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#71
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OK I'm naive. What is Godwin's law?
Bryan "The Monk" Chaisone |
#72
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Flyingmonk wrote:
OK I'm naive. What is Godwin's law? Godwin's Law: prov. [Usenet] "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that 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. -- from jargon.net George Patterson Give a person a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a person to use the Internet and he won't bother you for weeks. |
#73
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Godwin's Law states that the longer a thread on Usenet grows the
probablility of someone calling a Nazi approaches one. There is a general rule that calling somebody a Nazi, fascist, communist, or some similar term for those terminates the discussion, with the person who used the term automatically losing the argument. There are exceptions. You don't get to terminate a thread just by using the expedient of calling someone a Nazi. That is cheating. Also, if the thread is specifically about Nazis in, say, some group devoted to Holocaust deniers, then Godwin's Law cannot terminate the thread or all of the threads would be pretty short (not necessarily a bad thing, in my view). There have been people who have used sock puppets to call themselves Nazis simply to terminate a thread and to make it look like they were the winner, but that is really beyond the pale. |
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