Asklemmy @lemmy.ml

4w ago

What's the dumbest argument you've ever had?

116 comments

My mom was playing Jeopardy on her Alexa and one of the questions was about a state in Mexico. Her boyfriend, who was very drunk, adamantly insists that it's a trick question because "Mexico doesn't have states." It's literally called the United Mexican States. Two of my aunts are from Mexico. It took like two hours to get him off the subject.
- Confidently ignorant people really bother me. Even if I thought that I would've thought "Is that true?" and spent a second googling it. It is amazing how some folks are devoid of even the slightest curiosity but are blindly overconfident.

i got into an argument with my in law about a 60$ sticker to block the 'waves' on my phone. for my health. and my phone will still work.... it was a hologram sticker.
- I've got the new ones that also block radiation, they're on sale for 120$
- well, they do sell ones that work. you can measure them blocking all em radiation from exiting out the back of your phone... instead blasting all of it into your head. significantly more of it too, since the normal reaction of a phone that loses signal is to boost its own in order to find a tower.
  
  But blocking any of it is useless because none of it is going into your head, the wavelength of the radio waves is too large to penetrate skin or bone, it bounces off harmlessly like am/fm radio waves. It's in the nonionizing range of the em spectrum, unlike ionizing em waves like X-rays, gamma rays, radon emissions, etc that do penetrate human bodies and can cause protein or DNA damage.

Obligatory mention: Full Body Workout Every Other Day?
- Or if you’d prefer it in video form: https://youtu.be/eECjjLNAOd4
- Holy butts, that was the good kind of bonkers

the one where the democrats are the 'party of slavery' because of what the parties stood for in 1860. yeah that's why I'm voting for Lincoln and the union this year dumbfucks
- And yet California—a solidly blue state—just voted by public referendum to uphold slavery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_California_Proposition_6
  
  Yeah, the problem here is calling them the party of slavery, when both parties are blatantly in favor of it.
- They might want to look up how the parties flipped during the civil rights era.
- I wonder why so many Democrats left the party during the civil rights movement? I wonder why David Duke left the Democrat party? I guess we'll never know.

Toss up : a coworker who I would have counted as quite intelligent said we haven't been to the moon because "it's impossible to launch a rocket to the moon and land on it because rockets go in a straight line. Trying to time the shot of the rocket, and get to the moon at the exact moment when the moon gets to the right spot would be astronomically impossible. The odds of pulling that off at the speed you would be traveling and the distance you travel... Well the odds are effectively zero."
"Also you can't catch up to the moon because the moon is traveling faster then our rockets can go "
Either that or a prochoice individual who voted for Trump....
- How does this person think things like ICBMs work? They just go straight up and away from the earth and can't turn?
  
  When he used both arguments in the same conversation. I shrugged and stopped talking. Nothing to gain by continuing the conversation
- How does this person think guided missiles work? "Well the plane moved so we missed."
  "Also you can’t catch up to the moon because the moon is traveling faster then our rockets can go "
  Not true so discussion over right there
  Even if its angular velocity was faster than a rocket its radial velocity is nearly 0 so all you would have to do to intercept it is to lead it. No different than shooting a moving target at long ranges.
  
  Okay im curious. What about shooting something into the sun is very hard?
- The first argument is more or less understandable (still wrong): you can't just propel yourself upwards at your earliest convenience to reach the moon, you have to play around with orbital mechanics.
  If your friend's idea of a moon-worthy vessel is an unsteerable rocket with infinite fuel and a chair strapped to it... well the odds are effectively zero.
  The second argument? bro, last time I checked the moon was still orbiting Earth
  
  The friend should play Kerbal Space Program. It will be a fun way to show that yes, it's really hard, but it is possible to play around with orbital mechanics and get to the moon.
  And then it will show that an unsteerable rocket with infinite fuel and a chair strapped to it is also possible, just really really hard.

In a video someone discussed the average us household income. Someone commented that that number was actually inflated and it would be better to use median. I found the article the OP was referencing and pointed out that it was in fact the median and pointed out a median is a type of average. They argued for far far too long that average exclusively refers to mean, that median "isn't even an expected value" and that they were right and I was wrong because they are an engineer who works with this all day long. I ended up getting ganged up by several different accounts, I eventually screenshotted the Wikipedia page for average and got them to all delete their posts.
- Average vs mean vs median is always a clusterfuck argument waiting to happen.

My wife and I bought 10 lottery tickets at a time when the pot got up to 300 million or something like that. we were talking about what we would would do with the money once we won and couldn't agree on how many of our friends mortgages we would pay off. we MAY have had some other things going on in a relationship at that time, but it's still one of the stupidest arguments I've ever gotten in.
- Any time I think of the lottery I can't help thinking of this infamous reddit post that should be mandatory reading by anyone who wins.
  https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/comment/chb4v05
  https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/comment/chb4yin
  https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/comment/chb51su
- I like to believe that I would pay off mortgages for immediate family, and buy a house for any immediate members who don't have one. If I have some left over I would think about extended family and friends.
  I think I'm with your wife on this one.
  
  I really shouldn't respond to this since I'm just rehashing up one of the stupidest arguments I've ever had. but, what you said is actually pretty close to what my position was. we parted ways when it came to the more distant cousins. I suggested a cool hundred K USD out to second cousins 'cause, after all, 300 million doesn't buy as much as it used to
  but surprisingly, it didn't really matter because we didn't win the lottery. imagine that. /s.
  My lesson learned was that arguing on principle isn't usually worth it
  
  I'd make trust funds for them and make it clear that this was it. If you give them cash they will hate you because you gave them only $1,000,000 a year ago and didn't give them more this year.

The moment I knew that I had to break it off with my ex was when a comment about tea-cup saucers turned into an accusation that I "always had to be right".
We were having cake for dessert:
Her: "Can you grab plates?"
Me: Grabs a couple of small plates.
Her: "No, those aren't for cake. It's the really small ones."
Me: "Okay, but FYI the small ones are actually teacup saucers. You can tell the difference because they have the indent in the middle so the teacup doesn't slip around."
Her: "You just always have to be right, don't you?"
What followed was a truly bonkers argument where I found myself accused of "lording my intelligence" and told that I had to be right in everything.
For the record, I told her I literally didn't give a shit what she wants to eat cake off of. I'm the guy that would happily use a Tupperware lid as a plate if it was the closest thing to hand. I was just pointing out an "interesting fact" (in my mind at least).
- Understanding each others’ definitions is key to communication, so I’m with you on this one. I’ll often get accused of “you know what I meant!”, when I really didn’t and was honestly asking for clarification.
  Kids, don’t take ontology classes even if your friends say it’s cool.
  
  “you know what I meant!”
  This is why I've learned to repeat what I thought someone said back to them so they can confirm if they communicated it clearly or not.
  "Bring it to me."
  "Which one? I see 5 of them here.
  "Oh, I meant the blue one."
- How dare you point out something. Stop hurting her feelings by pointing out anything she doesn't know. "I would've pointed out you were about to drink soap but then I'd 'Always need to be right'."
  
  That is essentially the vibe I got from that argument. We didn't last much longer after that.

I was talking with someone from the UK about this article that they showed me. They were outraged by it, and I said I don't see what the problem is with it. They were weirdly fixated on the "asylum seekers" part, to which I told them the article says it will apply to vulnerable persons regardless of immigration status, and I asked them why they were fixating so much on this applying to one specific demographic.
This caused them to go on a tirade about "migrants are getting more rights than people who were born in this country" and how they aren't a racist because they married an Italian. They said "it's all about divide and conquer" and I asked them why they care so much about what ethnicity or nationality a person is, over if they're vulnerable and receiving healthcare equality or not. This quickly devolved into them going on about how the UK is "being taken over by migrants". So, I asked them if they knew any of these migrants, if the UK is "being taken over" by them. They said no.
This started from them watching a YouTube video made by some influencer who was getting angry over the same article. I'm more than convinced that social media can have its bad sides.
- I can kind of see their thought processes there. They're sharing right-wing media so they're likely already primed for those biases, plus that article title is intentionally misleading by suggesting asylum seekers will by default get priority over all other patients. It isn't until the sixth paragraph that they admit it's priority care for vulnerable people which is a group that happens to include asylum seekers and undocumented migrants (terms which this writer uses interchangeably, because of course they do). Very poor journalistic integrity even for a rag like this one, imo.
  This type of article is intentionally misleading and written primarily to rile up people with poor media literacy. Making people angry makes it easier to manipulate them, and vulnerable groups are naturally less able to fight back so they're an easy target.
  In an ideal world after being challenged they would have reevaluated the source and their beliefs. In practice very few people do that and they just get more entrenched instead. Especially if it's someone anonymous online just telling them they're wrong.
  
  Yeah, it seems like there are a lot of people who will only read the headlines, which when combined with what headline they went with is egregious. Honestly, clickbait such as this is a pet peeve I have with media in general.

Whether if something is deceptively [a trait] does it mean it's the inverse of the trait or more of the trait than it appears, ie: if you call something deceptively shallow, does that mean it is shallow, but looks deep, or that it is deep but looks shallow. Hours of arguing with my family and checking numerous sources, we came to the conclusion that the phrasing can be used either way.
- An event that happens biweekly could occur at the same frequency as an event that happens bimonthly.
  
  Shouldn't that be semi-monthly? Rounding months to 4 weeks, of course.
  Or maybe that's just me wanting bi and semi to have consistent meanings. Bi is two, semi is a half.
- Goddamit. I was so certain it was the inverse, and now here I am debating myself
  
  You can thank me later
  
  You're debating whether not-3 is the same as "less than three".
  It's => but not <= so it's not ==.
- I think if something is described as deceptively shallow it means that it looks deeper than it is. IMO

Let's give more money to billionaires, they will make us rich too.

ugh. gotta be the one about jesus preaching pacifism. The person said the turn the other cheek was not to be taken literally but a thing he says after he admonishes a disciple for cuting off a soldiers ear and healing the ear but then he says his fight is yet to come and he will need to be armed and armored for it. that he feels is literal and not prose at all. smh.

it was about nutrition. it started with the fact that proteins, fats and sugars all have different energy densities and so how much weight you gain is dependent on what the food is, which is all fair. but then i made the mistake of saying "your weight won't go up by more than the weight of the food, anyway." and that spiralled out of control completely. apparently that's wrong and you can gain infinite weight from one chocolate bar.
as usual for this person they felt that i refused to take the "holistic" view into account.
a more recent conversation started with them talking about some sort of blood sugar sensor that athletes use and when i said "that's interesting, what's it called?" they started talking about gut microbes.
- There's almost some truth to it. Certain foods, like salts and carbs, in certain situations, like low salt/carb diets, can have a ripple effect. 100g of carbs, or a few grams of salt, can cause your body to retain water. The effect being that you gained several pounds from eating just a few (hundred) grams of certain foods.
  However, for your body to retain that water, you must also consume said water.
  
  Though even in that case, I'd consider water consumed to be covered under "food".
  The only exceptions I can think of are from gaining mass from things other than what you eat. Like tar buildup from smoking, snorting or injecting various substances, boffing something (I think that's what it's called... Up the butt instead of out the butt), things sticking to your skin, absorbing through the skin, or bugs/aliens laying eggs inside you. Maybe getting possessed by a ghost, if ghosts have mass. But I don't think all of those combined would even come close to a single meal, other than extreme cases.
  I was curious and looked into how much mass the average adult loses through breathing, and apparently it's at least about 69g (at rest, if you are metabolizing fat).
- you can gain infinite weight from one chocolate bar.
  Eventually you'll turn into a black hole.
  “holistic”
  Aka, "Keep science and evidence out of this"
  
  Well, nutritional science doesn't have a great track record. While a lot of bullshit is justified using the word "holistic", it is also true that nutrition and in general our metabolism are affected by so many factors that a reductionist approach to nutrition more often than not fails to give actionable insights, especially if you move away from very broad statements. It doesn't help that every few years, some core concept of nutritional science is discovered to be the result of lobbying.

Whether 12:00:00 is a period of time and could be AM or PM, or whether it was a point in time i.e., the meridian, and was neither AM nor PM.
- I feel like there's not much to fight about. I can understand the latter perspective, but from a practical point of view it just makes sense to consistently assign it to AM/PM rather than creating an unnecessary edge case (lord knows there are enough of those with date/time systems). Also this is all made moot by the superior system: the 24-hour clock (now THERE'S something I bet you could have a good argument about!).
  
  Indeed, the minute (sorry) difference is what made the argument so dumb. In the end it came down to the implementation of the systems we were working withm which were… not good. My favourite thing about 24-hour time is to be able to use 00:00 and 24:00. And the worst thing is notation in systems only going up to 23:59:59.
- 12:00:00 exists in both AM and PM. I have my lunch at 12 PM.

A really stupid one was when my older sister started tossing out a bunch of random attacks on my character when I was about to drive her to work. I asked when I ever demonstrated any of these traits and she brought up when I jumped into an argument that had nothing to do with me the night before and supposedly said horrible things.
Anyone who knew me would have known I was in my room with headphones watching the Gravity Falls finale the night before. I think that was the first time anyone failed at gaslighting me, because I was that obsessed with Gravity Falls.
I told her to call a cab to work and she started crying. :/ Like, what did you expect...
- Ah, the classic Gravity Falls defense. I use it all the time ;)
  One of the best shows I've seen in a long time.
  
  Anyone with good taste had an alibi that night.

That the whole transgender thing is a conspiracy by the healthcare sector to earn more money.

This one..
- I’d like to have an argument, please.
- Nuh uh!
  
  This one…

Well, definitely arguing with my mom over me going outside in winter with hair that wasn't fully dry, when I didn't have time or I'd miss the bus and be late for college. I usually dry my hair enough that if I cover it with a hood or hat during colder days I'm perfectly fine, but she insists that one of these days going out with wet hair in the cold is gonna get me sick, which has never happened. I ain't changing the habit of not fully drying my hair after I get sick from going out with wet hair and that is the sole cause of me getting sick (so, probably never).
- This happens every time I go outside without a coat during winter. If I'm going to the grocery store, and I'm only outside for 60 seconds, I dont need a coat. Obviously if I was going on a hike then I'd need it.
  Where'd this myth even come from about cold causing colds? Its even in the name! I can't imagine how many hours of pointless arguing occurred between parents and children because of it
  
  No. The cold virus replicates faster in cold environments like your nose. So it is true. But you can just get warm quickly again to counteract.
- I'd hike across campus in college with wet hair and it would be frozen solid by the time I got to class in the winter. lol
  
  I'm lucky I don't live in an area where it normally gets cold enough for my hair to freeze during the cold season. Closest I've ever had to that was a miserably cold winter last year. Only subzero winter I've ever been in and I would never wish it even on my worst enemies.

Whether the saying is “if they think that, then they’ve got another think coming” or “if they think that, then they’ve got another thing coming”.
- After a cursory search it seems like both are acceptable. "Think" appears to be the original phrase, but "thing" is more common today, especially in America.
- That one always gets me. The phrase means that the person is wrong about something, and circumstances will compel them to reconsider their position or opinion. The word "think" refers to a cognitive process, such as reconsidering their position or opinion. As for the alternative, what's the "thing" that's coming? Their latest Amazon order is out for delivery?
  
  I've always interpreted the other thing coming as a threat or an unpleasant surprise. Ie, the consequences of thinking the thing they think.
  
  Comeuppance.

So dumb.
Hour argument, that the final cliff fall scene in Predator 1 was two different jumps in the 2 cuts.
Can see in the first one he is rotating. Second cut is a straight plumb drop into the water.
How were the rotational moments counteracted?
They weren't, it's two different jumps/takes.
2 friends came up with some hair-brained arguments that you could stop rotating on the way down. (눈_눈)
The only way would be air resistance, and hands/arms is not going to be enough to create drag to counter the rotation.
- I hate when people get into minute arguments about what is visually happening on screen versus the story that's being told. It can be a single jump narratively but two jumps in production. (I've never seen the movie.)
  
  I was not invested in the outcome of the argument, just seeing how far they were willing to take being wrong about aerodynamics/physics. Quite far it turns out.
- Jackie Chan: Always shoot the punch twice.

Someone on Bluesky last night mentioned Woody Allen for some offhand reason, and some sock puppet account was loudly defending Woody and saying he never did anything wrong and that Soon-Yin was never patented by him or anything like that. Imagine being a shill for Woody Allen of all people.
- So someone chimed in on a subject that was never broached in the first place? It reminds me of the people on reddit who will always pipe in about how mean John Lennon was no matter what the subject about him is.
  
  Literally someone joked "don't Woody Allen me" and this account went off with a bunch of "facts". It was super odd.
  When I was on Reddit I was talking about Jian Ghomeshi's sexual abuse charges on r/Canada (before it got overrun by racists), and a sock puppet account sent me the weirdest PM, about how I wanted to "touch the diamond that is Jian's life, but holding a melting diamond in your hands is dangerous" or some such shit. I actually feel it was Jian Ghomeshi because it was so narcissistic and weird. I could of course be wrong, but I really think it was. The wording was just too weird.

I can't remember the specifics (both because it was dumb and because it's so embarrassing I think my brain is trying to protect me), but from what I recall I got into a heated argument on the internet with someone because I felt that fans weren't cheering hard enough for a band I liked at a concert.
...yeah, I know. I'm grateful, though, because it was so colossally stupid and pointless that I had a come-to-Jesus moment and swore off internet arguments entirely. I can only imagine the countless hours of my life it's saved me in the intervening years.

I fought with my aunt about "mom jeans." I was telling her it was a style of jeans and she was adament that it was any kind of jeans that a "mother" is wearing.
- Well technically you are both right though she is being pedantic.

That time I had to teach math to Patrick Star.
Runner-up is trying to explain mathematics versus notation... to a math teacher.

Kinda related, I studied in Spain for a semester. Was taking with my fellow American roommate about the debate of if a tomato is a fruit or vegetable. Our host mom's daughter's boyfriend (Cuban, fwiw) overheard, and we told him about the "controversy" in the US but all 3 of us agreed it was a fruit. Host mom overheard us and asked what we were talking about, and the Cuban told her. "Well yeah, of course it's a vegetable"
I couldn't understand every word but when I could tell they were arguing about some vegetables having seeds or something like that I knew I spread something.
- You're both right. It's important to note that this classification only applies to botany. Botanically, it's a fruit. Just like a peanut is botanically a bean.
  Culinarally, tomatoes are a vegetable.
  And for the purposes of tariffs, taxes, and customs, according to Nix v Hedden, it's a vegetable.
  There are many ways to classify an item. This just happens to cross boundaries depending on context.
- People think of fruits as having to be sweet and tomatoes are acidic and are used like non-fruit vegetables in cooking so I can see why someone who hasn't thought about botanical definitions would think that way.
  
  That's kinda strange, I was taught in school that tomato was a fruit so that's what I always went with. As to why, I honestly have no idea and wouldn't be able to argue
- All fruits are vegetables, not all vegetables are fruits. All edible plant matter is vegetable. Fruits are, well, the fruit of a plant.
  
  Fruits are the reproductive organs of plants designed to be eaten by other animals in order to spread their seeds.

When I started studying computer science, my father asked me what I learned, so I told him about Turing machines, trying to explain the whole thing, that they are a mathematical model for computers etc. But he didn't believe me and insisted that a Turing machine was an actual piece of hardware built by Alan Turing. As much as I tried making it clear that Turing machines are a theoretical model, he was trying to explain to me that they are not. A week later when I met him he spent some time "fathersplaining" the life of Alan Turing to me. He had probably tried to read about Turing machines online (this was before Wikipedia), didn't understand a single word, and so read Turing's biography instead.
- He was probably thinking of the Bombe, which broke Enigma's encoding.

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