A Boring Dystopia

The suggestion to discredit publications like The New York Times because they “platform disagreeable opinions” misses the point entirely. The goal of engaging with diverse viewpoints is not to validate every perspective but to understand them, deconstruct them, and refine our own positions through the process of critical reasoning. If we retreat into echo chambers that reinforce our pre-existing beliefs, we're not just hiding from ideas we find distasteful—we’re deliberately choosing intellectual cowardice. It’s akin to thinking that if you simply close your eyes, the problem ceases to exist.

This approach is not only self-defeating but fundamentally immature. Refusing to engage with what you perceive as “extremist rhetoric” doesn’t reduce its presence; it only blinds you to its evolution, making it easier for such rhetoric to gain traction unchallenged. To use a crude analogy, it’s like seeing blood from a wound, covering your eyes, and believing the wound is healed. Refusing to look at the problem—or pretending it doesn’t exist—does nothing to solve it.

The notion that simply discrediting entire publications based on a few disagreeable viewpoints will somehow rid the world of those opinions is laughably naïve. In reality, it reveals a shallow understanding of how discourse works. Ideas don’t just vanish because you’ve decided not to look at them; they fester and grow stronger in the dark. This strategy isn’t just ineffective—it’s actively harmful, promoting a kind of self-imposed intellectual infantilism where one’s worldview is limited to only those thoughts deemed “safe.”

The suggestion to stop reading publications like The New York Times because they platform a range of opinions assumes that people are incapable of discerning between well-reasoned arguments and extremist drivel. This assumption is not only insulting but speaks to a profound lack of faith in people’s ability to engage with, analyze, and refute arguments on their own merits. It’s this very stunted intellectual development—the notion that the world will be better if you downvote things you don’t like and only read things that already agree with you—that cultivates ignorance, rather than addressing it. In short, refusing to engage with challenging or disagreeable views is the hallmark of a mind that fears it might not have the reasoning capacity to withstand genuine debate.

It’s ironic to invoke Godwin’s Law to stifle conversation, given that its original purpose was to call attention to the degradation of language and thought that occurs when Nazi comparisons are overused and misapplied. By cheapening such comparisons, the law sought to maintain the weight and specificity of historical evils like the Holocaust, which lose their impact when these terms are used flippantly or with little regard for context. This phenomenon is akin to Orwell's warning in 1984 about the dangers of language simplification, where words are stripped of their meaning and are ultimately used to obfuscate, rather than clarify, reality.

Interestingly, even Godwin himself has noted that invoking the law to shut down discussions does little to foster meaningful dialogue. Instead, he argues that Nazi comparisons can be justified if they are "thought-out and historically informed" rather than "poorly reasoned, hyperbolic invocations" that trivialize both the history and severity of such terms. The overuse of these comparisons not only dilutes their impact but also reflects a broader trend of linguistic manipulation that mirrors Orwell’s Newspeak: a language designed to control thought by reducing complexity and nuance. When words are allowed to encompass everything, they ultimately mean nothing at all.

This loss of linguistic precision can also be seen in modern political rhetoric, where phrases like “concentration camps” are debated not based on the context but on who is using them and against whom. This constant redefinition erases historical distinctions, blurs moral boundaries, and makes it easier for anyone to dismiss any accusation as mere hyperbole. In this context, we see a perverse evolution of Godwin’s Law where the very comparisons meant to be avoided are applied more liberally, often to dismiss, derail, or discredit rather than to enlighten.

The deeper problem is that invoking Godwin’s Law as a rhetorical cudgel or attempting to justify its non-application when "actually" talking about fascism in the overly broad ways it's now deployed is itself a form of linguistic reductionism. Rather than encourage thoughtful argumentation, it often forces discussions into binary categories: acceptable or unacceptable, on the “right side” of history or not. Such polarization undermines the very principles of debate and inquiry that Godwin initially hoped to preserve. In the end, it’s not the Nazis who are being compared to everyone—it’s the chilling realization that our language is being systematically eroded, making it ever harder to speak with the precision, integrity, and weight that serious topics demand.

Godwin always applies. Godwin himself said the comparison was sometimes appropriate, going as far as to say say the American Alt right should be compared to Nazis.