The worst argument you've ever heard

[ThreeWords]

I don't even have a good argument for this beyond asking for proof that God, or indeed anything, is circular in time.

Long answer:

Can you prove that time moves in a straight line?

Sadly, the only thing you can call the 'direction' of time is the change in entropy. Which would be fine, except that the statement "heat moves from hotter to cooler" is basically axiomatic: it could be the reverse, and you would never be able tell the difference.

"But I can remember the past, and not the future!" you cry, "and the passage of my memories show that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is valid in the manner of it's conventional interpretation!"

Well noted, but you have neglected memory skepticism: how do you know that your memories are even slightly legitimate? After all, the only 'record' you have are your memories, and if your assumptions about time were wrong, your memories of the 'future' would simply fade away on the universes march toward the Big Bang [small](Big Crunch?)[/small]

And you would be none the wiser for it, for in truth you have only a single moment in time available to you: indeed, you are not reading these words. You are simply remembering the act of reading them, and what they meant to you. For all you know, there is no progression of time at all, and all you have is this one infinitely small moment of time in which you experience your so-called 'memories' of the 'past', and start to realize that you know nothing at all for certain.
[sup]And don't even try to invoke Occam's Razor: Physics is so riddled with philosophical assumptions that you might as well invoke the Old Gods of Atlantis.[/sup]

Short Answer:

"Proof"?

Ha ha ha.

 

[lacktheknack]

Me, a Cashier: "I don't think we should keep throwing the grocery shrink out as it expires. Most of it is still good. We should send it down to the food stations downtown who will use it today, so we don't waste so much."

Random Girl Buying Stuff: "But wouldn't that mean that we starve the seagulls?"

To this day, I have no idea what she was smoking.

 

[FalloutJack]

I'm just going to simplifiy things by saying...

[HEADING=1]THE INTERNET.[/HEADING]

The internet is the worst argument I've ever seen. Even if it has its upsides, most of it is a poorly-constructed argument.

 

[AntiChri5]

Me, a Cashier: "I don't think we should keep throwing the grocery shrink out as it expires. Most of it is still good. We should send it down to the food stations downtown who will use it today, so we don't waste so much."

Random Girl Buying Stuff: "But wouldn't that mean that we starve the seagulls?"

To this day, I have no idea what she was smoking.

Could she have been agreeing with you? in a sarcastic, facetious way?

 

[SD-Fiend]

"I use logic and reason".

he never explained how his reasoning or logic was different from mine.

 

[lacktheknack]

Me, a Cashier: "I don't think we should keep throwing the grocery shrink out as it expires. Most of it is still good. We should send it down to the food stations downtown who will use it today, so we don't waste so much."

Random Girl Buying Stuff: "But wouldn't that mean that we starve the seagulls?"

To this day, I have no idea what she was smoking.

Could she have been agreeing with you? in a sarcastic, facetious way?

I doubt it. She looked pretty concerned for the precious seagulls. She might be a master troll, but guess which is more likely.

 

[Souplex]

I had a vegetarian say to me "If you can't see the problem, then I can't explain it to you."

I was asking for his opinion after he ranted about how animals should not be used in any lab experiments. The same guy put a picture of a dead panda saying that whenever you eat tuna, its exactly like eating a panda.

That makes me a saaaad panda...

EDIT-When someone says that you can't possibly understand something because you're too young. "you don't know pain because you haven't lived blah blah."

If only eating tuna could compare...
...Panda meat is too expensive for me to have it regularly.

 

[Vault101]

Mass Effect

no seriously,,bringing up all those painful memories relaly puts me in a rage state thats not good...0_0 [small/]I cant stop thinking about mass effect damit[/small]

Prepare yourselves, this has video.

...Yep.

the funny thing is he kind of proves evolution in a way..is this actulaly serious?

 

[ThePS1Fan]

That no homosexual person ever contributed to society.

I swear someone said this to me with a straight face. I guess any who did don't count. And when I pointed a few, mainly the contributions of Alan Turing, he said that anything he did would have just been done by a straight person anyway.

 

[MASTACHIEFPWN]

(Sorry for the political anecdote, BTW) Okay, so out of the spring of the hyper depressing conneticut shooting, and seeing a butt load of my friends posting why the 2nd amendment of the US constitution should be completely protected, I decided to talk about how I thought the second amendment is antiquated and pointless to keep. That stirred up some of my conservitive friends, and spawned some pretty bad counter-arguments, but my god, there was one so horrid- so idiotic, I just couldn't help but start to think that it was indeed the worst argument I've ever heard.

The person said this: "It's just funny how no one has any problems with firearms, or the second ammendment until something happens."

Spoiler: My reaction

The responded to this saying "Yeah, it's funny how no one cared about food sanitation until The Jungle Was written, huh?"
So according to this guy, if you are indiffirent towards something or like it, and then find out something really bad about it, or something bad that can come from it, you should still be indiffirent/like it.
He's commenting on people's indifference to human suffering, that people tend not to care about an issue or thing until it affects them. Experience and learning are aspects of humanity, and one's opinion or view on something is always subject to change. Of course NOBODY didn't care about firearms regulations, or food regulations before occurred or The Jungle was published; you always had some people that were adamant on these issues. However, it's the popularization of such events/books that spread these perspectives, and yes, many people HAVE developed viewpoints as a result.

Yes, that was the point I was trying to convay (The Jungle section was the mass of population not knowing about their food beforehand) And that we need large events to connect things to eachother, and he was deliberately trying to make it look like a bad thing that people were devoloping viewpoints over having to face what happens in situations like this.

 

[MASTACHIEFPWN]

That no homosexual person ever contributed to society.

I swear someone said this to me with a straight face. I guess any who did don't count. And when I pointed a few, mainly the contributions of Alan Turing, he said that anything he did would have just been done by a straight person anyway.

Wasn't Abraham Lincoln alegedly homosexual?
I know Oscar Wilde was, and he was an amazing poet/playwrite. Completely- You are correct, that argument is utterly barbaric and idiotic.
[small]Bimillinnial-post celebration, Whoop whoop whoop![/small]

 

[Terminate421]

Fallout 3 is a bad game because it was made by Bethesda!

Pokemon stopped being good after (insert generation here) because (x) Pokemon proves they are out of ideas.

Those two arguments make me cringe

 

[WWmelb]

"They were associated with [thing that some group likely has a thing against already] therefore it was the cause of [the horrible tragedy the person was involved in]".

Latest example: Mass Effect was responsible for the shooting in Connecticut.

I honestly was reading some posts concerning that and I think I felt my eyes start bleeding from the idiocy.... I can't believe how stupid people can be for this, especially when (as far as I know) they were complaining about the brother of the person who actually committed the shooting.

You'd think eventually people would realise this happens so often it's lost all meaning, but no. People keep using the attack.

In the last 50 years it was comic books, dungeons and dragons, various films, and now games because they're the easiest target.

I'm waiting for the day someone commits a crime and says "I saw it on the news and wanted to try it". Would love to see how that goes down.

I had this conversation a few weeks ago. I said that i would do this if i ever flipped the fuck out and did something insane, just to make the masses think lol

 

[nondescript]

I see a lot of conservatives are stupid examples. Here's one to balance.

So I had a (very opinionated) manager who happened to also be vegan. One reason she was so against it was she believed animals shouldn't be kept for domestication. Her example:
"If people were supposed to drink milk, we wouldn't have people who are lactose intolerant."

*****************Pause here for PETA supporters to defend*******************

Even granting that not all ranchers or farmers may be humane toward their animals, pigs are still hunted in places because they go feral fast and will eat flesh. (Takes less than 5 years for them to go full feral.) There are other factors (Amount of food needed to replace, possible famine from grazing cows instead of drought, etc.) but the first that came to my head was "If people weren't supposed to drink milk, women wouldn't be able to breastfeed."

 

[AntiChri5]

One of the worst reoccurring arguments i have seen (often even on this site) is "The devs were too lazy to _______"

People think that just because something they want in the game isn't, that means the devs spent the time they would have spent on it literally doing nothing. No no no. Nononononono!

When they aren't working on what you want them to be working on, they are usually working on something else. They aren't sitting in the corner masturbating!

This pops up so damn often. Do people really have such trouble grasping that not everyone has their priorities?

 

[eBusiness]

It creates jobs!

It apparently doesn't matter how pointless those jobs are, or that the same can be said about almost any conceivable public expenditure.

You could hire one group of people to shovel shit from one pile to another and another group to shovel it back again, and you would have created jobs. You would also have brought society another step closer to collapse from lack of people free to do the necessary work, but normal political debate hasn't got room for such subtleties.

The more cynical amongst us would argue that the shit shovelling programme is already live and running well deep within the bureaucratic systems. But better not take it down, or you would destroy JOBS!

 

[madmatt]

Slippery slope arguments annoy the fuck out of me.Just because one thing happens does not mean that something else,often completley unrelated,is going to follow

For example I've actually heard people say that if we allow gay marriage then before too long we'll have to remove the age of consent and legalise beastiality

Specially for you:


OT: My favourite is: "Everything happens for a reason," when something tragic happens. It's maddening, grown people say this and yet all it does is communicate to me that the person in question suffers from a childlike naivety and a near-dangerous delusion that there's some sort of plan laid out for them. Shit stuff just happens sometimes, ya know?

The problem is, most of the people I know that say it aren't even into all that religious/spiritual stuff so what higher power are they basing this insane notion on?

At the risk of sounding like the old man in the attic, this intensely irritates me as well; I can only assume it comes from the need to believe there is a happy ending to it all. That maybe this bad thing is just the precursor to something better in some non-understandable way.

My pet peeve though is people who conflate the equal right to have an opinion, with the equal validity of those opinions. "That's just your opinion" argh...

 

[D-Class 198482]

Just saw this today, I can't entirely remember what the person said, but in a nutshell it was this:
"Someone said something is wrong, they must be right, and thus the thing must be wrong! Oh, you say the person who said something is wrong is wrong? YOU must be wrong!"

 

[D-Class 198482]

Prepare yourselves, this has video.

...Yep.

So he completely ignores the concept that, according to the Theory of Evolution, we evolved from monkeys which by stereotype eat bananas like mad, and thus would've evolved to hold them better?

 

[Sirron Kcuch]

"There is no way to measure something as objectively bad or good. Everything is subjective"

Gee...what does this remind me off? George Orwell's 1984.

Emmanuel Goldstein, a strawman politician invented by the ruling party in order to draw out dissidents. Orwell uses Goldstein in order to set out his own views of totalitarian societies; in the book he is entirely correct, but the uthorities do not even try to suppress his message. Instead, they attempt to condition the population into being unable to comprehend an objective reality.

1984 is genius on so many levels