What words do you have left for events where numerous people are intentionally killed (shot, beheaded, blown up, tortured, etc) when you use brutal for this one?
There's video of people being beaten, crushed in doors, etc. That's brutal. That there's more brutal stuff out there doesn't mean it's not brutal.
We're in a thread about Nazi Germany. I think it really degrades our ability to communicate effectively when you use the same words to talk about that and 1/6.
Was the holocaust just "more brutal" than 1/6? Of course not. They're in completely different universes, and one of those things pretty much set the standard for brutal.
It's a trend that jumps out at me. People reach for the strongest adjectives by default. It seems like peoples scales just aren't calibrated.
I think the sibling comment might be onto something, maybe there was a missing word there.
People get brutally attacked on a daily basis. Genocide is a bit less common.
It's as if we have a scale from 0 to 10, where each number maps to an adjective. To me, brutal is towards the end of that scale. Everyone seems to have forgotten how to use the words on the 3 to 7 range.
I have the same reaction when I see people describe something as "extremely x". I don't often see things described as "extremely" whatever and think, "yep this person has a decent grasp on reality". This may just be something I'm sensitive to for whatever reason.