It Is Bad That People Are Willing to Spew Bizarre, False, Easily Checkable Bullshit for Twitter Likes, I Think
Okay, I know you are all getting tired of my talk of debate, but let me say one more thing
James Fishback did a Twitter space yesterday that I attended. Surprising both me and the betting markets, various people who disagreed with Fishback showed up, though their argumentation was laughably poor (I might coauthor an article with Fishback about the space at some point, so stay tuned for that). But here I have a more important takeaway—people are willing to just spew complete and total bullshit for the sake of a cheap dunk, even if it’s easily debunkable. When it’s debunked, they ignore it.
Social media dunks bring out the worst in people. People get social credit and a direct dopamine hit for being as nasty and vicious as possible—if you say something that really gets the other side, it is liked 100000000 times, and the dopamine hits come over and over again. When an entire group of people—who like each other—are trying collectively to dunk on people, it makes their standards for convincing dunks be roughly as rigorous as racoons standards for food.
A funny example of this happened with Jesse Singal a while ago. You can read the whole story here, but I’ll give a brief summary: Singal cited the World Professional Association For Transgender Health, and the person who supposedly had written the sentence he was citing took to Twitter to accuse him of misquoting it.
This was dutifully liked and retweeted by aleph null people going for a quick Singal dunk. Jeet Heer, for example, said:
After Singal disputed this person’s interpretation of WPATH, Hobbes declares:
Haha! So witty. What a great dunk.
It turned out that this person had, in fact, not written the sentence, as he later admitted. The person who had been in charge of the guidelines had apparently never heard of him.
Eventually, Emiston admitted that, though he had not written the sentence, he had supposedly been in a video call where he said the sentence which was later written down. This despite the fact that the video call apparently occurred at least a year after the guidelines were written.
But this phenomenon is ubiquitous. People make the most bad-faith, easily checkable, falsehoods, hoping that on the internet where it takes longer to debunk a claim than to back it up, they won’t face any backlash. Even if the claim is debunked, no one cares. I’m not especially famous, nor do I have a particularly large internet following. And yet in the vitriolic echo chamber generated by my mild criticisms of debate, I’ve been the target of these types of ridiculous smears from an unhinged mob.
In the Twitter space, Fishback gave lots of examples of judges who are explicitly biased in favor of left-wing arguments. Judges like Lila Lavender, whose paradigm said:
Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. . . . I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging. . . . I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments. . . . Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc.”
Someone claimed that there was right-wing bias too. Fishback and I countered that, though in the middle of rural Kansas, there are no doubt a few parents who are biased in favor of conservative arguments, if you look at the career judges, the ones who judge a lot, the ones who the NSDA can do something about, who determine what goes on in high-level debate, all of their bias is left-wing. I offered 20 dollars to whoever could find a judge who had judged a lot of rounds (I think I said over 100) who is explicitly biased in favor of right-wing arguments. As the space was wrapping up, someone began to give an example, and Fishback said he’d look over it later.
Now, note, the bet was explicitly about judges who had judged a ton of debates. This judge had not judged a ton of debates. So one would expect that they would not settle the bet…right? Well, in the barrage of bullshit, such obvious facts are just ignored, in favor of cheap dunks.
No goalposts had been moved. I had been clear on the conditions from the beginning; they had not changed. And yet Soto was undeterred—when I pointed this out, his replies were bizarre and utterly unconvincing, claiming that setting a threhsold is “goalposting.”
Apparently, setting a threshold is goalposting—whatever the hell that means. When you make a qualified claim involving a threshold, that is goalposting, which is the same as goalpost shifting, even if your claim remains consistent across time. Why let obvious facts get in the way of a nice narrative?
Remember, Soto said that I shifted the goalposts. Shifting the goal posts occurs when one makes an immediate claim and then shifts it when it’s disproven. An example of shifting the goal posts would be if one claimed that there are no conservative judges, and then when shown that there are conservative judges, they claimed that those judges hadn’t judged enough to count. But if one had been clear from the beginning that their position was that there are conservative judges, but they don’t judge very much—if they were on tape saying that—then this would not be shifting the goal posts. Goalposting is not a thing; it is not a word in English that means things, but instead a bizarre tool of deflection Soto is employing to try to avoid walking back his obviously false claim.
Soto is, of course, not the only example of this: Debaters seem to love little more than saying easily checkable defamatory falsehoods. In response to the story reported in the Free Press—as well as my article—about me losing a debate round based on character attacks involving an out-of-context Tweet and discord screenshot, Aidan declares:
But this is bullshit—it isn’t true. I didn’t lose the debate because of a skill issue—I lost the debate because the judge discarded various arguments that I’d made, declaring that I should be voted against because “A debate space where racist or violent people are not allowed is preferable to one where they are.” Apparently, out-of-context Tweets that I deleted prove that I’m a violent person. The judge, supposed to be impartial, explained that he discarded 4 separate arguments that I made simply because he didn’t personally find them convincing, saying:
There are a few other affirmative arguments I also need to address. Namely:
1 - "Debate is more toxic under this model" - I don't think this is true. I think a more toxic debate space is one in which people can say and do things that are violent or discriminatory and skirt discussion over it. I also think a debate space where racist or violent people are not allowed is preferable to one where they are.
2 - "Debate shouldn't be over things said in private" - This is honestly one of the things that made me cringe the most. The real world does not avoid discussions of things said in private, they forefront them and force people to be held accountable (think Donald Trump, Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard, etc.). I think it also links back into the same impact framing the negative did at the top of the 2NR, i.e., if the people we are allowing to be active in this space are violent or bad in private, what is there to say those tendencies do not translate over to actions in the community of debate or within rounds.
3 - "The statement is out of context" - I think the negative is right that regardless of context, you should not have made the claim. It's the same idea as saying a racial slur, but then reclarifying to say OH but the context makes it ok. It doesn't.
4 - "There are infinite things we can be held accountable for. We have to walk on eggshells" - I don't think this is true. A.) there are a plethora of people who have never been called out in debate because they have never done these things. B.) This isn't true. They only read two, and would've accepted your apology if you apologized for it.
These people will never stop lying. When spouting defamatory bullshit that makes your opponents look bad is rewarded, dopamine addicts will produce it on command. Of course, when their narrative is exposed as pure fabrication, because those touting it don’t care much about the truth, a deflection with irony is seen as a clever response, enough to diffuse sound proof that they were lying through their teeth.
How have we gotten to a point where person A lies publicly, person B points that out, person A mocks person B in response without addressing their earlier claim, and almost a dozen people like the apparently genius reply of person A? That Aidan was lying was pointed out multiple times, and each time he deflected with irony, because he knew what he was saying was false. And each time, tons of debaters sided with Aidan, because they didn’t care about the truth.
This is of course not the only time this has happened. It seems that everything that was said about me by debaters in response to my article was full of lies. One guy even created a substack just to call me a racist pedophile! When I debunked the entire article, systematically, there was, of course, no response—these lies are easily debunkable but no one cares. When their goal is smearing those who challenge the orthodoxy, no one gives a fuck who is right—if you can get away with calling the dissenter an ugly, racist, pedophile, then we all cheer for our team, even if none of that’s true.
People throw as much bullshit at the wall as they can and they don’t care if any of it sticks. Their devotion is to social credit rather than the truth, and as such, when they’re exposed as defamatory lying assholes, no one cares.
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I run an NSDA District, Citron Online www.citrononline.org, for students that can't compete in the Sabbath. As part of the district we run 20+ tournaments per year online and open to entire country. I am curious about your experience as a debater and judging. Particularly I would like to understand how often as a debater you felt you had a) biased judges to extent that they could not flow all arguments and b) situations like you describe of opponents doing OPPO research outside the round. We are setting guidelines for our district and want to make sure we include only open minded judges and put in rules that prevent such behavior.