28 People Online Made Fools Of Themselves By Picking An Argument With Someone Much Dumber Than Them

For a short while, I worked as a line cook at a Cracker Barrel, and there was a little saloon style door that led to the staff section (kitchen, bathroom, etc). There was a staff only sign on the door, above the doors, and on the wall behind the doors at eye level.

Usually if someone from the customer side comes in, they said, "Coming in" before opening the door, so they didn't hit anyone, but of course customers didn't know that.

So when this dude opened the door and hit a waitress carrying a ton of drinks, we were reasonably upset with him.
He said, "You should really put a sign up."
We showed him all the signs, and he goes, "That seems a bit excessive."

I was listening to a podcast once, and the host articulated something profound in a very well-stated way. He said (I paraphrase):

"I will never argue with a flat-earther, or an anti-vaxxer, or any of those people. The reason is because that these people have made that into _their whole identity_, and they are prepared to address any possible argument I could come up with. And because I care about facts and truth and they do not, my only possible response would be '...uh, I'll have to look into that, I don't know off the top of my head'. It doesn't matter that their response is incorrect or based on faulty research or has been rejected by the scientific community or whatever; by the time I discover that, they will be long gone and talking about how they won another debate."

This is it in a nutshell. If you argue about an issue with someone who has made _that one issue_ into the core of their persona, you will lose unless you are someone who has made arguing against that issue also into the core of your persona.

Of course I know that Andrew Wakefield is a liar and a scammer and of course I know that Apollo astronauts placed retroreflectors on the Moon which can be used to prove that they went there and that their photos of the spherical Earth are real, because I've done enough research to convince myself. But have I done enough research to convince someone who refuses to be convinced? And someone who has also done that research and come up with plausible-sounding nonsense to counter each of these arguments? Why would I waste my life doing this?

Not my story but once my friend (friend A) was having a friendly (turned sour) debate with another friend (friend B) about how sometimes people just don’t have a choice, in the context of, they can’t just choose to live a frivolous life because of their family background etc.

Friend A proceeds to say, “what about starving children born in Africa, it’s not like they had a choice.” To which Friend B answered....”WHO ASKED THEM TO BE BORN IN AFRICA? JUST DON’T BE BORN THERE.”

That’s when we knew.... :—)

I’m showing my age here but I used to work for an estate agency, and we had sales offices set up at the site of large new housing developments. Our primary method of communication was fax.

One of the sales associates telephoned our office to say that the fax machine had run out of paper. No problem, I said, one of the guys is coming your way later for a house tour, I’ll give him a box of paper to give to you.

We then had an almost 20 minute long argument when they kept insisting “NO, YOU JUST SEND ME A BLANK FAX BECAUSE I NEED THE PAPER, IT WILL JUST COME OUT OF MY FAX MACHINE.”

It was like trying to nail jelly to a tree. Difficult, irritating, and it achieved nothing :)

My good buddy wrote his capstone thesis on something about Islam. The dude spoke Arabic, is smart as hell, a history nut, and consumes books like they are skittles.

Anyway, he got into a long debate on Reddit with someone. He started showing sources, teaching the guy, etc. Anyway, he was about 500 words into a mega retort when he decided to actually look up the dude’s posting history. Turns out that dude was a "Drink Your Own Urine" evangelist.

I feel like that is Reddit in a nutshell.

I grew up Jewish in Oklahoma. I ran into this a lot.

Had a classmate in middle school try to convince me that Christianity predates Judaism.

I told him, "But Jesus was Jewish."

His response: "Exactly!"

No irony. Totally genuine. Conversation over.

Once worked with a guy who, by his own admission, got his rocks off by picking fights. He'd start an argument over the smallest thing. If you said it was white, he'd say it was black, just to try to start something.

The one that always stood out for me was the weather app competition. One day he asked me what temperature it was, so I read it off my weather app. He got all offended, because his weather app said it was a couple degrees warmer.

So he decides we're going to have a weather app competition. He was going to chart what our apps said the temperature was, and at the end of the week, whichever one was closest to that day's high would be the winner. And the loser would have to start using the winner's app.

To which I said, "What is your f*****g problem?"

So, yeah. For the first few days, he'd make a big performance about marching into my office, recording the temperature off my app, jotting down some notes, and walking off.

This started on a Monday. He gave up after Wednesday. Either because I was winning, or he was disappointed because, despite his best efforts, I just did not give a f**k about weather apps. Or maybe the boss told him to stop because I filed a complaint that this was bordering on harassment.

I used to argue a lot with my sister when we were kids. She would do this thing where she would say something, and then I would reference back to it literally a minute or two later to prove a point and she would say “I never said that” or “that’s not what I said”. Absolutely impossible to argue with someone who will just deny having said things that could hurt their argument.

Also, trying to change the course of an argument if they feel like they are “losing”. A coworker once called me an idiot for doing something “incorrectly” when I was actually doing it the right way. When I politely explained to them that the way they suggested doing the task didn’t actually work, they started asking “why are you getting so angry?? I was just trying to help” etc. So now we’re arguing about whether I’m angry or not instead of the right way to complete the task.

Not saying my mother is an idiot but boy does she lean hard on some stupid beliefs.

For example: I bring up that European countries have universal healthcare (Sweden is a good example) and she immediately fires up the *"but they're taxed to death to pay for it"* argument. In my research, a US resident gets taxed about 12% more (42% on income) than a Swedish resident (30% on income).

When I tell people to just reboot your computer and it will fix all their problems and yet they wont because they said if you wait long enough it will shut down, when in reality it only goes to sleep. Then when I tell them they have to completely shut it down they look at me like I'm an idiot and say they did. I tell them it seems like it but it only went to sleep. They argue back.

My mom complaining how my generation wouldn’t know how to do anything if it wasn’t posted on the internet. I simply responded, “Well, what else is that generation supposed to do when the generation that raised them didn’t teach them how to do anything?”

Keep in mind this while I’m moving files from her old Windows 8 laptop to her new windows 10 for her via flash drive. She can’t figure it out because “windows 10 is totally different!!” Obviously, it’s not.

Working retail. Especially when I worked in the tech shop od a computer store. Trying to convince someone their $500 laptop is never going to be a gaming system no matter how many of the very few replaceable parts we throw at it can be exhausting...

Brexit is a classic example of this. It was always an extremely stupid idea and they managed to beat enough of the population down to make it reality.

When I was a child a teacher argued with me about how my name is pronounced. Some sports guy had a first name that was spelled the same as my surname, and I guess that was the only acceptable pronunciation regardless of what little ten year old me tried to tell her.

My brother in law loves to have "debates" where he just wants to hear himself talk to make himself feel smarter. His arguments include "I haven't heard of that before, so it must not be true" and pulling argument points from YouTube videos on the topic because he "doesn't read, why would I when I can get the info faster from a video?"

He sprays paint as his career and has never been to college but took calculus in high school and that is his proof he is smarter than everyone else. When it is brought up all he says is "oh yeah, I remember calculus, it is as easy." What is it about? "You know... Calculus. Easy stuff."

I stopped engaging him on his debates when he just claimed everything was a government job and everything was "fake news, didn't see it on YouTube."

was arguing with this dude about something math-related. he didn’t know how to read a study which involved statistics. claimed he was in multiple AP math classes. tried saying that i “probably don’t even know basic integration”. gave me a common integration problem. he wrote it but forgot the minus sign, making it unsolvable. i pointed it out and he edited the comment to make it correct. told him that some people can see when you edit comments. he claimed that he just capitalized a letter. on and on and on…

A driver fell asleep at the wheel for a brief moment. The passenger noticed the car drift into the oncoming lane and exclaimed ‘Jesus Christ’ in fear. The driver woke up and turned the car back to their lane. It was impossible to have the passenger (and their whole family) admit this was not evidence that Jesus himself saved them. I was exhausted by the end of that conversation.

So many times.

So, I'm on my condo board, again. Sigh. Because being on the board means a lot of dealing with idiots. The worst thing is, they aren't normally stupid people, most of them, until they focus on some minor issue.

Anyway - sensor for the lights in our laundry room failed. We replaced it. I get a knock on my door from an owner, who I'll call Bonnie,because f**k Bonnie.

Anyway, she's upset because the sensor still isn't working properly. Now, the issue is the lights won't turn off.

"I stood in there for 15 minutes, and they didn't turn off! It's wastes electricity!"

"Bonnie, the sensor keeps the lights on as long as somebody is in the room. And you were in the room. So, the lights couldn't turn off. "

that's teh condensed version - so, after about ten minutes of her not grasping that being in the room means the light sensor won't turn them off...

Well, the laundry room is in sight of my condo. So, when we hit the ten minute mark, and she's not in the room but instead, in my face... the lights go off. And I point that out.

"I thought you said you would be a good president!"

thank god she's now so "scared" of me she wouldn't say s**t with a mouth full.

Had an employee sign a NDA about an upcoming art installation that had investors. He told everyone. He argued with me the NDA only meant he couldn’t disclose anything with the people in the company.

Ok - this'll get buried, but it was and still is hilarious to me.

Waayyyy back in the day I was a bill collector for travel trailers and mobile homes. This woman had promised to mail her check for the payment, and lo and behold it doesn't appear.

So I call her, and reference back to our prior conversation I say "You promised you'd mail this to me, and it never arrived." this wasn't particularly contentious. It more along the lines of "I thought we had an agreement and now I'm dissapointed."

So this woman, who was probably 30, really dumb and kinda country says to me "I did mail it. But the post office figured out that I didn't have enough money and sent it back to me so it wouldn't bounce."

My sarcastic reply: "I don't understand how that could happen."
She responds, completely sincere "I don't understand it either."

Literally wordless after that one