"Ha ha, stupid America is just like Liberia and Myanmar!!"
I know this has to be a logical fallacy, but don't know which one.
Is that the fallacy of False Equivalency (an equivalence is drawn between two subjects based on flawed or false reasoning), or something else?
A guilt by association fallacy occurs when someone connects an opponent to a demonized group of people or to a bad person in order to discredit his or her argument. The idea is that the person is “guilty” by simply being similar to this “bad” group and, therefore, should not be listened to about anything.
It looks like an argument by popularity to me: "look, most people do my way, therefore it must be the good one".
Here it is strengthened with ridicule by association with 2 poor countries that invites disrespect, as the laugh "haha!" suggests. This is not a fallacy proper, more a disingenuous debate tactic (no argument is made, but an attempt to shame the opposition).
"Ha ha, stupid America is just like Liberia and Myanmar!!"
Here, validity depends heavily on the statement’s underlying assumptions. If it argues that the policies are wrong because the people of Country X are themselves stupid, then this fallacious statement is just a big ad hominem argument.
If the statement argues rationally that there is something superior about the English system or defective in the metric system, then there is possibly a valid argument supporting an unnecessarily harsh conclusion. It does not appear that the premises are there to carry the argument from “wrong policy” to “stupid policy”.
Finally, it appears that the middle term of the syllogism (“policies”) is undistributed in both premises. The argument fails for that reason alone.
So I’m not sure this is really an argument without a little more context and motivation. Presumably the implication is that the US should switch to the metric system, and a more careful analysis with similar structure might well be a valid argument for it: that is, if only a few countries still use the old imperial units, it is potentially hindering scientific communication with the rest of the world, causing untold amounts of time wasted on conversion; one could even imagine real harm stemming from unit mistakes.
I think it's a faulty generalisation, I believe the implied argument here is:
Premise 1. A and B are X (Where 'x' is 'Countries which use the Imperial system)
Premise 2. A and B are Y (where Y is 'Stupid countries')
Conclusion 1 All X are Y (which is invalid)
Deduction: C is X therefore C is Y
A valid conclusion would be Some X are Y with this conclusion you cannot deduce anything about Country C.
You could still make an inductive argument that most X are Y so C, being X, is probably Y but would probably be hasty generalisation.
"Ha ha, stupid America is just like Liberia and Myanmar!!"
First, as noted in other answers, this is not a logical argument. Properly understood, this is a statement, and one based on facts.
It simply means that "stupid America" is like Liberia and Myanmar in not using the metric system.
Well, is that true or is that false?
It is true, at least according to the context as asserted by the question itself (no question mark):
Only three countries don't use the metric system: the US, Liberia and Myanmar
So, it all seems good to me.
The use of the qualification "stupid" also needs to be explained. It doesn't say and cannot mean "stupid Americans", as America is not an unorganised collection of Americans.
A country is also not a person, and so cannot be properly said to be stupid.
"Stupid" here is probably meant to refer to the policy of not adopting the metric system when nearly all other countries in the world have. It means that every American legislator who supports the use of the Imperial measure system is called here "stupid".
Perhaps the qualification is also meant to suggest that it seems stupid to have fought for, and won, its independence from the British Empire only to keep using its archaic measure system.
It is also interesting to note that, as demonstrated by the question itself, human beings cannot stop themselves from interpreting what other people say as "arguments".
12 and 16 support more even subdivisions. This may be helpful in some fields, where one might want to reduce a set of volumes or masses proprtionally, such as when a cook wants to cut a recipe to half- or third-size. One seldom wants a fifth of anything, except booze. Given the usefulness of 12 and 16 as bases, one might want to make everyone transition to the duodecimal or hexadecimal system. Or, like the Sumerians, go for a base of 60. Imagine learning a 60 by 60 multiplication table!
I think it is more about
one thing in America is stupid => America is stupid, just like the other two countries we may know nothing about but we assume they are terribly stupid
i.e. we judge an entity by a single trait and for added credibility associate same entity to two others by the same single trait as if this makes them equal.
The OP does not account that the US joined 1875 the metre convention, leading up to today's SI units, already permitted on US soil since 1866 by Congress (reference). Not only has NIST today kilogram standards (see here), the very first one actually was lost in shipping to the US in 1793 (see here, then cited here), too. Since detergent, toothpaste, or Dr Pepper equally are quantified metrically, the question should be: why would one use the metric system (at least for standardization), and then do the non-decimal conversion into inches, yards, miles, avoirdupois ounce (which is not the troy ounce) to go the additional mile ...
It's out of date information. An inch is defined as 25.4mm since the 1950s
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inch
"Standards for the exact length of an inch have varied in the past, but since the adoption of the international yard during the 1950s and 1960s, it has been based on the metric system and defined as exactly 25.4 mm."
So the imperial system has been metric-based for the last 50+ years.
So its an Appeal to Tradition, or an Argument from False Premise
