![]() ![]() ![]() "Quirk's Exception" states that attempting to invoke Godwin's Law intentionally in order to force-terminate a thread rarely works.It ties in with the idea that you can't mention Hitler's name because he's so evil (and you can't invoke Hitler's desire to be remembered forever as a reason to never mention him again). You also can't use Godwin's Law just because Hitler happened to be mentioned (the above-stated "Henderson's Law").This is especially true when discussing genocide, as The Holocaust is generally considered the standard against which to measure other genocides. In some cases, discussion of Hitler and Nazism is absolutely necessary, especially where people clearly seem to like its worst policies John Oliver once noted the need for a "reverse Godwin's Law" stating that if you fail to address Hitler or Nazism when you need to, you lose the debate. You can't just use Godwin's Law to shut down an actual pertinent comparison to Hitler.(If you actually have a legitimate comparison, that's when Henderson's Law applies.)īut the Internet being what it is, invocation of Godwin's Law isn't always going to end the argument in your favour either: Straining for a "legitimate" comparison to Nazi ideology, which tends to fail because Hitler Ate Sugar something isn't wrong because the Nazis did it, but rather the Nazis are evil because some of the things they did were evil.The latter was so prevalent in the online Harry Potter community that Fandom Wank coined the "Pacific Theatre Corollary" to refer to this strategy. such as its history of slavery or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Referencing one's own community's wrongdoings for instance, American commenters (who seem to be the majority of the Internet) might invoke atrocities committed by the U.S.If you don't want communists, you could try terrorists like al-Qaeda or Daesh. In fact, the invocation of a communist leader in this sense is itself worthy of a Nazi comparison, given how right-wing extremists are very prone to comparing their opponents to evil communists in a technique known as " red-baiting ". This doesn't even really avoid a Nazi comparison because the thinking is the same that leads to the Commie Nazis trope. Referencing other mass-murdering dictators, often Communists like Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, or Pol Pot."you know who else got rejected by an art school?"), thinking the law is about invoking Nazis' names rather than their ideas. Not mentioning Hitler or Nazis directly ( e.g.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. 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. 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. 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. Note that there's an important distinction - the comparison to Nazis must be frivolous. 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". Thus, once such a comparison is made, the thread can be presumed finished. 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. 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. Any off-topic mention of Hitler or Nazis will cause the thread it is mentioned in to come to an irrelevant and off-topic end very soon every thread on Usenet has a constantly-increasing probability to contain such a mention.
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