or, The Boy Who Cried Hitler.
I linked to this article earlier, so I hope I'm not overusing it, especially as it is a news-format article evidently meant to slam Dawkins (not that he doesn't deserve it). But there's another angle on it that I forgot to write about earlier.
When everything that you want to insult is insulted by being compared to Hitler, people get "Hitler fatigue" so that they automatically stop listening when something is compared to Hitler. The problem is that when something comes along that is actually like Hitler, you can't say it's like Hitler because people are sick to death of Hitler. Eugenics isn't kind of like what Hitler did, it's exactly what Hitler tried to do. Before Hitler, everyone who was a little progressive was "open-minded" about eugenics, because after all, don't you want the human race to improve? But eugenics requires breeding practices contrary to human dignity and the elimination of the unfit. As long as that was kind of abstract, people glossed over that part. But Hitler showed us in a most dramatic and gut-wrenching fashion how dreadful eugenics is in real life as opposed to castle-in-the-air fancies about human improvement.
Keep in mind he said the Hitler word first, not me.
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