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This Hitler Analogy By Manny Pacquiao’s Promoter Is Sure To Make The Floyd Mayweather Fight Happen

Floyd Mayweather beat Miguel Cotto over the weekend. For many, though, the most relevant aspect of the fight wasn’t that Mayweather kept his unblemished record – or even that he looked unusually vulnerable in doing so – it was that, once again, the fight was against someone who wasn’t Manny Pacquiao.

Mayweather-Pacquiao is the fight fans have wanted to see for years now, and it keeps not happening. There’s always talk of it happening, but the two sides can never seem to agree to terms. It might be a dustup over drug testing. It might be a dustup over money.

And it might even be a dustup over a dustup. Pacquiao’s promoter, Bob Arum, took some time out recently to talk about the difficulties in making the fight happen. This, in turn, gave him plenty of chances to talk trash about Mayweather, for his stances on the issue of both the fight purse and drug testing. Arum maintained that Pacquiao has agreed to the drug testing standards requested by Mayweather for years now, and to insist anything else is false. But the way he described his disagreement with Mayweather can only serve to drive the two sides even further apart:

For two years Pacquiao has said that he will take any drug test whoever administers it so why is that still being talked about by Mayweather? You see Mayweather is from the school of propaganda that Joseph Goebbels, who was (Adolf) Hitler’s publicist, adopted. The more you say things over and over again the more people believe them.

Godwin’s Law: it’s not just for the internet!

Yes, in meatspace feuds as well as virtual, if you go on and on long enough, someone’s gonna play the Hitler card. One wonders if Arum – or any of the principals involved, really – actually want this fight to happen. How easy will it be for the Mayweather to say, “Well, with the Pacquiao team playing the Nazi card, there’s no use trying to reason with them”? It’s a convenient reason for the sides to delay things even more until they both – again – wind up fighting a different opponent in a much less buzzworthy bout – or, you know, until Mayweather retires.

You never know. Maybe this will be the time the fight actually happens, and the Hitler/Goebbels stuff will only serve to intensify the hype and the tension between the sides. But there have been a lot of false starts here, and to use a somewhat less inflammatory analogy, Mayweather-Pacquiao’s looking more than a little like a white whale at this point.

And a final word about Hitler/Goebbels/any kind of Nazi analogies, unless in seriously extreme cases – and regardless of any potential effect on this fight: just… don’t. Even if you, for some probably-very-misguided reason, actually believe them to be true… do not use them. They will make you look bad. They will get you made fun of. They will make people pay attention to things other than the substance of your actual argument. They are, generally, very dumb analogies. Let’s hope Arum isn’t a political adviser to Pacquiao too.

[Sports Radio Interviews]

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