I love all these folks decrying Ocasio-Cortez for being "nasty" to Ben Shapiro--a man who's danced on the grave of murdered children.
Just as we saw with Sarah Jeong, it's one set of rules for them, another for women they hate. Shapiro can hurl witless abuse at Palestinians, or make hay attacking trans people with cliches, but AOC's the witch for not giving him the time of day.
But all the trending hullaballoo--and the fact that I've now mentioned the man's name twice--illustrates what these "debate" propositions are really about, and why it's usually only people like Shapiro who make them. It's about showmanship.
For people who like Shapiro, who make their living almost entirely through the attention economy, debate propositions like this are meant only to raise their profile by grabbing on to someone else's. It's red meat for their existing audience and a way to keep pushing their brand.
The "change my mind" brand of debate challenges is simply canned bad-faith. But it's also worth remembering that flashy head-to-head debates like this are largely pointless beyond burnishing one's image.
Debates are a performance. They test arguments, persuasiveness, and showmanship--but not veracity. If you approach a public debate like this with an earnest desire to uncover the truth, you'll simply fall flat on your face. That's not the game.
It's why scientists, as a rule, don't debate creationists because the scientific method of establishing truth (or at least, establishing what is likely to be true) doesn't neatly fit into flashy Question Time style brawls, which reward punchy one liners and zingers.
Such debates reward a kind of charisma, and an ability to make a snappy, witty argument. But not, crucially, an *accurate* one. Truth is optional in these kinds of debates.
The purpose is to win, not to mutually establish common ground with your opponent in order to cooperatively arrive at a truthful claim. The point is to "own" them.
Refusal to debate, then, doesn't mean one's ideas are weak. It just means one is unwilling to partake in a particular kind of performance where truth is an afterthought. But Shapiro's trending, so he already got what he wanted.
