In a new book, Fiona Fox, the head of the London-based Science Media Centre, has compared critics of the GET/CBT ideological brigades and the PACE trial to Nazis,
as I noted recently on Virology Blog. In response to her unfortunate reference to the Holocaust in this context, some on social media have invoked the popular meme known as “Godwin’s Law.”
Here’s
the Wikipedia definition:
“Godwin’s law, short for Godwin’s law (or rule) of Nazi analogies, is an Internet adage asserting that as an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison to Nazis or Adolph Hitler approaches 1.”
The irony is that
Mike Godwin, the American lawyer and author who first articulated this concept decades ago, was a high school buddy of a teenage Simon Wessely. That’s right! Young Simon spent time as an exchange student in the US during his formative years. Who knew? A few years ago, in an own goal representing an utter lack of self-reflection, Simon tweeted his old friend and eponymous-law-progenitor Godwin into a discussion over PACE. The proximal cause was that a commenter had just referenced the Holocaust in the course of the twitter exchange–in this case, a mention of “the banality of evil.”
Godwin took up the bait and reviewed the PACE trial. Despite the bonds of friendship he’d forged in the past with the future Professor Sir Simon Wessely, Godwin publicly declared PACE to be a “profoundly flawed”–a mess of major proportions. Simon tried to save face with some light-hearted protestations, but between the tweets you could read his embarrassment.
I wrote
a post about it at the time–June 18, 2018. Given that the issue of Nazi analogies and PACE has resurfaced, I thought it was worth a reprise.
**********
By David Tuller, DrPH
From the start, one of my strategies for this PACE-debunking project was to draw in outside experts–people with no ax to grind and no pre-conceived notions about the trial and its methodology–and encourage them to scrutinize the matter................................
