Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Godwin: The Sequel

I posit a new form of Godwin's Law: As the length of any discussion thread increases, the probability of a comparison to al-Qaeda or terrorism approaches one. The probability of one commenter questioning the patriotism/loyalty of another commenter also approaches one.

Also, I want to point people to this amusing Godwin FAQ, which contains this gem of a statement:
If you're really bored, a fun game to play is Six Degrees of Godwin. Take a topic - any topic - and see how quickly you can relate it to Nazis using legitimate topic drift methods. For example: a discussion about computers will eventually lead to discussions of keyboards and which are best, followed by a lot of complaining about the Windows key on 104-key keyboards, leading to complaints about Microsoft, forcing the standard MS-vs-government flamewar that I'm sure you're all aware of, leading to attacks on Microsoft's "fascist" tactics by one side or another, which will force the other side to start talking about the differences between fascism, capitalism, and, of course, Nazism! The fun never stops!


Garfield. Go.

6 comments:

Michael said...

This was a most amuzing post...

Ben said...

Garfield was the name of a fat cat and an American president. James Garfield was assassinated. Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (sp?) tried to assassinate Hitler. Hitler was a Nazi.

I bet you can do better.

Mike said...

Garfield is a metaphor for the Nazis and Odie is a metaphor for the Jewish people. C'mon, folks, read between the lines.

Ben said...

Too direct. Not silly enough.

Garfield is an orange cat. Orange juice is a similar color. Eichmann doubtlessly drank orange juice in his lifetime. Nazi!

That one was lame, but I had fun writing it.

Wonder if someone can actually do a legitimate one, like in the thing Jeff quoted above.

Mike said...

Well, a discussion about Garfield will inevitably lead to a discussion about lasagna. This undoubtedly would yield to discussions of its country of origin, namely Italy. This may lead some to a discussion of famous Italians, at which point someone is likely to mention Mussolini. And, well, obviously...

(That was four.)

Unknown said...

xkcd://garfield
xkcd://hitler

...doesn't really qualify any more than looking up "garfield" and "hitler" from the same encyclopedia, but I'll take any flimsy excuse to link to xkcd.