Commentary.

Some people will tell you not to read the comments, but me, I am all about, Oh GOD READ THE COMMENTS BECAUSE LULZ and also not funny anymore.

Nothing is very much fun, anymore.

(Okay, I also kind of love these titles, from the article above:)

New York Times: In ‘Hitler,’ an Ascent From ‘Dunderhead’ to Demagogue — "How did Adolf Hitler — described by one eminent magazine editor in 1930 as a 'half-insane rascal,' a 'pathetic dunderhead,' a 'nowhere fool,' a 'big mouth' — rise to power in the land of Goethe and Beethoven? What persuaded millions of ordinary Germans to embrace him and his doctrine of hatred? How did this 'most unlikely pretender to high state office' achieve absolute power in a once democratic country and set it on a course of monstrous horror?"

The Wall Street Journal: So Many Hitlers — "Hitler, of course, never went away in the first place. Since the immediate postwar period there has been a steady stream of biographical studies of the highest quality. Their successive struggles to make sense of a figure who was as personally inscrutable as he was politically destructive bear witness to the continuing fascination exerted by one of history’s most notorious men."

Nazi shooter goes on rampage OH WAIT NOT ACTUALLY A JOKE.

Hey guess what guys? This happened. Dude in Nazi gear seriously shot up a bunch of people in Houston.

Things you don't really know what to say about, because fucking really?

On the other hand, we have these kind of awesome jewish grandparents, who will fucking haunt you if you vote for Trump. I think this is a mitzvot.

But really, this is where shit stops being funny.

So there's this thing here, which Politifact rightly calls a war crime.

So, you know who else had pants thought the families of enemies of the state should be held liable for their actions?

Yep, you guessed it.

So, this is the moment when you're like... but wait, that isn't absurd. This is a real example of a paranoid and increasingly unstable authoritarian dictator implementing a brutal and internationally condemned policy, and doing the same thing ACTUALLY DOES REFLECT POORLY ON YOU.

This isn't like wearing the same pants AT ALL!

No, no it isn't.

Fuck.

I miss Ernst Rhoem.

Text, technology, and the Jewish Question.

So I have been remiss in my lulz, no? That is all right. Because much like the Gestapo, if you leave them alone long enough, the lulz find you and kick your bloody door in and relocate you to some ghetto.

So today, the ghetto in question is the Walled City of the Huffington Post, which has the benefit at least of being a blog full of opinion articles, and only barely pretends to be a legitimate news source (CNN, Fox, I am looking at you), and the lulz are found via Alan Kaufman's post thereupon about how the kindle is to books like the NSDAP is to the Jews. No, srsly.

Normally, we would giggle, Godwin, and go home, but Das Kainenchen felt moved to comment on some of the more egregiously alarmist and flat out hilariously wrong points here (i.e.-- the difference between a mandated purge and the expansion of a medium). And there, in the comments, we came upon This, from the author:

As not a few comments on this and other sites have invoked Godwin's Law in response to my article, as though it were Holy Writ, I've fornulated my own law:

KAUFMAN'S LAW: "Efforts such as Godwin's Law to thwart the finding of contemporary relevance in the Holocaust is a form of Holocaust denial."

Now wait just a cotton pickin' second there, son. I don't think that means what you think it means.

For starters, what we have here is good old Reducto ad Hitlerium-- you know, the Hitler wore pants arguments. Hitler burned books, so anything that might possibly be of percieved harm to books = Hitleresque. Quid pro quo, Clarice. Sometimes he still hears the books screaming at night.

For the moment, I shall dispense with the argument as to whether I think the kindle causes harm to traditional books (I don't, quite the opposite), or even whether I agree with the point that having all of one's texts available solely through controlled (digitally licensed) media is worrisome (I do, but note the qualifier) and deal with the above truly lulz-worthy statement.

There is a difference, and while that difference may be utterly lost on tehs intertubes, it is yet a profound difference-- between Thought and Godwin. It is one thing to genuinely examine the causes of National Socialism and how the Fascist expression thereof became the Holocaust as it happened in Nazi Germany, and to wonder if such a thing could happen Here and Now-- and if so, how it could, and why, and what factors might lead to it. It is one thing to wonder if there are not elements of our society that might not, left unchecked, lead to holocaust-like purges-- for example, the examination of American internment of Japanese people in WWII, or the worries about the treatment of contemporary Muslims and/or Arabs in light of the actions of a few. It is quite another thing to compare any random thing one doesn't like to a bloody, unilateral, government sanctioned relocation, enslavement and massacre of a race/religion. Even-- perhaps especially-- when said massacre is personally relevant to your own history. I understand the emotional resonance of invoking such a horror for... you know, whatever (even books, physical books, which are a thing that I love), but one must be judicious not only in the subject of the comparison, but also in the way in which the analogy is carried out. I don't think it is too much to ask that the analogy be... I don't know, relevant? That one not have to reach to draw parallels where what parallels there might be are so tenuous as to be completely irrelevant. Else, the discussion, when there is something important here becomes weakened, pathetic, a breeding ground for lulz. Like here. The import of the Shoah is lessened, the import of the issue the man actually wished to discuss is lessened. Houston, We have Doing It Rong.

To take that a step further and to say that calling Godwin's is Holocaust Denial is lulz of the highest order. The whole point of Godwin's Law is that petty and trivial things-- faith, anything short of wholesale slaughter or the path thereto (barring slippery slope fallacies like this one here) is probably petty and trivial by comparison. This is not Holocaust denial. It is a ridicule of someone's use of the Holocaust to validate their own point, whether that point be sketchy or valid.

And as to what I think of the point... well, that is not a matter for Dead Nazis, but rather a tl;dr.

ETA: Even better, I seem to have been banned from commenting on yon post, which makes me wish hard that I had saved my comment to post here or on Tl;dr. Cozya-- it was largely about how book replacement wasn't mandatory or otherwise being enforced by a government, so who were the great Technocratic They waging this war against the real book, citing some books that I can only get in e-format. Eh, it was probably Das Kainenchen's username (deadnazi) what did it. /sigh.

You can't have it both ways.

For those who are going to protests carrying things like this:






And touting more of this kind of crap, I have a bit of a semantics lesson for you. Please to be paying attention to the Gauleiter in the Jackboots. There's a love.

Just because National Socialism has "Socialism" somewhere in the name... well, this does not make it actually socialist. There were some things about socialism, sure, that NSDAP embraced-- community, unity, workers working solidly together for the universal betterment of their country, and putting their country before all other concerns... well yes, in theory. However, this was a Single Party System that got rid of all other parties and put a dictator in charge. That makes it fascist.

This thing you're talking about with Obama? Not fascist. Hell, George Bush wasn't actually fascist, though the post 9/11 lingo has a little bit more in common with fascism... well, with National Socialism in particular... than what is going on now. Why and how can I say this?

Because the man went away when his term was over. As will Obama. There's still multiple parties in your shiny Amerikanner guv'mint. Go figure!

At the end of it, like it or not, you may find yourself with affordable access to health care, even if you have a shit retail job. This is a leftist ideal, by the way... that the government has the obligation to provide health care to all of its citizens, regardless of who and what they are. And without radically re-defining who is and isn't a citizen either, like *koff*some people*koff* did. National Socialists are, by definition, so far to the right they make your silly republicans look like Engels supporters. We killed communists in ways Joe McCarthy only wished he could. You don't know about our anti-communism, bitches.

To say that some of us know better now would be an understatement. But I'd like you lot drawing little scrub moustaches on Obama to consider whether or not you're doing it because you have any idea of what Hitler's party stood for and can argue, in good conscience, that they have thing bloody one in common, or if you're doing it because dad gum, dem lib'rals did it to Bush and Hitler has come to represent to you lot Everything Evil Ever? Just think on it.

Though really, if you're going to use someone to represent Everything Evil Ever, I still think you'd do better going with Himmler. The sick sadistic little fuck.

i got nuttin.

Life has been short on lulz lately, I know. This is sad. There is only one solution:


Godwin Everything.


For great lolz.