evidence fly in the face of a narrative, whataboutism isn't a defense. Whataboutism would be if they said it's fine for Putin to commit atrocities in Ukraine because the US commits atrocities in various countries. That's not what was pointed out. It was pointed out that the narrative doesn't follow past precedent.

Many people in the US were very opposed to the Iraq war (the war in Afghanistan, though stupid, had a more real precedent). It would have been good had the US suffered sanctions for invading Iraq, but sadly the geopolitical reality didn’t support that at the time. Does that mean we should just roll over and accept deeply unethical and wrongheaded behavior from a different country? (It’s also worth pointing out that the invasion of Iraq, while by no means justified, was at least targeted towards a brutal dictatorship, whereas Ukraine is a functional democracy with a free press.)

Interestingly, the political party in the US which most favors Putin - the GOP - is also the most comfortable with the US committing atrocities on foreign soil (and at home TBH). Not a coincidence if you ask me. Looks like there can be messed up people in more than one country!

You claim “this isn’t about the human suffering caused by Russia”. You sure about that? I think most people feel like a primary issue with invading another country is the amount of human suffering it causes.

I'm sure many people in the US were opposed to it. Did they have a choice though? Both of those wars were essentially unanimous amongst the ruling class. There is nothing the average citizen can do at that point. You claim “this isn’t about the human suffering caused by Russia”. You sure about that? I think most people feel like a primary issue with invading another country is the amount of human suffering it causes.

Oh people most definitely do, an I am sure you and I both do. But clearly the countries imposing sanctions, almost every single one of which engaged in a bloody war of agression in the recent past, don't. Actions speak louder than words. >

I think you’re still oversimplifying. NATO countries may have been involved in bloody wars, wars which were varying degrees of bad idea, but at least those wars were fought against regimes which were terrible - brutal and repressive towards their own population. Ukraine is a mostly liberal democracy, which makes invading it even harder to justify.

But sure, US citizens might not have had much say in whether the US invaded Iraq. That doesn’t mean that sanctions wouldn’t have created political pressure which could in turn have made an invasion less appealing to the neocons in power at that time. So while I’m sorry to see average Russians (or at least those opposed to the war) suffer as a result of these sanctions, I can also acknowledge that sanctions may actually put pressure on Putin to de-escalate this conflict, and also warn him of the consequences of future aggression. It’s possible Putin will ignore these sanctions, but doing so risks improving the position of his opponents within Russia.

It's not unlikely that sanctions against USA because of Iraq or Afghanistan would have fueled USssian nationalism to an extent that makes the current right look like a fairy tale. Sure, there would be people protesting against the government because they would want them to reverse course but there would be people who would react in the precise opposite way and they would want to cave in. Pride is a strong human emotion.

The Russian aggression case is much clear cut, but it may not look like it is clear cut if you live inside a different information bubble (especially if you want to believe that your country did nothing wrong, or that it's just "an internal matter", or that "we don't want foreign missiles at our doorstep; the USA wouldn't want Russian missiles at cube why should we accept <insert threat>".

What we're learning in this day and age is that information poisoning cannot be cured by just throwing more information.

Perhaps. But another scenario is that the population, or some not insignificant part of it, is opposed to the war and doesn’t buy the party line. We’re certainly seeing more resistance within Russia than expected. At the very least, sanctions can force leaders to expend resources quashing internal dissent rather than looking outward.

I mean, should we not be imposing economic sanctions on Iran and NK? Sure, they hurt ordinary citizens, but they’re still a strong bargaining chip.

I’d argue that a large number of ordinary citizens would be brainwashed with or without sanctions because of the degree to which dictators like Putin have subverted the media.

>I think you’re still oversimplifying. NATO countries may have been involved in bloody wars, wars which were varying degrees of bad idea, but at least those wars were fought against regimes which were terrible - brutal and repressive towards their own population. Ukraine is a mostly liberal democracy, which makes invading it even harder to justify.

And the point is that you got this information from the ruling class who were for those wars. Or their allies abroad.

And as for Ukrainan democracy, from the Freedom house report in 2019 it sits between Burkina Faso and the Philippines.

Ha, now do Russia.

> Whataboutism would be if they said it's fine for Putin to commit atrocities in Ukraine because the US commits atrocities in various countries. That's not what was pointed out. It was pointed out that the narrative doesn't follow past precedent.

That's just a somewhat deniable -- i.e. more chickenshit -- way of saying the exact same thing.

Ergo: Yes, it's whataboutism.