Just thought of something that strikes me as interesting. This is, as usual, abstract philosophizing, not an attempt to complain about someone's behavior without naming names or anything personal like that. If anything, it's inspired mostly by interactions I sometimes see between my relatives on rare occasions.

To illustrate the point, I'll refer to this scenario: you're at work, and your co-worker does something that you think is just inexcusably stupid.

Consider then both of the following situations:

1) Having had this irritation at work, you go home and complain to your spouse about it. Your spouse lists every possible reason why your co-worker might have actually been in the right and/or had a justifiable excuse for doing what they did. You feel dissatisfied by this conversation, because it makes you feel as though at best, your spouse just doesn't empathize with you, and at worst they think you're judgmental, critical, narrow-minded etc. because you think your co-worker is an idiot whereas your spouse is being more 'charitable' about the situation.

2) Your spouse has had this irritation at work, comes home and complains to you about it. You then list every possible reason why your spouse's co-worker might have actually been in the right and/or had a justifiable excuse for doing what they did. Your spouse seems annoyed at you and you can't figure out why, since afterall, you're just being reasonable and providing an alternative intepretation of events aimed at alleviating your spouse's stress - "Aw honey, you don't have to hate people for being stupid - look, it could be this instead" is roughly your line of thought.

Now, the thing I find rather interesting is that I have a feeling a lot of people have been in both of these situations, yet fail to see the connection between the two. That is, a number of people (myself included at times - I don't like that I can include myself in this, but nonetheless I think can) seem to have this bizarre tendency to both:

a) expect other people to listen to their own rants and offer some empathy, rather than arguing with their interpretation of the events that inspired the rant, and

b) respond to other peoples' rants by arguing about their interpretation of events, instead of offering empathy.

Um?

To resolve this inconsistency, I would suggest the following principle: If someone is pissed off about something, the last thing they want to hear is that on top of being angry, they are also wrong. From this principle it follows that:

1) If someone is angry about something that happened, they will respond more positively if you say something like "yeah, I can see how that would be annoying" than if you say something like "well, maybe you're just jumping to conclusions." This advice stands, I think, even if you really do think the ranter is jumping to conclusions or whatever - take seriously the possibility that they don't see the situation the same way as you do, and that for that reason, regardless of whether or not your interpretation of the situation is more 'accurate,' realize that if you insist on this while the ranter is in the midst of their angry rant, all you're going to do is piss the ranter off more.

2) If it's so very important for you to share your 'more objective' (whatever that really means) view of the situation - as per the above example, to prove your thesis that people aren't stupid and deep down they all mean well, for instance - then wait until the ranter has cooled down a bit, or you're just going to piss them off and your view isn't going to get its 'day in court' anyway. I have no doubt that there are people out there who, when angry, actually do want to hear the 'more objective' side of things from someone else right away, because it actually does make them feel better, but I find that this psychology generally doesn't work on myself, people I'm close to, and/or most people whom I consider socially similar to me (gothy, artsy, etc. types for instance), so why it seems as though so many of us nonetheless do this from time to time is something of a mystery to me.

In summary/conclusion then:
If someone's ranting, either let them rant or, if you don't like ranting, go away;
They don't want to hear about your 'more reasonable' view or the 'fact' that they're wrong, nor do they care about how you think they 'should' feel;
I think almost everybody at least sometimes just wants to be told "it's okay that you feel that way" or "I understand how that would suck," and I don't think it's right for other people to look down on that need - sure, it can become a problem if one dwells on that all the time and never tries to fix what problems one may well actually have, but denying one's emotions seems just as unhealthy to me;
If more people were understanding about these things, I and those people with a similar psychological make-up to my own (and in this case, I don't think I'm all that big of a freak) would probably be happier in general.

A final note: Everything I've said here I've meant to apply to cases of the sort where person 1 is complaining to person 2 about something person 3 did (or some other situation that doesn't directly involve person 2). Whereas if person 1 is complaining to person 2 about something person 2 did, such that person 2 is being put in a position of having to defend themselves, it seems clear to me that that's a different situation in which different suggestions/advice/etc. would apply.