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Esar comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - LessWrong
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I don't think it's a case of the WAITW as Singer lays it out, though it's easy to see how the argument would go if it were. All the work of Singer's argument is to adress and argue against the idea that there are important differences between those two cases. The WAITW characteristically tries to skip that work.
That's a great answer, but did Singer eliminate all the potentially important differences? Carl Shulman has a nice post pointing out one such difference, and there may be others. It looks like detecting instances of WAITW can be difficult and controversial.
Well, I think the fact that Singer explicitly tries to tackle the problem of 'important differences' takes him out of range of the WAITW. At that point, if he fails, then his argument doesn't work. But he's not therefore doing something like 'abortion is murder'.
Edit: I just read Shulman's argument, and I think it's invalid. The fact that the drowning child and distant starving child cases differ in those respects relevant to various 'selfish' ends isn't strictly relevant to the question of their moral relationship.