Rules

Send us Fan Mail I have a principle about rules: you only ever make a rule for something that you don't think people will do/follow if you didn't state the rule. This means that every rule says something about the people who are meant to operate by them. By explicitly stating the rule you betray something about the level of expectation of those meant to follow the rule. For this reason, we don't have rules about "obvious things" that we don't think people would really do. Every so often someone drags out a list of really strange and obscure rules like "it's illegal to ride a cow while drunk in Scotland" and such like. How we write rules makes a big difference to how they are implemented. We learn very early about wiggle room around the wording of rules. Some people seem to specialize in the practice of twisting away from the obviously intended meaning of a rule and toward an obscure interpretation that gives them an advantage. I call this practice "kindergarten bullshit" because it reminds me of the practice of kindergarteners learning the rules of the playground at school.