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from the will-provide-tattoos-for-right-applicant dept.
Seems someone got the whole thing seriously wrong, but evidently there was a casting call for actors for a Cadillac commercial that was looking for "alt-right" or "neo-nazi" types.
Cadillac caused a stir this week when a casting service put out a request on behalf of the American luxury brand looking to fill the role of an "alt-right (neo-Nazi)" in a new commercial. Cadillac denied it had ever authorized the notice and condemned it, while the casting company took responsibility, saying that it had been issued by mistake. Regardless of who did what, the idea had to have been hatched somewhere and by someone, which reveals something far more troubling than a mere streak of poor taste and even poorer judgement in corporate America: the marketability and mainstreaming of an alt-right population, or those "identified variously with anti-globalist and anti-immigrant stances, cartoon frogs, white nationalists, pick-up artists, anti-Semites, and a rising tide of right-wing populism," as Tablet contributor Jacob Siegel wrote in a profile of Paul Gottfried, the alt-right's "godfather."
Hmm, maybe now that the "alt-right" has become just another marketing demographic, we do not have to worry about them taking over the country? I mean, who buys Cadillacs as a status symbol anymore? Not like they are your father's Oldsmobile. Except that, really, it was your father's Olds. So that brand no longer exists. Are we at the point where we can say, "Brietbart: it's not your grandpa's fascism!"? Except, really, maybe it is?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @04:42AM
It is a logical fallacy.
Interesting thing about logical fallacies: they are not always fallacies! We take for an example the Slippery Slope Fallacy. Sometimes a slight change will not lead to an irreversable slide into Armaggedon. But sometimes it does, as if when a society allows that some racist views are worth marketing to: almost always ends up with the country in ruins and der Trumpter eating a bullet in an undisclosed location. And the "ad hominem", often brought up here; but an "appeal to the person" is only a fallacy if facts about the person making the argument are not relevant to the argument being made. When the argument is whether these people are, or are not, actual Nazis, personal facts about them are in fact pertinent.
So, the reduction to Hitler is only a fallacy when the person/party/social movement it is being applied to is not Hitler, or by extention, fascist. This, of course, it what is in dispute, so to argue that alt-right is clearly not Nazi is to beg the question, in the correct usage of the phrase [begthequestion.info], and to argue that Reductio ad Naziarium is a fallacy is a blatant example of the Fallacy Fallacy. [wikipedia.org]