What doesn’t work about whataboutism and both-sides is that it’s always binary. It’s always one thing held up in juxtaposition to one other thing. No nuance. No grouping. No gravity pulling masses together and creating patterns. No ability to think one or the other through critically.
One thing is said. Then another, diametrically opposed thing is held up as a reason why the first statement is false. And because it’s binary, the assumption is that there is right/wrong, good/bad, black/white. No nuance. No room to figure it out. Just: brilliance, or idiocy. Take it or leave it. You decide, and your decision will be approved/shamed.
It’s about manipulating the construct, simplifying the argument, and then setting up expectations for behavior. It’s manipulating information to manipulate thinking.
Binaries are the problem. Reality doesn’t really run on them.
Any thinking can be corrupted through cognitive bias, emotion, and intent. Our bad actors depend on it; their primary goal is to manipulate information so they can set up systems and expectations that predefine their superiority. Not because they have a good bead on information, cognition, and interpretation; but because they like to have all the toys and cookies.
Switch it from a binary to triangulating information
I often wonder if whataboutism and both-sides started as a way to elegantly try to get to something close to triangulation, and that the proponents prefer others to leap the gap to think it’s a fuller story.
So, try adding more perspectives. Try pushing it into the triangulation that it’s (trying? using disinforming logic? using misinformed replication?) to be.
A person who wanted to win the argument they proposed having will say something along the lines of, “no, no, the scope is defined, you can’t add to it.” A person who really was just asking a question and wanting to talk it through will start adding more instances, too.
Triangulation is a really cool thinking model. It starts from an assumption of inclusivity. While it’s called triangulation, it’s really more about the effort to find the full landscape, no quantity cap intended. Find the disparate grouping, build in some human behavior, and find where the gravities of the information is. The more people included, the better. The hope is to find at least three major clumps of insights.
Include enough people, and there’s always going to be a cohort that will refuse to see anyone’s experience but their own. But the interpretations they’re adhering to get overwhelmed by all the everything else going on. It’s not that they are being dismissed, but that they are shown to be letting their biases predefine their inclusions and interpretations. Their information environment is at odds with reality.