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Godwin's Law
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Godwin's Law, also known as "Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies," is an "Internet law" describing the tendency of people on the Internet to say outrageous things to win arguments. Originated by Richard Sexton, it's named after Mike Godwin, longtime attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (and at one time for the Wikimedia Foundation as well), who popularized the law in 1990 in this form: Godwin based this on his observation of behavior on Usenet. Net.Legends FAQs "Usenet Rule #4" later reformulated it to read: In the end, it's a simple observation, by now generally accepted across the Internet: whoever is the first to play the "Hitler card" has lost not only the argument, but whatever trace of respect they may have had. If you have to resort to comparing your adversary to the most infamous mass-murdering dictator in history, that generally means you've run out of better arguments. Thus, once such a comparison is made, the thread can be presumed finished. The original "Godwin's Law" only spoke of Internet users' tendency to make frivolous Nazi comparisons, but the utter failure of those comparisons to work is now also enshrined in "Internet law". Note that there's an important distinction — the comparison to Nazis must be frivolous. The law is not supposed to apply to serious discussions of Nazi Germany or its policies on the Internet; Mike Godwin has long lamented frivolous invocation of his "law" to stifle such discussion, and has also lamented having to even clarify this aspect of the law. For example: following the infamous "Unite the Right" white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017, he went on record saying that comparing the participants to Nazis was absolutely valid, and openly took aim at people who cited his law to discredit people who made such comparisons. This led to the creation of a corollary known as "Henderson's Law", an observation by Joel Henderson that the Internet's awareness of the law has resulted in its invocation at any comparison to Hitler or Nazis, no matter how accurate or on-point. The Internet being a place where no one is allowed to concede an argument, users have tried to find various workarounds where they can use their desperate rhetorical devices without violating Godwin's Law. They've tried: |
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