Mr Bop-OH! got here just in the nick of time. Thanks.
Reverently,
Ginsberg

It's amazing that none of Libby's supporters have noticed that telling the simple truth would have kept Libby out of jail.

That's what you do in a Grand Jury if you won't want to commit a crime. You'd think a decent education or some common sense would clue someone in on that fact.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/18/AR2007061801713.html

'Woman Warrior,' A Memoir That Shook the Genre

By JONATHAN YARDLEY
Tuesday, June 19, 2007; Page C01

An occasional series in which The Post's book critic reconsiders notable and/or neglected books from the past.

[ . . . ] "The Woman Warrior" and Kingston's second memoir, "China Men" (1980), are the most widely taught books by a living American author on college campuses today [ . . . ]

- - Jonathan Yardley

But I distictly remember asserting that even in the reality-challenged times we live in that this was an idea too daft to even be mentioned anymore.

http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSL1982814520070619?feedType=RSS&rpc=22

Tougher sanctions or a blockade on Iran could help foment growing internal dissent to topple the government, former U.S. Republican senator Fred Thompson, a potential presidential candidate, said on Tuesday.

Nothing like cutting off food supplies to win friends and influence people. Best be sure that there's a steady supply of flowers though. The grateful populace will need them to greet their liberators with.

Mike Godwin is a libertarian.

Bwaaahahahahahaha!

I posted something about your comments on Maxine Hong Kingston:

http://lyssa-strada.bloggyland.com/?time=1182308002

Thanks, Both!!!

I agree it's pretty hilarious... but that doesn't make it any the less useful-- or needed.

Of course, Godwin couldn't have described discussions that devolved into food-fights among libertarians-- that would have been too self-referential, even for the web, and especially for the Staff Counsel to the EFF. [http://www.godwinslaw.org/about]

Now we need a term to describe arguments that devolve into liberarians throwing sand in everyone else's eyes... but we'll naturally have to use some other name for the corollary.

Frankly, it only serves him right. ;~) He gets to describe one type of argument and be one of those being described in another.

Any suggestions for a name? Here's your chance...

Karen:

Now we need a term to describe arguments that devolve into liberarians throwing sand in everyone else's eyes... but we'll naturally have to use some other name for the corollary.

Oh, Godwin's got that covered, too:

I seeded Godwin's Law in any newsgroup or topic where I saw a gratuitous Nazi reference. Soon, to my surprise, other people were citing it - the counter-meme was reproducing on its own! And it mutated like a meme, generating corollaries like the following:

* Gordon's Restatement of Newman's Corollary to Godwin's Law: Libertarianism (pro, con, and internal faction fights) is the primordial net.news discussion topic. Any time the debate shifts somewhere else, it must eventually return to this fuel source.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if_pr.html

Frankly, it only serves him right. ;~) He gets to describe one type of argument and be one of those being described in another.

Actually, it sounds like that was his aim all along!

Re: Newman's Corollary

Oh, well, I guess I can take that off my list of things that need a meme. ;~)

Sorry, Darkness, but someone already named it, and in the self-referential mode mentioned earlier, it sounds as if Godwin was in on it.

What is the average amount of pages of comments before the inevitable infighting over libertarianism or some semantical tangent?

Any guesses/theories?

I've done a complete analysis using several state-of-the-art statistical methods recently developed to quantify such things.

The average number of comments before libertarianism is mentioned is 42 depending on whether or not Shooter or RealName have been sitting in front of their computers all morning repeatedly hitting their refresh button so that they can enter a phrase like "Is it in blog format? Otherwise, What the hell?" or "Who cares?" or "Heh" on the first page of comments at which point the other commenters immediately set about trying to humiliate them (which is not possible). This tends to delay the onset of libertarian flame wars by an average of 10 comments.

Libertarian fireworks are normally set off when a commenter accuses another commenter of not taking the first commenter seriously at which point Ron Paul almost always the conversation. After the words "Ron Paul" are written, the insults escalate and usually continue until the end of the thread. The only libertarian who is an exception to this rule is Mona, because Mona is a somewhat reasonable person, almost never takes offense, and besides, most of the other commenters seem to like her. I know I do.

Debates on issues of semantics, sidereal as they seem at times, are actually the result of one of the newer commenters over eagerly typing a response to a comment containing one or more National Spelling Bee words without waiting for sysprog, LWM, William Timberman or either of the two Pauls to provide a detailed explanation of the words at issue along with links and other references.

Well done. And it's always gratifying to be mentioned in dispatches, even when one has done so little to merit it. :-)

Michael Harold:

The average number of comments before libertarianism is mentioned is 42

The Ultimate Answer! Of course you are right.

By Mike Godwin

It was back in 1990 that I set out on a project in memetic engineering. The Nazi-comparison meme, I'd decided, had gotten out of hand - in countless Usenet newsgroups, in many conferences on the Well, and on every BBS that I frequented, the labeling of posters or their ideas as "similar to the Nazis" or "Hitler-like" was a recurrent and often predictable event. It was the kind of thing that made you wonder how debates had ever occurred without having that handy rhetorical hammer.

Not everyone saw the comparison to Nazis as a "meme" - most people on the Net, as elsewhere, had never heard of "memes" or "memetics." But now that we're living in an increasingly information-aware culture, it's time for that to change. And it's time for net.dwellers to make a conscious effort to control the kinds of memes they create or circulate.

A "meme," of course, is an idea that functions in a mind the same way a gene or virus functions in the body. And an infectious idea (call it a "viral meme") may leap from mind to mind, much as viruses leap from body to body.

When a meme catches on, it may crystallize whole schools of thought. Take the "black hole" meme, for instance. As physicist Brandon Carter has commented in Stephen Hawkings's A Brief History of Time: A Reader's Companion: "Things changed dramatically when John Wheeler invented the term [black hole]...Everybody adopted it, and from then on, people around the world, in Moscow, in America, in England, and elsewhere, could know they were speaking about the same thing." Once the "black hole" meme became commonplace, it became a handy source of metaphors for everything from illiteracy to the deficit.

By 1990, I had noticed, something similar had happened to the Nazi-comparison meme. Sure, there are obvious topics in which the comparison recurs. In discussions about guns and the Second Amendment, for example, gun-control advocates are periodically reminded that Hitler banned personal weapons. And birth-control debates are frequently marked by pro-lifers' insistence that abortionists are engaging in mass murder, worse than that of Nazi death camps. And in any newsgroup in which censorship is discussed, someone inevitably raises the specter of Nazi book-burning.

But the Nazi-comparison meme popped up elsewhere as well - in general discussions of law in misc.legal, for example, or in the EFF conference on the Well. Stone libertarians were ready to label any government regulation as incipient Nazism. And, invariably, the comparisons trivialized the horror of the Holocaust and the social pathology of the Nazis. It was a trivialization I found both illogical (Michael Dukakis as a Nazi? Please!) and offensive (the millions of concentration-camp victims did not die to give some net.blowhard a handy trope).

So, I set out to conduct an experiment - to build a counter-meme designed to make discussion participants see how they are acting as vectors to a particularly silly and offensive meme...and perhaps to curtail the glib Nazi comparisons.

I developed Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

I seeded Godwin's Law in any newsgroup or topic where I saw a gratuitous Nazi reference. Soon, to my surprise, other people were citing it - the counter-meme was reproducing on its own! And it mutated like a meme, generating corollaries like the following:

Gordon's Restatement of Newman's Corollary to Godwin's Law: Libertarianism (pro, con, and internal faction fights) is the primordial net.news discussion topic. Any time the debate shifts somewhere else, it must eventually return to this fuel source.

Morgan's Corollary to Godwin's Law: As soon as such a comparison occurs, someone will start a Nazi-discussion thread on alt.censorship.

Sircar's Corollary: If the Usenet discussion touches on homosexuality or Heinlein, Nazis or Hitler are mentioned within three days.

Van der Leun's Corollary: As global connectivity improves, the probability of actual Nazis being on the Net approaches one.

Miller's Paradox: As a network evolves, the number of Nazi comparisons not forestalled by citation to Godwin's Law converges to zero.

In time, discussions in the seeded newsgroups and discussions seemed to show a lower incidence of the Nazi-comparison meme. And the counter-meme mutated into even more useful forms. (As Cuckoo's Egg author Cliff Stoll once said to me: "Godwin's Law? Isn't that the law that states that once a discussion reaches a comparison to Nazis or Hitler, its usefulness is over?") By my (admittedly low) standards, the experiment was a success.

But its success had given me much to reflect on. If it's possible to generate effective counter-memes, is there any moral imperative to do so? When we see a bad or false meme go by, should we take pains to chase it with a counter-meme? Do we have an obligation to improve our informational environment? Our social environment?

But this power to do good may also be a power to do ill. Anyone on the Net has the power to affect stock prices. (Or worse: a fraudulent re-creation of the Tylenol-poisoning scare could cause a national or international panic.) And viral memes are capable of doing lasting damage.

While the world of the Net is filled with diverse critical thinkers who are ready to challenge self-indulgent or self-aggrandizing memes, we can't rely on net.culture's diversity and inertia to answer every bad meme. The Nazi-comparison meme has a peculiar resilience, in part because of its sheer inflammatory power ("You're calling me a Nazi? You're the Nazi in this discussion!") The best way to fight such memes is to craft counter-memes designed to put them in perspective. The time may have come for us to commit ourselves to memetic engineering - crafting good memes to drive out the bad ones.

Otherwise, plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if_pr.html