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.

Alas, we can agree to disagree.

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.

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