Godwin

Mike Godwin · American attorney and author · 1956

Appears in 7 videos · 7 passages.

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani mentions Mike Godwin only through the "Godwin point" (Godwin's law), to which he returns regularly from 2017 to 2026. He does not see it as a rule of proper debate but as a means of forbidding or deriding any mention of fascism and Nazism1 2. He calls it by turns a "scheme" and a "scam"3 4 and, more recently, the "Godwin symptom"5. He stresses a matter of timing: this taboo and this irony take hold at the very moment when, in his view, Nazism is returning, especially in Europe in connection with the war in Ukraine6. He links this question to his reflections on crisis and war, on the dominant language and on the thought of Clouscard, which he considers relevant today in the face of neo-fascism and warmongering statements7. His reading stays the same from one session to the next: the Godwin point serves to ridicule anyone who speaks of a return to fascism.

Summary produced automatically from 7 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.

Who is this?

Michael Wayne Godwin is an American attorney and author. He was the first staff counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and he created the Internet adage Godwin's law and the notion of an Internet meme. From July 2007 to October 2010, he was general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation. In March 2011, he was elected to the Open Source Initiative board. Godwin has been a contributing editor of Reason magazine since 1994. In April 2019, he was elected to the Internet Society board. From 2015 to 2020, he was general counsel and director of innovation policy at the R Street Institute. […]

Read the article on Wikipedia

Text: Wikipédia, CC BY-SA 4.0, excerpt · Portrait: Voice of America, Public domain