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.

Station clarification.

Feeling googleicious. Today we whip out the reminders:

What is Godwin's Law?

Tell you what-- Ask Mike Godwin!

Long live Usenet.

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.

On youtube, everyone can hear you godwin.

So you've probably all seen This story, by now. But let's go forward a moment, to a video:





And some commentary that says it far, far better than I ever could:

Wanting to overhaul our completely fucked up health care system is not. the. mother. fucking. same. fucking. thing. as. Nazism.

Fucking. Hell.

You may think because World War II ended 60 years ago that your slinging the term "Nazi" around like a goddamned tether ball won't hurt anybody but, maybe, a few decrepit veterans and Holocaust survivors, who aren't paying attention, anyway. You fail to realize that the descendants of these veterans and survivors (and the descendants of the millions of non-Jews the Nazis murdered) are countless. We are part of this debate too, and we are listening to you as you pout and scream and wave your little posters. Some of us were probably even in that same hall as you when Barney Frank asked you what planet you came from. In fact, one was. Frank himself is Jewish. And if you think that misusing a term like Nazi in front of him didn't affect him, think fucking again.

Indeed. What planet are you from where you can afford to be so blisteringly ignorant about a war that is still very much affecting not only survivors and their descendants, but world politics? What planet are you from where it is acceptable to take a specific and very, very loaded term like "Nazi" and twist it to mean "someone we don't like." What gives you the right to do that with equally specific and loaded terms like "fascist" and "communist" and "Bolshevik?" (Not that I hear the last one so much, given that you probably wouldn't know how to pronounce it).

That right there? That's what I'm fucking talking about. And for those derailing the um... necessary and important conversation about health care with accusations of nazi-ism like it has shit to do with shit:





Barney Frank FTW.

Der Specialday.

So another year flies by, and it's time for the anniversary of our favorite winfail: The July 20th assassination plot!





I think tonight, I must needs rent Valkyrie and have cake.

Yeah, always have to trot out the demmed cake. I suppose it's better than the pants of assassination, huh?

All right, all right, I'm done.