[271828182846]

> All the health officials in the world will shout “horse dewormer!” at you and compare you to Josef Mengele.

Well, as a German I feel obligated to recommend those officials to read up on Josef Mengele and then reconsider throwing that name around so casually.

[rory]

He means it as a metaphor for "they'll say you're extremely evil," and Mengele is the most evil scientist that's also a household name. Treating any name like it's Voldemort isn't a helpful norm for a society to uphold.

I'm pretty sure Scott is Jewish, so I imagine he's aware of Mengele's work.

[JohnWhigham]

Blame the Twitterati for the normalization of calling people "Nazis" over slight political disagreements.

[jmull]

It's a Twitter thing now, but it might be useful to understand that it predates Twitter.

E.g., "Goodwin's Law" is supposed to have been coined in 1990, and of course it was a pretty well established phenomenon to earn a coined term.

I know from first-hand experience it was happening on BBS's and newsgroups in the '80s. I would be more surprised than not if it wasn't happening before then too.

(And if you want to generalize slightly, calling someone a Nazi is simply a current way of demonizing your opponent. People have been demonizing their opponents since well before there were Nazis.)

[h2odragon]

I think we ought to re-invigorate "Philistines" as the term for "people who disagree with us even though we haven't listened to what they said". It's got a better flavor, ya'know? and the whole historical angle should appeal to the kiddies.

[jacquesm]

Usenet wants a word.