Yeah and missing the point that a lot of people think ‘some ideas are so shit they shouldn’t be debated the right way’ esp not ideas about others who are not you and stuff we have debated (and fought over) again and again already. It is like the IRA, Kirk needs to be lucky once, trans people/minorities/university professors(*) need to be lucky every time, again and again, forever. This is just the dumbest level of object level vs meta level thinking out there. When somebody enters the marketplace with sawdust they claim is flour every week you toss them out, don’t let them in next time. And you should notice they only try to sell this ‘flour’ to the poor.

*: my second point, Piper is also very full of shit here. You know what happened to uni professors who debated/corrected/were women/poc in his space? They got put on the TPUSA watchlist and got death and rape threats. He was part of the organisation who ran that database. So this imagined idealized platonic Kirk shaped object isn’t even real. Hell you can see in debates the tricks he pulls so his side thinks he wins. That creepy smile he makes after a point that he knows is bullshit, that is to knock people off balance so people react oddly (as it is a really creepy smile) and don’t react to the dumb shit he just said. See this clip for example: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Jrsy1aB6OSk (it cuts off before she talks about how creepy his smile is). Note he is lying about the fetus thing, and if this wasn’t a high stress debate and people got time to think about things they would just reply with ‘so a dolphin fetus is a dolphin little human being?’. But that is professional debaters vs college students for you. This is not a man who was interested in truth or having his mind changed. And this smile is not some incident, he does it in other places. But his audience is preprimed on thinking they are the logic and reason people, so they consider somebody going ‘what the fuck did you just do with your face’ as a way to dodge the argument, so in their eyes this is a win for him.

I find that all these debatebro types have some of these tricks, in addition to often controlling the mic. Peterson refuses to explain, Shapiro demands you accept his premise from the start ‘for the argument’ (yeah if you are right you are right, but the debate is about if you are right not ‘assume im right’). The ‘I refuse your question’ guy is simply somebody who noticed one of those debatebro tricks and refused to go along with it. (the patron saint, may your hair remain long, and your bluetooth have good connections forever). Note that this prob doesn’t work on the more experienced debatebros as they would have prepared an answer for ‘why can’t we both have lgbt people and economic stability’ and it gives them a way to spout hate and misinfo again. As all work is skilled work, being a bad faith debate bro propagandist is also a skill (which the Koch brothers paid Kirk well for).

Related to this “Those who walk away from debatebros”.