Ben Stein busted for Godwin’s law violation
Godwin’s law predicts, reductio ad Hitlerum explains.
And Vox Day explains it doesn’t mean what Ben Stein thinks it means. Day and Stein ought to get together to coordinate — of course, as Twain noted, if they’d just stick to the facts, they wouldn’t need to coordinate at all.
Lacking any significant response from the movie’s creators or fan, scientists and skeptics have turned to debating who gets to kick the turkey while it’s down.
March 26, 2008 at 3:55 am
And Ben Stein used to be one of my favorite curmudgeons, too.
March 26, 2008 at 4:05 am
It’s just one more reminder (we never seem to get the point of the David & Goliath/David & Bathsheba story) that heroism is in the heroic act, and not in the person.
March 27, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Over at Dispatches, folks are discussing an interesting Hitler quote (or, rather, whether it really is a Hitler quote or not):
The quote comes from a source considered somewhat questionable as a work purely of Hitler’s: Table Talk/Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier
This quote is, at least, consistent with the evidence in the first edition of Mein Kampf that Hitler was a young earth creationist (though a later edition changed a reference to the thousands of year old earth to “millions,” though we don’t know exactly who made the change).
I think the edited page from Mein Kampf is perhaps even funnier than the above graphi though, if only because it contains on the same page that reference to the earth moving through the ether as it did “thousands” of years ago.
March 28, 2008 at 3:43 pm
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April 4, 2008 at 4:08 am
[...] often-pompous R. C. Sproul of Ligonier Ministries. Sproul had Stein in the studio to promote the mockumentary film Stein stars in, [...]
April 19, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Technically he INVOKED Godwin’s Law. Still, he lost the argument.
April 20, 2008 at 1:14 pm
No, Stein brought down the full wrath of Godwin’s law. He invoked Hitler (oddly, while allying himself with anti-semitics who disagree with Darwin, the more usual combination). By invoking Hitler, he triggered Godwin’s law, which says the longer a heated discussion goes on, the greater the probability one side will compare the other side to Hitler.
Had Stein the good sense to invoke Godwin’s law, he would have suggested to the script writers, producer, director and editors that they get all the Nazi references out of there.
April 20, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Speaking of Godwin and Nixonians, Not sure if this is where to point out Slate’s discussion of the ABC “debate”.
http://www.slate.com/id/2189464/?from=rss
Two degrees of Adolf Hitler.
Yesterday I challenged readers to do ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson one better at the guilt-by-association game. I invited the public to connect, “six degrees”-style, one or more of the remaining three major presidential candidates to der Führer und Reichskanzler himself, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945).
May 3, 2008 at 1:18 pm
[...] Stein and Godwin’s Law [...]