Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

The totalitarian impulse is always and everywhere the same.

The sadism comes first;

then the choice of a victim group;

then the choice or invention of a pseudo-philosophy;

then the creation or co-optation of an institution--a political party or religious sect--through which to act it out.

The local and topical differences are not significant.

Wow, I got 77% first try! Do I get a cookie?

Interesting time we are going into. Every political pervert that would normally be confined to collecting Nazi memorabilia in isolation now can have global exposure to like-minds over the Internet.

I, for one, think this is a good thing. Let's get them out into the open where we can see them. Then sterlize them. (Just kidding.)

Dude, I got 92%. --I'm not necessarily going to trumpet it from the rooftops, but I guess I snagged my merit badge in calling Godwin's?

(It's a question of style: certain tics of rhetoric seem out of time and place, for the one, or the other. [Of course.] Also: watch for the where.)

77%, but I tried hard. The Nazis really weren't that exceptional -- save in their pseudoscientific thoroughness. We could yet outdo them.

I got 92% -- I missed this one, attributing it to the Nazis: "I've been fond of transfer of these subhuman[s] for a while. Perhaps something more like targeted genocide... will become necessary."

Of course, I should have got even this one correct, because "genocide" is a neologism which post-dates World War II.

I don't know how any normal person can read LGF for very long without getting sick. I guess I'm just too sensitive.

I got 77%, but what I found more interesting is that all my errors were where I attributed something hideous to the Nazis that really *had* been made the little green ballers.

77% here. Actually genocide was coined to describe what the Turks did to the Armenians during and just after WWI. Still the Nazis never would let themselved get caught using the word. Dead give aways are "country of their own" means little Green footballs, transfer means little green footballs, both because they refer to Palistinians. Screaming press means little green footballs (by *late* German fascism the press was no longer screaming).

Without those clues, I would guess right 50% of the time.
The fact is that the late German fascism quotes are from the times when the Nazis revealed their true colors so no cheating there. I haven't done Gore and the Unabomber but I'm sure Kaczinski said something sane from time to time (nobodies perfect)

This whole exercise is a violation of Godwin's Law.

Methinks you weren't trying very hard, Brad. I got a 92 percent, and I think I've visited the odious LGF (er, Little Green Footballs) site on one occasion. That said, it's an instructive comparison. Wonder if InstaDildo will link to this one?

DeLong

You might not also be very good at division:

9/14 = .642+
8/14 = .571+

How could you possibly get 62%?

Uh Oh

100%! I rule! OK, it's all a matter of being sensitive to stylistic quirks that give away the era.

This doesn't violate Godwin's Law, it validates it (does it still apply if the probability of the thread involving Nazis is already 1 when it starts, since it is about Nazis?)

From a fan:

Eh, as you've noted before, your readership is a strict subset of Atrios'. So why post echoes? (If you're commenting on something he said, fine, but otherwise why relink? Or at least you should tip the hat for the link)

92%. It's easy to differentiate between them most of the time. Anything with a reference to "statehood" is from Little Green Footballs, for example. The writing style also tends to be quite different.

Wikipedia claims (and the OED backs it up -- no link, 'cause it's a pay-only service) that [t]he word genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, in 1944, from the roots genos (Greek for family, tribe or race) and -cide (Latin for killing).

Huh, no italics or links allowed. The Wikipedia citation is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide

Prof DeLong had this topic up about 2 hours before Atrios did.

Godwin's law was abolished by me months ago. There was an error in the proof, but I don't need to bother you non-mathematicians with it.

It's sort of like proving Fermat's last theorem -- everyone tries, and every once and awhile it seems that someone succeeded, but an error always shows up.

Alan,
"Prof DeLong had this topic up about 2 hours before Atrios did."
LOL ! Do the math...
DeLong (Berkely, CA)
Atrios (Philadelhpia, PA)

Oops,
Berkeley
Philadelphia

ch2:
Delong: 4:39 pm (7:39 EST)

Atrios 9:03 pm

So you are getting on about 120 vs 90 mins?

100% for me!!! Just bragging.

I got 92% as well. Thing is, I've never read LGF (either of them). My high score is currently scaring me - I think I've been reading Dave Neiwert a tad too often.

> This whole exercise is a violation of Godwin's Law.

Actually, no, it's a scientific proof of Godwin's Law, right down to the codecil that 'calling Godwin' does not show that one has won the argument.

I can draw you a graph if you like.

Ah, the Nazi alibi is alive and well.

What everyone misses here is that the Nazis (both Germans and Austrians) could have never carried out the extermination of the Jews without the almost complete co-operation of occupied Europe - a Europe which was not only guided by a virulently anti-Semitic church and many centuries of virulent Jew-hatred, but had in many cases (e.g. Hungary, Poland, Lithuania) instituted anti-Jewish legislation in the 1930s every bit as barbaric as the Nuremberg laws. Some examples:

1) Lithuania: Over 90% (200,000 Jews) of the Jewish population murdered in a few months not by Nazis but by local groups after exhortations by local Roman Catholic officials. The favored method of extermination was machine-gunning into open pits following which the joyful executioners famously celebrated their 'victories' in riotous parties at local inns.

2) Holland: Over 75% (100,000 Jews) of the Jewish population rounded up and shipped to Auschwitz (where they were subsequently murdered) by an enthusiastic local police force following direct orders from Dutch officials. Virtually all Jewish property was subsequently stolen both by the state and private citizens, very little of which has to this day been returned.

3) Poland: Over 99% (3,000,000 Jews) of the Jewish population residing in Poland in 1939 (a few hundred thousand had fled to the Soviet Union) murdered by the Nazis. In virtually all cases Jews were betrayed to the Germans and Austrians by their gentile neighbors, sometimes for something as little as a suit, often for nothing. All Jewish property was subsequently stolen by local Poles - none has been returned. It should be added that despite the fact that Poles themselves were marked for death (albeit by hard labor), they hated the Jews far more than they hated the Germans and Austrians. Indeed, a favorite expression in Poland at that time said everything that needs to be said on the subject: "When Hitler dies," they said, "we will go to his grave to spit on it. We will then return to bring him flowers for helping us get rid of the Jews." Virtually no effort was ever made by the Polish resistance to assist their Jewish fellow citizens: of the money sent from the exiled government in London only 1% was allocated to assist Jews; documents still exist which the resistance sent to London suggesting in no uncertain terms that Polish gentiles would never accept the return of any Jewish survivors. The relatively few Jewish survivors who did return post-war from the Soviet Union were either subjected to pogroms and anti-Semitic rioting. Virtually no Jews now live in Poland.

4) France: Following pleas to the German occupying forces and Vichy officials by the official French national railway company who saw an opportunity to make substantial sums of money, over 25% of French Jewish citizens and others (around 80,000 Jews) were rounded up by the French police and shipped to Auschwitz on railroad trucks owned by the said company. Nazi officials later commended the enthusiasm and thoroughness of the French police. It should be noted that the Gestapo specifically asked that Jewish children be exempted from the roundups. They were overruled by Petain who infamously wrote on his orders to the police, 'Les enfants aussi!'

5) Romania: Over 420,000 Jews murdered mainly by Romanians using the most brutal methods imaginable. So efficient were these Romanians that: "There were also instances when the Germans actually had to step in to restrain and slow down the pace of the Romanian measures. At such times the Romanians were moving too fast for the German bureaucracy." (The Destruction of the European Jews, pg. 759)

One should not neglect the role of the Allies (who fought a war not because of but in spite of the Jews) in the Holocaust, from their utterly shameful record regarding Jewish immigration to their almost total refusal to lift a finger, or even speak publicly about, the ongoing genocide. Their contempt for the drowning Jews of Europe was displayed in their abject refusal to spare even one bomber to destroy the railway tracks to Auschwitz; a refusal which led directly to the murder of over 600,000 Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz in just a few weeks in 1944.

Promoted by an otherwise unlikely alliance of Jew-haters from both the mainstream political left and extreme right in the West together with many Moslem extremists, one of the chief goals of the new anti-Semitism is to assuage and ultimately eliminate the understandable guilt felt by Western gentiles for the Holocaust. As they attempt to demonize and Nazify Israel and the Jewish people, they are able to say to themselves: "See, they are every bit as bad as, if not much worse than, us. How dare they talk to us about genocide!"

It is impossible to impose any logic on this situation as anti-Semitism itself is irrational. There is utterly no point in demonstrating that a comparison between Israeli Arabs and Jews living in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s is barking mad. There is little point mentioning that in the long, sad history of Jew-hatred, no comparison has been more odious and evil. Likewise, one would be wasting one's breath if one pointed out that any comparison between a few absurd people sounding off on an anonymous forum on the internet and the calculated and cold-blooded genocidal ideologies espoused sixty years ago by European gentiles and their churches and goverments, and today, by mainstream Arab organizations and newspapers throughout the Middle East is ludicrous. No, in the same way decent people could never in a million years have got through to a Hitler, a Goebbels, or a Stalin, the political bankruptcy of so many in the West is much too far gone to disabuse them of their utterly twisted and really quite wicked world view.

I suppose that after two thousand years of indoctrination, it was much too much to expect that the genocide of the Jews on the continent of Europe would have finally put paid to the longest hatred. Less than sixty years after the end of World War II, the gloves are off, and we are under threat yet again. It really does make me wonder whether the malignant cancer of Jew-hatred which lies at the very heart of gentile society in the West can ever be expunged.

Rob, I stand corrected. I thought you had not been aware that Atrios was on the East Coast. I wasn't arguing 90 vs 120 minutes, I thought I had been arguing 2 hours earlier vs 1 hour later.

Lithuania: Over 90% (200,000 Jews) of the Jewish population murdered in a few months not by Nazis but by local groups after exhortations by local Roman Catholic officials.

Completely absurd. There were big Lithuanian-led pogroms in 1941, and Lithuanians helped the Nazis persecute and kill Jews in many places in Eastern Europe, but most Lithuanian Jews died at the hands of Einsatzgruppen A and the SS.

Amazing. I got a 69% which is not high given that some of the collateral language really gives away a number of the answers.

"This whole exercise is a violation of Godwin's Law."

No, it is a fulfilment of it. Godwin's Law is misquoted more often than almost any other Internet "law"; there's nothing in it about winning or losing argument. It states merely that the probability of an argument's eventually bringing up Hitler approaches one. (On rec.arts.sf.written substitute "Heinlein" and "gun control" for "Hitler".) This has happened.

As for Mr. DeLong's audience being a subset of Atrios's: not true in my case. I believe that DeLong is intelligent and articulate, while Atrios is the political equivalent of a Slashdot editor: post an item, add a paragraph of sarcastic comment, and let everyone chatter away about it.

I also got a 77%, the most common score it seems.

Actually I heard Charles Johnson thought everything was by the Nazis, and expressed outrage when he found out what kind of filth was being posted to his well-policed comments section.

Subject: Terror alert in France

In light of the Madrid bombing, France has raised their terror alert level from:
"RUN" to "HIDE".

The only two higher levels in France are:
"COLLABORATE" and "SURRENDER".

UPDATE: Geocities couldn't handle the traffic so I've taken up Dr. Menlo on his very kind offer to host the LGF Quiz here: http://www.drmenlo.com/lgfquiz/

Pooh: there are some counter-examples, such as Finland, Denmark, and Italy. It wasn't EVERYONE in Europe.

85%. Manfred's right, it's about paying attention to the cues in the language. I wonder what my excuse will be for not getting 100%?

great sites, well done