A lot of these trump mine, but the first thing that came to mind was any of the numerous times I was arguing against this old chestnut:
“Marriage laws are already equal; anyone is allowed to marry someone of the opposite sex. Gays are asking for special rights!”
:rolleyes:
Oh! I actually forgot about this gem. On a comic book message board I frequent, a (completely bonkers) poster who has a bug up her ass about gay people argued - in all seriousness - that one reason we should outlaw the practice of homosexuality is because if aliens are observing our planet, non-heterosexual behavior might give them the wrong idea about Earthlings.
Well, I got into an argument recently with a woman who had bought into the idea that leeches could filter your blood better than your kidneys and liver. And that the leech would only eat the “toxins” and return all the good blood.
Since we don’t know conclusively what causes autism, we’re free to connect the dots to anything we feel like (what we feel like usually being the MMR).
When someone argues that they’re against people being gay (as if it were a choice like being vegetarian) because “it’s unnatural”. Then when you point out that homosexuality occurs in nature all the time, what do they say? “Well, do we really want to be like the animals?”
Oh, and I’ve heard one that goes “If everyone were gay, the world’s population would die out”. Just, wow. At most, maybe 10% of the world’s population is gay (if that number’s way off, I apologize). What, do you think the gayness is going to spread and infect all the God-fearing heterosexuals?
:smack: <-- There are not enough of these in the world.
Ok, one more concering intelligent design. “If humans evolved from monkeys, why are monkeys still alive?”
The worst arguments I’ve seen always seem to occur in religion or evolution arguments. It’s tough to top a die hard creationist for sheer unbelievable bullplop.
"the Jews didn’t lose all that much in the Nazi camps. Because of all those medical experiments, there are more Jewish doctors nowadays than all other religions."
After 25 years I still remember his exact words. If they ever come up with a memory flush medicine, I’ll be the first in line.
I don’t spend too much time on message boards and discussion forums outside the SDMB. I’m a member of a couple of other boards, but most of my online conversations and debates occur right here. My “stupidest argument ever,” therefore, comes from right here on this message board.
The poster was the late, unlamented milroyj. It would be possible to find a whole plethora of really dumb arguments by this guy, but the one that really stood out to me had nothing to do with his politics or even with any specific position he held. It was about what constitutes a valid citation.
He started this thread to accuse another Doper of lying, based on the argument that there was no cite available for a comment allegedly made by Barbara Bush, wife of former president George H.W. Bush. A bunch of people provided him with citations for the comment, and i went to the trouble of copying the transcript from Lexis/Nexis.
This was his response:
From then on, the thread took a completely surreal turn, as milroyj rejected any linkable citation on the gronds that it was not a valid source, and rejected valid sources (e.g., Lexis/Nexis) on the grounds that i couldn’t provide him a direct link (because it’s a subscription-only database).
It was one of the most incredible exercises in obtuseness and ignorance that i’ve ever seen. You really need to read the whole thread to get the flavor of this guy’s stupidity.
I have friends who tell me they love the smell of meat, and would love to eat it, but that they become physically ill when they try to even taste it- it is not a choice they have made to be vegetarian.
As I am too good of a friend to try to slip them some to see if they are telling the truth, I can’t judge the veracity of this, however.
My favorite dumb argument was also from a 9/11 “discussion” I had with a friend via email. He linked to an essay that argued that an easy way to prove that the towers were brought down by the airplanes crashing into it would be to build a scale model of the WTC, then crash a scale model of a passenger jet into it. The fact that no one has done this was touted as evidence that the engineers who investigated the WTC attacks were idiots who didn’t know anything about physics. The guy who wrote the article was a professional fisherman. When I pointed out to my friend that, on my side, I had literally thousands of engineers, architects, and physicists, and on his side, he had the Gorton’s Fisherman, I was accused of being elitist.
