GODWIN'S FIRST LAW
"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."
GODWIN'S SECOND LAW
"Drawing Bayesian inferences after extensive sampling, I’ve determined that it’s 99-percent certain that anyone who uses “woke” as pejorative will turn out to be a fuckhead. Please don’t blame me for pointing this out–it’s just science."
Michael Wayne Godwin is an American attorney and author. He was the first staff counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and he created the Internet adage Godwin's law and the notion of an Internet meme.
This year it seems that political discourse has really dived into the sewer in Australia and elsewhere around the world with those two observations by Mike Goodwin that became Internet adages receiving a mention as the hate is noticed and discussed.
Under Godwin's First Law a Hitler analogy may now be considered applicable to Donald J. Trump in any considered argument, rather than being just a hyperbolic comparison........
The Washington Post, 24 September 2024, p.19:
There's a semisatirical theorem, known as Godwin's Law, which posits that if any online discourse goes on long enough, it inevitably leads to a Hitler or Nazi comparison. No professional pundit wants to be guilty of tripping this law.
After all, equating a political figure with fascists sounds absurd. It's just so over the top. It also might not win over any additional allies; people roll their eyes and tune out when they hear commentators or historians warn, yet again, about another big bad Great Dictator.
Problem is, Donald Trump seems intent on making the Hitler comparison happen....
Even Godwin Law's namesake, Mike Godwin, wrote in a Post op-ed last year that he agrees the Hitler analogy is not just apt but necessary. He cited Trump's authoritarian instincts for consolidating state power in a single leader; dehumanizing political enemies as "vermin"; and claiming that immigrants were "poisoning the blood of our country," an infamous Hitler talking point.
"Those of us who hope to preserve our democratic institutions need to underscore the resemblance before we enter the twilight of American democracy," Godwin wrote in December.
And in fact, neither Godwin nor I is anywhere close to being the first to compare Trump with 20th-century fascists. Both of us were beaten out by Vance himself, who in 2016 referred to Trump as "America's Hitler."
The Washington Post online, 20 December 2023:
What's arguably worse than Trump's frank authoritarianism is his embrace of dehumanizing tropes that seem to echo Hitler's rhetoric deliberately. For many weeks now, Trump has been road-testing his use of the word "vermin" to describe those who oppose him and to characterize undocumented immigrants as "poisoning the blood of our country." Even for an amateur historian like me, the parallels to Hitler's rhetoric seem inescapable....
The steady increase in Hitler comparisons during the Trump era is not a sign that my law has been repealed. Quite the opposite. Godwin's Law is more like a law of thermodynamics than an act of Congress — so, not really repealable. And Trump's express, self-conscious commitment to a franker form of hate-driven rhetoric probably counts as a special instance of the law: The longer a constitutional republic endures — with strong legal and constitutional limits on governmental power — the probability of a Hitler-like political actor pushing to diminish or erase those limits approaches 100 percent.
While Godwin's Second Law, which posits that using the word "woke" as a pejorative is an indication of fuckheadedness, is being tested on social media.....
United Australia Party Senator for Victoria Ralph Babet, elected at the May 2022 Australian federal general election.
The woke left is harming children.
— Senator Babet (@senatorbabet) October 20, 2024
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