It is important to realize that all useful comparisons to the Holocaust will be made against situations that are not as dire as the Holocaust.
If there is a situation as dire as the Holocaust, then rhetoric about things being as bad as the Holocaust is no longer useful. Useful points made in a situation that horrifically dire are made with machine guns and bombs, not rhetoric. The proper time for rhetoric is well before the situation ever evolves that far.
We should therefore consider carefully whether a comparison to the Holocaust is out of line or not. Blanket judgement about such comparisons (such as the standard interpretation of "Godwin's Law") are not useful.
Yeah, that's my point. That there's a widespread convention that a thread is over once a comparison to Nazis is made because, well, where do you go from there? - and yet in this case, the comparison is factually very similar to where the Nazis were in the early 1930s, before guns and bombs became necessary. And yet we got the Holocaust and WW2 because nobody intervened back when it was "just" a surveillance state and a bunch of economically disenfranchised people looking for a scapegoat.
Actually, there have been several pretty brutal genocidal events in history that have points of comparison to the Holocaust. In no particular order, it is instructive to look at the Holodomr of Ukraine, Pol Pot, Stalin's purges, the Hutu-Tutsi conflict.
There's no sense in calling forum moderators nazis in general, which is why Godwin came about. But when considering large-scale genocide and surveillance societies, comparisons to Nazi Germany do become relevant.
There have absolutely been genocides that can be compared to the Holocaust. I probably mis-emphasized my above post.
What I mean is that statements comparing incidents to the Holocaust lack utility if the situation has escalated to the level of brutal genocide. Any sort of statement delivered with words is useless at that point, that isn't the sort of situation that you can talk yourself or somebody else out of. If you want words to have an effect, you need to use them before the situation ever escalates that far.
A house-fire can be prevented with a stern lesson about deep-frying turkeys indoors, but once that actually starts happening, your lecture is of no use. At that point, you need to call in the fire fighters.
Talking about genocides can conceivably prevent a genocide, but talk about genocides can never stop a genocide.
If there is a situation as dire as the Holocaust, then rhetoric about things being as bad as the Holocaust is no longer useful. Useful points made in a situation that horrifically dire are made with machine guns and bombs, not rhetoric. The proper time for rhetoric is well before the situation ever evolves that far.
We should therefore consider carefully whether a comparison to the Holocaust is out of line or not. Blanket judgement about such comparisons (such as the standard interpretation of "Godwin's Law") are not useful.