Fun with Dumb Arguments

There is a long and storied history of people offering the proverbial rope so that others may hang themselves.  From antiquity, Socrates, the world’s first professional asshole, created traps of logic and reason into which he would allow opponents to fall.  More recently we have trip ups and guilty slips of the tongue on the stand in every episode of Matlock.  These fictional examples, though, can never be a satisfying as their real life counterparts.  Anyone can have an opinion or side of an argument that is just dead wrong, but it is a special treat to see crumby arguments unravel with so much ease that it makes it hard not to burst into laughter.  A few examples have emerged this week.  

First, in a delightful article on Slate in reaction to Sakineh Ashtiani being sentenced to a stoning for adultery in Iran, the Islamic penal code’s rules are analyzed in hilarious detail.  Watching bible stories on TV as a kid and reading The Lottery as a teenager, I thought I knew what to expect from an old fashion stoning: people gathering around a whore/adulterer/witch/scantily clad woman in a circle, screams and shouts echo out as people start chucking things, and Jesus either showing up or not.  It’s basically like a NBA game at half time.

Yet, who knew there were so many rules?  Well, the scholars behind the Iranian Penal code must have thought long and hard about the rules of a ‘good stoning’ because they go to silly lengths to legitimate this practice.  

1. Women must be buried to the chest and men must be buried to the waist.

2. Rocks must not be too big that it would kill by itself but not as small as a pebble (Moderation, people.  Come on!)

3. Judges cast the first stone, unless, of course, there was a witness.  In that case, they get to start the party.

It goes on and on.  The Kafkaesque bureaucracy almost masks that fact that we’re talking about throwing rocks at people until they die!  Although it becomes crystal clear when these rules are read aloud that they are a shitty effort to legitimize, it really is its own proof of how cruel and silly ancient act really is.  

  Staying with Muslims but moving to state-side, the fake, insidious controversy of the Cordoba House community center or the “Ground Zero Mosque” gets stupider the more one simply asks obvious questions.  Palin tweeted that she does not want the mosque to be built on these hollowed grounds, “we all know they have a right to do it, but should they?” Mmmm. Good question.  I suppose she is talking about the right to freedom of religion and expression.  I wonder if she has questioned or would ever question the taste of other acts that are enshrined in the constitution like, say, the right to bear arms.  I know they have a right to bear arms but should they be allowed to in bars or at schools or in Disneyland?  But the real question for Palin is this: what would your ideal situation be?  Should they move their mosque? If so, then where? How far should a mosque be from the 9 year old rubble before it is deemed inoffensive?

The icing on this hypocrite cake comes from the cowardly New York Governor, David Paterson (saying that people with disabilities or deceases are uniformly brave always struck me as a bit condescending and I am glad Mr. Patterson is working hard to dispel this myth).  In a fantastic act of fence-straddling, the Governor tried to fix a potential political and religious mess the best way he knows how: by offering to build the mosque somewhere else on the taxpayers’ dime.  Yes, that is brazenly unconstitutional.  And yes, he is an idiot.  But that foolish idea has received an endorsement from Palin, and thus, millions of moronic sheep across the country.  To be fair, they are not challenging the constitution but merely calling for some decency for the people who died on that day.  They don’t want a mosque so close to where thousands died by the hands of terrorists with religious fervour.  Never mind that many Muslims died that day too.  Oh, and please don’t tell them about this.  

The real issue is not the rights of religions but right to not get offended.  Unfortunately for the right, only one of those rights exists in the constitution.  Say what you will about the founding fathers, but they were not pussies.  Making sure people were allowed to say anything they wanted necessarily meant that some people were going to be offended.  I thought the USA was the home of the brave.  Instead, the self declared ‘real Americans’ can’t whine loud enough about the proximity of one building to the rubble of another.  Like the Muslim clerics in Iran, their position has no grounding legally or otherwise but it is always an extra pleasure when they spell that fact out for you in such an embarrassing way.

Rep. Eric Cantor (R., Va.) verbally hanging himself with his own rope: