17. Resort to metatheory, essentially committing an argumentum verbosium fallacy (a.k.a., bullshitting your way through an argument with fancy language and advanced but irrelevant concepts). In the case of agentssith, there’s always room to talk about epistemology and Wittgenstein when someone is talking about anthropological research. Why talk about patriarchy as a social and cultural concept in the sciences when you can distract people with some deep-sounding discussion about the use of words and the philosophy of knowledge? It doesn’t matter that your opponent knows that anthropology, as a science, uses an evidentialist, foundational (axiomatic) epistemology, namely the inquiry of scientific method, and that talking about epistemology is, well, totally irrelevant to talking about patriarchy in anthropology (after all, we never distract physicists by asking them to explain the epistemic status of their knowledge after they tell us they discovered the Higgs Boson, do we?). You don’t have to impress or distract her, just impress and distract everyone else so that it looks like you know more than her. Remember, when your buddies say you won because they don’t know any better, you won.

Seriously though, agentssith… way to fail hard at being a philosopher. There’s a reason why epistemologists talk about epistemology and not anthropology, you dumb bastard. Only at the level of metatheory is it appropriate to mix the two, and even then, being such a brilliant epistemologist yourself, you’re probably aware that you can just take the skeptic’s position and completely discredit the scientific method for ALL scientific research, even things as foundational as logic and metamathematics. Or maybe you didn’t know that at all, perhaps I shouldn’t be feeding you another bullshit debating tactic. And besides, I already covered the issue of resorting to metatheory in my “deny everything” tactic explanation above.

18. Another two words, another fallacy, though this time in Latin: tu quoque. Remember, if you can think of ANY example of feminists doing something questionable or even reprehensible, like when some crazy radfems talk about killing male babies or something, that makes it totally okay for you to pull the same bullshit. Two wrongs make a right… or is it that it just makes you both wrong? It’s all right, MRAs always get that shit mixed up, so your friends won’t realize your error.