Yeah, Godwin-proofing is hard. And I know you personally aren’t a great Mittani fan, and probably, the same goes for a lot of other Imperium members. Hell, I knew several Razor people who totally didn’t care about any of that and were basically always only doing their own stuff up there in Tenal. (Or was it Venal? If I could ever remember. Maybe both.) But EVE fosters a certain “us vs them” mentality that I don’t especially care for, and in that one, you are to stand behind your alliance without reservation, and you basically hang with them. Even if you don’t do that yourself, others will treat you like you do. Basically, some people have a lot of fun producing propaganda (and some is very entertaining), and many people take it a bit too seriously. Nevertheless, I think Goons are… convenient, but unfortunate allies.

Also, I remember a discussion… but now I of course can’t find the link any more… that went basically along the lines of “Goons are a multi-game community, right? So might they all just leave EVE if they lose, or drop out for a bit then come back in force?”, and it sounded like EVE, by now, is their dominant game, to the point where there are supposedly many SA members who are “only here for Goonswarm”. That would be in line with your “hard core” idea. I can’t really say much about Something Awful. I never had so much as a look at it after I heard it was a weird web forum community. I’m not really a web forum person.

While I was doing my research, learning which servers had a large Japanese presence, which was roleplay-friendly and so on, the name “Goons” kept cropping up, usually in the context of “don’t roll here – it’s full of Goons” or “I’m looking for a new server because I heard Goons were coming to this one”. That got me curious enough to look into just who the Goons were, which took me to the Something Awful forums, after which I had a pretty clear idea what it was people were so worried about.

The purpose of that nostalgia trip is to point out that Goons have been around for a long time and they’ve always been either feared or hated by, well, almost everyone except Goons. Over the years Goons seem to have become inextricably linked with EVE and their image and reputation has, if anything, softened. My gut feeling is that that’s probably an illusion. There’s probably a hard core (or maybe a hardcore) that hasn’t softened at all. I do wonder if this isn’t all a bit like some bravos egging each other on to poke a sleeping bear with a stick. Maybe when the bear wakes up we’ll all see that it’s old and toothless and gone to seed. Or maybe there will be one very big, very angry bear and a lot of small figures disappearing over the horizon in the opposite direction.

I guess we’ll find out.

And I don’t think you can ever put in enough disclaimers to Godwin-proof something if you then mention Hitler. The whole thing goes south once he comes into play because that history is so far beyond the pale that it drowns out any message. Also, it didn’t help that Rob was there with another Hitler comment right after yours. Hitler double-team! Or Nazis, rather, since you didn’t actually say “Hitler,” but once you’re at Nazis, it is already folded into the picture.