feotakahari

I once tried that on a person who was actually anti-gay. He started telling me about the three different kinds of laws in Leviticus and how to tell which ones modern Christians are and aren’t allowed to ignore. I looked this up, and I still think he was talking bullshit, but it was bullshit that took a lot more thought and effort to take apart.

Conversely, try spending some time on an anti-evolution website. They have a lot of simple, logical-sounding arguments that are treated as instant win conditions against evolution (e.g. “how could wings evolve when partly-evolved wings are useless for flying?”) If you’ve done a lot of reading about evolution, you can find theories that address these issues. But explaining these theories takes time, and someone who expected to instantly win the argument will probably be frustrated with you “evading the issue.”

Obviously, my perspective on these issues is skewed because I believe in evolution and am not anti-gay. But either way you frame it, I think it’s important to recognize that other people have probably thought about the same issues you’re bringing up.

Note 1: This probably ties into Turning Verbal Traps Into Honest Questions, although that’s more about how to frame the argument than about whether the argument has been properly thought through.

Note 2: For the bonus round, try to find and take apart these sorts of arguments in anarchist vs. socialist vs. capitalist socioeconomic disagreements. The instant win conditions fly fast and thick from every side.