It is especially prevalent among parties oriented towards Russian speaking populace in the Baltics.
I've never seen it work, but maybe there is a bit of Ross Perot(not that Clinton/Bush looked like Perot) effect.
PS it is hilarious that when I made a comment I didn't realize this could be taken as a what-aboutism comment.
So on a meta level I should be more lenient when posters do similar things in other threads. Maybe not every poster is actively engaging in organized https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism but there is an urge to draw parallels on some psychological level.
It would be an interesting analysis to see if notable names appear more often as candidates and do they draw more plus(FOR) signs than regular candidates.
That's not the same thing at all. That is just someone with the same name as some celeb. The celeb is not running in the elections.
What is discussed in the article are fake candidates with the same (changed) name (and appearance) as an actual candidate, in order to confuse voters and leech votes away from the actual candidate.
Agreed the practice is not as despicable as the St. Petersburg case. (amazing city btw)
Still the question is would this person be running in the election were their name not a match or similar to someone publicly known.
These names usually appear in the middle of the list - so are unlikely to be major players themselves.
I looked through our local candidate lists and found more suspicious cases.
There are instances of not complete matches but things like a security guard from a populist party with the same uncommon last name as the prime minister at a time.
I think you can usually ignore people who complain about "whataboutism" - on HN at least it usually boils down to someone trying to dismiss a legitimate comparison with "Hey you can't say that, I said it first!"
Precisely. Also I think I'm being downvoted by people misinterpreting my use of "usually" as "in every single case without exception". But anecdotally, nearly every time I've seen the whataboutism response it has been in that context I described - someone trying to dismiss a legitimate criticism by deploying what they think is a sort of cheat code.
It is especially prevalent among parties oriented towards Russian speaking populace in the Baltics.
I've never seen it work, but maybe there is a bit of Ross Perot(not that Clinton/Bush looked like Perot) effect.
PS it is hilarious that when I made a comment I didn't realize this could be taken as a what-aboutism comment.
So on a meta level I should be more lenient when posters do similar things in other threads. Maybe not every poster is actively engaging in organized https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism but there is an urge to draw parallels on some psychological level.