A brief look at Mike Godwin's 1994 Wired article reveals that when most people cite "Godwin's Law", they're actually thinking of Cliff Stoll's restatement — a restatement that misses all the subtlety of Godwin's original point: he was trying to get people to quit citing comparisons to Nazis at the drop of a hat, not to make people treat comparisons to Nazis as beyond the pale for any discussion. The Nazis are by far the most accessible example of evil available to most of us; eliminating them from our vocabulary severely constricts not only our ability to discuss but our very ability to perceive evil.
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