Many of you have heard of Godwin’s Law (original 1990 formulation):
As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
I propose a sibling, which I’ll call Stentor’s Law in honor of the proximate inspiration for the dictum. Stentor’s Law states that
As comments to a blog post mentioning fat activism in anything other than a categorically positive context accrue, the odds that someone will post a garbled, angry, and uncomprehending comment complaining of bigotry or “fat hate” approaches unity.
You can see evidence of this law in action by reading my post from last night about the incredible vanishing murder suspect. Stentor quite inanely intimated that I was being unfair toward Mr. Laswell by claiming that he should be happy to lose weight by whatever means this could be achieved. As I noted in a comment on his blog, where he posted a similar bleat and accused me of being gleeful about the whole situation, his browser is apparently equipped with a plug-in or maybe some malware that renders blog posts in an entirely different manner from the one in which they are actually written.
I won’t go to the trouble of explaining yet another time what I intended to convey by mentioning the inmate’s less-than-intact faculties. When people are convinced the world is out to get them — and it surely sucks being fat, make no mistake about that — no amount of reasoned argumentation will sway them. All criticism of fat activists is rooted in evil motives; all fat people need to be cut some slack because they suffer so much.
Stentor, at least, is far from hysterical. He just happens to be wrong. Therefore, he retains the right to have a stupid Internet law named after him, something wild-eyed FFA’s themselves long ago ceded.



#1 by skrishnan on April 29, 2008 - 8:21 pm
http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/56706.html
explains the difference between “odds” and probability.
#2 by Kevin Beck on April 29, 2008 - 9:50 pm
Thanks for the catch, skrishnan. Maybe in ordinary discourse I would have gotten away with that, but around these parts it’s OK to be picky (read: accurate).