I’m posting this here because, quite frankly, I have no idea where else to put it. Also, forgive me if it has been proposed/done before. I searched, but I couldn’t find it.
I am generally a lurker. This means I spend more of my time here reading other people’s words of wisdom, and less time posting words of wisdom of my own. However, in the course of my lurking, I have found that certain arguments have been used far beyond the Point of Excess, past the Point of Near-Argument Death, right up to the point of Outright Death of Argument, Right Here and Now.
This does a great disservice to all involved. It causes well-thought-out debates to quickly degenerate into name calling and badgering, as more original posters are (for some odd reason) utterly compelled to savagely browbeat their more mundane counterparts. It bores the old-timey lurkers, and makes the baby lurkers cry. It needlessly wastes space in the Great SDMB Storage Banks, and causes one in every three hamsters to commit suicide by inhaling from their waterbottle instead of drinking from it.
Therefore, I propose the creation of a list, numbered and indexed. This list will contain as many of the thoroughly dead arguments as we can come up with. Henceforward, anyone wishing to use one of these hackneyed arguments can simply say “Index #2, with ‘Islam’”, and save us all time and space. Sort of like “ordering by number” at McDonalds or your local Chinese food establishment of the fast variety.
Note that I am not making any claim as to the validity of the argument, or the nature of poster of these arguments, with two (noted) exceptions: 1) The arguments are overused. 2) The posters of the arguments are very focussed individuals.
Without further ado, the list. Items in <> are placeholders, designed to be replaced at post time (like ‘Islam’ in the example).
Please feel free to add items to the list, and begin using it immediately.
**1. **Because God said so.
**2. **Because your <religion-name> God is a(n) <idiot/sham/demon spawn/other>
**3. **Because you, dear <sir/madam/other> are, in fact, an idiot.
**4. **Because you misspelled <word>.
**5. **Because all <profession> are <liars/cheats/cowards/Founding Members of the Illuminati/other>.
**6. **Because all <race, possibly epithetical> are <lazy/slack-jawed/good at sports/terrorists/smart/other>.
**7. **Because all <sexuality> are <afraid/promiscuous/dangerous/unsure of their true sexuality/flamboyant/derisive/the cause of AIDS/other>.
**8. **Because property ownership is <good/a crime/other>.
**9. **Because it’s in the Constitution.
**10. **Because that’s in the Declaration of Independance, not the Constitution, and <Index #3>.
**11. **Because you have explicitly violated <Occam’s Razor/Hanlon’s Razor/Godwin’s Law/Opal’s Law of Threes/some other logical “law”>.
**12. **Because <I/you> <was/were> <drunk/stoned/temporarily insane/other> at the time.
**13. **Because if I replace <word> with <other word> throughout your post, the insult becomes clear.
**14. **Because all members of <political party> are <racists/rich/stuck-up/Founding Members of the Illuminati/unconcerned/owned by corporations/other>.
