Doubt you can say worse.

Then I should say that I actually thought my point wasn’t tangential as much as fundamental. Sorry, that was me walking on eggshells.

But the Stalin apologists in the meme aren’t arguing one good thing redeemed his evil, they’re arguing that what he did wasn’t evil.

I believe this is the point where we interpreted the comic differently. The comic says, “But Stalin switched to the allies.” And I think that’s the comic pointing out a good thing that he did that they were saying excused his bad actions, and that is mostly what I was talking about.

If you interpreted the comic as if everything is evil actions cast in a good light, then that’s another interpretation. After all, he obviously didn’t join the allies out of benevolence. Or maybe you saw that as a statement that was only made on the way to their statement about Poland.

There’s no ‘less black’ interpretation of Hitler or Stalin insofar as there is no reasonable way to interpret their behavior as less-than-evil, not as in “There is no way anyone could ever be worse than either of them.”

This, I think is related to our different interpretations of the comic. I was talking about the idea that if Stalin saved a cat in a tree, then that does affect his placement on the scale (but it can’t balance out all the bad that he did). Whereas I believe that you were saying that all of the things the comic was saying about Stalin were truly evil things that push things towards the evil side, and shouldn’t be excused.

Fuck, man, there’s a place between “Everything is good or evil” and “Nothing is good and evil”

That would point pretty clearly towards a worldview acknowledging degrees of good and evil.

Bear with me for a moment. I interpreted your comment as if you were saying that you thought I meant “nothing is good and evil”, because otherwise, I’d have thought you were trying to make my same point and you’d have no reason to disagree with me.

I thought you meant that if it wasn’t “Everything is good or evil” or “nothing is good and evil”, then you’re saying it’s simple subjectivity objectivity, sort of saying that the concepts of “good” and “evil” don’t exist, and all shades of gray are the same. It sounds like a silly thing to believe, but I have heard people argue it before. When you said “there’s a place between”, I interpreted that to mean there’s a place to argue, not that shades of gray exist.

I can see now that I completely misinterpreted your meaning. The meaning you intended is a much more straightforward reading. I just didn’t get it because it started with “Fuck, man”, which put me into a defensive frame of mind.

Edit: I think I meant “objectivity” instead of “subjectivity,” so I changed it. But it’s late and I might just be confused. That entire section of the comment is rather confusing. It’s hard to explain a reasonable thought process that comes to a weird conclusion.