Godwin's Law

"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."[def] Technically, Godwin's Law relates not to the fallacious employment of argumentum ad nazium or reductio ad Hitlerum (association fallacies), but to the contention that such arguments immediately render a debate concluded (and lost).

Of course, debaters frequently fail to acknowledge that they have technically lost an argument by resorting to irrelevant attacks or that they have resorted to irrelevant attacks because they have already lost the argument by failing to logically support their claims.

In the simplest analysis, inappropriate comparisons of whatever is under debate to Nazism or Hitler fall into the categories of irrelevant and biased guilty-by-implied-association attacks. Obviously if the debate is actually about the Third Reich, eugenics, the holocaust, or the phenomenon of scapegoating, then mention of the National Socialist Party or bad old Adolf would be relevant.

Godwin's Law and Desperate Attacks on Darwinism provides an example of biased, unfounded, emotional resort to unfounded analogies that are aimed at defaming scientific theories of evolution with the implicit counterclaim that God is the Creator. Needless to say, Godwin's Law will not be applied and Creationists will continue to make illogical, ad nauseam arguments, implicit or explicit, for Special Creation.