I’m really too tired to go around punching people in the mouth today. So: if you find yourself tempted to post one of the following things to the Internet, or God forbid saying one of them sincerely in conversation, would you kindly punch yourself in the mouth? Thanks.
- “IANAL, but….”
- Anything describing how when you were a kid, [commonly accepted safety requirement] either didn’t exist or wasn’t used, and WE all turned out fine.
- Pretty much any sentence ending in “….and WE all turned out fine.”
- Support of tort-reform measures, unless you are a defense attorney or in some capacity employed by the Chamber of Commerce, PHRMA or the Republican Party, because at least then you’re getting paid for it.
- Any argument suggesting that matters of taste are actually matters of absolute truth. (“How can you not like strawberry ice cream? Strawberry ice cream is yummy!”)
- Statements about “religion” which make clear that you think “religion” is a synonym for “those annoying fundamentalist Christians who I had to deal with in the small town I grew up in”.
- A belief that any sexually explicit material, behavior or conversation is perfectly reasonable to have, display or wave around anywhere, anytime, because The Human Body Is Beautiful And Sex Is Natural. If you apply this standard to behavior that normal people would agree is sexual harassment, punch yourself in the mouth twice.
- Huffily stomping out of a discussion with a promise never to return. Yeah, that ever happens on the Internet.
I’m sure there’s more but your knuckles are probably split and bleeding as it is. We can pick up where we left off tomorrow.
Agreed. With one caveat:
I will say thing to my friends like “You’re so wrong in your opinion that, while [ice cream flavor preference] is usually a matter of subjectivity, you’re _objectively_ wrong. This is, of course, meant as a joke…
> Pretty much any sentence ending in “….and WE all turned out fine.”
But we/they didn’t. We just managed to cope, and decided call it fine. ;)
Randy:
All the ones who didn’t die of/get brain damage from whatever it was that their generation didn’t need… turned out fine.
Ehhhhhh “[commonly accepted safety requirement]” is so broad, that it hard to say. Two hand controls on machinery are one thing. Criminalizing parents for not having booster seats, not so. The latter is: 1) A really cool way to force people to buy from a commercial constituency of “Highway Safety” apparatchiks, but a cover for their cover-up of the risks of airbags for certain weights of people.