So the @nzyoungnats seem to have a real problem with Jews. After last year’s Sieg Heil, this year we’ve got this… http://pic.twitter.com/AJ5CryvxDE

Conjecture. For you may be so, but for someone like me who has written a car off, may be not so. I see the accident I…

And now I bow out, not wanting to take this any further, as I see too much potential for it to turn bad.

I think that 1) diagnosing people with mental illness over the internet (especially the dead type) is always a losing game and 2) from what I know of Hitler, he was many things (charismatic, obsessed, not a very good artist), but I’ve never heard anyone seriously proposing…

So you are making a distinction between being human and being a person?

Given the huge spectrum of human personality characteristics, and our extremely poor current understanding of how our individual personalities and mental traits develop (nature/nurture, etc.), that does seem…

Would you mind expanding on that?

Now that's the kind of attitude that worries me, and the reason I think it's important to keep this Nazi memorabilia. They were all fully human…

Nazism didn't have a monopoly on Fascism, but it did make it globally infamous. These days, I'm of the view that the most dangerous kind of Fascism doesn't wear jackboots and Waffen SS uniforms, but something a lot more respectable.

Well, see what Lucy wrote about

designed to explain exactly how the Nazis had become popular and widely-supported in Germany over the course of the 1930s

Hard to do that without presenting them as fully human. Memorabilia brings that humanity to life.…

The one WWII-related museum I visited in Germany -…

And that I find far more troublesome than Kim Dotcom's ownership of a copy of any book. I suppose demonising of the Nazis and WW2 era Germans generally has been going…

This is a contentious claim, unless you mean it in a very no True Scotsman way. "We rushed this prototype into production and man it sucked and it cost heaps"…

But what was 'few and far between' seems to have…

I have been fascinated by the way that genre fiction over the last decade has come to the universal agreement that the…

You're not wrong, and yes it is. But it's an oversimplifcation/generalisation that I don't think is particularly helpful, especially in this instance. It's hardly…

Absent other evidence I find this sort of attitude less suspicious and more…

I don't think this should have been muckracked into the public sphere in the way it was, but now it *has*, it's going to get discussed.…

Jason Ede can, certainly.
And his faithful minions Slater, Farrar et al.
and us for playing along
#lookoverthere

Would I personally associate with someone with a signed Mein Kampf? No, unless it was alongside a similar collection of signed works by Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill,…

Fair enough – I still…

Does that mean they are in bed with the Nazis too ??

Fun factoid, after the War the house became the property of the Berlin city government…

For some, yes. For others, there's nostalgia value. For others, liberation and national identity. For others, all of the above. And for more than a few drivers who hang…

Yes, but icky enough to generate all this fuss?

is a poor example, having suffered a similar fate to the Vikings in having his popular historical memory reduced to a caricature.

I think a better East Asian example is Mao Zedong. Didn't set out to conquer the world like Genghis Khan, but then again, Mao didn't see…

Ok, fine, we can question Dotcom's taste in collectibles, memorabilia and investments. But the closest I saw to anybody actually finding a story in this non-issue is this bit from the Herald's article:

Jewish Federation of New Zealand president…

There’s no way I’d want to own this type of item, but I can’t completely rationalise where I draw the line except that I think it’s around how recent…

No, I don't think it should be destroyed or hidden, but yeah, I think it's weird and creepy to spend top dollar for it and keep…

That seems right , even if Dotcom himself can see the creepy element that wouldn't stop him having it in the collection.…

The message seems to me to be that a bad thing happened with a bad person, so everything associated with that should be destroyed or hidden and only weirdos and creeps would be interested in anything to do with it. Seems…

Exactly. I also consider that weird. And kinda gross. I should stress that I don't think he has Nazi sympathies, but even if you're a collector, you don't necessarily *need* to fetishise an object that is associated with genocide. Yicchhh.

Oh please. I wouldn't own a copy myself – I can…

I am pretty confident that it’s OK for me to hold opinions, yes, weirdly enough. I don’t think that my opinions are reasons for real-world consequences, however – people are entitled to collect these books* and there’s no reason they shouldn’t…

I'd pretty much feel the same way about an autographed book by Stalin, for the record. Or Pol Pot, etc, etc.

Well exactly, but that says more to me about them than him really.

Its just a shame so many read and are taken in by his bile

So what about his Churchill and Stalin books?

Yes, plus the fact that we seem to have more info on DC than any other person that is in the corridors of Parliament or trying to get there. I totally believe his video game…

Not in this case, no.

No material harm comes from investing in companies that have stopped doing the harmful things – the spill has happened, the subprime mortgages are largely no longer offered…

This is a book that you can borrow from your…

But huge material harm flowed…

I'm not fascinated by KDC, though I must admit to a fascination with the desire/need to associate, or not, with him.

I'm still appalled at the memory of helicopters and the whole gogogo…

Okay, the exaggeration was over the top, but the point was that something can be an investment – a good one! – and that doesn't make it not distasteful. A better comparison might be banks that made subprime mortgages, or BP after the…

Isn't nice that with…

I don't think that's a valid comparison.

Do we know that he has “other Nazi memorabilia” apart from the book,…

Well, sure, but probably so are investments in companies that make land mines. That doesn’t mean I don’t…

If you are arguing that this was germane to his legal problems, then…

it's why i find dot com so confusing, but he's not hiding it, and who know maybe as someone growing up in Germany reading it is…

Now he owns a top-of-the-tree collector's rarity by history's…

It's hard to say. As others have noted, it would be significant if, as claimed, there was a Nazi flag hanging in Dotcom's basement…

Dotcom is also in the position of being a German individual who's living in a country where it's entirely legal to trade in Nazi artifacts. In Germany, it's a crime.…