Nazi cattle!

[Eichhörnchen]

Who is Godwin?



Do you mean this pillock?

[Sailor Steve]

Ummm, no.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

[Tango589]

I think it has to do with Godwins' Law, that the longer a thread goes on, the probability of someone being compared to Hitler or a Nazi approaches 1.

Read about it here.

[Aktungbby]

OH GREAT!! ALL WE NEED IN A FAMILY FORUM...'GLIB RHETORIC PEDAGOGUES'

[Eichhörnchen]

Well that's an education for me.

So we could maybe have a thread where we must discuss a particular topic (say, guinea pigs) for as long as we possibly can, without mentioning Hitler or the Nazis? And the first person to mention Hitler or the Nazis loses?

That would be excruciating. I couldn't do it. In a discussion about guinea pigs I reckon I might just about get past the first three Posts, tops.

[nikimcbee]

So we really can say, "kill the facist beast."

[Eichhörnchen]

Another old man who'd not heard before about Godwin's Law:



"What... what the hell am I doing in here? Oh yes, I remember: I was speaking to that nice Mrs Trellis the other day... you know her, she lives down by the shops. Anyway, her neighbours have got to move out because they can't afford the mortgage any more. And she says she doesn't see her niece much now since her sister (Mrs Trellis' sister that is) died a while back. She doesn't come around any more like wot she used to.

So all she does now is sit at home and watch old videotapes. She likes old films. She likes the old stars, Richard Burton and Yul Brynner, you know. She says she enjoys the old films best, not these new ones so much: she watched a film on the telly last week because she thought Richard Burton was going to be in it, but it wasn't him it was some German bloke called Bruno Ganz. It was called "Down... Down... Down... Downfall" Yes, that was it. But it wasn't about Mark Antony or Julius Caesar, it was about... oh BUGGER!" (FAIL)

[Onkel Neal]

Pulling up an old thread, I found a 1994 article by Mike Godwin on how he engineered Godwin 's law I thought you might find interesting

https://www.wired.com/1994/10/godwin-if-2/

IT WAS BACK in 1990 that I set out on a project in memetic engineering. The Nazi-comparison meme, I'd decided, had gotten out of hand - in countless Usenet newsgroups, in many conferences on the Well, and on every BBS that I frequented, the labeling of posters or their ideas as "similar to the Nazis" or "Hitler-like" was a recurrent and often predictable event. It was the kind of thing that made you wonder how debates had ever occurred without having that handy rhetorical hammer.

A "meme," of course, is an idea that functions in a mind the same way a gene or virus functions in the body. And an infectious idea (call it a "viral meme") may leap from mind to mind, much as viruses leap from body to body.

So, I set out to conduct an experiment - to build a counter-meme designed to make discussion participants see how they are acting as vectors to a particularly silly and offensive meme...and perhaps to curtail the glib Nazi comparisons.

I developed Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

I seeded Godwin's Law in any newsgroup or topic where I saw a gratuitous Nazi reference. Soon, to my surprise, other people were citing it - the counter-meme was reproducing on its own! And it mutated like a meme,

[Eichhörnchen]