When BOTH sides are wrong.

[Doktor Howl]

I keep hearing both sides of the gun argument braying the same wrong stuff, over and over again.  The gun nuts will tell you that they need the weapon for "protection" (even though they are statistically far more likely to have a fatal firearm accident than shoot a home invader), or they need it to stop Obama's UN troops from giving White women forced abortions (Shay's rebellion.  They had the exact same weapons as the military and lost anyway.), or tell you that you preserve rights with the 2nd amendment...even though they have cheerfully surrendered all of those rights since 2001.  Basically, they say they need guns to protect rights they don't have.

On the other hand, the anti-gun crowd is often just as silly.  "Assault rifles" are no more deadly than any other rifle, for example, and in fact the record number of people killed by one person with a firearm was a crazy Finn who used a crappy bolt-action rifle.  President Kennedy was killed by a bolt-action rifle, as was Martin Luther King, Jr.  Most of the Aurora, Colorado theater killings weren't done with a rifle...The nutcase had a jam, couldn't clear it, and switched to a pistol.

Lastly, it's important to remember that guns don't kill people; Nigel kills people.

This is just one example of everyone on both sides of an issue being wrong.  Even if the facts they use are right, they're still wrong, because what they believe is DUMB.  A crazy person may be correct in knowing what a Faraday Cage does; this does not imply that a tinfoil hat has any effect on blocking mind control rays (which themselves are crap).

Another example is the torture debate.  One side says that we have to torture people to be safe (even though torture doesn't give you accurate information), and the other says "America doesn't torture people" (even though we have for our entire history).  Both of these views are dumb.  The real truth is, once your country tortures someone, your country is no longer the good guy and no longer deserves any kind of safety.  But trying to tell someone that their country is evil is kinda dumb, too, because the moment you do, it becomes impossible to commumicate...So this is best used just to piss people off.

Most of the time, arguments presented are of course not what the person advancing the argument cares about.  Anti-Abortion advocates don't care about children at all, as evidenced by the fact that the moment the kid is born, he/she is vilified as a welfare mooch, and the same people who argued that the fetus had to be carried to term now argue that food stamps and education for the fetus are entirely too expensive. 

What they were really saying is "We wish to control women, and if those women can't keep their dirty slut legs closed, then they should be punished with children they can't afford, and a lifetime of poverty shall be inflicted on everyone involved".  The MEN who argue this have an even simpler motive:  "If a woman fucks anyone but ME, she shall be punished."

Lastly is the Big Bang vs Creation argument.  On one side are the creationists...They believe that God made the world in 7 days, 6000 years ago, sort of like a gigantic Testors Model kit.  Physical evidence demonstrates otherwise, so these people are essentially either indulging in the Manichean heresy (ie, the devil is stronger than God), or they are calling their God a liar (And if their God is a liar, then he probably lied about everything, including creation.  The other side is also dumb, merely for trying to use science to argue against fairy tales to convince people that have believed these fables since the bronze age.

Doktor's diagnosis:  To convince an idiot, you more or less have to become an idiot.   

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Amen!

[Eater of Clowns]

The Big Bang one is probably the one that upsets me the most. The science geeks, god bless them, think they can convince unreasonable people with reasonable arguments when all they're doing is legitimizing an absurd idea by merely giving it the time of day.

[Doktor Howl]

The Big Bang one is probably the one that upsets me the most. The science geeks, god bless them, think they can convince unreasonable people with reasonable arguments when all they're doing is legitimizing an absurd idea by merely giving it the time of day.

This is almost always correct.  I would say the counter-example was the Nye/Ham debates, where Nye used Ham as an example of the ridiculous.  He gave him the time of day, but it wasn't a very good time for Ham...It wasn't so much a debate as a monologue delivered with a crazy person rambling in the background.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

PREACH IT

[Karapac]

Yes. So much time, across all of humanity and all generations, that could have been productively spent (for example, by playing with a cat, or thinking about dinner... literally anything, really) has been wasted arguing with people who can't argue.

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  An interesting thing I've read is that America has a higher murder rate than other countries even excluding shooting deaths. Americans just kill each other more, guns or no guns. But, I guess at least school shootings would only have as many victims as one guy can knife before being taken down, had firearms been unavailable.

[The Wizard Joseph]

I've pointed out the "then God is deceiving you by presenting a cosmos that APPEARS to be ancient beyond all reckoning" paradox to no small number of the faithful. Not because I don't believe in God but because they are grossly incorrect in a way that makes a mockery of any attempt at sincere theology. "But isn't He just marvelous and powerful and who are you to question" is roughly the response I get. I have a few very close friends among them that have heard me out as I dissect Genesis. They understand, but will not agree. We are friends for far more reasons than shared faith or I would write them off with the rest of the Christbots, which they are otherwise far from.

Being right often means being alone. Nobody wants to hear it. IF there is a God I don't wonder why God keeps mostly silent.

I think dualism is strictly for suckers.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

The Big Bang one is probably the one that upsets me the most. The science geeks, god bless them, think they can convince unreasonable people with reasonable arguments when all they're doing is legitimizing an absurd idea by merely giving it the time of day.

This is almost always correct.  I would say the counter-example was the Nye/Ham debates, where Nye used Ham as an example of the ridiculous.  He gave him the time of day, but it wasn't a very good time for Ham...It wasn't so much a debate as a monologue delivered with a crazy person rambling in the background.

I guarantee you that not only does Ham think he "won" the debate, but that he and his followers believe that he handed Nye his ass.

In the meantime, he's become a household name.

Bill Nye isn't done losing my respect, though. My understanding is that he has also recently spent a lot of time with Monsanto scientists and is now ready to sing the virtues of commercial GMO crops, and is revising his book accordingly.