Am I the only one who is disappointed that two supposedly professional adults can't manage to have a grown up conversation about this? Reading the back and forth is pretty disheartening.
Oh, it's pretty much impossible to have any rational conversation these days. The majority of the technology speech these days is manipulative, flat out wrong, very anti free speech, and hyperbolic. When you start from that, there's just no point trying to be reasonable.
While I agree, you started the conversation by breaking Godwin's Law. I don't think Applebaum paid particularly close attention to your piece, but I probably wouldn't either in his position. A cursory skimming of your post reads as, "would you eat a sandwich from Hitler? No? Then why do you use software from Applebaum?" I don't think that's a fair distillation of your argument, but it is reasonable to think that someone briefly scanning your work might think it to be so.
Complaining about tech speech being hyperbolic whilst simultaneously [implicitly] comparing Applebaum to Hitler is a little ballsy, tbh.
You not only got that backwards, but Godwin's law is not one that can ever be 'broken' — just because you haven't used Hitler in an analogy yet doesn't mean you aren't asymptotically approaching such a comparison.
Using der Fürher in an internet argument is a realization Godwin's law, not a violation of it.
