Dumb people moments

[xvimbi]

I'm actually kind of surprised I hadn't heard of Godwin's Law until just recently.

The concept has been around since the old Greek philosphers for the first time really worked out debating strategies.

Politicians use it all the time (well, all they do is debating). It is dangerous of course, because one can easily overreach. Many politicians have had to step down after making "Godwin" statements, particularly when it comes to mentioning Hitler and the Nazis and making comparisons between Hitler and current politicians. For many of them, such statements indeed end their careers, just as they end Internet discussions. The tricky thing about globalisation is that pretty much any statement that includes personal aspects (such as remarks about race, sex, religion, Mozart, etc.) has the potential to be a Godwin statement as there is always someone who is offended.

[willcowskitz]

"Godwin's law" in more general form would state that the longer a discussion is going on, the more probable it is that one of the sides participating in it will make vague accusations that derive from their frustration to rationalize their thoughts and therefore being (emotionally) driven to try create weak associations to something that is in certain detail similar to the debatable subject, and also trivially complete and factionised (as in categorised to be acceptable or not (everyone knows Hitler was evil, etc.)).

Hitler can be brought in as a generic example of an ideology suggesting that superficial characteristics (such as race) define a person and his "human value", at the same time showing how destructive this ideology can be (creating the weak association from this ideology to Hitler's psychopathic character).

In this thread, Person A was categorising people roughly as "dumb" and "clever", and putting them in their dedicated lockers in the society by this label they carry.

Person B argued that these mentioned lockers are not for those labelled "dumb" and explained that the lockers for the dumb are sort of outside the society in the sense that they do not affect it's functioning in any way - they are not jobs that NEED TO BE DONE, they are jobs that are created to fulfill the dumb people's NEED TO DO.

Person C interpreted this clarification as "nazi-like", saying that what the above explanation implies is that these dumb people doing worthless jobs do not feed the machinery and therefore are useless and don't have purpose for their lives.

Person D interpreted this interpretation as "nazi-like"-like, because concluding "people who do not work for this machinery don't deserve to live" was hypocritical with the original accusation.


In brief: two vague, weakly associated nazi-accusations concluded participants of both sides "nazi-like", destroying the weight/value of the nazi-analogy. That is what happens when people with different views or values crash and instead of trying to profoundly explain them they bring in readily baked examples like the devil reading a Bible.

[xvimbi]

... like the devil reading a Bible.

Willcowskitz, I love your posts! Honestly! Keep using those sines and cosines; reading your contributions is well worth the effort!

[willcowskitz]

Thank you for the kind words, my heart is glad.  

[eugene_oneg]

Whow! this thread really shifted from talking about "dumb people moments" which was entertaining and funny to "dumb people moments" online.

 

[Swan]

Why does everything have to be dumbed down, pardon the pun?

I am totally against the idea of 'everything' being dumbed down.  I am for threads with the word "dumb" in it to remain 'dumb'.

 I know you didn't specifically refer to me, but this forum became serious and political long before I got to it.

Exactly.  I wasn't referring to you Robert.   In fact, I gave up reading most of this thread when I realised it was no longer about 'dumb people moments' - including your posts.   As I continued to scroll down ... and down ... and down... I got irritated, hence my generous use of the 'angry' smiley, which was quite exciting for me as I don't think I've felt the opportunity to use the 'angry' smiley before.  And seeing this was a 'dumb people moments' thread, I thought it was appropriate to be 'dumb'  and use lots of them!  

the public is largely uninformed about very important life and death issues.

My point was that THIS thread was not meant to be a life and death issue.  To use your own reasoning, only in reverse, "Why does EVERYTHING have to be a life and death issue?"  Why can't kids - or like minded adults for that matter - have a tiny part of this forum's space to be 'kids', and have their "dumb people moment's' topic without it turning into a lecture on morals or politics?

you can voice your opinion

Thank you Robert.  That's why I felt perfectly free to do so.

Get over it.  

I was never entirely 'under' it to begin with.  

My dumb moment?  Telling others they shouldn't be telling others what to do when I've just told those people telling others what to do what to do!!!!!

Yes it is very difficult on a forum to tell when someone is being facetious.   (I was hoping the smileys would give a kind of hint though.... )

Anyway ... my post is probably irrelevant now, cause I took so long before coming here again...



( I don't get to use the crying smiley much either ....)