Turning Point UK launches, lefty heads explode!

It is not bizarre to not wish to waste one's time debating someone who focuses wholly on style, and nothing on substance.

Academics do not have a lot of free time to fly off somewhere and take part in a big publicised debate. When they do, they have the academic and intellectual integrity to debate those who are on a level with them.

I would not expect a leftist academic to waste much of their time on Shapiro or Crowder, nor would I expect a rightist academic to waste much of their time on Owen Jones or Shaun King.

Fast and loose use of the term academic there.Just to clarify, you are also referring to :

1.The one who just cost NYC hundreds of millions of dollars in amazon jobs because she didn't understand the deal.
2. Doesn't know the branches of government.
3. Has a ludicrously priced deal which includes free money for the "unwilling to work".
4. Thinks Palestine is under occupation.

So either you're a troll or you've miraculously found a way to post on a forum from your coma, in which case I'm impressed.

I didn't mention AOC once. Why on Earth are you talking about her?

Fair enough. She is the subject matter of the last few pages of the thread.

Can you provide any examples of left wing academics you consider to be too worthy to spend time debating the likes of Shapiro etc?

Badiou, Zizek, Chomsky, Butler, Habermas, and Hardt, just to name a few.

Badiou, Zizek, Chomsky, Butler, Habermas, and Hardt, just to name a few.

I really don't understand people who think they are too good to debate with those they don't agree. It stinks of classist snobbery.

If you aren't willing to defend your ideas then they lack value.

I really don't understand people who think they are too good to debate with those they don't agree. It stinks of classist snobbery.

If you aren't willing to defend your ideas then they lack value.

Although Zizek apparently has a few days coming up with JP which should be interesting.

Yet the President and the Republican party tend to either deny climate change or refuse to do anything about it. That's far crazier than anything AOC has suggested. I don't agree the Green Deal is necessarily unrealistic, it's certainly not crazy. It's a genuine attempt to tackle one of the biggest threats the planet faces while the Republicans shrug their shoulders.

As for the 'unwilling to work', you didn't provide the context. It was one line, which has now been deleted, which has been explained referring to those who are retired. More likely bad drafting by a staffer. And besides, people should be economically secure and have some sort of safety net, in lots of peoples' opinion.

Further, saying a policy is 'unelectable' does not necessarily make it a crazy idea. You're just appealing to popularity there.

There are all sorts of factors at play. There are legitimate arguments to be made on both sides of the taxation debate, which for the purposes of this debate are not really relevant. All that's relevant is that arguing for high tax rates on those earning over $10,000,000 is certainly not a 'crazy idea'. Such tax rates have existed before and similar rates exist in other countries. You may disagree, as you have said you do, but again that's not to say the policy is crazy.

Criticising someone for appearing in a dance video at university, which people did, is certainly a smear. As is slating someone for not
debating a media personality. As is criticising her for appearing in a fashion shoot for a magazine .https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1041007083058024449

The obsessive focus on here by Republicans really is quite telling, given they also keep saying that she's a 'gift' who they aren't worried about.

You simply do not know what you are talking about at this point, it's very telling. Not once did I state that I believe those theorists to be 'too good to debate with those they don't agree', I stated that they are too good to debate gutter-tier pundits. It's not classist in the slightest - do you know what that word actually means?

There are a very large number of rightist academics who I would love to see debate those leftist academics. Shapiro, Crowder, Yiannopoulos, McInnes, etc. are not part of that group of rightist academics - chiefly because none of them are even academics in the first place.

I don't like Peterson, but he is an academic and he does engage with concepts and arguments on an academic level, which cannot be said of Shapiro nor Crowder nor Yiannopoulos.

All of the people mentioned in the previous post have spent plenty of time debating with those they don't agree. Often over the pages of academic journals, but in more popular media and sometimes even in person as well. What they generally do not do, however, is "debate" ideas they have long ceased taking seriously with pundits with no relevant expertise.

Let me illustrate an example. Imagine that you have spent your entire professional career researching the life and reign of Pope John Paul II. You're one of the top 2 or 3 most knowledgeable people about him in the world, and you've published 4 books about him. And then imagine that, out of nowhere, an obsessively anti-Catholic online blogger emerges claiming that John Paul kept a secret harem of concubines and had several illegitimate children, and demanding that you debate him on this theory. You can tell that all the "evidence" they offer is clearly either faked, blatant misrepresentation, or highly circumstantial. You are completely confident that none of the other academic John Paul experts (all of whom you know quite well, having been reading all their books and going to conferences with them for 15-20 years) would see any merit in it either.

Now, in such a situation, why would you agree to a debate? It will accomplish nothing. It won't move scholarly understanding of the topic forward. It will be a waste of your time and resources. It will most likely involve you having to painstakingly explain and walk through incredibly basic, entry-level concepts and pieces of knowledge that anyone with even a simple grasp of the topic knows well, which will likely infuriate and frustrate you. It will give him easy publicity, and even risk giving the misleading impression to lay observers that this conspiracist blogger is, like you, a knowledgeable expert, and that his arguments and your refutations are in fact two competing sides of a complex historians' debate. Depending on the rules and structure of the debate, it may be that the limited time and scope give him ample opportunity to spew falsehoods, but not give you enough time to correct all of them properly (for instance, you are given equal speaking time of 30 mins each, but each 1 minute statement he makes takes you 3 minutes to debunk).

You starting to see the problem?

It was you who brought up leftist academics. Who are the right wing academics you're speaking of?
Shapiro and crowder etc are political commentators. No one is saying they are academics.


The problem is your implication that because someone is right wing and not an academic, then that concoction in itself is guaranteed to result in some sort of **** Dastardly-esque online troll who spreads fake news and falsifies evidence.
If you have such evidence of either shapiro or crowder doing so then please present it. Otherwise your analogy is completely moot.

Shapiro isn't a troll (Crowder and McInnes are), but what all of them have in common is that they are incredibly low-tier debaters who engage in topics with a social media weary approach - they want to have good soundbites and 'own the libtards', rather than engage in a topic academically and fruitfully.

Shapiro isn't a troll (Crowder and McInnes are), but what all of them have in common is that they are incredibly low-tier debaters who engage in topics with a social media weary approach - they want to have good soundbites and 'own the libtards', rather than engage in a topic academically and fruitfully.

Shapiro isn't a troll (Crowder and McInnes are), but what all of them have in common is that they are incredibly low-tier debaters who engage in topics with a social media weary approach - they want to have good soundbites and 'own the libtards', rather than engage in a topic academically and fruitfully.

McInnes definitely is a troll but I don’t think Crowder is really. He’s essentially a more political, right wing John Oliver/Trevor Noah. With regard to their debating; what kind of debates would you like to see them having?

With multimillion dollar budgets and a team of 20 writers behind them.

then that concoction in itself is guaranteed to result in some sort of **** Dastardly-esque online troll who spreads fake news and falsifies evidence.

Re TPUK.
I forget who said it (Milo Yannopolis?)
but coming out as right wing at Uni is like coming out as gay in the 1950s