{"id":157,"date":"2017-02-20T21:09:15","date_gmt":"2017-02-20T21:09:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/?p=157"},"modified":"2017-02-21T14:58:23","modified_gmt":"2017-02-21T14:58:23","slug":"on-the-demise-of-godwins-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/2017\/02\/20\/on-the-demise-of-godwins-law\/","title":{"rendered":"On the demise of Godwin’s Law"},"content":{"rendered":"

Godwin’s Law, as posed in 1990, was this: “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” [1] As internet forums replaced the Usenet, people generalized Godwin’s Law: Given enough discussion about anything, eventually somebody makes an analogy with Nazis and kills the conversation.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

It was initially posed as a descriptive law, like gravitation or electromagnetism. In recent years, I’ve seen people more often describe the invocation of Nazis as a “Godwin’s Law violation”. That requires treating it instead as a proscriptive law, a commandment like Thou shalt not make an analogy between your interlocutor and Hitler<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In 2017, we are living in a post Godwin’s Law world. It isn’t funny or provacative to draw analogies with Hitler, nor is it a norm violation to say that something is what Nazis would say, when the current political scene involves actual Nazis.<\/p>\n

Of course, President Trump isn’t literally Hitler. But some small fraction of his political base are actual Nazis, he has emboldened them to sieg heil<\/em> in public, and part of his political strategy is not to distance himself too far from them. When we can ask whether it’s right to punch Nazis, not as a moral thought experiment but as a question about something we saw on the news, then Godwin’s Law just misses the point.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

[1] For history, see the jargon file entry <\/a>and Godwin’s 1994 reflection<\/a> on having coined it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Godwin’s Law, as posed in 1990, was this: “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” [1] As internet forums replaced the Usenet, people generalized Godwin’s Law: Given enough discussion about anything, eventually somebody makes an analogy with Nazis and kills the conversation. It was initially … Continue reading “On the demise of Godwin’s Law”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-et-cetera"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7PjAo-2x","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":158,"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions\/158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}