Sometimes it's not even a troll distracting, sometimes it's a stupid American who can't not talk about his unique experience - you see this often on Reddit, someone from a country will complain about something specific there, and an American will show up to say "that's nothing, here at Whatever, TX, it's even worse/better/bigger/cooler/etc."

But usually it's trolls

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

It's not always whataboutism, sometimes it's just a comparison.

Americans have this strange habit of expecting their "enemy of the day" to operate under a different standard than they do. These comparisons put things in perspective for people temporarily blinded by jingoism.

The term “whataboutism” is a tell for intellectual laziness at best. Considering multiple particular cases to draw general conclusions is basic ratiocination. You might as well just call the person you’re talking to a “chud” instead and be done with it.

If you cannot defend a subject without resorting to whataboutism, I would say this instead is intellectual laziness.

More often than not when I've seen "whataboutism" used here it means "You can't say that (about me), I said it (about you) first!" which is in my opinion, intellectually lazy. There are times when a bad faith whatabout-ist argument is made as a diversionary tactic and they are frustrating, but the original comment[0] we are discussing does not feel like that to me. In fact the comment they were replying to is making the lazy and intellectually lacking argument.

[0] = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30579098

I wouldn’t call Socrates intellectually lazy.

But what about Socrates?