So I decided to ego surf the google usenet archives the other day and was kind of taken aback to see that the first entry for “John Sundman” was this little nugget from comp.ai.philosophy:
John Sundman
People like “John Sundman” are obstacles to the progress of human knowledge and
deserve to be put out of their misery
It was a comment I hadn’t seen before in response to this story I wrote for Salon about artifical intelligence, or more precisely, about how certain AI types could stand to, y’know, lighten up a little! (Why, the nerve of me!). God, seeing that comment cracked me up, I must thay.
I was tempted to try to make some kind of extrapolation from that comment to Godwin’s Law, but I’m somehow not really all that motivated. So in closing I guess it’s only fair that I should remind you that you’ve just wasted half a minute of your life with an obstacle to human progress. Now, I want you to go off and think about that before you make any more foolish mistakes today.
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Wow, your own topic in comp.ai.philosophy! That’s gotta be worth something in geek points.
I love the particular message you point to. It looks like the guy who says you’re an obstacle to progress acknowledges that he didn’t even read your article. Then there’s the guy who says every crackpot deserves consideration, and the next guy who says they don’t. It’s not clear if they’re talking about you or the guy who doesn’t like you.
Godwin’s law is hysterical. Interesting, though, that my first reaction was to understand it as a commentary on discussion, rather than as simply a reflection of what must surely be the most significant social phenomenon of at least the century. And it wasn’t brought about by the Internet! I wonder what my mistake signifies.
When I read this entry to my wife she had only two words to say about it:
“Nazi dyke!”