We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12800643 and marked it off-topic.

Holy cow that is some black and white reasoning.

It's illegal to run entire buildings as hotels 100% of the time on AirBnB for well argued local concerns.

This has nothing to do with a fascist deciding to ethnically cleanse an entire continent.

Me thinks Reddit is leaking.

Anyway, when it comes to government, I adopt a stance I think is in-line with what Sam Altman was saying about defeating Trump: the easiest solution is to support Hilary.

The government exists and isn't going anywhere any time soon. It's easier to accept that and find ways to make it work better. Rather than sit here and think private industry should be allowed to tear it asunder and make it a clusterfuck of an organization.

Look what happened when we did the former. Went to the Moon, invented the Internet.

Look what's happened in the 30+ years since we started tearing it apart.

Echoing Spooky23's comment: "Really?" Did you really bring in Nazi Germany into a discussion on Airbnb and its practices and now illegality for short term rentals?

It was a perfectly valid analogy for the point (s)he was making (that laws aren't always just), and I see no reason to object just because the analogous subject was Nazi Germany. Making an analogy between two things is not the same as saying those two things are equivalent.

It's an analogy designed for an inappropriate level of emotional impact, rather than to clarify a relationship between two things. It's a valid analogy, but a misbalanced one.

The whole point of an analogy is to ease thinking by using something the reader is already familiar with. When your analogy brings along so much baggage, it completely fails in its task and just serves to disrupt the conversation. It may be technically valid, but it's a terrible analogy to use.

Au contraire, Hitler and the Nazis are great analogy material for exactly the reason you stated: Everyone is familiar with them, so they are the perfect stand-in for <bad people> in any analogy. I'm not sure what you mean about the baggage, but an analogy always compares specific similarities between two otherwise different things, and therefore there will always be irrelevant differences, aka "baggage". If the listener insists on highlighting these irrelevant differences, what can the speaker do? Example:

Person A: John wouldn't do anything evil like that. He has a family and kids!

Person B: Well, let's not forget that Hitler also had a family and kids.

Person A: John is not Hitler!

Person B's analogy is perfectly rational and effective. He's making the point that simply having a family and kids will not stop people from committing even the greatest evils (and therefore probably not lesser evils, either). However, Person A ignores this obvious line of reasoning, and instead focuses on a total strawman: assuming that Person B said that John === Hitler. But what could Person B have done to prevent this? Simply not using Hitler wouldn't work:

Person A: John wouldn't do anything evil like that. He has a family and kids!

Person B: Well, let's not forget that <some other bad person besides Hitler> also had a family and kids.

Person A: John is not <some other bad person besides Hitler>!

Person A is still factually correct in his final statement, yet it's still a total strawman. If he insists on employing this reasoning, then it's impossible for Person B to ever use an analogy, because an analogy always uses as its subject two different things, which are by definition not the same as each other in every single way.

Sure, it's a valid analogy, but there are better ones that could be made instead of going directly for that that don't force readers to compare the two.

What possible analogy doesn't force readers to compare two things? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12811091

And yet we need consumer protection, which means governments need to regulate markets; of course finding the highest utility is not as simple as not at all or everything.

> It was once illegal to be a Jew and own a business in Germany.

What does this have to do with protecting apartment dwellers in NYC from transients? I don't follow. We have doormen for a reason. NYC is a dangerous, large city and children, the elderly, and women should feel safe and be safe in their own apartment buildings.

Lmao

Really?

Some laws are bad, ergo all laws are bad?

... I'd get down voted further if I gave my honest opinion.