Five Bad Arguments That People Use All The Time

There’s a lot of bad argumentation on the internet, that’s no secret.  More ways have been invented to insult your mother in the last ten years than ever previously existed, thanks to the social media.

You find a lot of arguments and bickering, and that too is a tired observation.  What’s not so tired, though, is noting the overuse, misuse, and fallacy of some “points” that come up time and time again.

It’s time to rid ourselves of these five “arguments.”  Generally speaking, they serve little to no positive purpose, except as an attempt by the person making these arguments to establish dominance in the conversation.

You don’t want to be that person.

So here’s five clichéd non-arguments that you can eliminate from your linguistic repertoire, and in so doing, you’ve done a little bit to make the world a little less stupid.  Thanks for that.

(A note:  attentive readers may think this article looks familiar; it’s a re-work of a piece I originally posted back in 2013.)

5. “Name calling means you lose”

Nonsense.  If I think you’re a jerk and I say so, nothing has been “lost” except perhaps the comfortable, criticism free bubble in which you live.

Of course, that rebuttal is no less oversimplified than the original assertion.  The reality – as so often happens – is that this is a case-by-case situation.  If you think you’re making some profound political statement by referring to the president as “Barry” or always including his middle name when you talk about him, or if your discourse regularly includes words like “libtards” or “repukes,” then it’s a pretty safe bet that you don’t really have anything to say.

On the other hand, if you are espousing/promoting a hateful, ignorant ideology, it does not make the slightest difference to the (in)validity of that ideology if I point out that it’s hateful and ignorant.  It doesn’t add validity to your ideology if I tell you that you’re a greedy, selfish asshole for promoting it.  Jeffery Dahmer does not suddenly become a martyr because I say he’s a dick.  This is silly schoolyard nonsense that adds nothing to the conversation except a clear statement that the person making this assertion is desperately trying to control it.

4. “You Mentioned Hitler; You Lose”

Also, with all due respect to Mike Godwin, not nearly as iron-clad a conversation stopper as people like to think.  While it’s certainly true that buzzwords like “nazi,” “communist,” “socialist,” and others are often employed as ad hominem attacks with no real bearing on the subject at hand (and often a manifest ignorance as to what those words actually mean), it’s also entirely reasonable to point out when someone is making a suggestion or drawing a parallel that is uncomfortably reminiscent of the Nazi ideology.  For instance, some idiot bigot on some forum or the other that I was recently reading made a remark to the effect that homosexuals should be imprisoned and subject to any and all manner of “examination” to determine what “went wrong.”  Besides the obvious logical flaw (who says anything “went wrong?”), in reality this statement reminded me strongly of Dr. Mengele’s horrific human experimentation during the Nazi years which included gross violations of the rights and dignity of thousands of gays, Jews, Roma, and even included invasive and in some cases fatal research on twins.

I made a remark mentioning Mengele, and suddenly it’s all about how I “lost.”  I didn’t “lose” anything, nor was I trying to “win” anything.  I was trying to draw the writer’s attention to the nature of what they were defending, and to make the larger point that this sort of passive-aggressive enabling is exactly how oppression is empowered.  What enabled Mengele wasn’t some secret and obscure distortion of his psyche, although there were plenty of psychological issues there.  But what allowed him to get away with it simply an extension of the same crap you hear every day:  the deliberate dehumanization of various groups of people.

You see it constantly – consider how we refer to undocumented immigrants as “illegals,” for instance.  They’re not people anymore, certainly not living breathing human beings with dreams and hopes and aspirations and a rich and complex emotional life, because if they were then those of us who choose to regard them as sub-human might have to actually stop acting like assholes.

Mr. Trump, being what he is, has not only encouraged this way of thinking but given those who engage in it a false sense of social approval and acceptance, which is why it’s become so prevalent in the last three years (and it wasn’t exactly uncommon before that).

To some extent, any such grouping or pigeonholing is an exercise in the same behavior.  Reducing everyone to “libtards” or “teabaggers” is rooted in the same place.  This expression is pernicious and devious and nearly ubiquitous; consider how so many of these labels are used to depersonalize individuals and hold them accountable for the imagined misdeeds of their imagined co-conspirators.  Consider how words like “thug,” “urban,” or “ghetto” are all commonly used euphemisms in mainstream media for “black,” particularly “poor young black men.”  Consider the phrase “migrant laborer.”  I promise you, even if you can’t admit it to yourself, that when you read that phrase the picture that came into your head was of a Mexican – not a “Latino,” a “Mexican.”  And now when I say “This is Joe, he’s a migrant laborer,” there’s a whole set of attributes that goes with that phrase, which you have now just imparted to Joe.  You even have a picture in your head, right now, of what Joe probably looks like…and you and I both know that Joe looks like a guy with dark skin, black hair, probably a little short, probably not dressed in expensive clothes, probably not driving a new car.

Joe looks like that because that’s what you’ve been trained to think a “migrant laborer” looks like.  You were trained that way because someone, somewhere decided it was to their advantage that you think that way.  Someone decided Joe would be a lot easier to oppress if you could be made to forget that Joe is a human being who loves his wife and kids and has insecurities and worry and gastrointestinal distress and runny noses and enjoys a good joke.  If you can forget about Joe and just deal with “migrant laborer,” then Joe isn’t a fellow human anymore; he’s a usurper and a thief driving around the country in a low-rider with 85 of his cousins in the trunk.  Rather than a person, he’s a racist stereotype.

This behavior wasn’t invented by Mengele; he just used it as an excuse to go a couple of horrific steps further.  After all, these are “not really people,” so there’s no ethical qualms about experimenting on them, right?  See also:  The Tuskeegee Experiments,  Calmette-Guerin (experimental testing of a TB vaccine on infants of First Nations tribes in Canada, which actually happened prior to Mengele’s ascension in the Nazi party), or the Eugenics Board of North Carolina, among many others.  (The latest, this Florida man who didn’t understand why he was being arrested for killing a guy who came to his door, telling police he didn’t see what the problem was because he’d “only shot a n—-r.”  See?  Not a person anymore – an archetype, a symbol, an icon, a representative member of a predefined sub-human class.)

While it’s important to avoid casual comparisons to the horrors of the Holocaust, it’s also important to remember that one of the biggest things which allowed the Holocaust to happen is that people by and large refused to call out oppressive actions and attitudes.  One of the ways this was enabled was by depersonalizing the victims.  They are “only Jews,” they are “only homosexuals,” they are “only midgets,” they are “only twins,” they are “only gypsies (Romani),” they are “only [anything but Aryan],” so why should the ethics which apply to human experimentation, apply to these groups which are obviously not human?  VERY dangerous road to toddle down, it’s a slippery slope from step one.

3. You’re Intolerant Because You Dislike My Intolerance, Therefore You Lose

Another classic bit of nonsense from the peanut gallery.  My refusal to put up with you being a stupid bigot does not mean I’m “intolerant,” it means I refuse to put up with stupid bigots.  I also refuse to put up with axe murderers, but that doesn’t make me “intolerant.”  It makes me somewhat less likely to fall victim to an axe murderer.

This is a favorite refuge of stupid bigots who are desperately clinging to the idea that their stupid bigotry is not actively, visibly dying out in our lifetimes; that being a bigot is still something people can do and expect to live without consequences for it.

You can try all you want to pretend that’s the same thing as “refusing to put up with blacks” or “refusing to put up with homosexuals” or whatever your thing is, but in the end this line of argument leaves out two things:

1. You choose to be a bigoted prick.  You weren’t born that way.  For any adult to behave or believe in such a manner, as an adult or even a reasonably intelligent older child you have to make a decision to ignore all of the facts and logic and reason which clearly suggest that bigotry is stupid.
2. Nobody is hurting you by being gay or black or whatever.

As my friend Pope Snarky pointed out so succinctly, tolerating intolerance is not itself an act of tolerance; it is an act of passive-aggressive intolerance.  It’s the behavior of the bigot who has enough ego to worry that being a bigot will have negative social repercussions, but not enough actual character to stop being a bigot.  So, with their hands “tied” by public perception, they have to sit back and live vicariously through the stupid bigots who are ridiculous and delusional enough to think that their behavior is acceptable anywhere outside of their circle of bigoted friends.

2.  I Don’t Like The Source, Therefore The Information Is Wrong, Therefore You Lose

I’ve burned myself on this one several times.  A few years ago, one of those half-ass “liberal” “news” sites ran an article about the gathering of several fairly unhinged individuals to basically take over a small Pennsylvania town where a very unhinged individual – who happens to be the Chief of Police – was faced with a 30-day suspension for being a stupid douchebag.  Instead of taking it like a person of honor and maybe even getting the hint that his cro-magnon chest-thumping is not appropriate or acceptable behavior for a nine year old child (let alone for a man charged with the duty of protecting a small town), he doubled down and did even stupider, more insane things until he got his ass fired.

My mistake was that I initially blew the story off because I knew the source was garbage clickbait that tended to lie a lot in their headlines.

Turns out that, aside from the predictably salacious, hysterical headline, the clickbaiters had the gist of the story right – that a bunch of yobbos with guns had shown up in this small Pennsylvania town for the express purpose of terrorizing both citizens and local government into backing down.

I blew it, because I looked at the source first.

This isn’t to say that you should believe everything you read.  It’s not to say that when someone quotes a “News of the World” or “New York Post” or “Washington Times” article that you should assume that person is well-informed about media quality or that the story itself isn’t either made up from whole cloth or grossly distorted from one core fact.

However, if I’d taken a second to check the story out I would have seen that (as usual) this particular site was just rehashing reports from actual news organizations, and saved myself the embarrassment of having to publicly admit that I blew it.  So before you jump to point out that this paper or that one is junk, remember this one key reality:

The National Enquirer broke the story of John Edwards’ affair.

Obviously that doesn’t mean that I should stop thinking of “breaking news” in the context of many sites as more like “broken news,” but it does mean that I should check out legitimate information sources before assuming that any story – even a Fox News Exclusive – is entirely wrong.

1.  Taking Offense At My Offensiveness Is Violating My Rights!

There’s a little aphorism that floats around in various forms and guises, which basically says that if I’m offended about something, then it’s my choice to be offended and what I’m really doing is acting like a cheap bully that’s trying to control the conversation.

So next time someone claims that you’re some kind of terrible person for being offended at their racial or gender or sexuality stereotypes, and you ought to stop being a bully and trying to tell them what they can and cannot say, just find an offensive joke that you know they’ll take personally and for them to get offended…and then use their own argument against them.  “What, now you’re going to try to tell me what I can and can’t say?  How dare you!  What are you, some kind of nanny-state liberal treehugger who wants to tell me what I’m allowed to think is funny?  You’re just choosing to be offended because you want to dictate what I can and cannot say, it’s not me that’s offensive, it’s that you are choosing to take offense so you can bully me into silence.”

If they can’t figure out that their reasoning is entirely invalid after that, you’re either dealing with a complete idiot, or with a troll who doesn’t actually care about making a meritorious argument.  In either case, they can safely be dismissed and you need no longer waste time trying to have an intelligent conversation with them.

Bonus Round: You Lose!

This, the careful reader will note, is the common fallacy to all of these arguments.  The phrase “you lose” and the attitude that lies beneath it are clear indicators that the person making the argument isn’t really trying to engage in a discussion at all; they’re trying to engage in a competition.  They don’t want to learn, they want to “win,” which is of course entirely pointless in any genuine exchange of ideas.  If you’re getting involved in a discussion to “win” something, you’re turning it into a battle, instead of a conversation.  The only way to truly win that game is to not play it in the first place.