How to Win an Argument (As Learned from my Liberal Arts Education)

If there’s one thing I’ve learned while arguing, it’s that winning a heatedargument isn’t necessarily so much proving your point as it is disparaging your opponent. Here are a few simple ways to do so.

• Call Someone Anti-American and/or a Terrorist

It is hard to win an argument when you are fending off charges of being a member of Al-Qaeda. I put this masterful technique to stunning use in my Political Science class, with my un-American traitor adversary relegated to complete and utter failure. One can apply this technique simply by employing the Bush Doctrine – “if you’re not with us, you’re against us” – and using simile to equate terrorists to anyone against America.

• Invoke Feminism

In today’s enlightened age, even men can use this time-honored estrogen-laced battle call to nullify any argument. The next time you are facing a difficult literary analysis in your 19 Century English Literature class, diffuse a countering opinion by rejoindering, “What you say may be true, but we haven’t considered the feminist critique…” Sit back and enjoy as the discourse moves in a whole new tangent, one which you can control and domiante. Sure, its changing the course of the discussion for your own purposes, but that’s what women do anyways.

• Bring Up Quantum Theory

By using the Uncertainty Principle central to Quantum Theory, one can employ this method learned in Physics 101 to render your opponent’s potential checkmate null and void. The basics of this theory are centered around Erwin Schrodinger’s hypothesis that a cat, when placed in a sealed box with a 50/50 chance of a toxic gas being released that would kill the cat, is both alive and dead (for when the box is opened and the cat is seen to be one or the other, we cannot be sure in which of the two states the cat was while it was in the box or at what point the change occurred, and therefore the cat exists in two separate universes in either state).

That right there is the holy grail of argument-enders. You can claim anything, from the possiblity of the Israeli nuclear weapons program to the existence of unicorns, and not be disproven, for the inherent uncertainly provides that either side exists in dual but separate realities. And since your side exists in reality, you win.

• And Just in Case…

If none of these methods work, there’s always the old standby I picked up after the rapage that was the Math 104 exam: pound eight to ten shots of Banker’s Club, after which point you are as beautiful as Angelina Jolie, can sing like Frank Sinatra, and have the coordination of a ballerina. And at that point, you will argue loudly, and proudly, and you will win, because you are fucking gold.