Friday, July 1, 2016

Poe's Law

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 
Poe's law is an Internet adage which states that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, parodies of extreme views will be mistaken by some readers or viewers for sincere expressions of the parodied views.[1][2][3]

History[edit]

"Poe's law" was originally written by Nathan Poe in 2005, in a post on christianforums.com, an Internet forum about Christianity. The post was written in the context of a debate about creationism, where a previous poster had remarked to another user "Good thing you included the winky. Otherwise people might think you are serious."[4] Poe then replied, "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is uttrerly [sic] impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article."[1] The original statement of Poe's law referred specifically to creationism, but it has since been generalized to apply to any kind of fundamentalism or extremism.[3]  


Corollary I:
Parodies of extreme views of belief systems will always be accepted as TRUTH™ by adherents to the belief system.
Corollary II:
Any fundamentalist preaching on a belief system political or religious is indistinguishable from parody.