I love the typical responses
Of "If it doesn't fit into my world view it MUST be evil", or exactly the same thing the DM is accused of. I'm not in the UK, but I've read the Mail and calling in Hitleresque just doesn't seem to fit.
( BrokenCoccyx doesn't mind if you grope on, Fri 17 Jun 2011, 16:16, 2 replies)

The Mail is a mouthy, ignorant twat.
Politics aside some of the stories are, pretty much, "YOU PAID FOR THIS PEDOS SKY TV!!!!" -- when they mean that a person accused of deliberately downloading a cartoon of a child being sexually abused was housed in a open prison with some access TV.
(Me, I'm not... in any way intoxicated, Fri 17 Jun 2011, 18:30, closed)

The point is, many of the proferred alternatives have a leaning far to the other direction
I've seen such silliness as you describe in many news sources. That is why you check a few or you begin to see the world as "those fecking Nazis" or "those fecking commies".

Which in hindsight is a bad example because both commies and nazzies were socialist, the only difference being that one wanted it universal and other just for that country. Not really right v. left is it?
( BrokenCoccyx doesn't mind if you grope on, Fri 17 Jun 2011, 20:34, closed)

I tend to agree on the right vs left thingy.
But The Daily Fail isn't just one side's political views -- it's a hate-filled diatribe against anything they think the lowest common denominator will dislike.
As I mentioned below -- try The Grauniad (liberal, apparently), The Torygraph (capitalist pigdogs) or The Independent (have something to prove) and argue over, discuss and research their stories. The Mail is not a newspaper it is a hate-filled comic -- in darker moments I understand their point about some things, but even then they miss the point.
(Me, I'm not... in any way intoxicated, Fri 17 Jun 2011, 21:10, closed)

How? how the buggering fuck are communists and Nazis the same?
You can't come out with a claim that the "Nazi's were socialists" and expect it to pass without remark surely? And the remark is "Bollocks were they". Defend your position if you honestly feel that you can.

Even a minuscule acquaintance with history would prevent you from making such facile, shoot from the lip statements. Just because they had the word socialist in the name is not a sufficient reason to conclude that Hitler shared any beliefs with Marx. Who do you think the Brownshirts were engaged in street fighting with throughout the period prior to 1933.

It's perhaps fair to claim both ended up as examples of totalitarian states but Germany got there by a quite different route than did the USSR

(I don't actually believe the majority of communist governments were in any meaningful sense of the word socialist either. Given that they sprang from an avowedly left wing position and further given that virtually all state sized communist states have ended up totalitarian, it may be plausible to conclude that all unmodulated socialist projects collapse under the weight of human nature. Beside the point rather but felt it should be mentioned in passing)
(unclestinky, Sun 19 Jun 2011, 12:42, closed)

For fuck's sake.
Socialist means that the products of labour go to society -- it has fuck all to do with anything else.
You can still be a racist, genocidal, power-crazed dictator and be a socialist running a socialist country.
You can't characterise a regime by using a quick soundbite, the politics of governments are complex and the terms used to describe them mean contradicting things depending on context as well as the leanings of the person doing the discussing -- not to mention that a particular policy could seem to be from a different doctrine to the rest.
Don't even get me started on the right-versus left bollocks.
(Me, I'm not... in any way intoxicated, Mon 20 Jun 2011, 0:58, closed)

I agree with the loss of distinction beween left and right
But would suggest that is a much more recent development caused by a very large number of factors. In the early 1900s, at the birth of Facism and growth into mass movement of communism, they were in very many ways utterly in opposition.

At the very basic level the similarities which do exist can serve to mask this to an extent. Certainly both were in favour of single party states, in which all power and material would be used for and by the state, (but in different ways, I would suggest). Also true is the fact that both movements were hostile to opposition, either as idea or physical entity. Other things which seem to unite them can be found, an anti-clericalism is in both and both were, in different ways, opposed to capitalism. Nevertheless there is, or at least was in the inception of each, an extremely important difference. Communism was intended as an egalitarian method of running society, one in which the fruits of the labour of the proletariat was shared amongst everybody. (Forget how it actually worked out in the event, I have already conceded the point that both ended up as profoundlt illiberal totalitarian states.)

Fascism, on the other hand, was intrinsically hierarchically inclined. Under Hitler different cultures and races were rated according to their closeness to the "Aryan" ideal and if found wanting considered to be subhuman. Well we all know how that worked out. It was also expansionist, lauded the martial "virtues" expressed in war and believed in the decay of the current system into decadence and weakness.

Again I stress the point that both systems ended up perpetrating monstrous injustices but the fundamental basis of Nazi Fascism was essentially an atrocious anti-humanism. Certainly under Hitler it was more or less designed that way and exacerbated by the "working towards the Führer" concept of government. The roots of communist thought, on the other hand, lie in a basically idealistic view of human potential.

As an aside Socialism is the belief that the material wealth produced by society be shared equally amongst the people, which is quite different from the notion of an abstract return of the products of labour to a nebulous "society".

I don't claim it ever worked out that way in anything larger than a small hippie type commune but again it's not what happened but what was intended which defines the differences. Where both fall into error is in the idea of an either perfectible or changeable humanity, designing policies toward which people should modulate their behaviour, rather than accepting the fundamentally conservative (small c) pattern of behaviour exhibited by the majority of humanity and trying to run things with a pragmatic stance.

en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=working+towards+the+fuhrer&button=
(unclestinky, Mon 20 Jun 2011, 21:39, closed)

Wow, I wish I'd studied politics or history.
My point is more that, at present at least, Socialism is pretty much the oposite of Capitalism -- so in today's vernacular Hitler really was "a Socialist".
As to Left and Right -- I'd argue that the terms confuse (in its original sense) financial and humanitarian (for want of a better word) considerations. Good example of what I mean being Stalin -- who used "far Right" methods to try to create a "Left Wing" society.
I suppose the real way to characterise both Hitler and Stalin (as a canonical example) is Fascist.
(Me, I'm not... in any way intoxicated, Tue 21 Jun 2011, 17:32, closed)

So, you're complaining about a factually accurate headline?
NONCE!
( stuj (^(^;;^)^) GO TEAM SPIDERS!(^(^;;^)^), Sat 18 Jun 2011, 8:22, closed)

It's been compared to Mein Kampf because it consists of uninformed, factually incorrect ranting spewed out purely to incite hatred and hysteria.
And yet when non-white non-Christian authors put out similar publications, they're branded as terrorists. Funny old world, eh?
( The Mock TurtIe ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Sat 18 Jun 2011, 20:38, closed)