Tag Archives: Godwins Law

Boris Goes Full Godwin

Posted on May 15, 2016 by Tim Hall

Boris Johnson has gone full Godwin. More evidence, if any were needed, that Boris is an utterly cynical charlatan who says things he doesn’t even believe, and is willing to sacrifice the future of the nation to further his own short-term political ambitions. He cares far more about becoming Prime Minister that whether or not Britain leaves the European Union.

I hope a critical mass of the British public is smart enough to see through him.

And no, Leftists, this doesn’t let Ken Livingstone off the hook on anti-Semitism. Both Boris and Ken have been using classic internet troll tactics, saying something which is technically factually correct but ripped so far out of historical context it’s a dog-whistle for a far bigger lie. Hitler neither wanted to create a European equivalent of the United States nor cared about the future of Germany’s Jews “before he went mad”. To assign the same motives as Adolf Hitler to either the EU or to Israel is utterly grotesque, and it shouldn’t be necessary to have to explain why.

Posted in Religion and Politics | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Iain Duncan-Smith trying to stick the knife into George Osborne is a bit like Albert Speer at Nuremberg. It won’t wash; Speer still got sent down for 20 years.

Posted on March 18, 2016 by Tim Hall | Comments Off

Froxfield – A Near Miss

Posted on March 15, 2015 by Tim Hall

From the Rail Accident Investigation preliminary report when a heavily loaded HST struck debris on the track, and came very close to derailment at 95 mph.

The bridge parapet had originally been struck at about 17:20 hrs by a reversing articulated lorry. The lorry driver had turned off the A4 at a junction just north of the railway bridge, and crossed over the railway before encountering a canal bridge 40 metres further on which he considered to be too narrow for his vehicle. A pair of road signs located just south of the A4 junction warn vehicle drivers of a hump back bridge and double bends but there were no weight or width restriction signs. The lorry driver stopped before the canal bridge and attempted to reverse round a bend and back over the railway bridge without assistance, and was unaware when the rear of his trailer first made contact with, and then toppled, the brick parapet on the east side of the railway bridge. The entire parapet, weighing around 13 tonnes, fell onto the railway, obstructing both tracks

This was the same type of train travelling at the same speed as in the 2004 Ufton Nervet crash in which the train driver and five passengers died. What happened at Froxfield was a narrow escape from what could have been a similar disaster.

It was predictable but disappointing that lorry drivers on a forum I won’t name were keen to shout down any criticism of the driver. If you suggested that someone who recklessly endangered several hundred lives be prosecuted, you were compared with Hitler.

I can understand it’s human nature to want to circle the wagons in situations like this, but when the safety of the public is at stake the idea that “armchair critics” must not comment on “professional issues” is dangerous bullshit. As the saying goes, you don’t need to be a chicken to know when the egg is rotten.

The professionalism (or lack of such) of the road haulage industry is the business of everyone who shares a transport environment with them. Don’t let anyone persuade you otherwise.

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Godwin Strikes Again

Posted on September 29, 2013 by Tim Hall

It’s Godwin’s Law season again. Here is AIG’s CEO Robert Benmosche spouting the sort of nonsense that reminds me of the pre-revolution French aristocracy.

“It’s a war,” Schwarzman said of the struggle with the administration over increasing taxes on private-equity firms. “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

I was in an off-the-record meeting with top Wall Street folks where similar comparisons to Nazi Germany were tossed around. It really was a meme on Wall Street that the singling out of the wealthy for criticism — and, more to the point, taxation — had a direct historical precedent in Nazi Germany, where the Jews were first demonized, then taxed, and then, well, you know. The sense was that the rich in general, and Wall Street in particular, weren’t just being criticized, but that they were being turned into a dangerously despised minority.

Robert Benmosche, if you want World War II comparisons for the pushback against the elites, how about the Normandy landings? With you in the role of the occupying Germans?

Meanwhile, back on this side of the Atlantic, up pops David Blunkett to remind me why I don’t vote Labour

Drawing a parallel with Germany before the rise of the Nazis, he suggested a loose moral climate had fed the paranoia and fear that had allowed Adolf Hitler to flourish.

“In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Berlin came as near as dammit to Sodom and Gomorrah. There was a disintegration of what you might call any kind of social order.

“People fed on that – they fed people’s fears of it. They encouraged their paranoia. They developed hate about people who had differences, who were minorities.

I’m going to propose a corrollary to Godwin’s Law. “Anyone who makes totally inappropriate comparisons with Nazi Germany is closer to the Nazis than their opponents“

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