Ten Laws Of The Internet

As sent to me by my brother...

1. Godwin's Law


"As a web discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." ''It is closely related to the logical fallacy "reductio ad Hitlerum", which says "Hitler (or the Nazis) liked X, so X is bad", frequently used to denigrate vegetarians and atheists.

Common Godwin's Law appearances include describing women's rights campaigners as "feminazis", comparing the former US President George W Bush to Hitler, or saying Barack Obama's proposed healthcare reforms are the new Holocaust.



2. Poe's Law


"Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing."

Poe's Law also has an inverse meaning, stating that non-fundamentalists will often mistake sincere expressions of fundamentalist beliefs for parody.

3. Rule 3

"If it exists, there is porn of it." Generally held to refer to fictional characters and cartoons, although some formulations insist there are "no exceptions" even for abstract ideas like non-Euclidean geometry, or puzzlement.

4. Skitt's Law


Expressed as "any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself" or "the likelihood of an error in a post is directly proportional to the embarrassment it will cause the poster."

It is an online version of the proofreading truism Muphry's Law, also known as Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation: "any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror".



5. Scopie's Law


"In any discussion involving science or medicine, citing Whale.to as a credible source loses the argument immediately, and gets you laughed out of the room." First formulated by Rich Scopie on the badscience.net forum.

This law makes little sense without a background knowledge of Whale.to, a conspiracy theory site which includes such items as the complete text of the anti-Semitic hoax Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as well as claims that Aids is caused by vaccination programmes, and that Auschwitz never happened.

It has been expanded by posters on rationalwiki.com to include any use of Answers in Genesis in an argument about creationism and evolution.

6. Danth's Law (also known as Parker's Law)


"If you have to insist that you've won an internet argument, you've probably lost badly."

7. Pommer's Law


Proposed by Rob Pommer on rationalwiki.com in 2007, this states: "A person's mind can be changed by reading information on the internet. The nature of this change will be from having no opinion to having a wrong opinion."

8. DeMyer's Laws


"Anyone who posts an argument on the internet which is largely quotations can be very safely ignored, and is deemed to have lost the argument before it has begun."



9. Cohen's Law


Proposed by Brian Cohen in 2007, states that: "Whoever resorts to the argument that 'whoever resorts to the argument that... ...has automatically lost the debate' has automatically lost the debate."



10. The Law of Exclamation


First recorded in an article by Lori Robertson at FactCheck.org in 2008, this states: "The more exclamation points used in an email (or other posting), the more likely it is a complete lie. This is also true for excessive capital letters."

It is reminiscent of the claim in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels that the more exclamation marks someone uses in writing, the more likely they are to be mentally unbalanced.

According to Pratchett, five exclamation marks is an indicator of "someone who wears their underwear on the outside".


Addendum To "Ten Laws Of The Internet"
(As sent by my brother)

I would like to propose the following amendments to Rule Ten:

At the end of the second paragraph, following the words "mentally unbalanced," I would propose adding the words "or a moron."

At the end of the third paragraph, following the words "wears their underwear on the outside," I would propose adding the words "or Glen Beck."