Godwin's Law: Difference between revisions

As Quirk's Exception points out, attempting to invoke Godwin's Law ''intentionally'' in order to force-terminate a thread rarely works. All the same, shouting "Hitler!" is a fun way to express your opinion that a thread should be put to rest. Of course, it's also helping Hitler indirectly, as his greatest expressed wish was to be remembered forever, which means that you're [[Hypocritical Humor|just as bad as Hitler, you horrible Nazi-bastard.]] However, this corollary ''is not'' in the law itself. Likewise, trying to bait your opponent into breaking the law is poor form too. Sometimes commenters will try to get around mentioning Hitler's name directly (e.g. "You know who ELSE got rejected in art school? THAT'S RIGHT."), but this is really no better.

 

 

Occasionally Stalin is referenced, often by [[Genre Savvy|people who are aware of]] Godwin's Law but want to convey a similar message; in this case, this might slip into the [[Commie Nazis]] trope. Some people will be topical and use [[Osama Bin Laden]] or slavery (especially America's brand of it) as the canonical ultimate evil. However, any of these can also be seen to have violated Godwin's Law, since the point remains: comparing your argument to a clear and non-debatable atrocity is simply bad debating, since it implies that the opposition has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and is obviously insensitive to real-life victims and their descendants.

In fan circles, there's the "[[Fandom Heresy|true fan]]" argument, in which anyone who plays the "true fan" card automatically loses the argument:

 

 

Note that some lay claim to the ability to invoke "Bentsen's Defense" (i.e. "I knew Mike Godwin, Mike Godwin was a friend of mine -- you, sir are no Mike Godwin") to negate invocations of Godwin's Law. Note, also, that this is only available to those who can truthfully make the statement and that it is designed to foster reasoned discussion — not to deter it.

Pre-Mike Godwin and its prevalence on the internet, the spoken and written word version of this was called ''[[wikipedia:Reductio ad Hitlerum|reductio ad Hitlerum]]'' or ''argumentum ad Hitlerum'', coined by ethical philosopher Leo Strauss in 1953. It means pretty much the same as Godwin's Law: [[Hitler Ate Sugar|"A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler."]]

 

 

This trope is (perhaps not surprisingly, given [[Humans Are the Real Monsters|human nature]]) [[Older Than They Think]]. Prior to the 1940s, the go-to villains were generally [[The Bible|Biblical]], such as the Pharaoh of the Exodus, Pontius Pilate, or Judas.