If you have a certain argument to a certain talking point, then you're always going to repeat that same argument whenever that talking point emerges. There's nothing bad faith about that. These kinds of arguments get repetitive so you're going to see people repeat the same points.
As for the value of debate, even bad debate is better than nothing. Sometimes it feels like there's nothing being gained from it, but if you question people who have engaged in a lot of debates, you find that they're much more informed after the debates — even very acrimonious debates, where both sides are just trying to defeat the other side — than they were before it. A society needs people to communicate, for it to progress in its ability to effectively coordinate on complex social issues, and that process of communication is not going to be without warts, given how complex these social issues are, and how high the stakes are for a great number of people.
Societies which embrace civil discourse and protect free speech are far better off for it. This killing strikes at the heart of a civil society.
Charlie Kirk’s “certain argument” was “what is a woman?”. He would gish gallop weak and fallacious arguments to pretend like his definition was valuable (it wasn’t) and he would steam roll the nuanced definitions provided by his interlocutors.
And no, bad debate isn’t necessarily valuable and that dichotomy doesn’t get us anywhere. Kirk was not the only person doing valuable debates. He was a propagandist with a façade of debater.
Medhi Hasan is an eminently more honest and more skilled debater. Destiny is decent (although he does streaming debates for a living, so he gets a little too “debate bro” for my taste). Matt Dillahunty and some of his crowd are more informed and charitable than Kirk was.
We should be encouraging young minds to seek out honest interlocutors, not ones that sate their “dunking” appetites.
I’m not arguing for killing and your framing is not valuable. I’m arguing that Kirk was not a good role model for the kind of debate where people might actually learn facts.
Regarding even bad debate being better than no debate, I used to believe the same, then realized how much progress had been made in the process of low-quality arguments between 'heels dug in' interlocutors. It was like the inverse of a frog slowly being boiled.
But the question "what is a woman" is trying to get at finding this honesty. Even many allegedly highly educated professors respond to that with the answer "anyone that feels like one," which is an absurd and and demands the obvious response "but what is that thing?" Simply because a position can be correctly assailed with such a blunt question does not mean the criticism is not valid. Of course, it doesn't.
I think Medhi Hasan is among the best debaters alive, but I think he’s 100% wrong on his religious views.
Generally I’m a fan of Oxford style debates, such as Intelligence Squared.
Kirk was a rapid-fire debater who made all of his content to go viral. I don’t see much value in that style, because it steamrolls so much important nuance.
This isn't a valid accusation. I believe "both sidesism" has cursed Americans into locked thinking patterns where they can never develop, because they have to spend an eternity giving sober consideration to endless wrong-headed positions.
My viewpoints don't align with flat earthers, and also I criticize their unscientific methods.
When I'm really using AI, my mind is pushed to its very limits. I'm forced to maintain context that is much more complex than anything I had to keep in working memory pre-AI. But it also feels easier because you don't have to do nearly as much thinking to get every given task done. So maybe I get lazier, not in how much I accomplish, but in how much effort I put forth. So if my previous working intensity applied with AI would let me finish 10x as much work, now I'm content with exerting half as much effort and getting 5x as much work done as my pre-AI self.
Not commenting on any specific issue, but this link between avoidance of discussion and the slide toward authoritarianism is why the lifting of the Twitter censorship was so critical.
Speed bumps are built on public roads, which are shared property.
A private transaction is incomparable to that. The government imposing itself on every private economic interaction, by making itself a gatekeeper from whom you need permission, is incredibly invasive and dangerous. The threat vector here is the government, or the people in it, harming the general populace through malice, and more commonly, incompetence in how they wield these powers of warrantless surveillance and financial exclusion.
Banks unilaterally closing people's accounts, or refusing to open an account for them, because those people fall into high-risk categories, is now very common.
On the bank side alone, the costs of this system are estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars a year. All those costs are ultimately passed down to the consumers in a way of higher banking fees. On the consumer side, not knowing if you can move your money or access it is a significant source of anxiety that also makes it harder to plan one's life.
Trying to stop money laundering via mass surveillance of people's transactions is futile and creates far more losses than gains for society. It is what's responsible for the epidemic of debanking that has emerged over the last decade.
"The Financial Conduct Authority reported that banks in the UK were closing nearly one thousand accounts daily, with just over 343,000 closed in 2022, compared to about 45,000 in 2017.[4]"
Money transfer is a basic utility and should not be rationed out and gatekept by government regulators.
This kafkaesque nightmare is the same dysfunction you see in large corporations.
It happens for the same reason: when organizations get too large, the people running different parts stop communicating effectively, and no one feels directly accountable. But there’s also a reason some companies grow so large in the first place. Scale brings benefits: standardized systems, the ability to hire specialists for every niche role, resources to build infrastructure, etc. These advantages can outweigh the downsides of size for a while.
The difference is that companies hit a natural ceiling. Once the inefficiencies of size outweigh the benefits, they stop being competitive. Smaller firms hold their ground against them. Governments don’t have that check. There’s no competition forcing them to stay efficient, so they can grow far beyond their optimal size and never correct. Our best hope is what happened here: the courts striking down these government overreaches as unconstitutional.
I've seen it in public school systems. It's never "this is the right thing to do" or "this is the wrong thing to do" it's "I can't justify this to my boss" so you meet with their boss who similarly passes the buck. Eventually you get high enough that it becomes "I delegated that to Person X." Then you meet with Person X who says "I don't have the power to make that decision."
The average U.S. worker earns significantly more purchasing power per hour than the average European worker. The common narrative about U.S. versus EU working conditions is simply wrong.
there is no "average worker", this is a statistical concept, life in europe is way better them in US for low income people, they have healthcare, they have weekends , they have public tranportation, they have schools and pre-schools , they lack some space since europe is full populated but overall, no low income (and maybe not so low) will change europe for USA anytime.
Agree. There’s no other place in the world where you can be a moderately intelligent person with moderate work ethic (and be lucky enough to get a job in big tech) and be able to retire in your 40s. Certainly not EU.
Given Washington D.C. is the wealthiest city in the U.S., with a per capita GDP of $264,000, and voted 92.4% for the Democratic candidate in the last presidential election, having an industry that will lobby for less government control over the private sector, and by extension private citizens, seems like a good thing.
Arguably the most important person in D.C., Elizabeth Warren, was described by Politico in 2021 as the kingmaker in the Biden administration.
So what did Warren's allies in the Biden administration do when they were in power?
• subjected Americans, through the ban on Tornado Cash, to having all of their onchain activity monitored, without a warrant
• Operation Chokepoint 2.0, where they illegally deployed regulatory agencies to coerce banks to close the bank accounts of U.S. citizens who participated in the crypto industry
What does this "industry" make? The only products I read about are scams, theft from exchanges, payments for criminal dealings, etc.
There's lot's of moaning about "freedom from financial oppression" but also wild screams of jubilation when one of the "financial oppressors" starts trading or indexing crypto. Which one is it?
> So what did Warren's allies in the Biden administration do when they were in power?... etc
I don't really follow the legislative mess around crypto because nobody in power has defined what crypto is - without that, it's bound to be a mess. The question is, was the Biden admin too soft or too hard on crypto? I don't think you'll like the science-backed answer.
The same thing the internet "made" in 1995: permissionless infrastructure. You can dislike individual use cases, but you're missing the forest for the trees. The base layer of the crypto ecosystem is a decentralized transaction protocol that allows anyone to send verifiable, uncensorable data, including payments, without relying on trusted intermediaries. That's a breakthrough.
> The only products I read about are scams, theft... etc.
That says more about your reading list than the technology. Stablecoins are now the primary cross-border payment rail in dozens of countries. ETH secures billions in programmable contracts, used for everything from microloans to insurance to remittances. Even JPMorgan and BlackRock are tokenizing assets. Scams exist, as they do in every new technological frontier, but that's just the noise in terms of the big picture.
>There's lot's of moaning about "freedom from financial oppression" but also wild screams of jubilation when one of the "financial oppressors" starts trading or indexing crypto. Which one is it?
It's like opposing censorship while being glad when mainstream publishers adopt free speech norms. Crypto isn't anti-institution, it's anti-coercion. When financial giants choose to participate, that’s a win for the principle of neutrality and open access.
> I don't really follow the legislative mess...
That’s part of the problem. You admit you’re not informed, yet dismiss the documented abuses: warrantless financial surveillance, censorship of code, legal harassment of developers, and backdoor pressure campaigns against lawful businesses.
You don’t need to love crypto. But ignoring the suppression of basic rights in the name of tribalistic dislike for an industry is how authoritarianism creeps in. If crypto buying influence in DC prevents that, maybe it’s not the worst thing.
As for the value of debate, even bad debate is better than nothing. Sometimes it feels like there's nothing being gained from it, but if you question people who have engaged in a lot of debates, you find that they're much more informed after the debates — even very acrimonious debates, where both sides are just trying to defeat the other side — than they were before it. A society needs people to communicate, for it to progress in its ability to effectively coordinate on complex social issues, and that process of communication is not going to be without warts, given how complex these social issues are, and how high the stakes are for a great number of people.
Societies which embrace civil discourse and protect free speech are far better off for it. This killing strikes at the heart of a civil society.
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