AHC: No Godwin's Law

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to prevent Godwin's Law from ever happening or becoming true.
 
So basically you are asking us to either forego Hitler or the internet?

Right: Unleash the goats of war it is time to go kill an incompetent artist in 1910 Vienna...
 

shiftygiant

Gone Fishin'
1990, the University of Texas School of Law. Tragedy strikes when Mike Godwin, Law student, slips on a spilled soda whilst walking down the staircase, falling and breaking his neck. He will be missed.

Okay, so the best way I can see this happening is if Godwin is dead, although this would butterfly a lot in the field of computing.
 
Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to prevent Godwin's Law from ever happening or becoming true.

You'd need a universe where the conversational touchstone for evil is not the nazi party essentially.

A ww3 against the soviets or red china so that they're the more recent history and the gulags, cultural revolution get the pop culture airing that the holocaust does maybe?

Or simply a shorter ww2 so Hitler is seen as less important as he is stopped before the americans get involved.
 
Maybe turn the nazis into boring militarists just obsessed with territorial expansion and prestige instead of genocide.

Sure hitler can keep being a genocidal a-hole but he doesnt have to do much to go through with it,if anything not acting upon it would make perfect sense given their millitary situation.

After their are defeated they would be seen same as japan,a bunch of a-holes with a tank fetish beating up neighbouring countries in otherwise legitimate wars.
 
Thing is, there isn't even a clear and shared understanding of what Godwin's Law means. According to wiikpedia, the Law states...

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

All well and good. But then, you see cases where someone who mentions Hitler gets accused of BREAKING Godwin's Law, as if the law were an imperative along the lines of "Don't mention Hitler in a discussion." Whereas, insofar as Godwin's Law is a predictive statement, it would be broken by having NO ONE on the thread mention Hitler.

Be that as it may, getting rid of Godwin's Law would be a no-brainer, as already exemplified by numerous posts on this thread(ie. a world where there is no Hitler, and/or no Godwin, or Godwin never decides to formulate the law).

I guess a bigger challenge would be to come up with a scenario where the Law is well on the way to being formulated and presented to the world, but something intervenes to stop it, or to thwart its spread. Maybe, for some reason, mention of Hitler in unrelated topics becomes extremely taboo, and so the phenomenon described by the law ceases to exist.

So, let's say, some time in the early 90s, some netizen gets compared to Hitler in a debate, goes over the edge because of this, and walks over to his local coffee shop with a sem-automatic and shoots the place up. The media goes into moral-panic mode, with headlines like "NAZI COMPARISONS: ONE STEP TOO FAR?", thus leading to an unofficial but generally observed moratorium on them for a few years, thus making further publicization of Godwin's Law a moot point.

Of course, the moratorium will eventually end(like, for example, the post-911 "Death Of Irony"), but by that time, the momentum for spreading the Law has been lost.
 
Butterfly Taylor Swift 20 years earlier. With 20 more years of Taylor Swift songs every internet discussion is sure to hit the point where one poster will invariably ask: "Hey, didn't TS write a song about this once?" way before the subject of Hitler even comes up.

Alternative scenarios: Elvis lives and becomes the ajniversal cultural standard, John Lennon or Bob Dyllan get their popularity increased by a factor of 10 thanks to the Alien Space Bats controlling the internet....
 
Speaking of Godwins law, I think the first use of it should be ascribed to James Maxton, just after Churchill became PM, when he compared the House of Commons to the Reichstag after the speaker ruled that the ILP werent the official opposition.
 
Speaking of Godwins law, I think the first use of it should be ascribed to James Maxton, just after Churchill became PM, when he compared the House of Commons to the Reichstag after the speaker ruled that the ILP werent the official opposition.

Hey, wasn't there a Taylor Swift song about that?
 
The reason people always mention the Nazis is that it is one of the few historical reference points almost everyone knows since its in the pop culture - lots of documentary footage shown on TV, lots of movies, in the immediate historical memory from 1950s-1990s and beyond.

People could make the same analogies using other historical events, but 1) most people don't know those other examples themselves, and 2) if they did use them, the other people likely don't know them.

If you are trying to make a point about foreign policy and are looking for an example, do you use WWII or do you use the War of Spanish Succession or perhaps the Thirty Years War? If you are talking about a police state and book burnings, do you mention Hitler or Qin Shi-Huangdi? The SS and Gestapo or the Oprichniki?

People will only use other references when there is a better known reference point that is common to a lot of people.
 
Well you could always have kim jon un go compleatly bat shit,tie himself to a nuke and then proclaim he is the god of fire while throwing himself onto america,that should be enough of a distraction for people to forget the nazis.

He doesnt really have to hit anything important,maybe land on top of area 51 for added madness.
 
Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to prevent Godwin's Law from ever happening or becoming true.

Hitler gets assassinated by Elser in 3 September 1939. His successors gets blamed for what occurs afterwards, the war and the Holocaust, and Hitler is viewed as a successful man who brought the German economy back.
 
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