SoylentNews

gznork26 writes:

In discussions here, across the Internet and IRL, one of the checks against the lure of conflating some minor offense with Naziism is the specter of Godwin's Law. In most situations, the conflation is unfounded, and the law's effect is beneficial. But what about a situation in which it is appropriate to draw such a comparison?

In an article at MediaPost ( http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/276936/silence-death.html [mediapost.com] ) Bob Garfield has asserted that such a comparison is apt in the case of Donald Trump. Opinions among Soylentils will vary about this, but I'm submitting this story, not to incite a conflagration about the results of Trump winning the US presidential election, but rather to explore how even the most well-intentioned and beneficial curb on behavior, embodied in law or in Law, can fail.

All of us who write code know that edge cases are the ones that deserve the most attention, even though they are also unlikely to occur, because that is where sloppy logic fails. In this way, a body of laws acts as the operating system of governance, and refusal to test an edge case opens the way for that OS to be subverted and destroyed.

I challenge you to keep this discussion meta. Once we have explored the problem space, we can apply our insights as we see fit.

Original Submission