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DentArthurDent
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15 Jul 2014, 2:13 am

kraftiekortie wrote:
We should never compare Nazis to a bowl of petunias....or a sperm whale.



ahh but with an improbability drive anything is possible, indeed probable.


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Geekonychus
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16 Jul 2014, 7:40 am

It goes both ways. Invoking hitler is the most straightforward way to tell your debate opponent "My argument doesn't stand on it's own merit."



MjrMajorMajor
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16 Jul 2014, 7:45 am

Seems along the lines of "give enough monkeys a typewriter, and one will write Shakespeare". Except much more probable. :lol:



Janissy
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16 Jul 2014, 8:10 am

"Hitler/Nazi=bad" is a sentiment that almost everybody agrees on, including people who disagree about everything else. That's why it has turned into the go-to hyperbole device for expressing anger at somebody else's disagreed-with position.

What makes it interesting is it shows how common it is for disagreement to turn into fury (and fury calls for hyperbole). What makes it more interesting than the other things listed (like cheeseburgers and sperm whales) is that the other things are just generic thread derails. A thread isn't more statistically likely to get derailed in one particular direction over all others. Food and animals are common derails and one WP thread got derailed so amazingly by cats that I was inspired to give myself a cat avatar (previously had no avatar). But there is no single derail that stands out above all others.

On the other hand, when an argumentative thread doesn't derail, Godwin's Law shows us that it often doesn't stay civil but instead escalates to greater and greater anger until the hyperbole for pure evil (Hitler/Nazi) gets trotted out. Godwin's Law is telling us that it is very difficult to argue extensively without escalation, and that's interesting.