Quote:
Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague
You can talk about it, but comparing modern people to Hitler or modern governments or organizations to the Nazis is usually just done for effect and never adds a damned thing to the discussion. "THIS GUY = HITLER = EVIL YOU GUYS" is as nuanced as that crap gets. It also conflates a bunch of generally "bad stuff" that shouldn't be - Trump has some insane policies, including some borderline fascist ones, but he isn't advocating murdering babies and taking women as sex slaves.
ISIS, Trump, they're their own entities with their own unique brands of awful. Nazis don't need to be involved.
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There is a massive difference between discussing Nazi policies, and their current analogs, to THIS GUY = HITLER. I thought you in particular were very clear and forthright on this forum about discussing ideas and divorcing those ideas from other things they are associated with. Just because I see a parallel in how the National Socialists came into power, or some of their policies, doesn't mean I'm saying HOLOCAUST!! HOLOCAUST!!! However, apparently, I cannot say that, because Godwin means it cannot be serious.
The whole concept of Godwin's Law means that the entire discussion ends there. We have spent over a decade avoiding discussion involving any kind of policy that occurred between 1935 and 1945, even though those policies resulted in the most significant changes in our social make up in the last 100 years. Many people don't discuss the fact that the original arguments that the left and right have been squabbling about incessantly in the past 20 years have direct lines of causality from the visceral disgust western society had to the policies of Mengle and Himmler, yet we cannot talk about it, without some well meaning person shutting down discussion, because Hitler.
The worst part is that it shuts down discussion among the more intelligent, because it is usually someone with lesser intellectual talents that Godwin's a discussion with something inane like OBAMA=HITLER. I understand the original idea about the Godwin's Law, and it has it's reasons, but I feel that it's too broadly applied, and has become an impediment.