> > The pressure of Godwin's Law is starting to get unbearable.
> > Vitaliy

> Go for it =A0 =A0H H
> Gus

Godwin, eh?
Well, below for reference is the standard Godwin background.
It's not quite obvious how the proposer and the rifle loader wish to
apply it :-):

However it is, some care may wish to be applied in doing so, so that

- people are not offended unintentionally.

- people are not compared to Nazis by your insinuations, while you
appear or pretend not to mean what is insinuated.

The latter is the real reason for this response - if you start
comparing people and actions with those of thje Nazis, be it ever so
much in jest, please be utterly sure that you do so very clearly so
there is no doubt what you intend.

(If you wish to make open comparisons then by all means do so, so that
due process may be followed).
_________

Godwin's framework:

Once upon a time, oh my beloved, there lived a truly great man.
He was of somewhat delicate and artistic temperament and in other
circumstances may well have lived out his days in some simple role
such as, let us say, a painter of postcards.

Fate intervened and he became embroiled caught up in the drama of a great w=
ar.
This was in a universe far far away and long long ago and not for him
or them were the modern wonders of remote controlled impartial death.
In that far off universe war was fought with gun fist and bare hand
(shaken not stirred). Tanks had yet to be invented and when they were
it was the other guys that had them. War was largely fought from set
peace positions where high explosive was used to transform the
environment into an endless morass of mud, blood and miscellaneous
spare body parts. Men lived and died in the ooze and tunnelled beneath
it to assault each other.Nobody had much fun (except a few Australians
who turned it into a contact sport, from which evolved Ozzie rules
footy and league).

In this war our hero proved himself to be brave and selfless beyond
all reasonable measure. His assigned task was to carry messages to and
from the shell shocked frontlines. While his mates kept their heads
down our hero shuttled to and fro at vast personal risk. So dedicated
was our hero that when he was given time off he would voluntarily take
on the assignments of his fellow runners. Along the way our hero got
gassed (as one did in those days) and variously introduced to the
horrors of warfare.It also happened that he had a nearly perfectr
'photographic memory', which fact was to stand him in great stead and
also get him in great trouble along the way.

When his side lost, as happens, the victors mercilessly extracted
their pounds of flesh from the losers and bled their country dry with
reparations.

Our hero aspired to become the great white hope to lead his people
from their wilderness of ground down poverty, damaged pride and
national shame. Along the way he painted postcards, ate at soup
kitchens, slept rough and was indistinguishable from your common or
garden variety bum. Like dreamers do he wrote a long and rousing and
boring and unrealistic book about what he was going to do and how he
was going to set things right for his people.

In due course our hero, against all odds, against all sensibility, as
if in a dream, arrived at the position of power that he had aspired
to. He set out to make things right for his fellow countrymen, to
restore national pride, to give them breathing space and the respect
and honour that they truly deserved. He did truly great things. He
restored the national pride. He improved working conditions, build
holiday camps and welfare schemes for the workers, ocean liners were
built to take the workers on holiday. Factory production soared. He
built great a network of majestic high speed roads across his country
to link its far flung regions and reduce trip times greatly. That this
also improved military interior mobility as well was not wholly
irrelevant. Many and great were the things which this great man
achieved. If he had limited himself to doing well for his people, for
making his country proud and rich again for restoring his nations
place among the people his name may well have gone down in history as
one of its most famous leaders. Which happened anyway. BUT he had a
deep and dark problem. Amidst his altruism he was a hater. And as his
means of achieving beneficence and dominance he chose unremitting
violence. He preached to his faithful that the path to his goals was
to always be pummeling his opponents without mercy and without letup.
He took this rather more literally than others might. And along the
way his hate took on an embodiment. He found that he needed to
personify his opponents in the form of a group of people. If he had
learned to leave the theatre when the credits started he may have been
home by now but instead he got involved in unspeakable acts in support
of his worthy goals. He inflicted on the innocent and the uninvolved
damage in support of his cause which was not supportable by decent
standards. He made enemies of those who could have and would have been
his allies. And in the end his bullying writ large ate him up and spat
him out. He still went down in history as one of the most famous of
all leaders. But not as he might have wished.

OK.
That's the Godwin framework.
Is it relevant here ?


=A0 Russell

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