[Mathgod]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

This entire part of the conversation and Groot’s main point was directed towards people who wanted him to change his profile photo. So the most logical retort would not have been to go on and defend why his profile photo is important.

The thing is, I'm one of the people who think his profile photo should be changed and see it as important. Does that mean I have the "incorrect" opinion and you the "correct" one?

(next part spoilered for thread derail; don't read if not interested in political discussion)

Spoiler!

None that you’ve spent any time naming. There are countless differences between the two,

Tried to avoid derailing this into a political thread but here goes...
- Putin trying to annex Ukraine. USA never trying to annex any Iraqi territory.
- Putin blatantly lying about Ukraine being run by Nazis.
- Iraq under Saddam was a brutal dictatorship. Ukraine is not and has not been.
- USA had recently been hit by a major terrorist attack that killed over 3000 innocent people and destroyed or damaged some of its largest buildings. As a result, the American public was less adverse to using direct force as a response to foreign policy situations, than they otherwise would be. In other words, their emotions were still raw, and it was much more difficult for them to resist being swayed by propaganda than it otherwise would have been. No such 9/11 event in Russia two years prior to the Ukraine invasion.
- Russia a quasi-dictatorship where Putin orders secret assassinations or sham trials against those who treaten his power or antagonize his regime. USA is not that kind of country. If an American pro athlete or celebrity speaks out against the current or a former president, that person's family won't be harmed by the US government in retaliation.
- USA has a legitimate (albeit very flawed) election system. Russia has no legitimate elections by any reasonable standard.

but when you boil it down to a moral objection? No, the differences aren’t really that important. Unless it’s better to kill innocent Iraqis than innocent Ukrainians or better to believe Americans when they’re lying about why they’re undertaking an illegal invasion than it is to believe Russians. You really don’t think an American who supports his President believing in lies is similar to a Russian who supports his President believing in lies? I think they’re very similar.

I think a very important point missed in all this is the difference between supporting the military action of a leader, and supporting the leader himself. The controversy here is Ovi's cozy relationship with Putin throught his life prior to the war, not the war itself. No one is sitting here accusing Ovi of supporting the war (at least, none that I've seen).

So when you make the comparable of Gretzky supporting the Iraq war, the question becomes did he know at the time what the fallout of the war would be? Did he know that Iraq wasn't on track to build WMDs in the near future? We will probably never know. But did he support Bush's 2000 election campaign, or his 2004 re-election campaign? If so, I think that's better grounds for comparing him to Ovi.

Correct, but focusing on the wording of his definition was being pedantic. I think you well knew he meant the same thing you defined. You spent more time arguing why his definition of virtue signalling was wrong because he missed a word than actually identifying why the label itself was wrong. That’s being pedantic.

Yeah no, I wasn't. The word he missed was the most important part of the entire thing. It's like if I asked you for a "chip cookie", you hand me a cookie filled with computer chips, and I say whoopsie, I missed a word, I meant a chocolate chip cookie.

Virtue signalling only happens if the person making the comments has a motive beyond just sharing their genuine point of view on something. I didn't.

Fair enough, but you can at least see the reason for the reaction, I hope. Nobody needs to like or dislike Ovechkin. Nobody needs to cheer for him to break the record or condemn him. People are free to do whichever, but I think there’s just some people growing tired of people coming into a thread where the entire purpose is following him on his way to the record just to virtue signal about his profile photo or how awful he is for previously supporting Putin. Meanwhile the last thing Ovechkin said was that he doesn’t want war and hasn’t said a positive word about Putin or word against Ukraine since.

Almost all Russian players have kept their mouth shut and focused on hockey. They’re losing sponsorships, commercials and other promotional deals just for being Russian, and not saying a word. I think we can assume it’s not because none of them (including Ovechkin) have an opinion. So maybe we can just accept it’s probably more complex than we understand and people could stop asking for or demanding the absurd, from the pointless (profile photos) to the extreme (banning Ovechkin and only Ovechkin from Canada).

There just doesn’t seem to be a reason to rehash how terrible Ovechkin is when nothing has changed in nearing a year.

Agreed for the most part. But I still view the instagram pic as problematic.