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Notes -
So I was talking with a leftist friend recently about race-swapping in movies, as well as the general topic of racism, and we clashed on a bunch of things. I'm not sure how well I did, and I'm worried I capitulated too much - I usually take more moderate stances when speaking with leftists IRL than I do online, since I'm usually trying to persuade and shift them towards a point of view which is more critical to wokeness and the usual mainstream narrative.
If you go "Your entire worldview and perception is wrong, here's the evidence" from the outset all you're going to have is an opponent that won't listen to you. It's a fine line you have to tread and I'm still finding my feet as to how to navigate real-time debate. He did capitulate to quite a good portion of my points too (or at least seemed to, from my perspective), but again it's hard to know how hard to push your ideas. There's also the fact that they've got a lot of "common wisdom" on their side which is a big boon in conversations because they can simply make statements and disproving big claims in real-time communication can't be effectively done, as opposed to online where you can take the time to organise things and fully make your case against certain common preconceptions.
What are your methods of debating with people in the real world, and how do you know how hard to press your point?
Common wisdom is the worst, but it's easy to twist it around in your favor if you're reasonably well-informed. I used to always ask my friends "what is one of Trump's non-immigration-related policies that you disagree with?" and they never had an answer. Of course he had plenty of bad policies, but that question I think helped lay bare that a lot of the animus against him was driven by a sort of negative enevery field constantly emanating from the press.
The other useful tool was to bombastically deny certain claims. For example, "I'll bet you $100 to $1 that I can find 10 different news articles in left-leaning newspapers that say that that's not true." Most of the time the confidence was enough to make them rethink the claim, which was convenient because when they did call me on it I looked terribly argumentative finding the sources.
Due to the media's strong slant, there will always be plenty of real-world facts, that are easy to verify, that most normies are not aware of. Stick to those facts and you can be unassailably confident about things that damage your counterpart's narrative. I like to argue viciously about the facts of what happened, then be a lot more reasonable about their interpretation.
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