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Re:Avatar's green fascism by teilo on Tuesday March 09, 2010 @06:10PM (#1179648)
As far as I'm concerned, once Godwin's Law has been invoked [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwins_law], the writer has lost all credibility.
Re:Avatar's green fascism by kscaldef on Tuesday March 09, 2010 @06:29PM (#1179685)
And, as far as I'm concerned, in this case you're the one being intellectually lazy by making a knee-jerk rejection of the article on purely superficial grounds.

I don't completely buy the argument being put forward here (it certainly doesn't help their case that they at one point admit that they don't even know what "fascism" means), but it's interesting food for thought.

Re:Avatar's green fascism by teilo on Tuesday March 09, 2010 @06:40PM (#1179710)
Almost everyone who invokes Godwin's Law has a very reasoned argument why they can connect the Nazi's to Topic X, that is nevertheless fully contrived and meaningless.

I did read the article, thoroughly, and found the classic intellectual laziness associated with Godwinesque arguments. And I quote: "Sontag’s point is that the fascist sympathies and racial preoccupations that guide Reifensthal’s work for the Nazis also can be seen in her photographic work on the Nuba people in Africa. You can uncannily substitute Cameron’s name whenever Sontag mentions Reifensthal and substitute the Na’vi whenever Sontag mentions the Nuba. The entire Sontag article could just as well have been a review of Avatar."

In other words, So-and-so is a Nazi. So-and-so wrote an article. Substitute subject X for A and object Y for B, and it's practically a review of Big New Thing XY. Ergo, Big New Thing is Nazi-Fascist propaganda. QED.

Hogwash. This is an example of the same intellectual ineptitude that equates Obama with Hitler.