I’d say this “Godwin’s Rule” (which I had never heard of) is just a subset of shifting a debate to an area guaranteed to inflame the audience. Anything to do with WW2 is generally successful, in the right countries, as will be topics related to similar major events in appropriate other parts of the world.
Another popular forum tactic is personalising things. Anybody with children will know how this works. Little Johnny has behaved badly at school and Miss Smith, the teacher, gave him detention. He comes home and says “Mummy, Miss Smith hates me”. Of course Mummy will not believe her beloved Little Johnny has been a right little sh1t at school, so she gets in her 4×4 and drives down there and gives Miss Smith a hard time 
The forum version of this is: “the mod [name] hates me”. This is why many forums have anonymous mods (usually these participate under fictitious personas, often multiple ones), or have participating members with covert mod privileges. EuroGA was set up to be much more democratic, but as with all democracy it comes at a cost
Well… when someone writes that group of people sharing some common feature (like ethnicity, religion or geographical origin) should be kept in concentration camp then it has nothing with Godwin’s law. That’s fascism/nazism by definition. And it doesn’t have anything with shifting discussion – my post was just stressing and underlining what was written in previous post. I’m sorry @JasonC but in this case you’re wrong.
“Godwin’s Law” is a way for the Right to excuse itself from scrutiny in comparison with historical precedents.
It’s similar to the expression “Virtue Signalling”. It is to disparage virtue in favour of selfishness.
MedFlyer wrote:
By obtaining VAT number they can go out of the concentration camps and work
VAT? Value added tax number? is that the number you guys use for taxation generally or as a “citizen number” which other countries have, which identifies you with the authorities for work permits e.t.c.?
I am just curious how that works as VAT to me is something totally different and something which private persons regardless of where they are from and their legal status usually are only at the paying end at the stores.
And calling refugee camps concentration camps is not really helpful either, as far as I know nobody is trying to kill them in there, but rather keep them in a place where they can be registered, fed and kept alive until the due process of their asylum process is completed or they can be released pending further action. To call this concentration camps as in WW2 or SA is not appropriate.
Emir wrote:
Well… when someone writes that group of people sharing some common feature (like ethnicity, religion or geographical origin) should be kept in concentration camp then it has nothing with Godwin’s law.
I guess the term is very badly chosen and 2ndly it has not to do with common features but with their immigration status. Bona Fide refugees should get all the help they need in accordance with international law. The rest will have to accept that there are pre-conditions to enter a country or in the case of the Schengen Area a number of countries which they do or do not fulfil. To keep immigrants at a collection point where their case can be heard and processed is a pretty standard thing and has nothing to do with racism or worse and as I said, the term concentration camp is misleading and would indeed be what Godwin describes if the intention was to use the term to inflame the discussion.
Emir wrote:Solving the problem starts with eliminating the root cause not the consequences.
Naturally. But even then you will still get the fairy tales of a land of unlimited money and what not being told to unhappy people with the goal of taking their last money and send them to their downfall. Those people should be stopped first and foremost, particularly in comparatively safe places where the only argument for leaving is an increase in economic wellbeing. And within possibilities, seeing to it that those countries finally get to a standard where leaving is not the first thing on people’s mind.
When I use the term “Virtue Signalling” it is not to disparage virtue, it is to describe people who do (possibly) virtuous things in a very public way and then make absolutely sure everybody knows about it.
This is done for their benefit, not really for the benefit of the charity/good cause. I admire the people who plod away in the background and never broadcast their good deeds.
I agree that virtue signalling is invariably a reflection of the narcissism of the individual who believes that the practice places them beyond reproach.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
And calling refugee camps concentration camps is not really helpful either, as far as I know nobody is trying to kill them in there
To be precise, there is a difference between concentration camps and extermination camps. The vast majority of nazi concentration camps were not set up for the purpose of killing people, though poor conditions lead to many deaths anyway. Btw, concentration camps are not a nazi invention, both the US and Britain had concentration camps in the 19th and 20th centuries — not to mention the Soviet GULAGs.
Caetano Veloso’s London is a lovely song for any asylum seeker who was welcomed into the UK during the period of fascist Juntas in Latin America, as Veloso was himself.
You cannot compare that.
It was the Germans who have turned the municipal administrations, down to the level of every village, and the whole apparatus of state, the railway, the police, the military, etc., into a well oiled killing machinery, an industrial level process that delivered people to their deaths. There was an exhibition in a museum in Frankfurt some years ago., showing how the perfectly organized, prussian bureaucratic machinery made sure everyone was filed, stamped, and sent away, with carefully typed eviction notices, travel documents, police handover documents, train numbers, on government typewriters, with green, yellow and blue carbon paper copies. It was the saddest thing I’d seen in my life. So, please, don’t call Greek refugee centers, or others for that matter, concentration camps.
They aren’t.
EuroFlyer wrote:
So, please, don’t call Greek refugee centers, or others for that matter, concentration camps.
I agree because I know how concentration camps look like and I wasn’t the first one to use the term. Unlike the majority of people here I’ve seen them and luckily avoided to be imprisoned in one.
