Well, the flaming wild-ass response came REALLY early in this thread! Mac's new topic needs some fleshing out.
I call Godwin's Law:
On January 11, 2017 at 13:31, Mac Burks (39) said...
You see this video and think "its about time someone put cnn in their place"...while the rest of the world sees the video and thinks "holy S#!T this is exactly what Hitler did when he took power".
And here's the law:
Godwin's law (or Godwin's rule of Hitler analogies) is an Internet adage which asserts that that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1" —that is, if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Hitler.
and
There are many corollaries to Godwin's law, some considered more canonical (by being adopted by Godwin himself) than others. For example, there is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned Hitler has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress. This principle is itself frequently referred to as Godwin's law.
I've also run into a corollary that I could not find in three minutes, so I can't cite a site, but it goes like this:
At some point, someone will mention Hitler with the express intention of bringing the discussion to a halt.
Let's get some information about this from Mike Godwin himself. In 2015 he wrote "Sure, call Trump a Nazi. Just make sure you know what you're talking about." It is a sobering call to just freakin' cut it out, because when you refer to Hitler, unless you've really studied history, you're calling on a simile that is monstrously out of scale. The article itself is at
[Link: washingtonpost.com]~~~~
I've heard a conservative commentator observe that "Being a liberal means never having to say you're sorry." When, in the next four years, it turns out that Trump never does anything anywhere near what Hitler did, Mac will not be shouting from the rooftops "I was wrong! I was wrong!" No, instead, his present assertion will stand in the past with no commentary from Mac.
Mac, please do the study of Hitler that Godwin did, then come back here and tell us if you actually believe what you said in your post.One of the worst things about making such comments is that when mild irritating things are compared to Hitler, the monstrousness of Hitler is lessened. The Weimar Republic fell, at least in some part, because leftists called people fascists left and right, distorting and lessening the meaning of the word so badly that when real fascists came on the scene, Hitler and his brown shirts, nobody paid attention to the accurate warning that fascists were now, really, in their midst.
Lastly, I love this, that I ran across in my information search just now:
Cf. also Benford's Law of Controversy:
Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.
- Gregory Benford, 1980.
