This is interesting. When is a debate not a debate? How informative is a debate, or is it just a contest?
--Kim
I drove a very long distance this weekend. With the help of a lot of podcasts, including one with clips of Charlie Kirk debating/bullying. Which is what people are talking about when they claim he was for free speech or open debate or whatever.
Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social writes: "I know Charlie Kirk valued debate and free speech because he blocked me for fact-checking his lies on Twitter and then put me on his organization's Professor Watchlist for writing a book he didn't like."
Debate is a sport, and some people are very good at it, as he was, and it is not a reliable route to truth or clarity or anything else except who is more ruthless, relentless, has more rhetorical chops, etc. I mean it's dueling by verbiage and vehemence, and just like dueling with pistols or jousting with lances, all it settlesis better at the sport. (I know there is debate with rules in high schools and colleges, and then there's the free-for-all versions....)
He let college students pose questions and then (often, not always; see first comment) trounced them and somehow that was very appealing to a lot of people, which says a lot, but not that he was right or had his facts in line. Someone better than him at the sport--a top-notch courtroom lawyer, a lot of grownups--could have probably destroyed him in a debate not corrupted by interruptions and crowd roars, because he repeated a lot of MAGA nonsense. The clip I heard was him demanding his interlocutor say only yes or no to "can a man have a baby," and of course one thing I've learned in a lifetime of trying to avoid bullies is when you let them frame the argument you've already lost. Biological sex as all up-to-date people is a complex formulation, and also a number of trans men have given birth to children.
And of course he was shot as he was answering or not answering a question about mass shootings--which are a very specific kind of violence, mostly perpetrated by white men--with a misleading "counting or not counting gang violence," which is a very different kind of violence. The question was a follow-up to one in which Kirk was getting on board with Trump's assertion that trans people should lose their gun rights because of a recent shooting for which there is some muddled information about the shooter's gender identity; the questioner was pointing out how few mass shooters have been trans (it's striking that we keep getting stories trying to blame his death on trans people--and the plural here is a giveaway, because only one person shot him, and he's not trans, but first we got claims that factory markings on bullets were handmade trans messages, and now we're hearing some story about a trans roommate).
Anyway I'm sharing Laurie Penny's great 2018 essay against debating: they write:
There are some stupid mistakes that only very smart people make, and one of them is the notion that a sensible argument seriously presented can compete with a really good piece of theatre.
Every day, people on the internet ask why I won't "debate" some self-actualizing gig-economy fascist or other, as if formal, public debate were the only way to steer public conversation. If you won't debate, the argument goes, you're an enemy of free speech. You're basically no better than a Nazi, and certainly far worse than any of the actual Nazis muttering about not being allowed to preach racism from prestigious pulpits. Well-meaning liberals insist that "sunlight is the best disinfectant," anti-fascists disagree, the far right orders more popcorn, and round and round we go on the haunted carousel of western liberal thought until we're all queasy....
I'm not saying that there's no point in talking to the far right at all. I have interviewed members of the far right in my capacity as a journalist. But academic research and investigative journalism are very different from formal public debate. Public debate — at least the way I was taught to do it at my posh school — is not about the free exchange of ideas at all. You only listen to the other guy so you can work out how to beat him, and ideally, humiliate him. I'm choosing my pronouns deliberately here. The format is fundamentally an intellectual dick-smacking contest dressed up in institutional lingerie, and while there are plenty of women out there who can unzip their enormous brains and thwack them on the table with the best of them, the formula is catastrophically macho.
[full piece at the link:
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment