I sympathize with Megan, who’s too often on the wrong end of this from morons, but I’m going to demur from her “Grow up, Internet” post. Sometimes, someone makes an argument that’s so dumb it’s funny. This is not unusual on the Internet, but sometimes the person making the argument his sufficiently high-profile that it merits drawing attention to. And sometimes, the argument is dumb enough that it really is a waste of time to refute it: The vast majority of reasonably intelligent people who read it will recognize that it’s nonsense unassisted, and the remainder aren’t worth convincing. Life is short. Not everything I link is actually worth engaging. And a joke is never funny if you have to explain it.
Sometimes, Stupid = Funny
July 18th, 2008 · 3 Comments
Tags: Stupid Shit
3 responses so far ↓
1 Megan McArdle // Jul 18, 2008 at 7:33 am
Well, sure, I link to stupid things I don’t bother to refute. But if it really is self-refuting, I don’t need to announce it–my readers can see it too. If the argument is actually slick enough to fool anyone, then it’s not self refuting, is it?
As the jazzman says, if you have to ask, you ain’t never going to understand. And if you have to tell people that you could refute the argument if only you weren’t so busy with the needlepoint festival this week . . .
2 Julian Sanchez // Jul 18, 2008 at 8:00 am
OK, that’s probably true.
3 Bill // Jul 24, 2008 at 12:43 am
True.