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Vladimir_M comments on Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality - Less Wrong
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I defend kilobug here; It's not as bad as it looks. Each unnecessary Hitler reference is fractionally as bad as the previous, as Godwin's law is about the subject arising in the first place.
What's more, Vladmir_M referenced Hitler in an argument that something bad wouldn't be repeated until Hitler. That's not hypothetical, that references a terrible thing in the technically true rhetorical construct of "X is/was the worst thing since/until Y" where Y is/was worse than X, possibly by orders of magnitude, but the brain associates X and Y as similar regardless, in a way that is inappropriate.
kilobug only mentioned Hitler as a most extreme example of bad character, but it was clearly hypothetical. It's a cheap rhetorical move, maybe, but I think it's worse to say something is the "worst thing since.until Hitler", even if true, if that thing is orders of magnitude less bad (for several reasons), since it's not taking a hypothetical extreme case.
I think Hitler's killing program was much worse than Revolutionary France's for several reasons. First, quantitatively, hundreds of times as many innocents were killed. Second, France's was a case of willingness to convict nine innocents lest a guilty person go free, while a significant part of Germany's was gratuitous - this is a qualitative difference.
The news media love to use the "since" construction to inflame things and exaggerate importance, i.e. "This is the worst economic slowdown since the Great Depression" may mean "This economic slowdown is slightly worse than the one in the 1970's that you remember and have in your mind as a close comparable and that by all rights we should be comparing it to, also we either forgot 1937 or include it as part of the 'Great Depression'".
That's a fair point. I shouldn't have used the Nazi comparison due to its rhetorical effects that always obscure and sidetrack the concrete issue at hand.
When I wrote that, I had in mind specifically the history of Western Europe, and what a typical inhabitant of a Western European country would have seen through the centuries. If you plot the severity of atrocities that a random Western European would have had the chance to witness in his local region of residence after the Peace of Westphalia (1648), using any reasonable measure of their severity, there would definitely be sharp peaks around the time of the revolutionary/Napoleonic wars and WW2, with other peaks such as the Franco-Prussian War and even WW1 significantly lower.
But yes, I do plead guilty to rhetoric that, even if not strictly inaccurate, goes too far into the Dark Arts territory.
I don't find it rhetorical, I find it factual. If we avoid stating certain facts in order to avoid offending certain sensibilities, then we are committing an error of omission. As I see it, in this case you were not pulled from the brink of Dark Arts. Rather, you were pulled from the brink of political incorrectness. Which is not the same thing at all.
When any group is being sufficiently totalitarian in the name of lofty ideals, I support comparisons to other totalitarian groups, which may include the Nazis and the Soviets (among others). I believe that such comparisons can help us learn from history. Of course, the subject of such comparisons will always be both quantitatively and qualitatively different, but the Nazis and the Soviets provide intersubjective references points for certain political ideas gone wrong.
Of course, it could be more rhetorically pragmatic to swallow these analogies even when accurate depending on the audience.