<story><title>78% of Reddit Threads with 1,000+ Comments Mention Nazis</title><url>http://www.curiousgnu.com/reddit-godwin</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rm_-rf_slash</author><text>Nazi is an easy shorthand for evil. You don&amp;#x27;t need to show a Nazi kicking a puppy to say the Nazi is evil, because they&amp;#x27;re already a Nazi!  We get it.&lt;p&gt;The downside of this shorthand is that it dumbs down conversation. The Nazi-accuser shunts the Nazi-accused into a digestible category that needn&amp;#x27;t be historically comparable at all to be rhetorically effective, and the accused has less incentive to cordially communicate when it is clear that they are not being taken seriously, so either reasonable people leave or inflammatory folks troll, and we&amp;#x27;re all worse off.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tstactplsignore</author><text>At the same time, not all Nazi analogies are equally wrong- it&amp;#x27;s fallacious to claim that moustaches are evil because Nazis had them; it isn&amp;#x27;t exactly fallacious to claim that persecuting and demonizing a minority combined with enthusiastic nationalism through slowly increasing propaganda campaigns under the leadership of a charismatic leader should seem at least slightly worrying because we have Nazis as a historical example. The Nazis and the 30s and 40s can present real historical lessons- another is that in the 30s, the German Communist party declared &amp;quot;After him, us!&amp;quot; in response to Hitler&amp;#x27;s rise and their refusal to cooperate with the socialists, with the reasoning being that his disastrous short term would hasten about a communist revolution. Unfortunately, we often see the exact same argument used by both socialists and some of the more extreme Bernie Sanders fans today with regards to Trump. There are historical lessons and analogies in the past which can be genuinely useful to understanding the present. At this rate, it feels like if 1930s Germany had Godwin&amp;#x27;s law, it would have been used to quash any dissent about the &lt;i&gt;actual rise of Nazism&lt;/i&gt;.</text></comment>
<story><title>78% of Reddit Threads with 1,000+ Comments Mention Nazis</title><url>http://www.curiousgnu.com/reddit-godwin</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rm_-rf_slash</author><text>Nazi is an easy shorthand for evil. You don&amp;#x27;t need to show a Nazi kicking a puppy to say the Nazi is evil, because they&amp;#x27;re already a Nazi!  We get it.&lt;p&gt;The downside of this shorthand is that it dumbs down conversation. The Nazi-accuser shunts the Nazi-accused into a digestible category that needn&amp;#x27;t be historically comparable at all to be rhetorically effective, and the accused has less incentive to cordially communicate when it is clear that they are not being taken seriously, so either reasonable people leave or inflammatory folks troll, and we&amp;#x27;re all worse off.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stcredzero</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Nazi is an easy shorthand for evil.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s often that, but it&amp;#x27;s often not only that. It&amp;#x27;s often a shorthand for &lt;i&gt;extreme political ideology leading to authoritarianism&lt;/i&gt;. It&amp;#x27;s a shorthand for a particular affective&amp;#x2F;mental state groups of people can enter into. (1) The country that became Nazi Germany was highly educated, western, democratic, and industrialized. Germans are ordinary people, just like you and me. There is nothing peculiar or special or demonizing about them, or Russians or Chinese or Cambodians or Americans or any other group containing members who have enacted mass killings and genocide.&lt;p&gt;Our species&amp;#x27; brain is wired to enable us gang-up together, feel solidarity, and take action against other groups. The way this happens fits certain functional objective patterns of behavior, and Nazis are a very prominent mental &amp;quot;attractor.&amp;quot; Unfortunately, &amp;quot;Nazi&amp;quot; has such a strong emotional connotation, it renders rational thought about such group dynamics difficult in any public communications medium.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;The Nazi-accuser shunts the Nazi-accused into a digestible category that needn&amp;#x27;t be historically comparable at all to be rhetorically effective&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s also often used to talk about attributes and events that &lt;i&gt;are historically comparable&lt;/i&gt; to the activities of the Nazi party in its early, obscure days, before it had political power. The same group dynamics that applies to them, applies to other groups of people all throughout history. Unfortunately, the comparison it has such strong emotional connotations, the irrational feelings drown out useful rational discussion.&lt;p&gt;From what I&amp;#x27;ve seen, invocations of &amp;quot;Godwin&amp;#x27;s Law&amp;quot; are often used by people who are subject to the beginnings of the same group-dynamic negative-affective death spiral -- precisely to shut down discussion of the phenomena they are subject to. This culture sorely needs a way to calmly and meaningfully discuss such group-dynamics. If society was 1&amp;#x2F;10th as savvy about group dynamics as it is savvy about the cognitive bias caused by love and sexual desire, we&amp;#x27;d be vastly more advanced.&lt;p&gt;(1) - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=11630275&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=11630275&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>