Sheer pig ignorance and it makes me livid that there are adults stupid enough to casually compare this to the Third Reich
It's not CA specific. It's pretty much rampant on SM.
Zero mph-Godwin at the speed of light. "They are literally fascist/Hitler" has become a way to say "I disagree".
Maybe it's partly because we are so far from the war now. My grandfather fought in it, my mother born in it, I grew up hearing about it. It was real and its shadow was long.
But shadows grow lighter the longer they have to stretch. And perhaps it has stopped having enough weight as an event for a lot people these days, who are far removed from it. So it has been reduced to a sort of "top that motherfucker !" retort, put in place to stymie discussion, examining of arguments and debate.
I feel like things are going in reverse. It used to be that when we were children that was the time to divvy the world up into goodies (always right) and baddies (always wrong). It made things easier for a young mind. Don't worry about the point to hand. Just check the stripe of the team and decide who is right, or wrong on that basis. But we were AFAIR expected to expand upon that rather blunt tool once we got older.
Maybe we didn't do enough to sharpen our tool, and what we see now are the sprouting seeds that were sown by our own apathy ?
Or maybe because the internet can bring everything to our sofa we don't bother so much with placing what we see on a small screen into real scale with the real world ?
I'd read about WWII. My grandparents talked about it lots. My parents too, not least because my father was in the military and we had to watch a never ending WWII history programme on our telly every Sunday without fail. But I didn't really comprehend the scale and human cost till I stood in a cemetery near the river Khwae and from nowhere all these really shocked tears came out of me.
We can't drag people to the physical remains of what Nazism meant and what it cost so many nations. But without that contact with scale, I think only a shrinking proportion of the population will really understand why we can't afford it to be reduced to an ad hom in a SM row that you want to score cheap points in.
I dunno. I worry about DS. He's coming up for 17 and in these parts fascists and lovers of Il Duce are real and in some cases actually related to him. So he has some grounded sense of what it means in real terms. But realistically he spends more time being exposed to Anglophone SM than Italian real world when it comes to the bandying around of "literally Hitler !". So maybe I should start thinking about somewhere I can take him, so he can absorb the extent and meaning of what the words he hears actually mean one human level.
(Apologies, was only going to write a short comment, but went massively off at a tangent)