• Rentlar@lemmy.ca
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    23 hours ago

    I laughed out loud at this.

    An alternate opinion column could be: “One time, Adolf was an aspiring artist. Winston on the other hand, had rich parents, just like Osama Bin Laden.”

    • pandapoo@sh.itjust.works
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      21 hours ago

      Winston Churchill was a genuinely awful human being and a war criminal prior to WWII.

      He lucked out by also being a moderately competent wartime leader, who gets to be juxtaposed against Hitler for eternity.

      Also, Brett Stephens is a bed bug and has a terrible track record of properly handling public backlash to his writing. I hope dark days are ahead for him.

      • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
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        21 hours ago

        Yeah I know he’s not an angel and is in the example specifically due to the juxtaposition.

        I understand someone brings this up everytime Churchill is mentioned in a good light, so out of curiosity: who would be a better comparable figurehead? Joseph? Franklin? Neville? Albert?

        • madcaesar@lemmy.world
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          9 hours ago

          Churchill is fine to use. People keep trying to go back and just shit on everything, at some point you have to just move on. He literarily helped defeat Hitler, that has to count for something.

            • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
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              6 hours ago

              I’m still waiting for you to help me find an appropriate alternative. Which ww2-era leader was not racist?

              • pandapoo@sh.itjust.works
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                6 hours ago

                Churchill wasn’t bad simply because he was a racist… I think retrograde views on race are one of the areas where it’s reasonable make allowances when judging historical figures.

                Churchill was an aristocrat and an imperialist responsible for numerous atrocities within Britain’s colonial holdings, and that’s not even going into his anti-labor beliefs and practices.

                The reason why I didn’t provide you an alternative was because your original comment never required you to mention Churchill. That was an unforced error on your part, as the comment you were responding to wasn’t an analogy to begin with.

                But if you’re deadset on needing an alternative for your unnecessary analogy, FDR is easily the best of a bad bunch.

                • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
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                  5 hours ago

                  Ok. Thank you. I will use FDR more often as a comparison to Hitler in the future, but I do stand by my original use of Chruchill as not an error and actually more apt given the context you have helpfully shared.

                  The analogy comes from the fact in a similar fashion, this guy Luigi isn’t a perfect character and has published views I don’t agree with, some quirky, some potentially harmful, and has come from a rich preppy background. Those should be less relevant when discussing what he has purpotedly accomplished, despite it being twisted to an insane degree in this article.

      • Not_mikey@slrpnk.net
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        20 hours ago

        Also, Brett Stephens is a bed bug

        Wow we’re just going to allow blatant antisemitism on here /s