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This nonsense has been effectively dragged already, but there's one thing I can add: his argument falsely presumes that people are prejudiced for rational reasons, and that they can therefore be reasoned out of prejudice. If only.
Reason and argumentation are lovely and have some utility, but they're not silver bullets. Humans have built whole civilisations upon irrational assumptions, values, and beliefs. It's not just a tendency, it's who we are.
That applies to our ugliest habits and our capacity for evil as well. We do not reason ourselves into these positions, and we rarely reason our way out of them. A change in values occurs because a person changes what they choose to value, not because they got logiced out of it.
A strong argument has value. But as I always tell my students, a good argument is not necessarily a *true* argument, and a poor argument can be empirically sound. Debate is agnostic to truth; it is a contest of rhetorical skill, no more or less.
And people will hold fast to seemingly irrational beliefs, not because they have a well-thought out argument for them, but because the belief makes their world make sense, because it supports their values, or because it makes them happy. All are impervious to argument.
Thus, many people are bigots for these irrational reasons. To debate them is merely to engage in a fruitless exercise of goalpost shifting, gish galloping, and ad hominem. They want to believe their prejudice is connected to deep truths about the world.
So how do people change for the better? All sorts of reasons, most equally irrational. A family member comes out. They see a movie that makes them empathise with the Other. They go to a different church. They lose their friends and make new ones.
Our beliefs are stories we tell ourselves, and how any individual person decides that a different set of values tells a better story is a strikingly unique process. But it is almost always personal and rarely rational.
Debates also create irrational perceptions: that an argument has two equally valid sides, that the argument is mainstream and therefore socially acceptable, et cetera. All of which are agnostic to the substance of the topic being debated. And people use this ruthlessly.
Does this mean that learning logic, argumentation, and rhetoric are wastes of time because people are only moved by the dancing shadows of Plato's cave? Of course not. But you're not actually using those tools skillfully if you think they're *panaceas.*
You do a violent disservice to logic, for instance, if you fail to recognise that it's founded on givens/premises, and is therefore prone to being a 'garbage-in-garbage-out' process if you're not careful.
And with debate, one must always pick her battles. Facing off against someone whose whole worldview is founded on hating you because of who you are hardly seems like a good use of anyone's time. Thus, resume dragging. Contempt can show bigotry is socially unacceptable.
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