Hacker News Reader

Godwin's law is rubbish. The Nazis are a strongly and consistently disavowed extreme group. They're a perfect tool when you need to cut across cultures and remove any chance of ambiguity. Their actions so despicable that comparing X performing Y1 to the Nazis performing Y2 is a good tool for reasoning about Y itself and the difference between Y1 and Y2.

View on HN

Nazis had state sponsored scientific research and a national healthcare system (with certain, obvious exclusions).

It just seems nonsensically reductive to go 'the nazis did it! therefore its bad!'

I agree, however that's not what this thread is about.

The first poster essentially said "this is so normal, even Nazis do it".

We consider Nazis to be abnormal, so if a behavior is common many groups inclusive of Nazis it can be used to imply that the behavior is something inherent to human beings or human governments or human societies.

That's why Godwin's law is pretty much not rubbish. Compare to, say, Himes' law:

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Corvairs approaches 1"

This law, as best as I can determine, is rubbish.

I mean, have you read Unsafe at Any Speed? :P

Reply on news.ycombinator.com