Godwin's Law: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

{{quote| ''"You wanna know [[Hitler Ate Sugar|who else]] used laws to stop debates? [[Adolf Hitler|HITLER]]!"''}}

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.

George Orwell said something similar in his 1946 essay, "[http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=3&sqi=2&ved=0CBwQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmla.stanford.edu%2FPolitics_%26_English_language.pdf&rct=j&q=orwell%20politics%20and%20the%20english%20language&ei=0gCjTKX8NYP4swOkobH6Bg&usg=AFQjCNHLldoScj4lgGsrdciEwPo7hl2skA&cad=rja Politics and the English Language]", where he noted the new definition of fascism had pretty much become "anything you don't agree with".

 

 

Showcased on ''[[QI]]'' as "Godwin's Rule", giving an example of Hitler's love of animals (and disgust of fox hunting) as a fallacious reason to keep fox hunting legal, though this wiki considers that a wholly separate logical fallacy: [[Hitler Ate Sugar]].