US Politics Feedback Thread - Page 40

On January 10 2017 02:19 Liquid`Drone wrote:


Nobody said either of those things.

On January 09 2017 07:26 ChristianS wrote:
That Russian interference is a convenient argument doesn't make it true or false. ("The Holocaust is just SUCH a convenient argument that the Nazis were bad.")

On January 10 2017 05:41 ChristianS wrote:
Didn't think I'd have to say this, but I don't think LL is a Nazi, Nazi sympathizer, Holocaust denier, or Hitler (mecha- or otherwise), and if I said anything that seems to imply otherwise, I either misspoke or was misconstrued. In this case my assumption was that he would agree that the Holocaust did indeed happen, and that it is, in fact, a convenient argument to demonstrate that Nazism is bad, as a quick and easy demonstration that the convenience of an argument and its veracity are largely unrelated quantities.

Although Godwin's Law is framed as a probability statement, its purpose is to make people think twice before following the rhetorical line of least resistance and escalating their arguments to comparisons that trivialize the impact of the Nazis and the Holocaust. In short, its purpose is to trigger (insistently) a reader's historical awareness and perspective, especially in contexts where perspective has otherwise been lost. So why frame it as a kind of statistical or natural law? Because the kinds of people who reflexively bring up Hitler or Nazis in order to trash the argument or opponent du jour hate to discover that they're merely instantiating a lazy intellectual tendency so common that it seems like a natural law -- they would rather think of themselves as free-willed, independent thinkers.

If you read blogs much, you've probably come across Godwin's Law. Godwin's Law states:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.

I think it's basically correct.
However, one could formulate another law that relates to Godwin's Law. Call it "Henderson's Godwin's Law." It goes like this:

When people in a political discussion want to put down other people who even mention Hitler, they will invoke Godwin's Law even if the person compared no one to Nazis or Hitler.

We saw this recently in the case of the junior U.S. Senator from Texas, Ted Cruz.

At one point in his 21-hour speech in the U.S. Senate, Cruz made the case that we should not take as given that opposing something is futile just because many people say that opposing something is futile. He gave a number of instances. One of them was many people's thought that man could never land on the moon. Another instance was this:

If we go to the 1940s, Nazi Germany--look, we saw it in Britain. Neville Chamberlain told the British people: Accept the Nazis. Yes, they will dominate the continent of Europe, but that is not our problem. Let's appease them. Why? Because it can't be done. We cannot possibly stand against them.
In America there were voices who listened to that; I suspect the same pundits who said it couldn't be done. If this had happened in the 1940s, we would have been listening to them. Even then they would have made television. They would have gotten beyond the carrier pigeons and letters and they would have been on TV saying: You cannot defeat the Germans.


Of course, as we all know, someone did land on the moon and the German government was soundly defeated.

Now here's what Washington Post blogger Alexandra Petri wrote about that segment of the speech:
We even got some Nazi analogies, just proving that Godwin's Law holds for filibusters as for online discussion. Godwin's Law states that as a discussion goes on the probability that someone will be compared to Hitler approaches one.

So whom exactly did Cruz compare to Hitler? No one. He was making a point. He was saying that when we have a cause, we shouldn't give up, even when it looks as if the other side will win.

I'm not defending Cruz's strategy. My friend Alan Reynolds has said well why Cruz's strategy is probably a poor one.

What I am saying is that in discussing opposition to Hitler, Cruz did not compare anyone to Hitler and he did not say that ObamaCare was Naziism. All he did was use a number of historical incidents of defeatism and show that in each case the defeatism was unjustified.

First, let me get this Donald Trump issue out of the way: If you’re thoughtful about it and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and refer to Hitler or Nazis when you talk about Trump. Or any other politician.

On January 10 2017 07:15 ChristianS wrote:
If Godwin's law holds that people should think twice before drawing similarities between Nazis and whoever they're arguing with, I agree wholeheartedly. If it's being interpreted to mean that Nazi, Hitler, Third Reich, and any other WW2 Germany-relevant words are Voldemort-like words with an unholy power that should, therefore, never be uttered or written, well that just seems silly. Imposing duch an aphasia does nothing to civilize dialogue or help us deal with the problems of our time.