At first I thought that this comic was serious, and I'm still keeping that as a possibility, but based on previous experiences with Randy's preachiness, he wouldn't acknowledge his own prickishness, and he absolutely wouldn't let his opposition have a valid point against him.
If we cut to the core of this attempt at a joke, we can see that it's just another 'delibrately misinterpret a common phrase' thing, which I have both praised and hated, depending on the presentation.
This one, I pan faster than a man in California in 1849 pans through a river filled with copies of Chinese Democracy. The phrase "For the sake of argument..." is almost always used as part of "...you're wrong, but let's pretend you're right about this one thing so I can tell you how you're wrong about the whole issue." Now that's a very vague and awkwardly phrased way of putting it, but it's 2:30AM right now and I think it gets the point across.
The thing about XKCD when it has these 'little conversation' comics is that they always start oddly. How the hell do two people get to "just for the sake of argument" when one person is being this intentionally dense?
When I first read this comic, my mind instantly went to those awful people that say we shouldn't say the word "moron" because it originally meant "someone with a mental age of eight to twelve". "Moron" and "For the sake of argument" have a meaning today, and picking on alternate meanings that don't actually exist in the normal use of them is the most pedantic and minute thing anyone could possibly complain about.
Sincerely, a guy who made a whole blog about how a webcomic isn't as funny as people think it is.
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