This - people like this who pretend to debate while resolutely refusing to actually listen or learn are so utterly insufferable.

You can tell them from a mile off because they always exude a nasty aura of thinking they're better than literally everyone else.

Debates are mostly for show though. It’s not about bringing the opponent to the other side. It’s about convincing the audience.

understanding logical fallacies is a must

so you can attack the argument when used by your opponent and so you don't use one and ruin your own argument

"Disheveled and rough?" He was clean with a Cambridge style outfit. His hair style was different than mine but I saw a few others in the audience with similar hair.

He was great at at shutting down Kirk. That should be the only take away here.

CK was a pussy who got his ass whipped every time he left his faschist echo chamber and debated someone with more than two brain cells

He was a content farmer. And he worked hard for that content because most average, random college kids absolutely destroyed him.

That was a fun read
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

I was in middle school when Adam Sandler's Billy madison came out. The year following, we had debate class.

Anything remotely approximating a gish-gallop was immediately responded to with the ben stein quote

"what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."

Im disappointed this did not just become the standard shut down.

Fucking Aquaman?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLqXkYrdmjY&t=191s

It's sad how stupid your message can be and still amass an army of idiots to line up behind you.

Call him by his name so folks can better shame him. Kent Hovind is a bitch less whoreson who has willingly and knowingly exposed children to pedophilic sexual predators.

TIL

Like I’ve seen it in action and have had to counter it but never knew there was a formal name for it.

We can probably thank decades of shout shows on television, especially cable, in which "debates" took place that were not really actual debates.

Same with the way our "debates" are run when it comes to politicians running for office.

This. He was terrible at arguing. You are describing a terrible orator with no skill to analyze it present ideas.

But we took humanities out of school curriculum long ago, so most can't tell.

In the land of the blind the one-eyed is king.

never with any actually serious debate clubs

In my experience, many debate clubs have at least a few members who are wankers like Kirk.

For example, Ted Cruz was a debate whiz kid in college. But outside that artificial, controlled environment, he still resorts to bullying and flooding the zone with bullshit. That's because propaganda is a different game than debate, and debate skills have limited relevance to political discussions.

I typically avoid videos because I vastly prefer reading, but I make an exception for those. I just watch them at double speed.

The way to deal with it is to not play by their rules. Fascists don't care about winning rational arguments, they just want to get you to waste your time and energy trying.

Drive them out of power, that's the only language they understand.

Yeah since his death I watched a couple of videos and he is was so robotic and insincere. Like he would just cut off his opponent if he detected a keyword that relates to some lukewarm rebuttal (that anyone with a passing familiarity with the topic would see through) and use it as a rhetorical trap, to stop having a thinking debate and pivot to simply spewing talking points.

Smelling the feculent turn, the crowd would then cheer and whoop him on as he would pile on more and more bullshit over the original dishonest dump.

Then his Move: he would ask a question based on this insincere tower of turds. He would repeat it, it's a simple question, right? Just answer the question.

Obviously the original point is buried under several layers of shit by this point, so it's hard to tell what the debate was even about...

I think that's what honest people failed to realise when debating Kirk. It wasn't about anything other than winning the debate.

As someone who categorically avoids watching far right bad faith grifters, I missed the original debate. This young woman is super smart and articulate. Still some room to grow, but I've watched a few things with her now.

That said, I wish we lived in a world where it was considered more worthwhile to do something more impactful with her mind than engage with these grifters for clicks while putting herself at risk given their audiences and her physical appearance and views.