If I thought you were arguing in good faith, I'd say something like: you are wasting your time running toxicology screens on a patient with the knife hilt still

If I thought you were arguing in good faith, I'd say something like: you are wasting your time running toxicology screens on a patient with the knife hilt still protruding. It's intensely unsubtle what happened: the languages were banned, boarding schools beat kids for talking anything but English, and so on. However, I feel that nobody plays devil's advocate in good faith. In the worst case it's a shallow wrapper for "lets pretend my hate is a hypothetical" or in the best, "lets spend a few minutes kicking the skulls of innocents down the road, merely for idle argument's sake." Which evinces such a callous disregard it's hardly better than the former.