Kind of amazed this was let on the front page of HN. I've seen so many political posts sunk to the abyss the past few weeks.
(which is the original sense of the word and which, as everyone here hopefully knows, predates computers, and btw didn't originally have to do with breaking into closed systems)
Pro-democracy and anti-democracy is another axis entirely.
Both are political comparisons, but they are not the same thing.
The implication of the article is that we will only discover whether the current government is authoritarian based on how it handles social resistance.
Now flagged and nowhere near the front page.
This is the same thing done by everyone from radio jockeys dealing with callers, to TV shows.
The fundamental tool is the ban, because the only real power for site owners is silence.
Any principled stand will be riddled with exceptions in under a few days of operation. I’ve seen this repeated in multiple free speech communities, like clockwork.
Id very much like to see a principled stand which isn’t reducible to “free speech = speech exceptions I can tolerate.”
Most people can’t and don’t want to live in 4chan (8chan ?)
If you're constantly comparing people to some group, you can't talk about that group without being suspected of dogwhistles. Which forecloses discussions that otherwise could have been interesting.
When you look back at how the world received Hitler before he became the Hitler we know, you see publications like the NYT musing that Hitler really doesn't mean anything he's saying about the Jews, and when he comes to power he will temper himself [1]:
So violent are Hitler’s fulminations against the Jews that a number of prominent Jewish citizens are reported to have sought safe asylums in the Bavarian highlands, easily reached by fast motor cars, whence they could hurry their women and children when forewarned of an anti-Semitic St. Bartholomew’s night.
But several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.
Sometimes they are close enough but different that the similarities strike normal people. Except when they bring it up, the defense is “no actually the Nazis we’re specifically doing XYZ. This isn’t the same. Which shuts down conversation about both - the actions being similar or identical.
But this is the value of rhetoric.
I think you could invoke Godwin's law but it was seen as childish, not political.