NavList:

John Clements, you wrote:
"Godwin's law! (This thread is now officially over....)"

Not the "leap second" thread, but the portion leading away from it --specifically Tony Oz's post from earlier today-- is over, yes. And I have masked the subject of this side thread so that readers can know that it is, at minimum, off-topic and more bluntly "toxic".

For NavList members who do not realize this, Tony Oz lives in Russia, near the Bay of Finland west of St. Petersburg (apparently!). Like most Russians, he is subjected to the near-continuous barrage of anti-western propaganda generated by the Putin regime and its pervasive paranoia cult. I have left his post visible on the NavList message boards precisely so that NavList members can understand how bad things are. I would call it a "parallel" universe, but it is perpendicular to reality.

You're wrong, by the way, John, that Tony's post was an example of "Godwin's law". That applies when someone makes a simplistic analogy to Hitler as a reductio ad absurdum, sometimes euphemistically called reductio ad Hitler in a conversation when they have run out of intelligent points to make. That's not what we have here... Tony's post simply repeats the standard lines of Putinism. They see (what they believe to be) real Nazis everywhere. There's no suggestion of "analogy" to Nazis in the warped foreign policy of modern Russia. Putin and his paranoia cult ardently believe that they are battling Nazis --real Nazis, straight out of 1944, not analogous Nazis. And the great sorrow, the deep tragedy of it for Russia's "enemies" and, yes, for Russia itself, is that Putinism is fascism every bit as grotesque as Nazism.

If any of you wish to continue this "xxxx" side discussion, I suggest you email Tony Oz directly at zao@profitt.** (replace ** with the two-letter country code for Russia). You can also email me at fer@fer3.com. No further NavList posts. Thank you.

Frank Reed