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I’m going to take the Ezra Klein-Hanania line and, without any sappy respect for a dead man, I’ll say these ‘dunking’ debates are good, actually. Literal marketplace of ideas, forum of democracy. Though it may offend your snobbish sensibilities, that’s how ideas trickle down to the little guy.
A market where the stronger party selects whom it gets to compete with is not a very good market for evolving ideas. I am a snob but I'm a snob from 2ch, a cognitive elitist, opposed to self-appointed aristocracy. Compete on an open field with whoever is strong and willing to fight, live by the dunk, die by the dunk (which is why it's inappropriate that he literally died by a bullet from a hidden assassin, a total violation of the spirit). I like Fuentes more because he and his groypers invaded his debates and disrupted Kirk's silly scheme with even more insidious gotchas, and made deserved gains on it.
will be very unfortunate for Fuentes if it was one of his more mentally ill followers.
Looks like it worked and the format allowed your guys to make some good points. I don’t understand the blanket hostility (“fake debate, fake intellectual engagement, fake morality “). Like yeah, it’s not perfect, no-holds-barred, high quality debate, but it’s… still good enough?
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The idea is great, being open your ideas being challenged in public, and being able to argue for them. But in practice, that's not how it goes. Whoever talks faster, and is more skilled with "debating" has a clear advantage, regardless of whether they actually believe in their ideas or not. Regardless of whether their ideas are good. As long as you can present them as being such, you can have the upper hand.
I didn't know a thing about Charlie Kirk before he got shot. But you have a similar example in the streamer Destiny. He does the same thing, primarily does online "debates", but he's also visited a few colleges. But in the end, it's literally his job, it's his life mission to do this, he knows his subject well, he knows the tricks of the trade, he has great control of his emotions, all of which give him a huge advantage over anyone else. If you pit him and some random college student up against him, the student will almost certainly look worse by the end.
The same can happen even with people more educated than him.
Debates have flaws that can be exploited, but so does every other manner of exchanging ideas. Writing off this style of debate enitrely just sounds like sour grapes.
How effective any particular debate tactic is depends on the audience. For mass appeal, sure, it's all theatrics. But convincing idiots is only useful for getting their votes or their money. They are memetic dead ends.
Politicians are optimized for this type of debating, because they're optimized for winning votes. When was the last time you heard any interesting arguments in a Presidential debate? It's not a flaw of the format, but the audience. When was last time a politician ever changed your mind? That's not their job.
Convincing intelligent people is trickier, but also a force multiplier on your ideas. Moldbug has a much smaller audience than Kirk did, but the former is more influential. Scott is even more influential. Hasan has a bigger audience than Destiny, but Destiny is more influential.
These people can't really roll over serious opposition. Look at how Rogan tried to handle Flint Dibble. Amongst Rogan's fans, Dibble was discredited. But outside that bubble, it was just another case of what everyone already knows: Rogan is a loud conspiracist with a loose grasp on reality.
People have poopooed Jubilee's surrounded format for being all theatrics, and it mostly is. But I've never seen a more metaphorical destruction than that kid telling Peterson "you're really quite nothing." The memetic power of that moment is hard to overstate. The stock of Peterson's brand of Christianity went into the toilet overnight.
The tactic of concern for me is cherry picking opponents. Kirk had been dodging Fuentes for months knowing full well a debate on Israel would leave him fumbling. Destiny has been eternally dodging debates on HBD knowing full well the subject collapses his world view. People like Tim Pool, Sam Seder, Crowder, F&F, etc. build their shows around the image of being all about open debate but only engage with opposition when they're screened as losers, i.e. mostly debate morons.
Kirk was at least holding open mic challenges in a real physical space. He could still control the frame to some degree, but much less than other formats. We'll see less of that now.
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For the process to work (and consequently the entire liberal project), you don't need the correct idea to win every time, regardless of rhetorical skill. It is enough for the correctness to be correlated to winning, and I believe it is. I think even destiny and charlie kirk (I don't watch their stuff either) would have trouble defending manifestly absurd positions, like the sexes being as strong as each other, anti-vax nonsense, or black people having to live in fear of random white people violence.
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