Nazi -- Not Nazi (warning: some graphic images)

I feel like I've been repeating myself every few months, so you'll pardon me if I don't put in quite the same effort this time around, even if this is a message that apparently needs to be repeated constantly for some of the more puerile users of this site.

My standard backgrounder for this message:

All four of my grandparents were survivors of the Holocaust, three of them the sole survivors from their own very large families. My mother's parents met in Auschwitz shortly before liberation; my father's parents met in a displaced persons camp not long after the war ended. They all eventually made their way to safety and freedom in the Milwaukee area.

And I have had more than my fair share of confrontations with contemporary Nazis, some of which I wrote about here.

So I think I'm pretty qualified to judge who and what deserve the Nazi label and who and what don't. A simple primer:

This is a Nazi:

This is not a Nazi:

These are Nazis:

This is not a Nazi:

These are Nazi images:

These are Nazi-like images:

These are things that aren't even remotely Nazi-like:

getting troll rated

people who have opinions that are different from yours (unless, of course, they actually are Nazis -- see the images above to make a proper determination)

soup

people who support Hillary Clinton

feminism

people who support Barack Obama

demanding equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities

people who think we could have done a hell of a lot better than either Clinton or Obama

It's a question of whether you have a solid grasp of reality or suffer from self-inflicted delusions, whether you're rational or hysterical, whether you have a genuine argument to make or are the rhetorical and moral equivalent of Falafel Boy and Rush Limbaugh. See, what the Nazis did was many orders of magnitude worse than having someone disagree with you, or insult you, or criticize your favored candidate on a blog. When you set Nazis and Nazism as the baseline against which to compare things that aren't even in the same universe in terms of evil, you trivialize the crimes of actual Nazis and the sufferings of their all too real victims.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, it is better to keep your hands off your keyboard and let people think you are a fool than to violate Godwin's Law and remove all doubt. There's enough foolishness in the world these days with Republicans in the White House and dominating the judiciary. This blog is supposed to be a place to help fight against that. Let's keep it that way.