Stupidest Argument Someone Around You Has Made

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I have a relative who is just out there. Clinically insane is probably the best description (well, paranoid delusional would be better, as she has coated a wall with tinfoil to prevent a young man from watching her use the bathroom), but she has never been actually diagnosed. Which is another story.

In any case, she lives in her own world, a world which stopped evolving some time in the 1930s. Add in the fact that she’s a devout Catholic and you get a very strict, rigid personality. She’s constantly offended by the real world. (I realize that most Catholics are perfectly able to go a day without being offended. I also realize that most Catholics are sane. She does not fit into either rubric.) She gets strange ideas, and she has no problem with telling the world about them.

An idea she has expressed around me recently is that advertisements that have sex appeal cause dictatorships, or that a society that allows sex-based advertising will soon have a dictatorship because of it. She’s not too clear. Here’s an idea of how my conversation with her went:

Her: Sex in advertising causes dictatorships.
Me: How?
Her: You’re driving down the road and you see a two-thirds naked woman on a billboard. People used to have decency, but now we’re bombarded with ads that have mostly nude people in them. People should write to Congress and say ads like that should be banned.
Me: No, banning those ads will lead to a dictatorship.
Her: People will get sick of those ads. They should get on their Congressmen to ban them.

It gradually tapered out from there. Like taking a baseball bat to a swarm of gnats, no? She wouldn’t do well in politics (let’s all hope).

Another idea she’s had is that the government should be able to horsewhip people. For any crime that doesn’t merit death, that is. Pleasant woman, neh?

Her: The government should horsewhip people like that!
Me: No, that’s cruel and unusual and bears a resemblence to what the Nazis would do.
Her: Don’t speak to me about Nazis! I was alive then. [True, she was in Austria during WWII. Didn’t teach her a damned thing, apparently.]
Me: Then you should know that torturing people is wrong.
Her: Well, I wasn’t talking to you.

Truly, a wet match could explode her arguments.

2

I did my school work experience week in the graphic design department of a large UK military establishment. The sole designer was a middle-aged man whose personal bugbear was tired drivers. He seriously believed that drunk drivers should not be prosecuted since tired drivers were not subject to the same rigourous checks and were equally dangerous. He thought it was better to be absolutely even-handed in who got arrested, even if that meant some drunk drivers would not be caught.

3

I have nothing to add here except to state that I absolutely love that metaphor, and intend to use it in the future :cool:

4

Durring the preshift meeting at my restarant the other day hte manager ends by saying something like: “And smoking is bad. It will make you die.”

To which one of my brilliant co-workers responds that he is a smoker and therefor it is his destiny to die horribly. We tried to explain that he should probably stop and let his body heal. Nope. Destiny makes it impossible for him to stop and he is going to die. He’s 18ish. :smack:

5

I love my niece to death, but sometimes she can be…well, let’s say…entertaining. Sometime in 2000, she told me, in earnest, "You know, I bet all that Y2K stuff is really going to happen in 2001…because that’s when the millennium really begins, right?

sigh

At least she knew when the millenium really started, I guess.

6

This space case told me, “We (America) should return to a hunter-gatherer society. We would all be healthier.”

In other words, not only get rid of the food industry, but get rid of farming.

I said, “How are 250 million people going to live that way? How do you get the population down to a level that can be sustained by hunting and gathering?”

“I don’t know, but we would be much better off.”

I guess he meant after the famine and plagues.

7

Gosh, I don’t feel like racking my brain to decide what’s the stupidest argument I’ve ever heard. I’ve heard some doozies. But I’ll share a pretty stupid one I heard last night…

I was in line at the grocery store. Woman behind me and her companion were checking out one of the tabloid mags by the register, which featured a story about Jon Benet Ramsey.

Stupid Woman makes some comment.
Stupid Woman’s Companion:“You think they did it?”(meaning, did her parents kill her?)
SW:“Yep. Of course. She was famous.”
SWC:“I’d like it if my kid was famous.”
SW:“They couldn’t handle it that she got more publicity than they did.”

Ooookay…At this point, I’d completed my transaction and left, hoping she never has any kids who get famous. Or that she ever pulls jury duty…

8

My ex-boss once told us, in a team meeting, that he’d figured out that there was no connection whatsoever between diet and body weight/size. Because, you look at sheep, and they eat all day, but they don’t get fat.

The problem was the my team was editing a health book for schools at the time. He wanted us to shift the focus of the “healthy bodies, healthy eating and exercise” pages right away from food and only discuss exercise.

I asked for cites from peer-reviewed journals. He didn’t like this. (It almost certainly contributed to me getting punted from my job - could you save your “you have a problem with authority, you need to grow up and stop acting up” rant for another thread, thanks)

I edited the pages so they said what I wanted them to say. Next team meeting, he thought they were great. A couple of meetings after that, he admitted he’d probably been wrong about the food-exercise-sheep-theory.

9

There are many valid, reasonable, compelling, well thought out arguments on the pro-life side of the abortion issue.

My former co-worker’s statement “What is it [the fetus], a lizard? If it isn’t a lizard, it must be alive.” is not one of those arguments.

Should you choose to use it, the other people might stare in stunned silence - which in some circles passes as winning the argument.

10

Sitting with a friend and her ass of a boyfriend one night, the topic somehow got onto everyone’s favorite rapist canniblist Mike Tyson. BF said something along the lines of MT being the best thing since sliced bread. I disagreed, pointing out the small matter of multiple rape accusations. BF then proceeded to tell me that MT was in no way responsible for raping the beauty queen. Why? Well, because

a) MT’s “handlers” (yes, he actually used that word) should have never let him anywhere near beautiful women

b) Beautiful women should have never approached MT unless they were willing to be raped, because they knew how he was

c) His strength is physical, not mental, so we shouldn’t expect so much of him.

I tried reasoning with him. Boy, was that a waste of time.

bella

11

I spent 6 weeks last semester working on a theatrical production of “Inherit The Wind,” which deals with the sagas of the Scopes Monkey Trials. At the cast party, one of my co-stars turned to me and asked, “How do we know dinosaurs and humans didn’t live together at the same time?” I sputtered. I stammered. I tried to think of something to say to get her to see the complete moronic nature of her statement. I briefly debated beating her to death with my script, because READING it obviously did her no good.

Gah. When will certain fundies realize that The Flintstones is not a documentary to be basing our scientific knowledge on?

12

I have a definate, extremely clear recollection of the stupidest arguement I’ve ever heard in my entire life. Two brothers that I know got into a fistfight, a vicious, knockdown-dragout bloody FISTFIGHT over the following arguement: One of them said you could help being “dumb” but you couldn’t help being “stupid.” The other argued that you can help being “stupid” but you can’t help being “dumb.”

13

My ex and I actually got into a full-blown argument over this…

He was from Northern Virginia and was upset the Washington Redskins played in Maryland. He thought that it would be fairer if the 'Skins played in Virginia so he wouldn’t have to drive so far to go to the games. I told him it would make more sense for the Washington Redskins to play in, you know, Washington, but my argument didn’t cut it because it was all about him, see :rolleyes:

No, he was not the sharpest knife in the rack. No, I can’t say I miss him.

14

In the dumb-ex vein…

My ex and I were discussing ACT scores. The ACT, as every sentient human knows, is a standardized test…everyone takes tests of equal difficulty. Right? Right.

So we tell each other what our scores were – I got a 31, he a 16. He then launched into a lengthy explanation of how I only got a higher score than he did because he attended a private Catholic school, and I went to a public school, so my test was easier.

No, I don’t know what the attraction was.

15

…Wow, now that’s classic. I guess between the two of 'em, they could help being dumb or stupid.

16

Here’s the dumbest one I’ve heard in a while. My SO and I were at dinner with his dad and his dad’s girlfriend. We got to talking about movies and I mentioned how much I liked “Fellowship of the Ring.” Dad’s girlfriend said that it was too violent for her. I said that it was violent, but that the violence fit with the context. “After all,” sez I, “it’s an epic, like Beowulf.” She snarks, “I didn’t see that one either!” At this point, I drink a big sip of water and avoid the SO’s eyes. My SO points out gently, “Beowulf is an ancient epic poem.” Her response: “Well, then I didn’t see it, did I?” Hard to argue with that.

17

I’ve posted this before, but what the hey…

First draft of a student’s essay on human cloning:
“When God created Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, he did not mean for them to clone themselves…”

My comments:
You might want to rethink this argument, because you’re writing for a general audience and some of them may not be Christians, or may not take the Creation story literally. Try looking at some of the objections to human cloning that are based on science or a more general sense of ethics.

Final draft of essay:
“Why do people want to clone themselves when we still have millions of years of evolution to go? Take a look at the people living in medieval times. Imagine if that generation had cloned itself. We would be without the comforts of modern-day living we experience today … Besides, when a child is cloned a soul is not established, leaving that child a victim of society.”

On second though, I think I liked it better with Adam and Eve.

18

Drats! I meant to say they couldn’t help being dumb or stupid. Apparently, neither can I.
I work in a fabric-lined box, and on one of my walls is a Boondocks comic strip that is just a little critical of the current president (and this was when his ratings were still in the eighties). One of my more conservative co-workers (I won’t go into why I call her conservative. Let’s just say I don’t think she’d disagree) saw it and went into a tirade about Al Gore. I don’t happen to support Gore, either, but I kept my mouth shut, even after she mused that “If Gore were president, we’d all be speaking Arabic right now.” Hyperbole? Frankly, I couldn’t tell. I’ve since moved the strip out of plain sight.

19

burundi nailed it with my father’s imbecile girlfriend. I’ve told some of my stories about her in other threads, but what the hell. They never grow old.

On Einstein: “Why does everyone think Einstein was so smart? All he did was that one thing.” (this is, incidentally, a verbatim quote – and no, there was no context to it that makes it less stupid.)

On shopping: “Do you ever go shopping and not know what to get? I do…so I look in other people’s carts to see what they get…but then I don’t get it…” (my girlfriend of the time quickly excused herself so that she could get away before the laughter began in earnest).

Then there was the time we were playing the game Taboo, only making up our own cards. If you’ve not played the game, each card has a word on it that you’ve got to get your teammates to guess, and five words you’re not allowed to use. A card might look like this:

Cecil Adams
Dope
Ignorance
Teeming
Column
Smartass

My brother and I were thoroughly sick of the GF’s idiocy (and were young and cruel), so the last card we made up read:

Sarcasm
Don’t get it
Whoosh!
Over your head
Way past you
Pearls before swine.

She got the card, looked at it, furrowed her brow, and looked at us in betrayal.

“You can’t do that!” she said. “That’s thirteen words!”

Our point exactly.
Daniel

20

DanielWithrow-
Perhaps your father keeps her around for the laughs, and he’s just very good at keeping a straight face…