He holds views that were the progressive norm 15 years ago, which are now considered bigoted, this is considered unacceptable today. There's a lot I don't agree with him on, like Ukraine, but "despise" is a word I reserve for the likes of Putin.

I don’t think Putin is the epitome of evil that the west portray him to be either. War is hell and he surely started the larger scale war, but just remember that you’ve probably been introduced to less than 1% of his side of things as a western citizen. The western world has gone to war many, many times in history for lesser reasons.

I’ll rephrase your argument for you: “Why don’t you listen to the rapist’s opinion? The victim is surely not blameless. Besides, your cousin is a shoplifter”.

Is this really the best response you could put forward in to people trying to make a nuanced point?

1. As already mentioned, it's hardly a nuanced point.

2. If you actually want to hear my opinion, then the realm of geopolitics + good old-fashioned hate of the US government does a number on people's logic, so we get what I can only charitably describe as a parade of non-sequiturs, whataboutisms and other fallacies. And so it can be useful to frame it in the simpler terms, for example you could hardly find anyone even on this site who would condone the forced takeover of parts of people's homes. Literally the same is happening on a scale of the countries.

Totally agreed. Make it about individuals where the analogy holds.

It cuts right through the bullshit and frequently exposes a lot of hypocrisy, hate, self loathing, racism, etc.

Nuanced point? That person just said 'sure, putin is committing genocide and destroying an entire country, but we haven't heard his side of the story'

Then they followed it up with the old hacker news chestnut of 'whatabout the west'

Would his side of the story matter to you? I don’t think it’s a particularly nuanced point to you since you’ve already made up your mind, however ignorant it might be.

Putin already gave his side of the story. He declared Ukraine an invalid country, said there were nazis there and then went into full out war to destroy the country while committing countless atrocities.

I don’t think it’s a particularly nuanced point to you

What point and why do you keep saying 'nuance' over and over while giving zero actual information? What are you trying to say and what evidence is there?

Let's think about this super hard. What is the justification for an unprovoked genocidal war? Why are you defending putin?

however ignorant it might be.

Show me where you get your information, lets see the source of this nonsense.

It wasn't "nuanced" at all. Just muddled and obsequious.

>Yeah he started the one of the deadliest wars in the 21 century, threatens to destroy the entire planet with nuclear weapons, but he is not that evil because there were other wars started by the west

That's an extremely dumb take

I'm from a country that's arguably part of the West today (Romania).

Your nonsense straight out of the a Soviet propaganda book doesn't work on me.

Go ask people from Eastern Europe how they felt about 45/50+ years of Soviet imposed governments and regimes.

The West has done awful things but in what way do they excuse the attempted ethnic cleansing of Ukraine?

What do you know about Putin’s motives? What propaganda do you think you’re under?

You’re probably smart enough to understand that out of spite and regret of your country’s history with the Russians your countrymen have more motivation than many others to judge the Russian efforts without any further investigation into the matter.

The same applies for myself, since I’m Finnish. It’s almost sad to see how people abandon all reason and critical thinking skills because of some ingrained belief that “Russia bad”. All of my knowledge of the human nature leads me to believe that they’re no more bad than the next people, and that they probably have some motives to go to a taxing war that we don’t really understand here in the west - seeing as the first casualty in war is the truth.