Sorry,. It ate my (sarc)(/sarc) markups. But you get the drift.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault;
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest, —
For Brutus is an honorable man;
So are they all, all honorable men, —
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honorable man.

Lawdy.

Poe’s law results in blowback when persons who pass on the parodic position cannot discern its falsehood, but those in the majority / in power can.

The second addendum is as follows:

Poe’s law results in schism when the position is so extreme as to mark them as an enemy.

If you can discover their axioms and reason from them, you will get their positions (Slate Star Codex is remarkably good at this.) Sometimes you can’t; that’s true unreason. Since it is much easier to rationalize axioms than to correct them, people will often cling to poorly performing axioms. It is also the case that reality is sometimes more subtle than you think, and abandoning an axiom when things get difficult is no particular virtue.

Poe’s law relies on not that the positions are unreasonable, but that people are using the positions as signals – Poe’s law works by hacking the signal. This is similar to people wearing a uniform similar to another’s – the casual observer may be fooled by the similarity, but the very dedicated recon will discern the difference. The reason why Poe’s law is effective is that people are glossing positions for emotional reasons, and signaling support for them. When the attack signal is spotted, they only identify its rudimentary form, i.e. ‘does it signal support for X?’ and pass it along or believe it based on that.

I personally do not think that Poe’s law is limited at all to extremism, it is simply that the author of the law had trouble discerning real from fake signals in positions very different from his own. But Poe’s law is only effective with extremism because it attacks by overloading the signal. It is hard to overload the signal of moderation, since the effectiveness of the attack is that it gets people to ‘admit’ to positions that are, in reality, horrible, because they cannot discern the fake signal. The person to whom the position is extreme is not really the target, but the target is primarily the person to whom the position is NOT extreme.

I do not trust anyone who admits to using such techniques in a non-jocular fashion, for obvious reasons.