Sunday, August 23, 2009

Brilliant Ideas That Will Never Work: Godwin's Law penalty box

First, we make a universal standard for necessary exemptions from Godwin's Law (i.e. cases in which a comparison with nazis is appropriate).

Then, anyone who makes an inappropriate comparison with nazis gets a time-out. They are banned from all discourse for a certain period of time, like a penalty in hockey. If any particular political faction is egregiously overusing nazi comparison, these penalties will enable their opponents to dominate discourse, like a power play in hockey.

A potentially feasible variation: people who make completely irrelevant comments in comment threads (e.g. the gist of the article is "Look! Baby ducks!" and someone comments "See, this is what's wrong with feminists!") is banned from commenting for a certain period of time.

2 comments:

laura k said...

(e.g. the gist of the article is "Look! Baby ducks!" and someone comments "See, this is what's wrong with feminists!"

There was a time in my life where I would have given anything to have one of these penalty boxes IRL.

impudent strumpet said...

Yeah, I can think of one or two situations where that would be helpful IRL.

Maybe we should all carry yellow and red cards in our pockets.