Rules, and the Ruling Rules who Rule them
My old (and I do mean old) friend Jaquandor issued a small post last week that got me to thinking about rules, and how, though most are made to be broken, might come in handy in solving the silliest of arguments.

Jaq posted a piece about how Dennis Miller was being hypocritical of left 'Nazi-labelers'. It seems that a lot of people on the left, according to Miller, like to label right-wing leaders as some derivation of the Hilter-led movement. Frankly, I've heard it a lot myself. However, the linked article Jaquandor points to shows that Miller himself used a lot of Nazi comparison jokes when he was more liberal. That shows how your political views influence your perception, but that's not why I'm rattling here today. Jaquandor doesn't like the term, and who really does, but I think a more basic point has been ignored, and that is in terms of argument, being called a Nazi is a good thing.

I'm sure all of you have been involved in some form or another of a barroom political argument, whether it be over trees, abortions, or Al Sharpton (if even the idea of Sharpton causes you to giggle, you are in with me). And perhaps at one or another of these arguments, both sides got heated and someone called someone else a Nazi or a fascist, etc. Happens all the time when people get angry and flustered. And the arguing probably escalated from there into shouting, kicking, punching, biting, scratching (my order of escalation). Excellent. Wait, but no, the argument should have ended right at the point someone was called a Nazi, because of the logic behind Godwin's Law.

Godwin's Law was originally concocted by uber-geeks on the Usenet to add order to discussion threads. Put in terms of everyday logic:

"As a [Usenet] discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups.

Who decided that comparing someone to a Nazi ends the argument? Well, the logic is that if you are comparing your discussee to the paradigm example of ultimate evil, you are exaggerating or run out of actual logical arguments to use and are just being emotional. It is the equivalent of resorting to vulgarity (Mr. Poopy-Pants!) or other outrageous accusations (Senor Burns es el diablo!), and it just means that you've run out of intelligent conversation.

Of course, this whole line of reasoning doesn't matter, because of the 90% rule, which I derived from Sturgeon's Law years ago. Sturgeon was a famous science-fiction author who said "Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud." Meaning, for the purposes of this discussion, that 90% of all people are idiots. I have not seen any evidence to controvert this in my 32 years. Unfortunately, this means that 90% of the people out there won't understand Godwin's Law, and that I'd be better off saving time and resorting to violence. Hmm... violence, eh? Only a Nazi would disagree.