The Succulent Succession of Swine Side: A Brief History of Bacon

Although not the most popular animal in the US, the pig remains a "wonderful, magical animal" and has become a staple of the American diet (and internet memes - some more NSFW than others). It is, in fact, even more popular in Europe. Of course, if you happen to eat the pig it becomes pork - like transubstantiation. Pork just happens to encompass a wide swatch of carnivore favorites, including ham, fatback, soki, porkchops, and - arguably most important of all - bacon. While consumption of pork in general hasn't changed much in the last 50 years, bacon has become more popular than ever.

Depending on how you define bacon, of course.


Defining Deliciousness

Bacon in the US comes from the pig belly, which gives it the distinctive parallel stripes of light fat and darker meat (coincidentally, 80s movies often mention pork belly futures, which seems like an outlandish trading commodity, but is actually a means of alleviating risk for meat packers by helping to stabilize the price). In other parts of the world this bacon takes up the name American bacon or breakfast bacon. The USDA even appetizingly defines bacon as the "the cured belly of a swine carcass." But this is a bit backwards, as etymologically bacon comes from the Old French and Germanic words for "back."

In order to preserve the meat and give it its distinctive flavor, it has to be cured - usually by sitting in a smoke house or in a barrel with a heavy brine. Curing defines bacon, but location on the pig is also important (in fact, the only thing initially separating ham from bacon was that ham came from the legs and bacon came from almost anywhere else). Bacon in general often refers to any portion of meat (non-organ) cuts rear of the front legs and excluding the rear legs. Although modern consensus limits bacon to the belly, sides below (or behind, if you don't want anthropomorphic pigs) the ribs, and the fatty portion of the back.

As noted, American-style or streaky bacon comes from the belly. The back portion is usually called Canadian (or Irish) bacon in the US (when it's not ham) and tends to have much less fat. Side bacon represents a mix of the fatty and meaty American and Canadian associations. The Kevin Bacon tends to have a lot of Golden Globes and SAG awards and isn't considered very edible. These distinctions between different cuts of bacon - and even the difference between ham and bacon - have not existed for long.


A Brief History of Deliciousness

Pigs were one of the earliest domesticated animals. Human diets have included various types of pork for quite a while. Chinese historians often claim the first ancestor of bacon in the form of pickled pork bellies around 1500 BC. While whole animals became the focus of feasts and banquets, armies used cured cuts of meat as a marching staple. Unlike the American association with long strips of smoked pig belly, most early forms of "bacon" likely came in chunks and were heavily salted to prevent decomposition and to remain edible.

The Romans issued soldiers rations with pork (about 2lbs of grain and 1lb of meat when possible, augmented with what was available nearby). They distinguished pig by two types: perna (hind-quarter/ham) and petaso (fore-quarter/shoulder bacon). Soldiers were often given petaso (often just called bacon in English); a contubernium (squad of eight) had its own frying pan to bake bread and fry meats.

During their occupation of Britain they brought numerous Roman foods to the Celtic populace - including soldiers' bacon. Subsequent generations of immigrant Angles and Saxons enjoyed using bacon grease (and pork) in their cooking. Distinguishing bacon from other type of pork has happened in numerous countries recently, but for much of the last few centuries the culinary distinction existed primarily in the Anglosphere.

But the Roman invention of specifying different parts of pork mostly disappeared after the empire collapsed. In the centuries afterward etymological ancestors of bacon simply defined cuts of meat. By the 12th century in England bacon was being used to refer to cuts of meat from the back - initially adopted as a synonym of flicche or flitch (this corresponds to adopting an abundance of Old French words as the Normans came in).

Subsequently, the famous story of the Dunmow flitch has helped solidify bacon's place in history. Supposedly the tale spawned the phrase "bring home the bacon" because a married couple could bring home a flitch of hog (i.e. side of bacon) if they had not quarreled for twelve months and a day. Supposedly the custom was so widespread that Chaucer referenced it. Bacoun (Middle English compared to Old French bacon above) soon referred to any cut of pork.

By the 1600s, bacon referred to a cut of pig meat cured as a single piece (back when slices (or rashers if you're British) were called flitches). By the 1750s bacon was synonymous with the cured side or back of a pig (close to the current general definition now). Northern England (not Scotland) had pickled pork - a close equivalent to modern bacon. By the late 1700s, ranchers and industrialists bred pigs to emphasize particular portions and flavors of the meat (even breeding them for bacon that could more easily be cured).

Although most bacon was heavily salted or smoked in a chimney, more refined curing processes began to develop. Wiltshire curing, one of the oldest styles of modern bacon, developed in the 1860s. As ice became more common, ice houses developed. The cold temperature let butchers cure meat over longer periods of time, requiring less salt - allowing for sweeter, more flavorful bacon.


Now let's see some petaso lingerie.

Which Came First: The Stick and the Egg

Media featuring WW2 have a flare for the dramatic. Americans wield iconic M1 Garands and invariably drive around in jeeps. Germans sleep at MG42s and will inevitably scrounge up a tank. In movies and video games there is a satisfying duality between the Axis and Allies; not only ideology separated the two, but a dichotomy of technology as well. Americans throw "pineapples," Germans throw "potato mashers" (what Damian Lewis is holding in this picture).

Undoubtedly this is because the Stielhandgranate (stick hand grenade) is a recognizable piece of military equipment from the Second World War unique to the Germans (that whole Eastern Front thing? I don't know what you're talking about). It's unfamiliar design and curious operation evoke a very foreign feeling towards Wehrmacht soldiers. Americans (and - when pictured - British and other Allies) invariably appear with grooved, fist-sized grenades like the Mk II "pineapple" grenade. Never mind the fact that the US had copied the basics of this design from the British Mills Bomb during the First World War.

Depicting Germans exclusively using Stielhandgranaten a convenient avenue of influencing the audience's perception that the Germans were vastly different in culture. The truth, however, is that the favored German grenade was very similar to the Allies' design, with a funnier (yet still food-based) name: the egg hand grenade.

German military production favored two types of grenades: the Stielhandgranate (stick hand grenade) and the Eihandgranate (egg hand grenade). Mass production of the Eihandgranate began in June of 1940 and soon far surpassed the production numbers of the iconic potato masher. Even including production numbers from 1939 and 1940 (before the "egg" grenade came into use), 9 million more egg-shaped grenades were produced during the war (84.2 million to 75.4 million stick grenades). In fact, the only modern movie or video game to actually display the Eihandgranate is The Pianist (where they are never used).

Aside from potential identification errors by the audience, there's a reason Eihandgranaten aren't usually depicted in movies and games. They don't appear in historical photographs as prominently as their stick-y counterparts. This has little to do with their actual prevalence on the battlefield; the grenades tended to be kept in a soldier's pockets until needed (unlike American Mk II grenades, which tended to be clipped on to assault webbing). This gives them much less visibility than Stielhandgranaten, which tended to be tucked into the belt.

Here's another chance to catch a glimpse of these elusive eggs.


In case you're wondering why all these eggs and sticks seem to have roots: explosive German grenades used a friction-based fuze. The soldier would yank on the bead, pulling a cord attached to a wire coated with abrasive, which scraped through the friction-sensitive compound in the detonator...similar to lighting a match (or pulling a stick of sandpaper through a tube of match heads). Like a Rube Goldberg machine, except it explodes. Generally the cord was secured inside the grenade's housing, except when they would need to be used on short notice (instances of exposed cords getting caught and prematurely detonating the grenade happened occasionally).

The Eihandgranate consisted of a fuze and detonator in one convenient package. So convenient in fact that by 1943 the German army had essentially changed its stick grenades to be Eihandgranaten with attached handles. Originally, the stick grenade's detonator was housed in the handle of the grenade. This meant the soldier had to unscrew the handle and insert a detonator into the head of the grenade and then screw the handle back on before the grenade could be used, prompting the famous text on the side of the charge: VOR GEBRAUCH SPRENGKAPSEL EINSETZEN, reminding the soldier to unscrew the handle and insert a detonator before taking the grenade into battle.

(If you think that implies soldiers are incredibly aloof, you probably don't want to know what's printed on the M18 Claymore mine)

Both types of grenades favored concussive force over fragmentation - and for this reason are often dubbed "offensive grenades" (as opposed to passive-aggressive grenades, maybe?). That is, German grenades relied on the raw force of the explosion to incapacitate enemies, allowing soldiers to more safely use the grenades at shorter distances (such as charging an enemy trench). Although the German army had developed fragmentation sheaths for use on stick and egg grenades, it was really the Allies' that preferred fragmentation (the Mills Bomb mentioned earlier had an effective range farther than any soldier could throw it, thus the idea of a "defensive grenade," one a soldier would only want to use in cover). They tended to use a smaller charge of explosive to blast apart a shell of metal, which would break apart into high-speed fragments.

So the next time Band of Brothers is on TV, just imagine that the German soldiers have some Eihandgranaten nestled in their pockets for warmth.



"Speak softly and carry a big egg" just doesn't have the same weight...unless your antagonist has ovaphobia.

Go, Goodman, Go

I tend to listen to Pandora whenever I happen to be building chainmail, filling out job applications, or if I happen to play a video game with a sub-par or repetitive soundtrack. One of my Pandora channels features the misleading title "Comedy." Originally developed from a Todd Snider song featured on Bob and Tom, a song by Steven Lynch, and a much less well-known song by a much less well-known artist, Cheryl Wheeler (so unknown in fact, that I almost misspelled her name). Pandora works by assessing the musical qualities of songs that you approve to find similar songs. The channel has since developed to favor "folk influences," "melodic songwriting," and much more nebulous things like "major key tonality" and "acoustic sonority" that music majors might be able to explain (as far as I can tell "acoustic sonority" is the equivalent of "sound-like sound").

Regardless, the channel ended up introducing me to an abundance of artists with interesting, lyrically-driven music that tends to feature lots of singer-songwriters playing a guitar. It's also introduced me to John Williamson and Spectrum - a means of letting me talk to Australian women by pandering to their love of 30-year-old Australian music. It also brought me Steve Goodman, who's likely the far more interesting find. He gets a spot on my site because of his sublimely timed birth. Also he died of leukemia in 1984.


Pandora introduced me to Steve Goodman through a medley he spontanteously created, which happened to be recorded during a live concert. During concerts he would ask for a cowboy hat before singing a semi-satirical country song he wrote with John Prine. When no one could produce a cowboy hat, an audience member shouts, "You want a motorcycle helmet?" The result was Goodman playing a medley of "vehicular songs" including 3 wikipedia-dubbed teenage tragedy songs with a humorous edge as he improvisationally plucked away at his guitar (while wearing the motorcycle helmet).



Goodman was well-known for connecting with the audience and keeping a friendly, personable atmosphere. A master of the guitar, he would often play so furiously and so long that a string would break mid-song. Without missing a beat he would continue singing and replace the string.

Goodman sung an abundance of humorous songs like Leroy Van Dyke's The Auctioneer (here for a tenuous YouTube link) or Shel Silverstein's Three-Legged Man - along with his own rendition of I'm My Own Grandpa (without the past-nastification of Futurama). But he also wrote many of the songs he sang, such as Talk Backwards and the afforementioned You Never Even Called Me by My Name.

Despite Pandora's inclination to give me many of his humorous songs, he was also a skilled lyricist. In years past he was actually more well-known as a writer than a singer-songwriter. His best-known song City of New Orleans refers to a 20-hour passenger train route that still connects Chicago and New Orleans (often dubbed "the least glamorous overnight train" due to the fact the majority of its passengers don't travel between Chicago and New Orleans so the train has very few luxury cars). Goodman took a sentimental look at a vanishing piece of Americana: the now-defunct rail network. Even today, it is often considered one of the best train songs ever written (again, here for a ephemeral YouTube video). I guess if we can have "dead girl songs" and "vehicular songs" we can have train songs too.

As a native of Chicago he wrote numerous fan songs for the Chicago Cubs - for the downtrodden team that has not won a World Series title in over a century (In contrast, the Brewers' franchise has been around since 1969 and managed to snag a pennant in the 1980s, something the Cubs last managed in 1945). The most famous of these songs remains Go, Cubs, Go due to its modern resurgence during winning Cubs seasons in 2007 and 2008 (and the fact it has more uplifting lyrics than his other well-known Cubs' song A Dying Cubs' Fan's Last Request).

Unfortunately, Goodman died of leukemia in 1984 at the age of 36. Mere days later the Cubs clinched their division in 1984. In a stroke of posthumous honors, he also won a grammy for songwriting for Willie Nelson's rendition of City of New Orleans.

And they called him Cool Hand Leuk. No, wait...that's what he called himself.

Vituperating Thesaurus Diving with Scurrilous Excoriations

My desktop houses a rather unassuming file called words.txt. The file - without the fluff on Microsoft Word documents or even WordPad - functions as my own personal dictionary and thesaurus. At fewer than 40 words it's a poor representation of the English language, but it is a great cross section of strange words that have entered my possession through others' misuse or my own curiosity. Unfortunately, It seems lots of people like to finger through thesauruses without double-checking to make sure the words work. I have a great disdain for these thesaurus divers, even if their salvaged treasures fill my dictionary.

Thesaurus diving involves making a piece of writing pretentious ("grandiloquent" if you really will) by replacing common words with longer, rarer or obscure words. There's no problem using a thesaurus to sound a bit more poetic; sometimes blue is just a bit too blue and you need some azure or navy. The problem arises when blue heedlessly becomes something like beryl (beryl is a mineral, which is clear in its pure form, but can take on a multitude of colors).

So I'd like to share a couple of my words and their provenance as part of my dictionary ...No, not scurrilous words (don't ask me why I have so many synonyms for "using abusive, insulting language").


alimentary [al-uh-men-tuh-ree] - adjective
1. concerned with food, nutrition or digestion.
2. providing sustenance or nourishment; nutritious.

This one is fun because it works as a pun for elementary. "Why did the mouse die of starvation, Holmes?" - "It's alimentary, my dear Watson!" (never mind that Conan Doyle never had Sherlock Holmes say "elementary, my dear Watson" in 40 years of stories).


esurient [ih-soor-ee-uhnt] - adjective (esurience - noun)
1. craving food in great quantities; extremely hungry.
2. (often followed by "for") ardently or excessively desirous; greedy.

Not all of my words deal with food, I promise. Anyway, this word fell into my posession from a Monty Python skit involving a cheese shop. The main character played by John Cleese is a bombastic wordsmith and apparent cheese afficionado, and he brings up this rare synonym for hunger almost immediately - along with the more British-sounding "peckish," which makes a nice double entendre since it means hungry and/or irritated. Speaking of double meanings...


excoriate [ik-skawr-ee-eyt] - verb
1. to strip off or remove the skin from; to abrade (scrape off) skin or hide.
2. to denounce or berate serverely; to flay verbally; to censure scathingly.

Who says you don't learn anything watching sports? This word came up during the olympics, when one of the announcers mentioned a hockey coach was excoriating the team for their poor defensive maneuvers. This word is a bit strange etymologically. The core of the word is corium (that's right, I used core just before corium - take that, clarity!), which is Latin for "skin" so the first meaning is apparent, but the figurative meaning requires a bit more imagination.

(Alright there's food again, but that apple snuck into this picture, I swear!)

Double (and triple and quadruple) meanings are the great benefit of a diverse vocabulary. I've enjoyed them ever since mortally wounded Mercutio's pun in Romeo and Juliet: "Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man." Even if Shakespeare's puns were originally an indulgence granted to the humors of the lower classes visiting the theatre. In case we're getting too low-class, next up we've got one of them, whosawhatsits...that's right, $10 words.


pulchritude [puhl-kri-tood] - noun
1. physical beauty - especially of a woman; that quality of appearance which pleases the eye; comeliness; grace; loveliness.
2. attractive moral excellence; moral beauty.

This pops up more often as my favorite word: pulchritudinous (a fancy, long way of saying beautiiful). I hear you say, "I've never seen it before, how much more often could it pop up?" Well, because most spam filters target things like "hot" or "beautiful" or "sexy," pulchritudinous tends to be the generic thesaurus treasure that comes in subject lines like "pulchritudinous Russian virggins redy 4 u."

Beautiful comes from Middle English and Old French, but pulchritudinous derives from fancy, civilized Latin. So how about some more Latin-derived words that are less nice?


scurrilous [skur-uh-luhs] - adjective
1. grossly or obscenely abusive language; vituperative.
2. given to the use of vulgar or coarse language; foul-mouthed.
3. characterized by or using low buffoonery; coarsely jocular or derisive; given to undignified joking as only a buffoon can warrant.

Okay, I lied when I said they weren't scurrilous words. One of the words is literally scurrilous.

I stole this from dinosaur comics, which uses it quite often. Whether or not it's actually being used correctly is arguable (T-Rex hadn't actually said anything mean or vulgar or jocular to warrant the devil's response). This one has fun double meaning since you can clandestinely imply someone is a foul-mouthed buffoon with a single word.


I believe that puts the site 2 years ahead in our "Word of the Year" program. Plus more people will hopefully use pulchritudinous, so my spam inbox won't seem quite so exotic.

I forgot to make a Thesaurus Rex joke, didn't I?

The Importance of Auxiliary Verbs

The United States officially entered World War II on December 7th, 1941 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Often considered a terrible strategic blunder, Hitler subsequently declared war on the US on December 11th. These actions dragged the United States in the Battle of the Atlantic against Germany's commerce raiding navy - primarily submarines. It also brought us the rhyming phrase "loose lips sink ships." However, the original poster adds a very important auxiliary verb to the mix: "might."


Battle in the West (Atlantic)

Between the fall of France in June of 1940 and the loss of numerous u-boat aces in early 1941 (most famously Günther Prien and his magic torpedoes (like magic fingers, but half a meter wide and explosive instead of tingly)), German submarines and commerce raiding ships proved frighteningly successful. In the four months after the Fall of France German submarines sank 282 Allied merchant ships totalling nearly 1.5 million tons of shipping. Their success was so great that after the war Churchill commented that, "The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-Boat peril...It did not take the form of flaring battles and glittering achievements, it manifested itself through statistics, diagrams, and curves unknown to the nation, incomprehensible to the public."

Ever increasing British anti-submarine efforts resulted in wanning commerce raiding opportunities for German submarines in late 1941. However, Hitler's declaration of war allowed u-boats to hunt new targets off the coast of North America ("Canada? What's Canada?"). The first wave of long range Type IX submarines departed as part of Operation Paukenschlag (Operation Drumbeat). For the next 8 months, German submarines saw a resurgence of success (hence the Wikipedia article title "Second Happy Time," from German commander's referring to a period of success as "glückliche Zeit" (meaning "happy time" or "fortunate time").

Germany only had 12 available Type IX boats, so commanders of smaller (more famous) Type VII boats suffered more cramped quarters and meagre rations to risk the journey to hunt down fresh American vessels. They proved so successful that a newly created American Office of War Information began a campaign of information control by mid-1942.


Look at that Ess (c)ar gee-oh

Ironically, the US likely started the campaign to prevent Americans from learning about sinking ships instead of preventing Germans learning information letting them sink ships.

Similar to other propaganda from the period, a large company created the "Loose Lips Sink Ships" (LLSS) poster to aid the war effort. The poster came as part of a series of eight drawn in 1942 by the art director at Seagram Distillers' branch in New York (think Pepsi Co., but with more alcohol). Seagram printed the posters for placement in taverns. Apparently they felt bad for liquoring up all those intelligence officers ready to provide vital war information to German spies. Loose lips might sink ships, but lots o' sips loosen lips.

Obscurely signed as Ess-ar-gee, the poster's artist went without much recognition, despite creating one of the most recognizable phrases from World War Two. Ess-ar-gee enigmatically disguises the initials SRG, which refer to the Seymour R. Goff Jr. (some places slip a Henry in there...we could probably throw in a John or William to cover some other common turn-of-the-century names - or maybe he just didn't like hens).


What Might Sink Ships

The American navy and coast guard were initially unprepared for the waves of German submarines that came. The British immediately recommended switching to the Commonwealth's convoy system - the American navy eschewed the perceived burden of the system. The British recommended flying constant reconaissance and sending out available ships for escort duty (sick of that 'fishy' smell, the British had commandeered many fishing trawlers for anti-submarine duty in 1940 and 1941) - the American navy again abstained, unwilling to seize civillian vessels and lacking available destroyers. Ships leaving American ports suffered heavily between January and August 1942. The British recommended blackouts in coastal cities - and yet again the American navy refused the suggession.

At the height of the "Second Happy Time," German submarines were operating within sight of American harbors - identifying ships' silhouettes against illuminated cityscapes and sinking them as they ventured out to sea. The British tanker Coimbra was sunk within 30 miles of Long Island; residents who spotted the wreck's burning load of oil called the authorities. Due to light air patrols and a lack of available escort ships (many having been "lent" to the British in 1941 in Roosevelt's Destroyers for Bases program), occasionally German submarines sank ships during the day as well - such as the Dixie Arrow sunk 12 miles from the Diamond Shoal anchored light buoy off the coast of North Carolina.

Loose lips might sink ships, but a poorly prepared navy, obstinate leadership and an aversion to adopting proven strategic decisions do sink ships.


"Negative Buoyancy Sinks Ships" just didn't rhyme well enough.

Controlled Internet Anarchy

The internet remains an unregulated sea of anonymity and randomness (even if some politicians would like to revoke Internet neutrality). Internet culture has adopted numerous aphorisms to explain and predict net behavior.

The most prominent of these are:

Rule 1. Do not talk about /b/
Rule 2. Do NOT talk about /b/

Immediately apparent is how these rules were stolen from the rules of Fight Club. Also apparent is how no one adheres to these rules...which is fitting, since /b/ itself essentially has no rules. /b/ refers to the "Random" forum at 4chan (I really recommend you do not visit this site at work). Wikipedia has a brief history and numerous quotes of what mainstream publications have said about /b/.

/b/ is famous for protests against scientology in a spontaneously created movement called Anonymous, creating the rickrolling meme (along with its predecessor - duckrolling), copious amounts of porn (you were expecting a link to porn, maybe?), Boxxy, "trolling for lulz," caturday (which grew into LOLcats), and probably half of the strange things you've seen on the Internet.

The content on /b/ remains ephemeral. It functions as a forum, except only the most recent posts remain active - the rest are purged (never to be seen again...except in the form of screen captures). Although this hasn't stopped other websites from archiving 4chan material.


Rule 34. If it exists, there's porn of it.

As Avenue Q (tangentially) points out, a vast amount of content on the Internet consists of porn (or pr0n, for the uninitiated). However, the Internet's breadth combined with anonymity results in bizarre creations of porn that you're bound to find at least one example either hilarous or disgusting (...or both). Porn itself isn't that surprising; until chaste Victorian society came along there were no qualms about having nudity everywhere (ironically, Victorian society also produced an abundance of nude paintings...but we all know that if you're tastefully nude you're not really naked, right?). The Romans in particular really loved them some nudity; and true to their throwbacks to Roman culture, Renaissance artists embraced the nude...figuratively (...usually).

If you'd like to see a list of typical Rule 34 examples without risking grievous injury to your psyche (or to your internet priveleges at work), I'll recommend TVTropes' list of examples. Relatedly, there's (less common) rule 36.


Rule 36. If it exists, there's a fetish for it.

From coprophilia to vorarephilia (that's scat porn to vore - but more scientific sounding) there's an incredible breadth to the number of fetishes out there. Since the Internet allows people with like interests to easily connect, rare and strange fetishes tend to develop their own communities.

If that's too unsettling, true to its schizophrenic nature the Internet has an alternative Rule 36 for you.


Rule 36. There will always be something worse than what you just saw.

In the low bandwidth days of yore, trolls relied on shock images to harass or disgust potential viewers. In time some websites developed to cater specifically to these sorts of vulgar pornographic or gruesomely graphic shock images.

In a bizarre twist of Internet trends, rickrolling has displaced shock images as the "bait and switch" prank of choice. This doesn't violate the rule, however.


John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory
(Hey, that's the name, don't look at me)

A normal person when provided anonymity and confronted with an audience will turn into a jackass.

This theory was created by Penny Arcade creators Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik in 2004. As illustrated in its original conception, this theory has managed to prove itself many times over. Anyone who has played on Xbox Live can attest to its truth. Relatedly, you'll come across plenty of 11 year olds playing M-rated games ready to teabag your corpse while yelling racial slurs into a microphone.


Godwin's Law

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison
involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

Created by Mike Godwin originally for USENET in 1990, Godwin's Law (or Godwin's Nazi-Corrolary) exists because anonymity allows us all to call other people Nazis with impunity. This trend exists because Nazis are generally considered the worst, most evil thing around. So what other insult could be greater? Subsequently, once someone has been called Hitler or a Nazi, a thread has been "Godwin-ed".

The more recent version of this (or the 1950s version) is to call people Stalin or communist. FOX News and other right wing political institutions like to cover all their bases and call people fascist socialists. Apparently they missed that whole "Soviet Union fighting Nazi Germany for 4 years with 30,000,000 casualties"-part (along with numerous political and economic ideology clashes). So pick one or the other; someone cannot be Nazi-Stalinist.


Poe's Law

"Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article."

Eponymously coined by user Nathan Poe on the Christian Forums in 2005, Poe's Law has evolved to mean that parodies of extremist views are indistinguishable from serious posts without some blatant, transparent indication. It originally related to discussions of evolution, but has since branched out to cover fundamentalist and outlandish conspiracy theorists, as well.

Now all you need to do is to fomulate a post on 4chan about how liberals are like Nazi-Communist-Fetishist porno-junkies via a shock photo and you'll have all your bases covered.