re: Defend a villain

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Thanos was right

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Well, except for the fact that with that level of power he could have simply created more resources.

And while we can't know about alien species, humans went from 4 billion in 1974 and 8 billion in 2022... meaning that all his work would be undone in less than 50 years on Earth, presuming the entire race doesn't die off due to depression and PTSD on a global scale.

Nah, this is a good exercise in thought. The best way to defeat an enemy is to get inside their head and understand them, so you can predict and anticipate their moves, and to an extent manipulate them.

Going back to Sauron (which I fully admit is an extreme case): as Tolkien wrote, Melkor (Morgoth) is the one who wanted to do his own creation, and when he couldn't, he wanted to break everything instead. Sauron didn't want total destruction, he wanted total control.

In his perspective, creation was basically a project. And then when it gets to life and especially Men, the Valar's approach was to sit back and "let it happen". Sauron didn't want to do that, he wanted to be hand's-on. No wasteful, inefficient stuff, like fertile fields thousands of miles away from populations, unable to be accessed. No random dozens of civilizations popping up and dying out. Early on, it was established that the Valar wasn't going to play a big part in guidance, so he jumped to Morgoth's side.

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The men who served Sauron served him out of fear and hatred, not love. They were Sauron’s slaves like the orcs were.

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Whatever their motivation, the Easterlings chose to stand and fight on the Pellenor Fields long after the battle had been decided, the Witch King gone and the orcs routed. That sounds like more than fearful slaves, who would have dropped their weapons and fled. They were a proud people and not ready to concede.

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We can also see Mordor with our own eyes and know that he plans to raze every forest that he can and blot out the sun.

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Meh... the Emyn Muil and the Northwest part of Mordor was scorched earth from the last wars, when Sauron tried to slow the Last Alliance. If he feared an attack at that area again, makes strategic sense to leave it that way, so his defenses would be more effective.
"Blotting out the sun" is clearly a strategic move, too. He has large numbers of Orcs, who don't function that great in bright daylight. They're nocturnal. He's able to adjust the battlefield to his advantage, allowing those orcs to perform better... and oh by the way significantly impact the morale of his opponents in the process.
All these things Sauron does, WE do or attempt to, when engaging in combat.

He has massive armies, and Tolkien explicitly states they don't eat ash and dust... which means they have agriculture. And the organization to supply such armies on the move and while encamped in a desert.

Was he benevolent? No, I don't think you can argue that. But that wasn't his goal, it was to organize and elevate the Men to their potential.

Remember, Tolkien also says these stories are a pre-history of our own world. As such, what would be the legacy of Aragorn's victory and reign?
The extinction (or assimilation) of the Dwarves and Hobbits (and Orcs), the total departure of the Elves, ultimately The Flood (Tolkien being a strong Catholic wouldn't deny the Flood, so that's going to be in the timeline somewhere). Multiple extinct civilizations around the globe.

Sauron's victory, especially if Celebrimbor and the Elves hadn't opposed him in the beginning, would have meant Elves remained and society would have advanced, and Men would have united much earlier. Probably the Flood anyway, but we see removing Sauron didn't prevent that.

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Werner Von Braun was much nastier than our revisionist history has led us to believe.

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While I believe this is true to a degree, I was sort of laying out folks along a spectrum. Setting WVB aside, do you consider Speer the same as Goeth? Kramer? Dirlewanger? Eichman? Kaltenbrunner?

If Schindler's actions in working to save Jews counteracts some/all of his prior acts/motivations, then do WVB's post-war contributions to the furtherance on mankind counteract at least some of his?

There are monsters and then there are monsters, I guess is what I'm saying.

Back to my earlier question, "Is there a continuum of evil that is useful/meaningful?"

Little Bill Daggett

Peace officer just trying to keep his town peaceful.

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OML - you do you, my guy, but either be more careful or more precise to retain your credibility, IMHO.

Mensur goes back almost 500 years. It has zero to do with National Socialism or the Bohemian Corporal. A glance at photos of German officers from WWI or even back to the Franco-Prussian War should definitely prove that.

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Yeah, but Nazis took that up a notch with their pagan bullshite revisionist history.

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Now, Debus was in a relatively select group of cats who served in both the SA and the SS. While I personally think there is more to dispute in some of the evidence against Von Braun, there is virtually no question that Debus was a true believer.

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Yeah, personally I don’t think Von Braun believed in that master race shite either, but on the other hand neither did Heydrich, who by almost accounts (including Hitler himself) was the single worst of the Nazis. Debus was absolutely a true believer and had that scar over his Nazi beliefs. Debus was definitely worse than Von Braun.

Bane - The Dark Knight (2008)

Have we done Bane yet?

Except for blowing up the stadium, ol' boy's rhetoric would fit right in, these days.

This is doubly true for the folks who think Luigi Mangione is some kind of Robin Hood folk hero.

Pennywise was an elderly soul, lost and stranded in a scary place. Literally starving, he tried to survive off of the smallest, most insignificant sustenance for his dietary needs. A gang of intellectual elitists, prejudiced against him because he was "different", essentially went out to kill him like an angry mob. He tried to befriend a mentally and psychologically abused child and his friends for protection, but the gang would stop at nothing.

Most childhood bullies repent and find sympathy once they've grown, but not this group. Years later, sadistically, one gang member orchestrated a surprise "guy's trip" weekend to relive the fun, abusive history of this innocent creature.

Do we celebrate and cinematize the hunting and execution of a king snake just because it happened upon farmland (god-forbid) and refused to eat a hen, instead only eating one of her eggs (out of respect and humility---- and fear)? Its slithering may be scary to the uninformed, uneducated masses who fail to value all our differences. Fortunately, however, most humans have empathy, and are intelligent enough to realize that the "evil" king snake is actually protecting its neighbors from true danger.

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Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.

the war was fricked. and we had no shot of winning it.
our own arrogance, hypocrisy, and self indulgence were never going to overcome a country of people willing to anything to win (like sawing arms off kids that had just been vaccinated for polio).