Hmm, I think you are misquoting Godwin's Law here. Or rather; you are accurately quoting mutual friends of ours who were misquoting it at you !

Hmm, I think you are misquoting Godwin's Law here. Or rather; you are accurately quoting mutual friends of ours who were misquoting it at you !

(Aside: I do love your server. Really. It posts cleanly first time every time.)

Yes, I know, I'm sorry about the server. In fairness to it, I pay remarkably little for quite good service. And yes, that looks like the correct quote.

Sigh, 'the language was German' this is the kind of pedantry that gets you a bad name my friend. Still if you've got the time I'd love to hear your defence of the Patriot Act and associated bits n bobs, Guantanamo Bay and all that because I can't for the life of me work out why someone as keen on rights, liberties and freedoms as you usually are wouldn't be blowing their top about all this. Please don't tell me it's patriotism. M

Actually, while it sounds pedantic, it does have a bit of a point, Martin. Vidal's throwing a fit, and backing it up with some ridiculous filagree about "even using much of the same language." Anyone who's ever translated legal language knows that it's tough as all hell, and differs according to translator anyway. So assuming 'it uses the same language,' why is this so? Well, there's a few possibilities: (a) The language he's referring to is so standard that there's really only one way of stating it. I find this unlikely. (b) The purposes of whatever German statute he's referring to can reasonably be translated into the same text as is in the Patriot Act. This is quite likely if the sections of 'the same language' have the same general purpose. But this is sort of cheating, since it very likely isn't actually the same: it almost certainly wouldn't be the same text if translated 'blind', i.e. without knowledge of the target-language document. (c) Of course, it could be the same language. Someone in the Bush Administration might have pulled up a Nazi-era German statute (written for a civil-law system, I believe, but hey, it might work), translated the relevant bits, and stuck it into the Patriot Act. This certainly is the implication of Vidal's piece, or the impression it's meant to give you: "Bush is a Nazi." It's also ignorant--there's not good reason to lift text from a 1940's era German law, whatever you want to do. Unless you're some obscure hobbiest, it's easier to write the text from scratch. (d) Vidal's just making it up and doesn't know what he's talking about. This certainly seems most likely, but without citation, you can't really tell. The point is 'pedantic' if you've never translated a law or legal document before. Otherwise, it suggests that Vidal is 'supporting' his assertion in a way that either is offensive ("Bush is lifting text from Nazi-era laws!") or meaningless ("The text of two statutes with two similar purposes written in different languages can be similar in translation, and thus 'the same text.'") Of course, I might be missing the bit of the Patriot Act that is written in German, but otherwise it's not pedantry to point out that someone has made an emotive statement that carries no intellectual content.

OK, so the point is pedantic if *and only if* you're a lawyer. Read it as you should read everything - in a spirit intended to get the message M

*nudge*: 'LANGUAGE:....2 a : form or manner of verbal expression; specifically : STYLE' (from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary)

FC: Welcome to the site. However, I don't buy the 'language as style' argument, unless you want to say that a particular part of the Patriot Act and a particular part of some (unmentioned) German law have been written in a stylistically similar manner. And between languages, that's (a) bloody difficult, and (b) fairly pointless. And Martin, what you've just said, in so many words, is that "Vidal was making a point that had no intellectual merit, in the hope of comparing Bush to Hitler. In the meantime, because the comment had no substantial merit, it's impossible to rebut."

Um, thats not what I said. Are you being pedantic again? Anyway. Vidal's point is that the laws being passed as part of the Patriot Act are similar to those passed by the Third Reich, even to the extent of using much of the same language. Leaving aside the 'but it's German' comment we can view this in a few ways. 1) Word for word copies - obviously unlikely 2) Stylistically. Since I know nothing about Third Reich law (about as much as you?) lets imagine that Hitler passed a law called the FATHERLAND Law. In it he set out the legal apparatus of his dictatorship while using language to give the laws an air of patriotism and reassurance. 'It can't be bad, look at it's name. Only a filthy communist could oppose the Fatherland Law'. Now we have Ashcroft's Patriot Act which uses language in the same way. It may even deploy similar phrases and rhetoric to similar ends. It could then be considered to be 'using much of the same language'. Since I know full well you're a sensible guy who understands semantics I can only assume you're misreading all this deliberately. ps : The Patriot Act sounded kind of ok, but do you think Patriot II sounds like a missle?

Yes, I am reasonable, and yes, I understand what you're saying. I'm not going to agree, however, that it's anything but empty rhetoric. First of all, most statutes don't have a lot of rhetoric in them: outside of a statement of purpose, they're fairly dry, lacking in much of a style. Secondly, you can't 'ignore' the German issue. (Or rather, since you took issue with my making that point, ignoring it now makes little sense.) To say that two things are stylistically similar in different languages is pretty tough in the best of times. I somehow doubt that's the case here. Of course, there's no way we can actually tell, since Vidal doesn't list a law for me to look up in Lexis or anything, and I don't know how florid or dry the language in Nazi-era legislation was. But given what I have translated in laws, I find it pretty unlikely that the similarity is stylistic rather than substantive. In other words, if there's a similarity, it's simply because in places two laws are meant to do the same thing. But Vidal's statement makes no sense there: it becomes redundant, the phrase 'using much of the same language' would just repeat the charge levied in the preceding clause. I just can't consider this 'in the spirit in which it's intended' because the only spirit it has is a Bush=Nazi comparison which the 'facts' given don't reasonably support. Or rather, I'm willing to believe that the Patriot Act is stylistically similar to some piece of Nazi legislation somewhere, but don't concede that it's relevant. (I also challenge you to sensibly maintain the charge that the PATRIOT ACT is 'as despotic as anything Hitler came up with,' since that's a much quicker search through Nazi jurisprudence.) Now, the language you're talking about may be the language around the act, or supporting it: what Ashcroft says about the Act isn't what is in the Act, and you might possibly make comparisions between those. But at least on the face of it, that's not what Vidal did. I can't see how you can defend the clause, other than to say it has no meaning and thus can't be 'wrong': there is no objective sense in which one can possibly consider it correct, to the extent that it's even a provable proposition.

Oh, and to save me the bother of retyping the same thing, please see Prof. Yin for a reasoned analysis of how, on the law, Vidal really doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to the Patriot Act. You asked why I'm not so worried about it, Martin? It's got its flaws, but most of the objections have come from people like Gore Vidal, whose arguments are fanciful misreadings (if not purposeful misrepresentations) of the facts.