Could Protestor Arguments Work for You?

[grixit]

Hmm, "citation-barf". Let me see if i can do better...

How about, "parathetorrhea"?

[fortinbras]

With reference to the "citation-barf", I wanna get my two cents in because I worked on two legal stylesheets and have made a point of noticing the stylistic differences among legal publishers (most of whom reject the Ivy League Bluebook).

For one thing these citations are very sloppy throughout. I can understand an occasional bad cite because typing this stuff is as much fun as proofreading logarithms, but when it's this bad and widespread it's a sign - it's PROOF - that the writer has zero legal training, not even a couple of hours with a friendly law school student. Second thing, even with the sloppiness, it's clear that more than one citation style was at work - some of these cites are taken from one publisher, some from another, and possibly some from yet another (the differences are small but telling; the year is given between the name and the reporter, the year is given at the end, the year is left out, some cites give the official edition before the unofficial, some don't and some skip one or the other, some are pin cites - to the specific page of a quote - and some just to the case, etc.). To my mind this characteristic is absolutely fatal to his credibility. This shows that this guy never actually read these decisions, he's just copying the strings of cites from other people's publications.

[Famspear]

What is also telling is the citation to the same cases that we've seen over and over and over and over and over again -- especially the state court cases that have nothing to do with federal income tax, and the incorrect citation to Lucas v. Earl (showing summaries of the losing taxpayer's brief rather than the decision of the Court). This indicates that the Wackadooster in question has simply copied and pasted garbage he saw somewhere on the internet.

When I began editing tax-related articles in Wikipedia in late 2005, I saw tax protesters citing these same cases over and over.

Not only do the dimwits have no idea that an Oregon state court case has no bearing on federal income tax, but they also have no idea that literally hundreds of other dimwits have already copied and pasted the material -- and have been shot down in places like the Quatloos forum and the talk pages of Wikipedia.