Disruptive Dissertation: debate

Showing posts with label debate. Show all posts

Sunday, June 18, 2023

"Debate me": Rogan wants to host Hotez vs. RFK Jr.

Because of course he does

When someone is a expert in public health facts and values public health outcomes, they don't want to participate in a disinfotainment war. It degrades the dignity of their actual knowledge, and it may contribute to bad outcomes. Who "wins/loses" the debate is subjective and is not the point. Even if the audience at home judges that the scientist sounded better (which is unlikely), the entire event is a loss for science.

The audience wants to know who won this "debate," for the same reason they want to know who won an Oscar or an Olympic medal. It's part of knowing how to make and join conversations in society. In the process of trying to "keep up" with the current megalogues, however, they begin to assume that listening to the show would be a path to wisdom. The show's producers don't care if anyone absorbs that idea, as long as they listen to the show. It's the wrong idea.

BTW, RFK is transphobic.

"In a recently unearthed video interview, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the noted anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and a Democratic challenger of President Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection bid, claimed chemicals in the water supply are turning boys trans.

“A lot of the problems we see in kids, particularly boys, it’s probably underappreciated how much of that is coming from chemical exposures, including a lot of sexual dysphoria that we’re seeing,” the scion of the Kennedy political dynasty said during an interview with Canadian psychologist and ring-wing pundit Jordan Peterson."

— "RFK Jr. claims chemicals in the water are turning boys transgender," Christopher Kane, Washington Blade, June 19, 2023

A year and a half later, at his confirmation hearing to become HHS Secretary, he denied having said this.
Senator Rips Into RFK Jr. — And Gets Him To Admit He Spread A Conspiracy Theory: Pretty sure Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) won't be supporting Kennedy's nomination. Ryan Grenoble, HuffPost, Jan 29, 2025

Also BTW — this is a July 17 update — as shown by "Kennedy's first FEC filing, the lion's share of Kennedy's biggest donors have previously only donated to Republicans." (Judd Legum, Popular Information)

On Angry White Men: Tracking White Supremacy (June 18, 2023), there's a list of all the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists who have appeared on RFK Jr.'s podcast. He's made 143 episodes since 2021.

An MD PhD on Twitter criticizes Joe Rogan's vaccine misinformation. Rogan responds that he'll donate $100,000 to a charity of the MD PhD's choice if he'll come on the show to publicly debate RFK Jr, who is a conspiracy theorist. In response to that, Dr. Danna Young tweets: The incentive structure is broken. Folks. Science cannot 'win' a media performance because science is not entertainment. Science is a practice, a method of pursuing truth. And in our current political media environment it is at a disadvantage against performative 'whataboutism'.

The appeal of RFK jr or even Rogan is the psychological needs they fulfill, not because they get anyone closer to Truth. But because they offer simple intuitive answers in a seemingly incomprehensible world. They offer a sense of agency and control, and a sense of community.

Scientific reasoning is only possible when people operate in good faith, are transparent, are solely operating in pursuit of truth, and never remove themselves from doubt.

The goals of political media (or “political-ISH media”) like Rogan is not truth-seeking ... but meaning-seeking, pleasure-seeking, community-seeking.

To show up there as a scientist to argue the merits of claims that are fundamentally NON-falsifiable (which all conspiracy theories are) is a fool's errand.

It’s like if I were a fish and I agreed to a duel. Folks. I'm going to lose but NOT because I'm a bad gunslinger, but because I CANT BREATHE ONCE I LEAVE THE WATER FFS (and I don't have hands)

POINT BEING: the purpose of MOST contemporary media has NOTHING TO DO WITH TRUTH. Think about it- How does Rogan HAVE all those dollars to pay a scientist to debate RFK? Because the purpose of contemporary media is attention-based profit. And in that arena, Rogan is winning.

By the way, to follow up on an idea above: Conspiracy theories give simple explanations for complex phenomena, and thus make some people feel reassured. Similarly, people want definitions of themselves. These don't even require conspiracy theories — which are elaborate stories that boil down to relatively simple explanations — but just dictionary-style definitions. These definitions can be used as part of conspiracy theories.

Christine Gritmon tweets: Obviously you know this already—but because if we go around loosening the definitions of male and female (and the expected roles and presentations thereof), it messes with the societal power imbalances that make them feel safe. They desire to feel 'defined.'

It's so blatantly obvious that tech billionaires are pushing RFK Jr. to weaken Joe Biden and try to usher in fascism with DeSantis. His biggest fans are all right wingers, which should be an immediate tell. They're trying to replicate Russia's oligarchy.

And the worst grifters who claim to be on the left are trying to replicate 2016 and do this all again with RFK Jr. and Cornell West. They don't want leftist policies. They are nihilists who just want to tear it all down without any vision for a better society.

Thomas Lecaque in a 5-tweet thread: Here's the thing, anti-vaxx conspiracy theories isn't just a bad idea, it's a toxic worldview, and consequently nothing else about RFK Jr.'s policies or plans or beliefs or rhetoric can be trusted. Once you adopt a far right anti science worldview, all your other beliefs are tainted. You think you could trust him on fiscal policy or foreign policy or public healthcare or literally anything else? No, no you couldn't. So no one needs to debate him, once you adopt magical thinking in service of getting kids killed by preventable illness you don't get to demand to be treated like a good faith adult in the room. Oh and asshole podcast hosts and billionaires demanding you debate him actually makes him infinitely LESS serious. If other people have to scream 'debate him bro' on Twitter it's because he's not a serious person and the adults in the room all know it.

Michael Hobbes, two-tweet thread: 'Why won't you debate?!' is such a perfect distillation of the dumb-guy's-idea-of-a-smart-guy ideology that has taken over American culture. No effort to discover the truth, understand the research or listen to experts. Just the hollow fetishization of counterintuitive 'ideas' and endless argument. *Actual* smart people can acknowledge the gaps in science and move forward anyway. Vaccines work. Shut the fuck up.

Ben Collins tweets: As president, I will replace double blind studies with debates against Joe Rogan. America's No. 1 problem, erectile dysfunction, will be cured in my lifetime.

Nate Silver tweets: Turning down a 'debate me' challenge isn't the own that people think. Having rhetorical skills in an adversarial format before a large audience is a nice but fairly niche skill that doesn't really correlate with underlying accuracy or really even courage of one's convictions.

It's like: sometimes I've been tempted to publicly challenge someone whom I'm in a statistical argument with to a poker match. And believe me, I'd be thrilled to play and I'd have a big edge. But I've also spent 10k+ hours playing poker. It's not exactly a neutral playing field.

When one commenter seemed not to understand Silver's analogy, another paraphrased it:

A live debate between a professional conversationalist and a research professor, not to mention when it’s on the professional conversationalist’s home turf, is extremely lopsided in favor of the conversationalist, regardless of the factual evidence.

In other words, Joe Rogan knows his side has a big advantage, completely apart from the factual evidence.

Sometimes at least one of the proposed interlocutors is a bad person

Seth Abramson: FFS this explains literally everything. If you give RFK Jr. the time of day after learning that he’s advised by the biggest ratf*ckers in the MAGA cult—Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, and Roger Stone—just admit you’re a rabid Trumpist interning with a psycho psyop collab

It’s so transparent: Rogan needs self-styled MAGA alphas for money; Musk needs a GOP White House to do the borderline illegal anti-monopolistic garbage he wants to do with “X”; all these charlatans have an angle for supporting actual lunatic RFK Jr., and in every case it is money

Radley Balko tweets: Fun to think about backslapping tech billionares amplifying RFK Jr. to amuse themselves while driving by the street that's still closed because an unhinged man radicalized by the kind of 5G paranoia RFK peddles flattened two blocks of my city with a bomb.

Hell, even the bomber had the decency to avoid injuring other people. RFK Jr. isn't just a crank, he's a crank whose ideas could kill millions. This smarmy tech/podcast bro effort to elevate him is one of the ugliest, most cynical episodes in US politics in quite a while.

Seth Abramson tweets: The Hotez-Rogan-Musk silliness in a nutshell: 1. Experts of whatever political stripe should always be willing to debate other experts of whatever political stripe. 2. Experts should never debate abject fools posing as experts—because they haven’t earned experts’ time/attention.

Those who call Hotez a coward or charlatan for not immediately agreeing to play PR games with Rogan, Musk and RFK Jr. are just trolls whose toxic-masculine bullsh*t makes them think every man can be persuaded by calling him a chicken. They don’t know how to *earn* attention. When Tucker Carlson wanted to debate me on his show I said no—instantly—despite knowing it would’ve afforded me significant attention and (eventually) money. Why did I say no? Because we should never demean ourselves by debating people who haven’t earned our time or attention. Hotez owes Rogan, Musk, and RFK Jr. *nothing*. They haven’t earned anyone’s time/attention—let alone an expert’s time/attention—on the subject of vaccines. And Hotez owes Rogan’s audience nothing because it *wants* to be lied to about vaccines. RFK Jr. is doing that just fine. I get secondhand embarrassment watching grown-ass men like Musk and Rogan humiliate themselves on topics of import for years—insisting they know better than experts—only to beg experts to “debate” them for money. They should crawl back into their rich-boy safe spaces, instead.

If you think an expert refusing to debate a nonexpert for cash proves themselves a liar—or that they don’t care about charity, or that they can’t substantiate their expertise—you‘re a goon who lacks critical thinking skills and should avoid thinking and walking simultaneously. I understand it’s hard for stupid people to know they’re stupid—so I *do* have empathy for avid fans of Joe Rogan and Elon Musk. But at a certain point you’ve had it explained to you by experts *why* you’re stupid so many times that your recalcitrance becomes a character flaw. The armchair alphas who think they know more about vaccines than those who’ve studied them for decades are the same people who falsely told everyone VAERS is a database of confirmed adverse post-vaccine events and *kept saying so* after they were told that was laughably wrong. Hotez made a mistake when he went on Rogan’s show the first time, but can be forgiven because he’s a doctor not a PR expert and at the time was rightly desperate to get accurate data to *any* audience he could. But at *this* point neither Rogan nor Musk deserve his attention.

Rogan is an expert on MMA—that’s it. I’d listen to him on that topic.
Musk *also* has areas of expertise: (1) sealioning (Google it); (2) gaslighting; (3) destroying companies; (4) bad parenting; (5) taking credit for others’ good ideas; (6) cult construction and management. If you’re listening to Rogan on any subject other than MMA, congratulations—he played you. You’re now his cash register. Just so, if you listen to *Elon Musk* on any subject beyond those I listed above, you’re yet another mark for the richest man on Earth, congratulations. The list of subjects on which I know nothing is virtually endless, but let’s take woodworking as an example. What kind of a****** would I be if I went around demanding that woodworkers interface with me as an equal? Rogan and Musk are the worst kind of fools: arrogant ones. Everybody really has to think about this: what’s happening here is that Rogan and Musk are *so* rich and *so* privileged and *so* out of touch with consequences that they’d rather see hundreds of thousands die than have their Big Important Feelings not be publicly validated.

I’ve no idea if Rogan and Musk were always unwell. Maybe so, maybe not. But both have been poisoned by wealth and celebrity into a level of toxic narcissism that’s galactically cringeworthy to any observer not so affected. It’s tragic, embarrassing, and profoundly dangerous. If these men had friends rather than cultists, an intervention would’ve happened a long time ago. So my question has nothing to do with Hotez debating a crank, but whether Rogan and Musk *chose* to have no authentic friends or did it just happen? It affects how I judge them. Also this: while lawyers can frame facts/precedent differently—it’s key to our adversarial justice system—and scientists may have slightly different reads on how some data project forward, debating anything subject to the scientific method is lunacy.

So if your big issue today is being mystified at why Dr. Hotez isn’t eagerly agreeing to debate a random moron about vaccines, understand that you have one or more of these issues: 1) You lack critical thinking skills. 2) You’re in a cult. 3) Ideologically you’re a fascist. For the rest of us, the prescription is simple: determine the expert consensus on any question that interests you. Everything else—especially circus sideshows orchestrated by rich men obsessed with their Big Important Feelings—is just *noise* that wastes your valuable time.

The interlocutors

They have to share enough common ground to have a conversation. They need to share the same sense of reality.

Richard Nanian tweets: I've taught logical argument for over 20 years. I tell students argument is the fundamental skill of civilization, even ahead of agriculture. It’s not conflict but a way to manage conflict. But it’s only productive when the participants share certain epistemological assumptions.

Thomas Lecaque (June 19, 2023): The problem with debating people in the parallel reality is that your facts won't impact them and so the appearance of the debate will be that you're losing, even when they are unhinged.

As well as the same values intertwined with that sense of reality.

David Frum tweets: 'Rabbi, I'll offer you $100,000 to come onto my popular podcast to debate whether the plague is or is not caused by Jews poisoning wells.'

Each of them has to have a relevant knowledge base, even if those bases have significant differences.

Dave Vetter: Musk, Rogan and the entire Debate Me Bro community are just this cartoon. Cartoon says: We'll talk to a well researched and respected expert...And in the interest of balance we will also talk to an idiot.

Hamilton Nolan tweets: I know you did a PhD and wrote a book on this complex topic but if you don't debate my horse on stage at the county fair, why should I believe you? my horse can clomp his hoof once for yes and twice for no

If the interlocutors interrupt and talk over each other, then change the topic, how can that be winning?

Clan Malkavian parody acct tweet: That's literally how Ben Shapiro does it. Because when he's in a 'debate', he doesn't give you time to dissect and break down why he is wrong. He just interrupts and changes topics. But there are literally hours and hours of videos out there of why he's wrong.

Talia Lavin: I was president of my high school yeshiva league debate club and I won every time with minimal prep by Talking Fast Using Big Words. thats it. that's the skill. the merit of ideas has nothing to do with it. it's a wpm contest.

Why does the interlocutor with less expertise pressure the more knowledgeable one to debate?

Why would a non-scientist want to debate a scientist about science?

Mikel Jollett tweets: Instead of bringing scientists on podcasts, how about we force podcasters to prove they can do basic science? Do you know what 'double-blind' means, my dude? Can you define p-value, bro? Without googling it, give me the basics of polymerization. Can't do it? You lose.

John Scalzi tweets June 18, 2023: Why won't that beef-witted podcaster write a peer-reviewed scientific paper? What is he scared of? Is he too much of a coward to present his findings to a group of experts in the field for their critical examination? Why is he hiding?

The audience

A mass audience doesn't share a scientist's expertise either. They may not even share the same awareness of what facts might be relevant, fidelity to truth about those basic areas, or active pursuit of advanced knowledge.

Thomas Lecaque: You're an expert when your ideas have been reality tested by other experts, not because you engage in a social media yellfest with a public that doesn't share the same objective reality you do.

They do, however, become zealous, to the point of harassing the participants outside the debate.

Alex Rosen tweets: I confronted @PeterHotez and asked why he is too scared to debate @RobertKennedyJr on the @joerogan podcast! In response, Elad Nehorai tweets: They came to his house. Of course. This is the thing about the “debate me” culture. It’s abuse posing as intellectualism. They don’t give one sh*% about debates: what they demand is access to you whether you agree to it or not. It’s about power and domination, nothing else.

Amy Maxmen, PhD tweets: 'Debate me' is not communication. 'Debate me' is an invitation for scientists to subject themselves to severe harassment, doxxing & death threats. >32 kids died in Samoa after RFK Jr visited & convinced parents that measles vaccines are dangerous, 2000+ sick.

If someone's making unfounded claims of knowledge and epistemic purity, public debate can be a performative response to help smoke that out. It doesn't "resolve intellectual disputes." It resolves annoying performativity disputes.

Nate Silver, June 23, 2023 tweets: There's a robust middle ground between not wanting to engage in a theatrical debate against people with more experience and adopting a posture of 'I'm a Scientist and therefore Pure as the Driven Snow' (particularly if you often tailgate in the politics/science middle lane). I've tried to take a principled stand against 'debate me, bro' as being a good way to resolve intellectual disputes. It's not. But there's a degree of grenade-throwing behind the wall of credentialism, and other motte-and-bailey tactics, beyond which it becomes more appropriate.

The Political News Media Still Doesn’t Know How To Interview Trump, So I’m Going To Show Them, Todd Lombardo, Substack, September 26, 2023:

"In my previous Substack, I described four theories about how the political news media is getting it wrong in covering MAGA more broadly, and Donald Trump specifically: bothsidesism, doomsdaying, access journalism, and fascist-normalizing."

In this post, these ideas are applied retroactively to a Trump interview.

RFK Jr. will run as an independent in 2024

In October 2023, RFK Jr. announced he would stop challenging Biden in the primary and instead run as an independent.

Robert Reich writes, distinguishing the father from the son (Substack, October 10, 2023):

"I worked in Robert F. Kennedy’s Senate office in 1967. ... Robert F. Kennedy would never have suggested or even thought that a deadly virus was targeted at certain races. He wouldn’t have repeated the trope, dating at least to the Middle Ages, that Jews unleashed a plague on non-Jews. ... RFK Jr is not an independent. He is a right-wing tool being used to help elect Trump. His candidacy has been backed by a PAC that also funds Marjorie Taylor Greene and George Santos."

www.motherjones.com/politics/202... Obviously this is not a serious person, but it’s amazing you can just run on what amounts to forced institutionalization of neurodivergent people in 2024

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— David is a Downer (@davidlanzrath.bsky.social) Jul 25, 2024 at 3:43 PM

RFK Jr. says he placed a dead bear cub in Central Park 10 years ago, Aaron Pellish, CNN, August 4, 2024

Do Republicans like debate?

I dunno, maye they do, but then why does their leading candidate insist on no debates?

Trump Demands That The RNC Stop Hosting Debates For His Rivals Or Be Revamped: NOW!!! The coup-attempting former president has skipped all three debates to date but has been getting more agitated about them as the GOP primaries draw closer. S.V. Date, Huffington Post, Nov 20, 2023.

They never wanted to debate, just make unfunny jokes...

Joe Rogan Mocks Trans People And COVID In Netflix Stand-Up, And The Internet Is Fed Up: The controversial podcaster's new comedy special, "Burn the Boats," is being met with criticism. Jazmin Tolliver, HuffPost, Aug 5, 2024

They don't want to teach critical thinking

Whenever this topic comes up, my mind always wanders back to this now older article.

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— Rima Regas (@rimaregas.com) December 30, 2024 at 6:09 PM

Read this article by Julia Serano

Gender-Affirming Care for Trans Youth Is Neither New nor Experimental: A Timeline and Compilation of Studies (32-min read), Julia Serano, Medium, May 16, 2023.

The article came to my attention because she tweeted on June 19, 2023: "since we're talking about anti-vaxxers & calls to "debate me", I will add that anti-trans activists use this exact same playbook. you can't "debate" a scientific consensus, b/c it's not based on one study & can't be undone w/individual "questions/concerns""

RFK is now doing some complicated spoiler stuff

I regret to inform you the RFK Jr. is back at SCOTUS, this time asking to be taken off the Wisconsin ballot — after previously, unsuccessfully, asking to be added to the NY ballot. He claims he's going to do something at SCOTUS re: Michigan, too. www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docke...

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— Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner.bsky.social) October 24, 2024 at 12:20 PM

77 Nobel Prize Winners Write Message To The Senate: Don’t Confirm RFK Jr. "The leader of DHHS should continue to nurture and improve — not threaten — these important and highly respected institutions." Nick Visser, HuffPost, Dec 10, 2024

Unhealthy

Reading about Americans' uniquely unhealthy diet of ultra-processed foods and thinking we also have a uniquely unhealthy diet of ultra-processed entertainment and information.
— Howard Mittelmark (@howardm.bsky.social) January 9, 2025 at 8:59 AM

RFK Jr. Says He’s Rehiring Thousands Of People He Mistakenly Fired: The cuts were a mistake he’d always planned to make, Kennedy said in head-scratching remarks. Lydia O'Connor, HuffPost, Apr 4, 2025

HuffPost headline: RFK Jr. Says He’s Rehiring Thousands Of People He Mistakenly Fired

he did this just *after* going to the funeral of an 8 year old girl. he walks away from where the hearse is idling and immediately starts hyping this stuff again. www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

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— Rachel Maddow (@maddow.msnbc.com) April 7, 2025 at 12:34 PM

RFK Jr.: "Pharmaceutical drugs are the third-biggest killer of Americans." This is straightforwardly false. The original claim is that MEDICAL ERROR is the third leading cause of death in the US. That is also a lie, based on terrible science: gidmk.substack.com/p/medical-er...

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— Health Nerd (@gidmk.bsky.social) April 13, 2025 at 5:19 PM

FDA’s artificial intelligence is supposed to revolutionize drug approvals. It’s making up studies, Sarah Owermohle, CNN, July 23, 2025

How awful. This is outright health disinformation, lying to the American people. Not only is there massive evidence showing no link between vaccines & autism, there’s not even a plausible mechanism based on what we’ve learned about the genetics of autism, some environmental exposures in pregnancy

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— Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD DSc(hon) (@peterhotezmdphd.bsky.social) November 19, 2025 at 10:18 PM

ICYMI: Robert Kennedy Jr. claimed that he had nothing to do with Children’s Health Defense during his confirmation hearings. His wife just headlined the group’s annual conference. www.importantcontext.news/p/kennedy-sa...

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— Walker Bragman (@walkerbragman.bsky.social) November 10, 2025 at 5:40 PM

“the secretary of health and human services food-shamed the secretary of state by instructing AI to create an image of him spoon-feeding sauerkraut to the vice president and then posting it on X” is now a true sentence you can say before pulling your hair out.

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— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) September 3, 2026 at 10:46 PM

"RKF took money earmarked to provide health care for Black infants and spent it on his personal security detail" is a ludicrous headline. Comic book villainy.

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— Radley Balko (@radleybalko.bsky.social) September 25, 2026 at 9:03 AM

Friday, April 8, 2016

Ideas in tension

The essayist Joseph Joubert wrote, "It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it." Sometimes the wisdom is in the debate itself, or at least in the perception of two or more alternatives. "A wise man of our own time," wrote Gilbert Highet, "was once asked what was the single greatest contribution of Greece to the world's welfare. He replied 'The greatest invention of the Greeks was men and de. For men means 'on the one hand,' and de means 'on the other hand.' Without these two balances, we cannot think."

However – or, to borrow a phrase, on the other hand – Lee Siegel warned that if we always silo ideas that are in tension and focus on the resulting dichotomies, we will never be able to make connections, find common ground, and help each other move forward. He wrote:

"Now just about every political debate comes down to one phrase: economic policy.

* * *

What we never hear about in the popular media – where intellectual discussion once took place – is debate over fundamental meanings, or essential definitions, or connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena. Those are the elements of an idea, which is the challenge consciousness makes to concrete reality. When Archimedes said, 'Give me a lever that is long enough, and I will move the world,' he was talking about how you can think your way into a new actuality.

Instead of ideas, we have 'issues,' which are the way the world tricks consciousness into believing that things never really change. Because an issue has two sides to it, both sides will still be there whichever one prevails. The 'issue' – consider abortion – never goes away. But an idea – e.g. the issue of abortion is more fundamentally about the social limits of sexual pleasure, not merely about reproductive rights – leaps beyond the two sides of an issue into the essential condition from which they spring. It makes you stop to think, instead of provoking you to start to argue. An issue is the place where ideas run out of steam.

As a result of our yapping, endlessly banal, issue-dominated culture, the intellectuals, who work with ideas the way a Realtor works with property, are out of work."

Matthew E. May presented this insight: "When U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said generations ago that ‘I wouldn’t give a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity,’ he meant that to find elegance, you must appreciate, embrace, and then travel beyond complexity." The judge's comment favors the assumption that there is a problem to be solved. He says that a simple solution is better than a complex solution, but it would be even worse to arrive at no conclusion at all.

On the third hand, analytic philosophical inquiry itself – whether it is content to remain in a perpetually unsatisfied debate or whether it progresses toward a conclusion – may not be the best way to find truth. Robert M. Pirsig wrote:

Once it's stated that "the dialectic comes before anything else," this statement itself becomes a dialectical entity, subject to dialectical question.

Phaedrus would have asked, What evidence do we have that the dialectical question-and-answer method of arriving at truth comes before anything else? We have none whatsoever. And when the statement is isolated and itself subject to scrutiny it becomes patently ridiculous. Here is this dialectic, like Newton's law of gravity, just sitting by itself in the middle of nowhere, giving birth to the universe, hey? It's asinine.

Sources

Joseph Joubert, quoted in the Montreal Gazette. The Week, April 4, 2014, p. 15.

Gilbert Highet. Man's Unconquerable Mind. New York: Columbia University Press, 1954. p 19-20.

"The Intellectual Crash of 2009." Lee Siegel. TheDailyBeast.com. March 25, 2009.

Matthew E. May, In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing. New York: Broadway Books, 2009. p. 25.

Robert M. Pirsig. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. (1974) New York: Bantam, 1975. p. 385.

Thursday, October 29, 2015

Still waiting for a better answer on 'How to Be Right'

“The idea for this book has been inside me for years, growing, grumbling, developing horns, like a gestational twin with a vestigial tail,” says Greg Gutfeld. His newly released book, How to Be Right: The Art of Being Persuasively Correct, an instructional manual for “conservatives” to feel that they can demolish “liberals” in fifteen-second sound bites, is — like his metaphor for writing it — horrifying.

Horned goat from "winterseitler" on Pixabay

While he laments a shift from “fact-based debate” to “fact-free rhetoric,” he also thinks it’s important “to confirm normal, commonsense assumptions” (note that assumptions are not facts, and what counts as normal and commonsense lies in the eye of the beholder), and his book is entirely about rhetorical flourishes, not facts. As he puts it: “The whole point of arguing is to defeat your opponent by looking great, without hurting your knuckles or spilling your mojito.”

He advocates misattributing and twisting people’s beliefs – for example, if someone supports abortion rights in general, you should inform them that they really also specifically support abortion for gender selection in China. (“Replace ‘pro-choice’ with ‘pro-boy’....The next time someone says they’re pro-choice, say, ‘Congrats, you’re also ‘pro-boy.’”) In case it is not obvious, let me chime in to say that you can support someone's legal right to make their own choices without agreeing with any and all choices they may make and without endorsing every one of their motives and objectives.

He says that the subject of using aborted fetal tissue for medical research should be used rhetorically as moral equivalents to using tissue from executed criminals or concentration camp inmates or using an uncle’s skull for a paperweight. On the contrary, these are not exact moral equivalents; anyone with a little philosophical skill or training could quickly enumerate the relevant differences in these scenarios.

One of his nicer rules: “Concede”. He explains: “Demonizing an opponent on all points makes our opinion unrealistic, histrionic, and boring.” He does, nonetheless, refer to “the innate desire of the left to embrace any cause that undermines the foundations of the country. They are termites.” He says that there aren’t any “left-wingers in charge of anything that requires results” while, to their eternal credit, no “right-winger” has ever used the c-word “to describe any liberal woman”.

He perceives liberalism as acts of emoting, wishing, blaming, throwing money at problems and then resorting to putting on bandaids and lipstick, while conservatism raises standards and solves specific problems on the ground with targeted actions. Conservatives fight the wars and maintain the police presence that allow liberals to philosophize. (No word from him on what [liberal] philosophy might be good for – for example, its influence on foreign policy and domestic law that in turn govern the [conservative] military and police.)

Male feminists are dismissed in this fashion: “Women love a man who fights for her rights, even if the fight suggests she can’t fight for herself. And men dig the fight because impressionable undergrads find it cool that he’s so into the war on patriarchy, while leeching off his parents for tuition.” He says that “Women love sexists” based on some information in or interpretation of the erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey.

One of his favorite approaches is to shut down an area of concern by raising a subject of concern that is several orders of magnitude larger. “If you feel strongly about Hobby Lobby denying two kinds of birth control out of dozens,” he says, “how do you feel about sharia law? How do you feel about burkas, or flogging?” (No acknowledgment from him about how he feels or would react when this trick is played on him. For example: If he feels strongly about not wanting to pay for someone else's birth control, how does he expect others to feel about not wanting to fund a war that they believe is damaging and unwinnable?) Another example of this occurs in response to a woman who videotaped herself having “been catcalled more than a hundred times in twelve hours”; he says that, “in the same month, Boko Haram had kidnapped and enslaved dozens of women. So, yeah, catcalls suck. But they don’t rate, compared to true evil.” He also blames that particular woman for walking “where minority men were standing around. She didn’t go to Saks or Equinox.” He thereby reveals his prejudiced expectation that men of color are more likely to make sexist comments that “suck” while he simultaneously implies that the road to civility is paved with luxury department stores and fitness clubs and that the feelings of people who cannot afford these places are not worthy of concern.

He complains that it’s perceived as OK to mock “Republicans, religious types, old farts, white men” but not “liberals, Obama, women, gays, trans”. Trans is not a plural noun, a slip that calls into question his qualifications to opine on anything having to do with transgender people. There are repeated digs against transgender people in the book, including against “the infamous pregnant man” whose existence is notable only because Gutfeld admits to having made a public comment about him for which he was annoyed at being called to task by Barbara Walters and which he does not repeat in the book.

He advocates slamming people who are “consumed by [the subject of] sexual reproductive rights” by simply suggesting to their faces that they aren’t getting laid. His particular complaint is against public funding for birth control pills. He believes that women should be “free to make decisions about their health choices” but that they should have to fund it themselves, because otherwise “the implication is that you cannot be depended on to take care of it yourself,” and he thinks this implication conveys the “sexist” and “paternalistic” idea that you [women] cannot “handle your life...because you’re female” and that “women...need us [men]” to subsidize a range of female health needs. The multi-part rebuttal is, hopefully, obvious. For Gutfeld’s hypothetical woman who is unable to afford birth control, the link between her poverty and her gender is obscure. She has already been defined as asking for help not because of her gender, but because of her finances. Gutfeld manages to find a gender imbalance that offends him only by falsely presuming that male workers contribute all the funding to public health programs for indigent women, as if women do not also work and pay taxes and as if women’s healthcare (including their ability to control when they get pregnant) is not also a benefit to men (in the true sense of the term "public health" in which each person's health contributes to everyone's well being). Later in the book, he undercuts his own argument by complaining about men who want public funding for condoms; there, he doesn’t say that such men are admitting that they cannot handle their own lives as men nor that the cost of their condoms would have to be paid by women. Instead, his argument takes a different tack: “If condoms are a human right that must be paid for by someone else,” he says, “why not your food or clothing?” But I’m pretty sure that any thoughtful person who maintains that sexual health and reproductive control is a human right would also maintain that food and clothing is a human right. Lastly, a person’s poverty doesn’t mean that they cannot take care of themselves. People care for themselves and each other in different ways, and much productive work (such as caring for the young, old, and sick) is financially uncompensated. If there is public or communal funding for birth control and one chooses to avail oneself of that program, that is a way of taking care of oneself and one’s family. Choices like these appear in the context of larger life choices and situations that may also involve taking care of oneself and one’s family and not having large amounts of money because of it, and these larger situations make it necessary or convenient to use whatever health insurance programs have been set up to fill a prescription. If Gutfeld is irritated that specific prescriptions have their cost shared by a large group of people, he really ought to look at different health insurance models and decide if some are more annoying than others, and, from there, he could look at the entire economic system that generates demand for anything like health insurance. Without a fuller context of all the costs that we share as a society, it is hard to seriously consider his moral objection about sharing the cost of one pill through a health insurance model that isn't even defined.

As the purest illustration of tokenization I have seen in a long time, he says that the Republican Party should strategize its growth by doing “the most shallow (but perhaps most important) thing: look like the left. That’s all. Look like them.” By which he means, Republicans should recruit a few people with brown skin. The next time “you’re” – presumably he is addressing the white Republican reader – “trying to make a point at a bar: quote people who look like Democrats.” He must be unaware that he is fighting against his own goal of diversifying the Republican Party by writing in a way that is probably especially irritating to people of color (and their white allies) who might happen to be reading his book. He sings the praises of Mia Love, not because of anything specific she has said or done, but because she is “black, female, Haitian, Mormon. And Republican. All that’s missing is a dorsal fin and an antenna.” I suppose he means that in the spirit of inclusivity and acceptance, but it is hard to feel it. To him, Mia Love’s existence as a “demographic of one” somehow proves that “demographics means nothing.” Not super convincing on his facility with statistics there, adding to his more general failure on how to respectfully acknowledge someone’s race.

He sees some people as being “focused only on their sexual identity, their gender, their race,” and that they should come to “realize that you played no constructive role in this identity you are proud of” since it was not an “accomplishment” but was arrived at merely “by luck or biology.” Not sure how he manages to remain so unaware that people do construct their identities (in part because, all too frequently, they have to labor through their reactions to books like his). His definition of the term “white privilege” is the idea that “every Caucasian is evil,” “any achievement by a white person is based on racism” (whatever that means), and the world itself is “gigantic racist plot”. I could suggest this modification: Privilege includes not having to think about how you construct your identity because the process isn’t painful or challenging. It leads to the false assumption that there isn’t even any such thing as an accomplishment within the realm of identity and that neither you nor anyone else does or can do anything to affect your own self-understanding or presentation.

A very small handful of statements would have been potentially agreeable, if they had been, well, rephrased and reinterpreted.

The motto “Play to win, not for retweets” appears suddenly. I am not entirely sure what it or its context means. Generally, being retweeted should not be one's primary life goal. But then, neither is "winning" the best interpretation of life.

“One can love Muslims but hate tenets of Islam that are shitty to women, gays, and nonbelievers" — well, broadly, this is true of any religion or ideology. It is useful to identify harmful parts of religious ideology without demonizing people who belong to that religion. This sentence by Gutfeld is not the most elegant or sensitive expression of that idea.

Of course, not all offenses are morally equivalent, and a sense of proportion is key. Of course we ought to avoid “falling into the trap of manufactured stridency, where the condemnation of a pop star over a song is on par with the emotion you might normally reserve for ISIS." However. However. Gutfeld fails to achieve that very goal in this very book.

January 2022 update: See this Washington Post article about his rise to the top of Fox News. The article explains that his old show, "Red Eye," was “a subversive, periodically hilarious, reliably sophomoric program he hosted from 2007 until 2015, airing variously at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. on weekdays and 11 p.m. on Saturdays, on a most unlikely venue: Fox News Channel at its most self-righteous." Now:

After years on “The Five,” an ensemble show he co-hosts, he’s become even a bigger part of the dominant news network’s success as the host of a late-night comedy program that debuted in April — “Gutfeld!” Defying predictions, “Gutfeld!” is regularly generating higher ratings than more established late-night fare, such as “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and “The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon,” and has at times even topped “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

September 2025 update: Gutfeld was one of the few people on the right who admitted "we don't know" who shot Charlie Kirk.

HuffPost says: "If you didn’t know, Gutfeld — who hosts the political satire show “Gutfeld!” on Fox and is known for his conservative views — has not only suggested that conservatives should reclaim the word “Nazi,” but also that crime would simply “disappear” if women were to vanish from the planet."

Disruptive Dissertation