Text 10575, 122 rader
Skriven 2013-10-05 16:11:56 av Roy Witt (1:387/22)
  Kommentar till text 10566 av Ward Dossche (2:292/854)
Ärende: Godwin's Law
====================
 Brer Ward Dossche wrote to Brer Roy Witt about Re: Godwin's Law:

 RW>RW>>> Reminder: On Friday September 8th 2006, Mike Godwin's 16 year
 RW>RW>>> experiment was concluded and Godwin's Law was officially
 RW>RW>>> repealed by a MAJORITY vote among millions of individuals.

 RW>WD>> The 'Oxford English Dictionary' expresses a different point of
 RW>WD>> view.

 RW>> No one cares that the OED's pov is in error...

 WD> Whatever. I can't find a text somewhere to support your claim.

That's a piss poor excuse.

I snipped a long article written by Godwin himself to get to the chase of
the matter.

/Quote

Meme, Counter-meme

By Mike Godwin

Godwin's law is really a meme seeded in online discussin groups. Counter
memes have been materalizing ever since.

A counter-meme was reproducing on its own! And it mutated like a meme,
generating corollaries like the following:

    Gordon's Restatement of Newman's Corollary to Godwin's Law:
    Libertarianism (pro, con, and internal faction fights) is the
    primordial net.news discussion topic. Any time the debate shifts
    somewhere else, it must eventually return to this fuel source.

    Morgan's Corollary to Godwin's Law: As soon as such a comparison
    occurs, someone will start a Nazi-discussion thread on alt.censorship.

    Sircar's Corollary: If the Usenet discussion touches on homosexuality
    or Heinlein, Nazis or Hitler are mentioned within three days.

    Van der Leun's Corollary: As global connectivity improves, the
    probability of actual Nazis being on the Net approaches one.

    Miller's Paradox: As a network evolves, the number of Nazi comparisons
    not forestalled by citation to Godwin's Law converges to zero."

In time, discussions in the seeded newsgroups and discussions seemed to
show a lower incidence of the Nazi-comparison meme. And the counter-meme
mutated into even more useful forms. (As Cuckoo's Egg author Cliff Stoll
once said to me: "Godwin's Law? Isn't that the law that states that once a
discussion reaches a comparison to Nazis or Hitler, its usefulness is
over?") By my (admittedly low) standards, the experiment was a success.

But its success had given me much to reflect on. If it's possible to
generate effective counter-memes, is there any moral imperative to do so?

When we see a bad or false meme go by, should we take pains to chase it
with a counter-meme? Do we have an obligation to improve our informational
environment? Our social environment?

But this power to do good may also be a power to do ill. Anyone on the Net
has the power to affect stock prices. (Or worse: a fraudulent re-creation
of the Tylenol-poisoning scare could cause a national or international
panic.) And viral memes are capable of doing lasting damage.

While the world of the Net is filled with diverse critical thinkers who
are ready to challenge self-indulgent or self-aggrandizing memes, we can't
rely on net.culture's diversity and inertia to answer every bad meme. The
Nazi-comparison meme has a peculiar resilience, in part because of its
sheer inflammatory power ("You're calling me a Nazi? You're the Nazi in
this discussion!") The best way to fight such memes is to craft
counter-memes designed to put them in perspective. The time may have come
for us to commit ourselves to memetic engineering - crafting good memes to
drive out the bad ones.

Otherwise, plus ‡a change, plus c'est la meme chose."
/Unquote

FFW to 2006:

/Quote

Update: Godwin himself appears in comments (authenticity confirmed via
email) to explain that his "law" sought to discourage frivolous, but
NOT substantive, Nazi analogies and comparisons.

Responses by Godwin:

Responding to the neocon objections to my post on the universality of
war-justifying propaganda, Kevin Drum writes that it's "time to repeal
Godwin's Law" - at least the distorted version which purports to
prohibit all comparisons to German crimes - labeling it "an endlessly
tiresome way of feigning moral indignation."

Kevin adds: "WWII analogies are extremely useful because they're
familiar to almost everyone."

Godwin agrees: "the very notion that a major 20th Century event like
German aggression is off-limits in political discussions is both
arbitrary and anti-intellectual in the extreme.

There simply are instances where such comparisons uniquely illuminate
important truths:

To demand that German crimes be treated as sacred and unmentionable is
to deprive our discourse of critical truths.

/Unquote




         R\%/itt - K5RXT

 Reminder: On Friday September 8th 2006, Mike Godwin's 16 year experiment
 was concluded and Godwin's Law was officially repealed by a MAJORITY vote
 among millions of individuals.

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