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Comment Policy

Updated on 8/25/18:

All comments automatically go to moderation. Don’t freak out if I don’t get to them right away, sometimes I’m just not near a computer or notifications aren’t coming in.

I recently reread Anil Dash’s piece If your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault and I’ve been on Twitter enough that my patience for bullshit has basically cratered since I originally made my comment policy. So it’s changed to this: I’ll approve your comment if you aren’t being an asshole. I’ll delete it if you are.

This is the thing: I’m not obligated to let you comment on my blog. I do not owe you a corner of my already-tiny platform so you can share your thoughts about whatever bug you have firmly planted in your ass. And I’m well aware that if you’re that kind of asshole,  no matter what I do you’re going to declare victory and skip off with your opinions affirmed. And that’s kind of a freeing realization for me, you know?

A non-exhaustive list of things I’m likely to just delete because I have neither the time nor energy to be bothered: racism, ableism, anti-lgbtq stuff, political grandstanding pretending to be debate, your screed about how liberals are the real fascists, your keyboard-smashing description of how offended you are that I found something offensive because somehow I’m a snowflake and you aren’t. And so on.

Honestly, I don’t give a shit about your opinion if you’re a jerk. My time on earth is limited and I prefer to not waste it.

And to the First Amendmenteers out there: I am not the US government. I am allowed to kick you off my blog and delete your comments. If you whine about the First Amendment, I will do my best Bella Lugosi belly laugh while I ban you. If you want a platform from which to say the kind of shit that would compel me to ban you, get your own blog.

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reference post sarcasm someone is wrong on the internet

Reasons why I will not be replying to your argument

This post has been made for my own later use. Others are welcome to use it as well.

The numbers on the list are for reference rather than ordinal purposes.


To whom it may concern:

Thank you for your interest in my blog post/comment/tweet/facebook post/[insert social media of choice here]. I appreciate that you have taken time out of your day to share your opinion with me. However, I will not be addressing said opinion further or at all in any substantive way (beyond the link I have just shared with you) for one or more of the following reasons:

  1. Something you have said indicates to me that you are not interested in arguing in good faith. That is to say, I have reason to believe you are not interested in an actual discussion in which both sides listen to each other, modify their positions, and come to some form of agreement.
    1. I might have just given your social media profile a brief look and seen slurs indicating racism, misogyny, homophobia, or transphobia, or observed terms such as “libtard,” or other MAGA/MRA/Gamergater/Neo-Nazi flavored language thrown around and thus concluded this really isn’t going to be worth my time.
    2. Same if I notice you run a climate denial website or something similarly disconnected from reality.
  2. You have moved the goal posts at least once.
  3. Something you have said indicates to me that you lack the necessary factual grounding in order to have this argument, and I am completely uninterested in doing the background research for you.
    1. If you are interested in paying me to do the research for you, for example by way of writing an annotated bibliography that you can peruse at your convenience, we can discuss my hourly rates.
  4. You have thus far done such a good job at arguing with straw man conceptions of my words that I’ve come to realize my input is entirely superfluous. Please feel free to continue this argument without me.
    1. See also: the argument you are attempting to have has only the most passing resemblance to the argument in which I’ve been participating.
  5. You have said something so gob-smackingly insulting or downright evil that I don’t want to be on the same planet as you, let alone in some kind of intellectual interchange.
  6. Mommy taught me not to feed the trolls.
  7. I don’t see the point in responding to complete non-sequiturs.
  8. You said something about the First Amendment that indicates you have no actual understanding of the First Amendment; refer back to point number 3.
  9. This argument is two people shouting “Nuh UH!” “Uh HUH!” into the internet for eternity in all but the most literal sense.
  10. I’m annoyed enough that I have completely lost my ability to be either kind or only gently sarcastic.
  11. I have homework to do/I have work to do/I have cats to pet/I have a Fist of Havoc better utilized elsewhere/my pedicure could use some maintenance.
  12. Responding substantively to this argument would give it more intellectual cachet than it deserves.
  13. You immediately misgendered me and I can’t be arsed to deal with you right now.
  14. I’m too mentally or physically tired to want to mount an expedition down this rabbit hole.
  15. I just finished having this exact same argument with someone else and don’t feel like repeating myself, kindly refer to my comments/mentions.
  16. You appear to be attempting your own version of the Gish Gallop, and I have better things to do with my time.
  17. My humanity, my identity, or that of my siblings in struggle is not up for debate. You are simply wrong. The end.
  18. I have a deadline and my agent has a rubber hose.

Please do not take my lack of interest in responding as a sign that you have “won” in any sense but that of water “winning” over a piece of rock by wearing it smooth. My silence is neither agreement nor assent, but rather lack of interest in anything further you might have to say coupled with disinclination to waste energy or breath better spent elsewhere.

I wish you luck in your future endeavors. Have a nice day.

Categories
rants reference post someone is wrong on the internet

I Give a Homeopathic Fuck About Your Entitled Whining

Dear Sir and/or Madam:

Thank you very much for bringing to my attention the important issue of (circle one):
a) white people losing their privileged position/racial majority in this country
b) your deep feelings that gay people getting married somehow renders your marriage less special
c) your barely concealed rage that we no longer live in a fictionalized version of the 1950s
d) your horror that Christianity is no longer the accepted default religious position and those damn Muslims/Humanists/Atheists/Sikhs/etc insist on existing
e) the basic unfairness of a universe that refuses to allow you to scientifically support your religious/crackpot ideas
f) your deep philosophical point that I am fat/a chick/a chick that doesn’t wear make-up/obviously some kind of lesbo/a hippy pinko feminazi/etc therefore am incapable of being right
g) [write-in space here for issues not covered]

Your opinion is not actually important to me at all. In light of that, please allow me a moment to explain just how little I actually care.

Imagine, if you would, that in the deep recesses of the past my blackened, shriveled excuse for a heart was capable of giving a fuck about you. Not because I thought that you might actually have had a point, but rather because I could recognize your basic humanity and thus stir myself to the level of empathy necessary to give a single, lonely fuck about what you had to say.

This single, sad little fuck ran up against the crushing behemoth of your entitlement. I attempted to engage in reasonable conversation on the misapprehension that such a thing is actually possible in the comments sections of most websites. But then the jaw-dropping assertion that, say, pointing out that straight white men have it kind of easy is somehow racist hit my poor little fuck like a rocket sled crashing into a block of ice. That fuck I gave was easily shattered into at least one hundred pieces, one or two of which I was able to recover for later use.

I would have tried to recover more of my poor, pulverized fuck but you burnt my fingers with your incoherent inability to spell or use even the sophisticated grammar of a second grader and I retreated rather than suffer further.

And then that just kept happening. 

Over and over again, I attempted to give you what remained of that original fuck, and you continued to crush it under the weight of your certitude that life is spectacularly unfair to you because there are people who, shockingly, want the same opportunities you were born with.

Thanks to the internet and the free range of jaw-droppingly stupid opinion available for instant consumption, the fuck I once gave has now been divided and diluted to the point that you could search through every molecule that has ever existed in the universe and find no trace of it.

So at this point, the best I can manage for you is a homeopathic fuck at a dilution somewhere past 400C. Which, if you believed in magic, might actually have some kind of meaning. But given that I’m a woman of reason, it means I literally have no fucks to give you at all. In the entire universe, not one single fuck exists of mine that can be yours in regards to your entitled whining. Ever.

Have a nice day.