Godwin's Law question

One point here from a long time Usenet rat. The implicit assumption of Godwin’s Law was that it applied in arguments where a direct comparison with Hitler or the Nazis was unreasonable. Unreasonable in the sense that a neutral reader who had no particular stake in the debate at hand would when seeing the comparison to the Nazis would :rolleyes: and think it was ridiculous. HOWEVER, it I were to post that “in order to teach Them that they Should Not Fuck With Us, we should do as the Russians did to the hometown of a terrorist in years past: take the hometown of one of the hijackers, kill every man, woman, and child in it, and raze it to the ground with bulldozers so that no trace remained”, because I am in fact proposing the mass murder of innocent people, as this is definitely nazi-like, nobody would think it ridiculous that someone would make the comparison. Godwin’s Law doesn’t apply in cases of advocating the mass murder of civilians.

Thanks tomndebb, that goes a long way to clearing things up. it looks like it mostly gets horribly misused.

True dat. I remember from my lurking years here, many moons ago {I won’t search and link to it in case any of the participants here are still around to be embarrassed by it, and I suggest no-one else does either} when a relatively innocuous, if a shade precious, thread on how vegans should have their books peronalised resulted in a comparison between those who bound their books in leather and concentration camp commandants who fashioned lampshades out of human skin. A horrendous analogy on a number of levels, and the resulting firestorm was not pretty.

A far better use of godwinization would be when your targets are acting like republicans. :smiley: