Godwin's law
From Internet-Encyclopedia, a free encyclopedia.
Godwin's law (also Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies, Sexton-Godwin Law) is an adage in Internet culture established by Mike Godwin on August 18, 1991, which states that:
As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
There is a tradition in many Usenet newsgroups that once such a comparison is made in a thread the thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups. Many people understand Godwin's law to mean this, although it is not the original formulation.
However, there is also a widely-recognized codicil that any intentional invocation of Godwin's Law for its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful.
Godwin's law is named after Mike Godwin, who was legal counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the early 1990s when the law was first promulgated. The law is a formalization of Richard Sexton's October 16, 1989 post
You can tell when a USENET discussion is getting old when one of the participants drags out Hitler and the Nazis.
Finding the meme of Nazi comparisons on Usenet illogical and offensive, Godwin established the law as a counter-meme.
Many people have extended Godwin's law to imply that the invoking of the Nazis as a debating tactic (in any argument not directly related to World War II or the Holocaust) automatically loses the argument, simply because these events were so horrible that any comparison to any event less serious than genocide or extinction is invalid and in poor taste.
In particular, the use of phrases such as soup Nazi are widely viewed with distaste: the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) argued in January 1997 that it "trivializes and denies the murderous intent and actions of the Nazi regime" and "cheapens the language by allowing people to reach for a quick word fix".
