Overuse of Nazi comparisons

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This seems to be common and isn't limited to the Trump apologists.

We have posters here who are sometimes anti-Trump but sometimes aligned with him, when Trump is criticized as a neo-fascist they appear to have an emotional response and take the criticism personally as though they themselves have been called a fascist or a Nazi or similar when nothing of that sort has actually been said.

Similarly, when this topic comes up many of us get drawn into arguing over claims of behaviour that we ourselves have not actually engaged in. If you're careful about how you use these labels you're not actually being accused of the behaviour and don't owe a response. The behaviour being complained about doesn't appear to occur here regularly and refusing to engage with posters who are inventing issues to distract from real issues seems like an appropriate response to ensure imagined issues don't dominate actual issues. Don't feed 'em.

Personally I know I've been quite careful over what I label as fascist and as Nazi and haven't engaged in the behaviour being discussed in this thread and therefore won't be responding further. If any poster can provide a link to a post by me demonstrating the behaviour I will respond to that claim at that time. Failing that, you guys can keep beating this dead, imaginary horse until your heart's content.

We don't need to compare something to Nazism to condemn it as evil. Plenty of evil stands on its own.

Sometimes comparisons are warranted. IE: We wonder to ourselves how the world could have let the Holocaust/Shoah happen, when we see the world ignoring ethnic genocide and injustice all the damn time. Rohingya, Uighurs, the immigrants being detained by ICE. They are not all synonymous with things like the Holocaust, but making the reference forces people to realize that they're right now complacent with the deaths and misery of human being like themselves and doing nothing about it.

How many of us have read about the Holocaust and wondered to ourselves which people we would have been in Germany? Would we have been silent? Would we have been fooled by the propaganda ourselves? Would we have worked counter to the regime? The vast majority of us like to think that we would have been the latter of all of these things. But are we complicit with national evil ourselves in our modern day to day lives?

At the same time, explaining why something is evil by making a comparison (this is wrong because the Nazis also did it) can lead to the reductio ad Hitlerum fallacy and cheapen things which must not be compared with the Nazis. For example, according to Thomas Clements, Nick Walker tried to compare using the disease model of Autism to proposing the final solution in Nazi Germany. That's a bunch of self-pitying nonsense that gets the debate surrounding Autism rights nowhere.

No where did I say "all" and I don't like it when people try to change my sentences. I said it was no different in liking him. That is how awful Trump is. It's too bad people can't see it and they refuse to and can't see the similarities and see how dangerous this is. And no, my opinions did not come from the media but came from me listening to his speeches and boy were they scary and frightening and then it was even more scary that people actually voted him into office and people thinking all these protests are just people having a tantrum for him winning in 2016 were deeply mistaken.

No where is it like "liking spaghetti and meatballs is no different than liking Ted Bundy" just because he liked that food. Trump can enjoy video games hypothetically but it certainly wouldn't be "liking video games is no different than liking Trump." If someone were to make that inane comment there, I would disagree with that statement and point how absurd that it. But I certainly wouldn't report that comment just because I disagree and how dare they say me liking video games is the same as liking Trump. I would probably be curios to know why they see it as the same. But I certainly wouldn't have interpreted that comment as, "Oh no, they called me Donald Trump and said I was an idiot and called me a narcissist." But hey, people will twist words. Then when you stand up and say I never said that, I said this (post your exact words you used) people think you are just doing a cop out and think you are lying. Their problem, not mine. It only becomes a problem if they manage to get the mods to harass you and become brainwashed by them. I know the mods here deal with crazy reports all the time because they didn't like a comment someone made or their opinion. I seldom report anyone here.

And also that mod agreed with my comment I wrote but told me it wasn't the time to do that yet. That seemed to imply people were in denial and people are not ready to hear that truth yet and I didn't violate any rule there but was asked anyway to not make that comparison yet.

It's interesting that official policy is to let feelings get in the way of facts if it might offend some portion of the political spectrum. Especially when that portion has often been vocal about how the facts don't care about anyone's feelings.

You have to look from a mod's perspective, they are very busy people and they volunteer here on the forum and they deal with lot of inane and petty reports from users. They may ask you to refrain from interacting with another user here, tell you not refrain from posting certain opinions. It just simply makes their jobs easier. There is a reason why many mods here always retire and then not return to this forum. A couple ones that moderated here and then retired from it have said on other forums how whiny people here are in their PMs and ranted their frustration about it.

As a user I always think "why can't they just ignore their complaint if it's not valid?" But it would be interesting to hear from a mod's perspective why they can't just ignore these complaints about other users when they hadn't violated any rule here with their comment?

Because if you ignore complaints, you get flooded with more and more of them, in more and more agressive manner and valid complaints disappear in the crowd. If you at least explain why you do nothing (e.g. why a reported post doesn't violate any rule), you get a chance not to get the same complaint from the same person again and again.
It's rather draining work but necessary to keep the place relatively peaceful.

This is something I wonder about as well. In high school, we were learning about WWII and it was very graphic and one of the toughest things to learn when it came to the Haulocaust and hearing about eugenics and genocide. You then wonder if they would have killed you as well because of your mental issues or disability.

Also we learned in History how so many people were misinformed about Hitler and Nazis so they went along with it. From my understanding, there was a lot of propaganda going around and people were told Jewish people were being rehabilitated and being taken care of. But what if, what if they knew what was actually happening to these people and they were actually being put to hard labor and being starved and not given proper clothing and not proper shelters, and were being shot and treated worse than animals and forced to jump off cliffs to their deaths, etc. would they still have voted for Hitler and his troops and still would have been proposed to this? Would they still have supported him and his troops if they all knew? The truth didn't come out until after the war ended.

So I can understand the Trump and Nazi comparison as well because we see it happening. It's like Deja vu, sure there are no death camps this time. Hopefully there is nothing too bad going on we don't know about. This is why so many people are scared and why there were celebrations around the world and in the US about Trump losing.

Another thing I wonder here is how many Jewish and other minorities voted for him only for them to find out it cost them their life or lead them to being tortured?

My only issues are that caving in to those demands only encourages more of the same; but further it's unfair to a poster who hasn't actually done or said anything wrong while rewarding a poster who is behaving unreasonably.

Bullying the mods with excessive unreasonable reports and demands of punishment or censorship should itself be an actionable behaviour once it rises to a certain level. It's not right that they be subjected to abuse and if punishing abusive, unreasonable posters drives them off I fail to see how exactly that's not a positive.

This is exactly why my attitude has always been 'if I've done wrong I'll accept the consequences but I expect unreasonable posters to be treated as unreasonable instead of being punished just to shut them up'. A complaint has to be reasonable to be actionable. A poster loudly making numerous unreasonable complaints against a poster they don't like or disagree with is just using the mods as a weapon and should never be encouraged.

I was HOPING someone would post an american gay pride flag. Glad you did not disappoint.

First of all, that's a terrible photoshop in the first one...

Most pride flags are JUST a rainbow, and do not imitate the american flag. The fact that someone went and created pictures of them does not mean they are instituted. Odds are someone made them so they could use them to make the same argument you currently are. Anyone can make a picture of anything. And yes, I disapprove of them, too. Also firefighter ones.

I have SLIGHT disapproval of most of them, because many people don't know better, and because most of them aren't LAW ENFORCEMENT. I am more critical of law enforcement doing it because they are LAW ENFORCEMENT, and SHOULD be held to a higher standard, by proxy of the authority they possess, and SHOULD know better. If you want to make your own SEPARATE flag, just like every state has their own flag, go ahead and make one.

Coincidentally, subversion of symbolism was another things nazis did. It wasn't always called a "swastika".

Being conservative does NOT make you a nazi. However, Nazis are more likely to be conservative, due to the similarities in adherence to traditionalism, and despite nazi germany's overuse of words like "social" or "people's", they were actually conservative viewpoints, manipulated to look "liberal" and "social". A box of rocks doesn't magically become a PS5 just cos you write it on the side of the box. The label is less important than the content.

What name predates swastika?

Yes, this has been obvious all along but sadly when you mention about certain ideologies people hold or talk about people being Nazis and holding those views, people throw in the word "conservative" and auto take offense. To me this is twisting words. Unless someone says "conservatives are Nazis" then do take offense since that is what they literally had said and call them out on that bigot comment.

But however, saying "most Nazis are conservative" is not bigoted and this is a truthful statement and no way does it mean "ALL conservatives are Nazis." Anyone that interprets it that way is twisting your words.

It is no coincidence seeing racist people being Trump supporters or conservative. Same as for those that use Nazi symbols in their profiles.

We live in a country where people are shot up by islamist extremists for attending a gay nightclub.

I generally find extremists of all types greatly concerning and often they're pretty violent.

The difference is that violent extremist groups don't control our government. Trump for all his problematic rhetoric is much more an unstable child than sinister dictator. Is he commanding people to jail and execute those who disagree with him. No he is not.

There's a big difference between the violent far right extremists and the 70 million people who voted for Donald Trump. If you can't tell the difference then you live in a reality different than this one.

You also live in a country where alt-right terrorists walk into a Walmart and murder a bunch of people for possibly having Mexican ancestry, where other alt-right terrorists feel entitled to drive vehicles into crowds of people who disagree with them and where other like-minded extremists just occupied their state capitol with assault rifles and later plotted to assassinate their governor with the encouragement of a president who kept telling them they needed to liberate Michigan.

No, not all Trump supporters or conservatives support terrorism or dictatorship in the name of their political ideals but don't kid yourself that those extremists are the fringe of the fringe of the fringe. They're barely the fringe of the mainstream of GOP voters these days.

Okay, I'll concede that. Just trying to demonstrate a point, here.

I have in the past, but I don't want to make a habit of it.

Actually, I prefer to have these sorts of things stay, so people can judge for themselves.
The trouble is, mods defy my royal decree to leave the offensive material as is.
"How Dare They!"

Socialism is fine until it runs out of other people's money.