TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
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User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
12hr ago
It would be equally easy to say that e.g. the Groypers on Nick Fuentes' comment section are the "most concentrated and distilled Republican space on the internet", and that it's those people who are determining the flavor of the party.
People claiming it's fair to paint small, hyper-sectarian factions as "the REAL outgroup" would be wrong in both instances.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
12hr ago
... and people also started talking about RBG the moment she died, both positively and negatively. Plenty of people opined how she should have resigned during a D president before her body was even cold.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
12hr ago
I assume you were doing your debate-club stuff in a small room filled with only debate people who accepted that one person was going to have to take the opposing side of the argument.
Mostly correct. Sometimes I could be in rooms with dozens or even low-hundreds if I made it to finals, but there was always the understanding that my arguments would take a certain shape just based on the rules of debate. It wouldn't be much of a debate if both sides agreed with each other!
In contrast the debates Kirk was doing were real debates
I do not see his dunk-farming as "real debates" in any meaningful sense. The danger he faced was similar to what any other public figure faces when they go out into the open, that there might be a low probability, high magnitude event where a crazy person tries to attack them, like what happened to John Lennon, Tupac, Dave Chappelle, or Steve Buscemi. Cancel culture was a threat too, but being on the conservative side makes you less likely to have serious ramifications, not more likely.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
12hr ago
Being any sort of public figure has been a dangerous activity as a baseline. I don't judge political discourse as being significantly more dangerous than a celebrity. I might buy that it could be somewhat more dangerous, but not orders of magnitude relative to how well the person is known. Again, perhaps that's changing now, but political assassinations had been surprisingly rare in previous decades.
Feel free to present evidence to the contrary.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
12hr ago
that he wasn't running any risks?
... of being ostracized? Yes I will suggest that, because it's true.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
12hr ago
I don't understand how you get that from what I wrote.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
18hr ago
What? Make your point clear please.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
18hr ago
For what it's worth, I believe the attempted hagiography around Floyd was just as silly, if not more so, than what's happening now with Kirk.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
18hr ago
We're you debating in favor of any right-leaning policies?
Sure, every once in a while. But I, like Kirk, was in an environment where I was never going to run a serious risk of being ostracized. In my case it was because we all knew debate was a silly game, while in Kirk's case it was because his conservative audience wanted him to say edgy right-wing stuff.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
18hr ago
Now let's say the left was using this silence to make brazen claims about how AOC was one of the greatest people who ever lived on par with MLK or Jesus or Lincoln, and also that every right winger was complicit in her death. Would you maybe feel the slightest urge to respond?
I mean, you could just say "no" to win this specific argument, but I must say I never found the idea that we must wait X number of days before speaking about an event particularly convincing when either side makes it.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
18hr ago
It can take a lot of courage when there are real stakes.
Sure, I don't disagree with this. And the policy debate I did was fake. But the debates Kirk did were also fake. And almost all political debates of this sort are fake. It's a performative skill you can build like any other. There were no stakes. If Kirk has a bad performance, he could just cut that from the TikTok highlight real. At worst, he might run some risk of someone else filming him mess up and counter-dunking on him, but social media algorithms would be unlikely to serve that to Kirk's audience in any case.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
18hr ago
It's the representation of Democrat voters online.
It is not. That's pure weakmanning. It's a representation of a specific faction of woke Democrats that like censorship, credentialism, and catastrophizing.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
18hr ago
Is this supposed to be speculation of why I made this post? Even if it's just talking about various unnamed leftists more broadly, it's still ridiculously "boo outgroup".
"People I disagree with are having terrible fits of cognitive dissonance, but instead of resolving it by admitting I'm correct, they desperately throw out red herrings and non-sequiturs, thereby making my point even stronger!"
Uh huh.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
19hr ago
Sure you can list off individual incidents, but again they pale in comparison to all the public figures that have ever done public events in the past decade+.
And yes, as I said there have always been crazy people, but it hasn't been an undo concern for politicians relative to other public figures. Sure, they have security details, but Taylor Swift also has a security detail and it's not like she's running for office, or even regularly giving political hot-takes.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
19hr ago
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
19hr ago
As I said, a little flip-flopping is not a bad thing. I've certainly changed my mind about some things over the past 10+ years. But the nature in which it occurs, and its frequency, are both very important as to whether it's genuine or cynical. In Kirk's case, his changes were both frequent and abrupt. Oh, he just got a call from Trump and suddenly decided that the whole Epstein affair was silly and not worth talking about right when Trump was trying to bury the whole thing? Uh huh. Sure.
This type of thing is fine if Kirk and people talking about him were honest that he was just a government mouthpiece, but they keep trying to build him up as a "martyr for truth" when he demonstrably wasn't.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
19hr ago
Bluesky is not representative of liberals as a whole, and especially not top Dem leaders (with perhaps the exception of Ilhan Omar).
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
19hr ago
I don't see how Milo was such a piece of shit relative to Kirk, unless we're judging specifically by how much we personally agree with their political opinions. Milo was also successful, for a time, until he crashed out by ending up on the wrong side of the right-wing pedo craze if my memory serves correctly.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
19hr ago
Because it's relevant? I'm sure some leftists claimed that Floyd's drug habits were beyond the scope of the discussion, but they would have been wrong given whether he had fentanyl in his system could have been very, very important in how he died.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
19hr ago
Any of Kirk's content that zoomers were seeing on TikTok was of course going to be highly cherrypicked.
I don't know if he also did full unedited livestreams, but even if he did I'd hardly call it amazing. Debate is mostly fake. By that, I mean the idea that the strongest argument (or the most truth-seeking individual, or even just the most persuasive) inevitably wins is fake. It's a skill like any other -- Yglesias has gone into this on the case of Hasan.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
20hr ago
Top right-wing leaders are already pushing political narratives, so it's reasonable to respond to those narratives. Something similar happened around when Floyd was killed, and while I'm sure some leftists said it was "too soon" for conservatives to make counterarguments soon after he died, the conservatives were justified in doing so given the types of arguments leftists were pushing.
I don't have the guts to put myself out in public and go around debating leftists in person at venues across the country. In terms of virtue points, maybe I get 8 for honesty and he gets 5 points, but he gets 10 for courage, and I get like 2, so he beats me.
"Going out in public" and debating people is hardly something that takes immense courage. I did policy debate in college -- where's my statue?
Before this, public figures generally didn't worry that much about their personal safety. Random crazies have always been a threat, but they're relatively rare compared to all the public figures going out into public. Maybe that's slowly changing as the US becomes more sectarian?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
20hr ago
He was dunk-farming on infantile leftists for clout in a similar vein that Milo Yiannopoulos exploited about a decade ago. That's not a bad thing, but it's hardly some great civic service.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
20hr ago
Maybe you'd have a point if we could all collectively agree to wait for a week before opining on this sort of thing, but top conservatives like Musk and Trump almost immediately blamed "the left" (basically half of the country) for this attack. You're effectively demanding unilateral disarmament.
I recall the exact opposite, actually. I remember leftists trying to tell her "step aside you old hag" in polite but forceful terms, and when she didn't there was pretty widespread worry that she had screwed them all (which she definitely did lol).
Yes, I don't disagree with this.
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