AzureLunatic: Am I dating myself in the fact that I think the goatse man is classic internet humor, but I think that the use of Tubgirl is another form of Godwin's Law in action?
E: Not really -- I think you're quite correct there. The trick URL is one thing -- posting disgusting pictures in an attempt to overwhelm the person is quite another. It's attempts at intimidation, plain and simple.
AzureLunatic: One doesn't usually post the actual goatse man picture as a bludgeon. It's artfully presented as an aid to the argument that winds up being unexpected, but easily escaped.
E: Of course, any picture posted over and over becomes a bludgeon, same with text, but text takes a lot more of it to have the same effect.

The upshot of this, of course, is that it's becoming widely accepted in assorted internet forums that if one has to resort to posting the Tubgirl image (if you don't know about this, please, enjoy your innocence; if you're really dying to know what it is, you can Google it, but not from work, unless you work for an extremely nasty adult service, and not if you really do like your sanity; suffice to say that it's a rather nasty image manipulation) or other pictures of a similar negative level on the "savory" scale in order to feel that one has "won" a debate, one has no more won than if one has resorted to drawing unwarranted comparisons to the Nazis and/or Hitler and using those to attempt to crush the opposition.

The GNAA and all the trollish denizens of certain notorious forums have automatically lost all internet debates they enter into, in other words.