Repealing Godwin's Law

Godwin's Law is wrong, and dangerously wrong. I suspect intentionally wrong.

Or rather, to be fair to Godwin, the misinterpretation of Godwin's Law is wrong. For what Godwin actually said is correct and unobjectionable:

“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

Which is true, and actually necessarily true. Like a monkey at a typewriter composing Shakespeare.

But this has been commonly misinterpreted as “whoever first mentions Hitler or the Nazis has lost the argument.”

The problem with this reading should be obvious. It exempts any real Nazis in the ideological sense from criticism on that basis. What could be better calculated to promote Nazism?

It would be fine if Hitler were some sort of supernatural demon who could never appear again. But he is not. He has come again often. Right off the bat, this perverted form of “Godwin's Law” exempts from criticism the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide, the Holodomor, the Cambodian Killing Fields, the Rwandan genocide, the Cultural Reolution and Great Leap Forward, and on and on, all of which were properly comparable to what Hitler did.

There is, on the other hand, a much easier and pretty reliable way to declare when someone has lost an argument in an email forum, a usenet group, or on Facebook. Human nature is human nature. Almost invariably, if someone loses any argument badly online, they will insult the winner--that is, go ad hominem. When reason won't get them what they want, the average person turns to verbal fists. Then they will unsubscribe, unfriend, or leave the group.

If they own the group, of course, they will instead ban the winner.

So whenever someone leaves a group, unfriends, or unsubscribes some member, the person taking that action can usually be assumed to be the recent loser in an argument. Of course, this is not a perfect rule; there are, it is true, good reasons to unfriend or ban. But it should be the default assumption if the person leaving the group, unfriending or banning themselves participated in the argument.

And this brings up the bigger issue of free speech; because the principle here is exactly the same. It is important because, without it, it will, just as online experience shows, invariably be the best and strongest arguments that will be most often banned. Nobody is afraid of any argument or position they believe they can easily refute. If some impolite speech is also banned, this serves only to mask the nasty reality. It is hardly a necessary thing. Truth is the real target of any attempt to restrict speech.