I’m sure most of y’all have heard the rule (theory? maxim? I’m not really sure what word I should be using here) that anyone who brings up Nazis in an online argument automatically loses since it’s usually an hopelessly inflammatory and unsupported reference. Example from an arguement about vegetarianism: People who choose to ignore what happens in today’s slaughterhouse are the same as the Germans who chose to ignore the Jews being led to the gas chambers.
Is there a name for this rule?
You’re probably thinking of Godwin’s Law, but that’s a little different. Godwin’s law really says that in any exchange, it’s inevitable that someone will eventually invoke a comparison to Nazis. The fact that the mention of Nazis ends the exchange is not actually part of Godwin’s law itself.
Hmmm, I had never actually seen a definition of this before. The definition seems to imply that the Nazi argument is a somewhat arbitrary stopping point to keep threads form getting too long. I assumed it was because the point at which Nazis are brought up is usually the point at which reasonable, level-headed discussion has ceased.
Only the Nazis would dream up a rule like this!
Godwin’s law can be interpreted in a couple of ways. On the face of it, it says that debates will eventually degrade to the point that someone plays the Nazi card. More fundamentally, it’s saying that normal rules for civility to not apply in detached and relatively anonymous online forums. You might be shocked if someone compared you to a Nazi during a polite dinner conversation, but in an online forum this kind of attack is not only common but inevitable because people are not bound by the same restraint they would naturally show face to face. So the basic point of Godwin’s law has nothing to do with Nazis per se but just uses that as a benchmark for uncivil behavior.
That might seem kind of obvious now that online forums are so pervasive and there are a lot of people who spend more time in them than they do in meatspace, but Godwin’s law was posed back when Usenet was fairly new and many people weren’t accustomed to new rules (or lack thereof) that they might find there.
In it’s simplest form, Godwin’s Law states:
As the length of a Usenet thread increases, the probability of someone making an analogy to Hitler or Nazis approaches 1.
There are several derivations that are widely observed but not actually a part of Godwin’s law:
The Jargon File has a pretty good description of it. Godwin himself gave a brief history of the law and his reasoning behind it in [url='http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if_pr.html’a Wired article.
Someone (I can’t remember who) once commented that the point of Godwin’s Law isn’t that parallels to Nazis or Hitler aren’t ever accurate. But rather, in any given situation, there is always some other analogy which is more accurate than Nazis that you could have used, but didn’t.
Gosh its been a long time since my logic classes, but it sounds vaguely like a straw-man argument, or a reasoning by false analogy.
X takes position A
Y introduces position B
Y then “knocks down” position B to prove that position A is wrong.
Here the eating of meat is presumed to be X’s position
Y then compares eating meat to the holocaust.
The presumption then is that since the holocaust is wrong, eating meat is wrong.
That’s my WAG
For more info on logical fallacies try this site
The invocation of “Godwin’s Law” (there’s no such thing) is just as frequently a sign of a lazy debater as is the invocation of the Holocaust as an analogy.
There are subjects that have legitimate parallels to Naziism and the WWII Germany (e.g. racial oppression) and other subjects whose context warrant legitimate references to the Holocaust (e.g. art about war), but lazy debaters often cry “GODWIN! GODWIIN!” in the face of such legitimate allusions, just because they’re desperate to find a back way out of a discussion.
So, personally, I ignore “Godwin’s Law” (there’s really no such thing) and judge an analogy’s relevance and legitimacy on its own merits.
In my errant youth I knew of an absolutely moronic game called “zoom/schwartz” that you had to be at least three sheets to the wind (pretty bombed for you Gen X and laters) to play. The suite of rules are not the point here, but anyone could win by simply declaring “profigliano!” Presubably you had to be sober enough to remember and pronounce it.
Sounds to me as if “Godwin’s Law” is a feeble attempt at a “profigliano” statement that wins all arguments as long as you remember it.
Stupid thing about it is that the whole thing seems to have eroded down to 'Haha! you compared me to the Nazis, therefore you are wrong and I win!".
There are occasions when Nazi history is a completely valid and appropriate parallel to be drawn - I remember one occasion here on the board when a notorious poster (now banned) suggested (from memnory) something like that elderly people be rounded up and forcibly held in closed communities in the desert.
If someone takes a position in an argument that is substantially similar to Nazi philosophy, and this comparison is made, leaoping up and down, shouting “Godwin! Godwin! You lose!” is just plain stupid.
Godwin’s Law doesn’t exist?
So I take it you’re denying the existence of all those sites that give definitions of it?
Short of like those people who deny the Holocaust ever happened.
GODWIN!
Couldn’t agree more. When someone justifies a political action or stance by saying that the perpetrator is “sincere” and really thinks that he or she is acting in the best interests of the nation, then I think it is perfectly valid to reply that Hitler was “sincere” in his belief that the Jews are the root of all evil.
Being “sincere” and the politician “thinking” that the action is justified doesn’t justify anything.
This is the corrollary that I tend to use. Someone mentioning the Nazis is a signal that the debate has degenerated into an argument, and there’s really no point is following the thread any further.
Of course, there are cases where Nazis are relevant to the discussion, but those are the exceptions that prove the rule.