It’s been a little over a year, so it’s time for another list of ways to avoid setting off my bullshit detector. This list is a sequel to this one.

  1. Don’t beat around the bush if you’re going to make an accusation. Or, unspoken implications with plausible deniability built in are for cowards.

    Person A: “It sure is interesting that you were out of the office the same day that two joggers were bludgeoned to death in Piedmont Park.”

    Person B: “Are you saying I blugeoned two joggers to death?”

    Person A: “No, I’m just saying it’s interesting.”

  2. Don’t claim that because person A makes person B angry, that person A must have a point. If that were the case, Ann Coulter would be the most insightful person in the world. She’s not.
  3. Don’t respond to an accusation of malfeasance or general dickery by pointing out an occasion where someone else has engaged in malfeasance or general dickery. I don’t give a good goddamn what Bill Clinton did or didn’t do. He’s not the president anymore.
  4. Don’t evaluate a subject area by criteria which its own practitioners don’t evaluate themselves by. Most bloggers aren’t journalists, and don’t claim to be.
  5. Don’t try to rationalize a stupid and/or offensive statement by questioning the audience’s sense of humor. All I did was call your father a toothless disease-ridden baby-eating overall-wearing three-eyed goat rapist. I obviously was kidding. Where’s your sense of humor? Baaaaaa…
  6. Don’t claim that profanity or poor grammar/spelling weaken an argument. Neither of these things are inherently true. Try addressing what was actually said instead of projecting your arbitrary puritan grammatical mores as a means of weaseling your way out of an argument. Alternately, give me one good fucking reason that shit is profane and crap isn’t.
  7. Don’t pretend like you being too dense to understand something makes it worthless for everybody. I’m not very good at math, so math must suck, right? Stupid calculations. I’m not going to pay bills anymore.
  8. Don’t use the phrase “hate-filled” to describe criticism motivated by anger. This is meant to dismiss people who were placed on the defensive by something inflammatory that was said about them, and who are righteously pissed off about it. You can also play bullshit bingo with the words “shrill” and “sensitive.”
  9. Don’t use an irrelevant list of terrible things someone has not done to try to distract from a list of terrible things someone has done. Okay, so Ted Bundy killed like 30 girls. That was bad and all, but it’s not like he ate the bodies! And he NEVER cheated on his taxes!
  10. Don’t try to pass ‘but think of the children!’ off as a reason to do anything. People from all ideological corners are often guilty of this rank bullshit. Just because you don’t watch your kids closely enough to keep them from downloading Midget Watersports 4 1/2 on Bittorrent doesn’t mean the rest of us should be deprived.

It’s takes a bullshitter to know one. I’ve probably partaken in at least some of these at one point or another, and am not claiming otherwise. But that doesn’t let you off the hook for using them (read rule 3 again).