Moff's law originated in comments on an io9 post and was identified on Racialicious. It's lengthy but this is the summary:
- Of all the varieties of irritating comment out there, the absolute most annoying has to be “Why can’t you just watch the movie for what it is??? Why can’t you just enjoy it? Why do you have to analyze it???”
- If you have posted such a comment, or if you are about to post such a comment, here or anywhere else, let me just advise you: Shut up. Shut the fuck up. Shut your goddamn fucking mouth. SHUT. UP.
That is, it bans a form of silencing. The reason why the argument of "It's just a book/game/movie/tv show/etc" is wrong is that culture informs society, and a creative work that perpetuates hatred, misinformation, or other bad things can have an effect on large amounts of people, however subtle that effect may be, degrading society to some extent as a whole.
If Moff's Law was phrased as a parallel to Godwin's Law or the Unicorn Law, it would become something like
- As comments continue in a feminist [social justice] discussion of pop culture, the probability of someone saying "why do you have to analyze it? it's just a movie/cartoon/book!" approaches 1.
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