When Your Organization Collides with Poe’s Law

Nathan Poe once commented that, “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.” From that statement arose Poe’s Law, which states that it’s impossible to tell the difference between somebody holding an extreme position and a parody of somebody holding an extreme position.

For some time I’ve suspected that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is an elaborate parody of animal rights activists. It seems that the organization has been performing increasingly outlandish stunts and making increasingly absurd demands in the hope that somebody will finally realize that the entire organization is one giant troll:

The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals affiliate in London is asking developers at Games Workshop to ban animal furs from its Warhammer 40,000 board game.

[…]

The group spoke out on the issue in a blog post by PETA UK’s digital marketing manager, Dan Howe.

“[N]othing on the bloody battlefields of Warhammer’s conflict-ravaged universe could match the terrible reality that foxes, minks, rabbits, and other living beings experience at the hands of the fur trade,” Mr. Howe wrote.

I’ve never played Warhammer 40,000 but I’ve been down several Wikipedia wormholes about its backstory. Warhammer 40,000 is probably the darkest universe every conceived by man. We’re talking about a universe where hundreds or thousands of people are sacrificed every day to keep a decaying emperor alive because he is the only thing that stands between humanity and forces far worse than hundreds or thousands of humans dying every day. It’s like somebody took a black metal album and turned it into a story for a war game (which is to say it’s pretty fucking awesome). And PETA’s biggest gripe with it is that some characters wear fur.

I’ve said it before and I’ll double down on it now, PETA isn’t actually an animal rights organization. It’s a parody of an animal rights organization that is desperately trying to find an act or demand so outlandish that the world will finally figure it out.