Here are arguments that people make with some regularity that are so utterly idiotic and meaningless that they should be banned. Well, not banned because that would be censorship. But when people try to use them, automatic software should cause mocking laughing faces to appear and shame that person into not using these so-called arguments.
Warning: the first two are political, the third one isn’t
(1) The fact that a movie about the assassination of Bush was made is somehow evidence of how much Liberals hated him. This is total BS. The movie (a) was not made in America at all, and 99% of such discussions are about Americans, and (b) was in no way endorsing such a killing and saying “la la la, wouldn’t that be wonderful”. Rather, it was using that as a launching point for a hypothetical “what if” scenario. (And again, it wasn’t something like “what if Bush died? Oh, well, we would all join hands and sing in harmony” or anything like that).
Yes, a lot of people REALLY hated Bush. Really really really. No argument there. And I’m sure that you can find a fringe who carried posters bearing just about any hyperbolic and insulting “Bush = XXX” message you like. But the movie is not further evidence of that hatred.
Now, I think there’s an interesting and legitimate question as to whether the movie would have been made about a more popular, less polarizing, president. But that’s a far different issue from the one that people keep dragging this out for.
(2) When something bad happens to a conservative who a lot of liberals dislike (recently, Cheney and Glenn Beck), and there’s a thread in which at least some number of Liberals make comments that range from gallows humor through tastelessness all the way to “that ****er had it coming”, and someone says something like “wow, you liberals sure are the party of nice tolerant people, we can see it right here in this thread” or some nonsense like that, as if they’re caught us all in our own web of lies. There are many things wrong with that:
(a) as far as I know, liberals never claimed to be the party of being nice
(b) while I certainly believe that liberals are, in general, more correct than conservatives (since, after all, I think liberal views are generally the correct ones, as I would expect a conservative to think the opposite) that in no way means I think liberals are better than conservatives, and I would not make such a claim without adding so many restrictions as to render it meaningless
© there are hundreds of active liberal posters on the SDMB if not thousands, no more than 20 ever post in any of those threads. They don’t prove a damn thing about liberals as a group
(d) as far as I know, there is no accepted cornerstone of liberal thought or philosophy that says “you shouldn’t make fun when bad things happen to people you dislike” which is being hypocritically violated in these threads
(e) as miller eloquently said in the Beck thread:
(3) When some relatively new technology is discussed, most notably cell phones, and people make dismissive comments about how not having cell phones never killed anyone, and oh these people think they’re going to die without their cell phones, blah blah blah. You know what? I’m 100% sure that not having cell phones DID kill a fair number of people over the course of history. Do you really think there was never a case where some family was (for instance) stranded in a car in sub-zero weather with no way to call for help? Or someone had a heart attack while they were away from their home phone (or, heck, before home phones were invented) and they couldn’t call a doctor? Or any number of similar situations? Obviously humanity as a whole survived without cell phones. And obviously humanity as a whole could again. But to use such a clearly factually false turn of phrase just makes you look like a luddite.
(And even on a much lower level of import, it’s 100% indisputably clear that there are various situations in everyday life that are made easier by cell phones. When you and someone else are rendezvousing somewhere, for instance, it’s incredibly handy to both have cell phones with you so you can say “I’m over by the ticket counter” or “I’m running late, please buy me a ticket”, or whatever. Obviously these are not earth- or life-shattering, but it seems to me to be so definitively clear that cell phones are a very useful thing that it’s just bizarre that people try to claim otherwise. Now, do cell phones have issues? Are there legitimate things to complain about? Of course! But the same is true of any technology.)
Similarly, “back in my day dad would drive us across the country and we’d sit in the back seat of the station wagon with no seat belts and we never died”. Well, obviously YOU never died as you survived to post here. But don’t you think SOME dad driving a station wagon at some point had an accident and his kids died because they weren’t wearing seat belts?
Less irritating, in the same general vein, are things like “back in my day we had metal jungle gyms with exposed bolts and you fell 11 feet only hard asphalt and we never died…”.
