Question

"The worst argument in the world"

Accepted Answer

"If we can apply an emotionally charged word to something, we must judge it exactly the same as a typical instance of that emotionally charged word."

"That's racist!" This is now the third most common short phrase in the English language, after "Good morning" and "Thank you", but it too is sometimes a form of the Worst Argument In The World. The typical example of racism is, of course, Hitler killing ten million people. When somebody, let's say, publishes a study that says minorities commit a disproportionate amount of crime, and somebody else responds by saying "That's racist!", they are taking something that no one could possibly object to on its own merits - a social science study, maybe a relatively well-conducted one - and telling us that our opinion of the study must be closely correlated with our opinion of Hitler killing ten million people. Yes, the study is racist, if by racist you mean "It says bad things about minority groups," which seems like a reasonable definition. But it's the okay kind of racism, just like taxation is an okay kind of theft and abortion is an okay kind of murder and Martin Luther King was an okay kind of criminal. The fact that you can't even say the phrase "an okay kind of racism" without being torn to pieces so viciously it makes Bacchus' death look merciful is exactly what gives The Worst Argument In The World its power.

"Obamacare is socialist!" I don't think anyone knows quite how to define socialism (although maybe nancylebov can help with that one), but Obamacare seems as likely to qualify as anything else. The problem is that everyone can give an typical example of socialism, and that example is Stalin sending people to the gulag (it doesn't matter that there was nothing remotely socialist about that), or maybe some bureaucrat deciding that there will be exactly 860,000 shoes produced this year and dooming everyone to wait on shoe lines barefoot in the freezing snow. There are a lot of reasons not to want the United States to look exactly like Communist Cuba, but Obamacare stands or falls on whether you want poor people to be able to afford health care, not on whether you want to have to go around calling everyone "Comrade" all the time.

Kind Worst Argument Typical Study Emotionally Charged Phrase