Steven Pinker said something else I liked. "I've been...", he said "...a victim of Godwin's law. This states that as an internet discussion continues, the probability that someone will be compared to Hitler approaches certainty."

The sub law of this is that in business the probability of someone in a long, typically fraught, e-mail thread, cc'ing everyone in the company becomes a rock-hard certainty. It is an inescapable law as immutable as gravity. It will happen.