How to identify them, and how UK students neutralized one of recent history's most famous BSers.
The field of science is by no means perfect. Its practitioners are only human, and those funded by vested interests routinely sell their souls in exchange for financial incentives.
That said, science has contributed far more to the betterment of humanity than politics could ever hope to.
Scientists discover useful things. They cured rickets, beri beri, and kwashiorkor. They gave us electricity and lighting. They gave us cars, and then fuel injection and crumple zones to make those cars safer and more efficient.
Politicians and their campaigners, in contrast, gave us bullshit. They continue to give us bullshit. Big, steaming, never-ending piles of mierda del toro.
Politicians start wars, facilitate psy-ops, impose taxes, rort the public purse, introduce laws that diminish our freedoms, and hang out with sex predators. While scientists innovate and contribute, politicians are by and large a pack of leeches that extract.
It is highly instructive, therefore, to examine the ways in which scientists and politicians communicate their ideas to the world.
The primary mode of communication in the field of science is the written word. This is in total contrast to politics, where oratory is the key form of communication.
The most common venues for the written word of science are what are known as scientific journals.
If you’ve ever read more than a handful of journal articles, you quickly notice something:
They are written in a very dry, matter-of-fact style.
Journal editors and peer reviewers do not care for personality or charisma or cutesy phrases or funny anecdotes or the exercising of artistic license. Submit an article with those attributes and it will come back with lots of red lines scrawled through the text.
Journal editors and peer reviewers want facts. They want data that support those facts.
During a live debate, a shifty participant can claim “research by X shows Y causes Z, so take that!” then quickly move on without ever having to provide supporting documentation. That won’t fly with a journal paper. If you make a claim that is not backed by your own data or by previous research, the journal will promptly demand supportive evidence.
If you don’t have that supportive evidence, you can’t call the peer reviewers and attempt to sway them with your ‘charismatic’ penchant for smooth talk, because peer review, unless performed by climate change hucksters at East Anglia and University of Pennsylvania, is anonymous.
Science does not progress by holding televised ‘debates’ or self-aggrandizing “Prove Me Wrong!” stunts. Instead, scientists put their ideas to paper, and these papers are then distributed around the world in hard copy and digital form. Readers can then sit down in their own time and examine them carefully, without the distraction of some activist ear-bashing them while they try to concentrate.
They can reread the papers as many times as they wish, making notes, highlighting discrepancies, and cross-checking references.
All the usual logical fallacies that routinely win debates won’t even get off the ground in a properly-reviewed journal paper.
Sure, sometimes the process goes awry. Especially when big money interests like the drug industry are involved. When a drug fails to show efficacy in any of the pre-ordained endpoints, the researchers can slyly chop and change endpoints, or combine pre-existing endpoints until they get something that achieves statistical significance.
But astute readers can still pick this up. They can publicly criticize the researchers by saying, “hey, you clearly stipulated these endpoints in your study protocol, but then you moved the goalposts. What gives?”
Or they can point out that, ”yes, you managed to mix and match endpoints until you got a statistically significant result, but how can it be clinically significant when the drug saved zero lives and presented zero hospitalizations for the very disease it is supposed to treat?”
Contrast the scientific method of communication with the oral transmission of verbal diarrhea that dominates the field of politics and political activism. Politicians and activists make statements designed to trigger, not your inner detective, but your emotions.
By targeting your emotions, they bypass your critical faculties. They sway you by preventing you from thinking the matter through, and instead winning over your feelings.
While peer-reviewed papers and the subsequent exchanges they trigger are considered the gold standard of communication in science, oral debates are considered the penultimate form of political exchange.
Very few, if any, voters ever sit down to read a document by each candidate thoroughly outlining their policies, the rationale behind them, and how they will be funded. Instead, they tune into an incessantly hyped ‘Great Debate’ between two ageing narcissists. Most people who watch these debates have already picked their ‘side’, so are watching more from the perspective of a sports fan than a detached observer seeking factual clarification. When their preferred candidate makes a witty remark or fields a clever comeback, they experience a dopamine hit, as if watching their favorite team score a goal. This process has nothing to do with advancing knowledge; it is entertainment, a form of digital masturbation whose primary purpose is to reinforce what one has already committed to believing.
Shonky Debate Tactics to Look Out For
Among the most prominent of political activists in recent times was Charlie Kirk. Contrary to the image he and his handlers carefully crafted, Kirk was not an intellectual powerhouse. Far from it. His positions were simplistic and, more often than not, hopelessly wrong.
To successfully convey ideas that are deeply flawed requires a number of key propaganda techniques. This is where Kirk excelled - at least when ‘debating’ opponents inexperienced in dealing with his brand of argumentative chicanery.
Nathan M. F. Charles is an attorney, former federal prosecutor and national security official. So it’s fair to say he knows a thing or two about effective argumentation. He’s written an excellent dissection - one that deserves far more attention that what it’s currently getting - on Kirk’s style of ‘debate’.
Below are some of the dubious tactics used by Kirk to advance his arguments. At the end of this article, you’ll see just how quickly they broke down when Kirk found himself in an unfamiliar situation - namely, arguing with people who were wise to his bullshit.
Style Over Substance, Victory Over Decency
When your arguments lack substance, you are forced to rely heavily on style and persona. Kirk and his handlers manufactured a facade of confidence, boldness and invincibility.
Maintaining this facade meant doing their best to avoid capable debaters and instead targeting college age students ill-equipped to deal with Kirk’s tactics.
These students were presented as objects of ridicule, representatives of evil “WOKE” culture that were promptly “DESTROYED” by the all-knowing Kirk.
I find it a disturbing reflection of our society when young and often well-meaning students, still in their formative years, are portrayed as evil villains. I find something inherently sick about them being “DESTROYED” in a gratuitous, digital equivalent of the old feed-Christians-to-the-lions spectacles.
There's a famous unattributed quote (no, it wasn’t from Churchill) that says, "if you're not a socialist at 20 you've got no heart, if you're still one at 40 you've got no head."
Young folks are often idealistic, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The job of us old toots is to guide this idealism and its accompanying enthusiasm in the right direction - not to make a mockery of it. When you prefer to ridicule, lampoon and publicly humiliate youngsters rather than guide them, you are not a “hero”.
There is another four letter word which far more aptly describes your type.
Kirk was arrogant, confrontational, and sought to belittle rather than to enlighten his opponents. A key facet of this belittlement was humor. He carried an arsenal of one-liners and clever comebacks, guaranteed to raise the mirth of his admirers. The effect was to turn his opponents, no matter how valid their arguments, into a laughing stock. This went beyond entertainment, which was a core facet of Kirk’s shtick; it was a form of psychological warfare, aimed at demoralizing the opponent by making them a subject of amusement.
The Gish Gallop
Kirk was a prolific practitioner of the Gish gallop. This is a tactic in which the bad faith debater attempts to overwhelm their opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, without regard for their accuracy or strength. The bad actor does this with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address the specious arguments in the available time. This creates the illusion that the opponent cannot factually address the arguments of the bad actor.
Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the bad actor’s arguments at the expense of their quality. It is a virtual enactment of the “if you can’t blind them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit” principle.
It’s not uncommon for people to wander off on tangents during conversations. However, a debate deals with a specific question, and it is incumbent on the participants to focus on that question. If one or more participants cannot or will not do this, it is the role of the moderator to reign them in and impel them to stay on topic.
A common feature of Kirk’s pseudo-debates was the total absence of a moderator.
Scapegoating, Shifting Blame, Feigning Empathy
I’m not fond of abortion, especially the abhorrent practice of killing live fetuses. Nonetheless, if I were to pen a piece on the subject, I’d endeavor to stick to the facts.
Unlike Charlie Kirk.
He repeatedly claimed large numbers of women were denied informed consent before having an abortion, implying a deliberate and surreptitious campaign by, well, someone, to trick them. Not surprisingly, he never presented a shred of evidence for this claim. Informed consent is a standard requirement for procedures such as abortion. Further, as a highly publicized and constantly debated procedure that has been legally available in the US for over fifty years, it defies reality to maintain substantial numbers of women don’t really know what’s transpiring when they seek and go through with the procedure.
So why lie about it?
As Charles points out, Kirk was being strategic. With around one in four American women having an abortion by age 45, a large chunk of the population has either had an abortion or knows someone who has.
So how does one go about pandering to their ‘conservative’ base while not potentially alienating a large chunk of potential recruits?
Easy. Portray women who get abortions as the victims. Shift the blame by casting physicians as Machiavellian and women as dupes. By absolving women of personal responsibility for abortion, Kirk “preserved a recruiting pathway for people with personal or relational ties to abortion while still feeding outrage. The narrative was not designed to clarify or reduce harm. It was designed to mobilize anger, expand his base, and channel people toward his movement.”
The ultimate absurdity of all this is that conservatives are supposed to place a premium on personal responsibility and accountability. In reality, conservative activists are just like those of any other political leaning - their emphasis is on perpetuating misleading, self-serving bullshit.
Pretending to Share Common Ground
You see this one a lot, especially when the bad faith actor realizes he is losing ground. He will say something like “we both agree that …” or “you agree that…”, and then state something to which the opponent never actually agreed to.
The tactic here is to put forward some contention, of peripheral relevance to the debate topic, and impress upon the audience that the opponent agrees with this contention. The goal is to strengthen the bad faith debater’s position by making it seem he has won the agreement of his opponent, when that simply isn’t the case.
If you are debating with someone and they ask, “can we agree that…”, realize they are pulling this ruse on you by feigning a desire to find common ground. Kirk tries it on in the videos below, but for an especially grating demonstration of this shady tactic, check out the ‘debate’ between Andrew Kaufman and documented liar Steve Kirsch.
Evasions, Distortions, Half-Truths, Outright Lies
This is where we really get to the guts of the matter. No matter how much confidence he projects, no matter how many one-liners he comes armed with, the bad faith debater must still act out the pretense of being an expert on the topic up for debate.
As such, a fundamental tactic of these debaters is the liberal use of distortions, half truths, outright lies and the avoidance of inconvenient facts. If anyone brings up those inconvenient facts during a debate, then the bad actor quickly maneuvers to steer the conversation in another direction.
Kirk was an avid practitioner of this dishonesty, a prime example being his dogged insistence that Israel’s ongoing slaughter of innocent Palestinians was justified by the alleged events of October 7. Kirk’s defense of the IDF genocide campaign is what brings him under fire, and to the very edge of his composure, in the first video at the end of this article.
It takes an especially disgusting, callous and sociopathic type of character to insist the murder of children is justified by the alleged actions of a group those children have nothing to do with.
Kirk’s “But. Hamas!” argument allowed no room for mention of the fact the last Palestinian election was in 2006, which means the overwhelming majority of Palestinians alive today were too young to possibly have voted for the Israel-sponsored outfit that was surreptitiously foisted upon them.
Kirk routinely repeated the canned IDF propaganda pertaining to October 7, safe in the knowledge most listeners were unaware just what utter nonsense it all was.
Kirk never mentioned the pre-October 7 history of the region.
He never mentions the critical bit about Zionists starting this entire problem in the late 1800s when - their God having failed to provide the desired real estate - they began lobbying the UK, and later the UN and US, for their so-called "Promised Land".
Kirk never mentioned the 1947 UNSCOP report confirming the population of Palestine at the end of 1946 was comprised of 1,203,000 Arabs (65%) and 608,000 Jews (33%). Nor that the only reason there were that many Jews (up from 13% in 1922) was due mainly to immigration. In anticipation of the imminent land grab, Jews had been encouraged by Zionists to move to Israel, often illegally.
Yep. Illegal. Immigration.
I thought conservatives hated that.
Kirk never mentions that, in 1945, Arabs were the majority landowners in every single district in Palestine.
Kirk ‘forgot’ the bit about the UK seizing Palestine from the Turks at the end of WW1 and, instead of giving it back to the majority Arab population (which would have avoided the situation we have now) decided to hang onto it, while Zionists lobbied and Jewish terror groups went on a mass-killing and bombing spree.
He never mentioned the hideously evil Jewish terror groups like Lehi and Irgun, and their long history of wanton murder and rape.
Kirk never mentioned the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, in which up to 254 innocent unarmed villagers were gratuitously murdered by Israeli terrorists. Men were paraded on the back of trucks in a twisted humiliation ritual, then shot dead. Women were raped and then murdered, during this and other massacres by Zionist terrorists. The incident was wholly unprovoked; these were innocent Palestinian villagers going about their daily chores.
Among the satanic scum who took part in the Deir Yassin butchery was one Menachem Begin. He became the sixth Prime Minister of Israel.
Kirk never told you any of this. Why not? Because like all shameless bullshitters, he came prepackaged with an agenda that didn’t fare well in the presence of contradictory and verifiable facts.
Kirk never shared with his audiences just who gave us the car and truck bomb. It wasn't the IRA or Sicilian mafia. Nope, they got that bright idea from Jewish terror groups!
Like all demented defenders of pedicide, Kirk’s rantings about Hamas fastidiously avoided any mention of who really started Hamas.
Kirk’s agenda allowed no room for admitting Israel lied through its teeth about what happened on October 7.
It allowed no room for telling audiences how Israel lied about the mythical "mass rapes" and how, when a UN commission set out to investigate the rape claims, Israel refused to cooperate (see here, here, here).
Kirk’s dishonest agenda allowed no room for discussing how Israel lied about the babies it claimed were beheaded and burned by Hamas.
Kirk’s agenda wasn’t compatible with discussion of how the IDF - originally formed from the pre-1948 Jewish terror groups - intentionally killed its own soldiers on October 7.
It sure as heck wasn’t compatible with telling audiences how the IDF admitted it killed its own personnel on October 7 "in immense and complex quantity”.
Kirk’s agenda could not allow him to acknowledge Israel’s Hannibal Directive, which officially endorses this behavior.
Kirk’s agenda could not even begin to allow him to acknowledge October 7 was a blatant psy-op. Israel, despite planning knowing of the attack for up to a year, did nothing to stop it.
Then when this supposedly 'surprise' attack kicked off, Nutty Yahoo ordered the IDF to stand down for seven hours.
You read that right - seven hours.
"Hey Benji, we got a situation! Those Hamas bastards we sponsor are running around mass-raping women and burning babies in microwaves!"
"Really? Those savages can use microwaves?! Bugger me! Tell you what, let's get sloshed on arak for the next seven hours while we work out what to do!"
“Sounds like a plan!”
October 7 was clearly a pre-orchestrated event, staged to provide a pretext for the subsequent genocide in which at least 65,000 Palestinians (mostly civilians) have been murdered. The excuse put forward by the Callous C**t Crowd is that, hey, the Palestinians deserved it because they supported Hamas.
No, Israel supported Hamas.
"In 1981, Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, Israel’s military governor of Gaza, told me he was giving money to the Muslim Brotherhood, the precursor of Hamas, on instruction of the Israeli authorities. The funding was intended to tilt power from both Communist and Palestinian nationalist movements in Gaza, which is considered more threatening than the fundamentalists."
-David K. Shipler, New York Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief from 1979 to 1984
In 1992, Israeli military intelligence whistleblower, Ari Ben-Menashe, revealed how Israeli intelligence agencies were using “Palestinian terrorists” to sabotage the Palestinian cause:
“The slush fund helped finance the intelligence community’s “black” operation around the world. These included funding Israeli-controlled “Palestinian terrorists” who would commit crimes in the name of the Palestinian revolution but were actually pulling them off, usually unwittingly, as part of the Israeli propaganda machine.”
There are many more examples here, but let's fast forward to more recent times.
In February 2020, former Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman revealed Prime Minister Netanyahu secretely asked Qatar to keep funding Hamas:
Mossad chief Yossi Cohen and the top officer of the Israel Defense Forces in charge of Gaza, Herzi Halevi, visited Qatar earlier this month on the instruction of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to plead with its leaders to continue the periodical payments to Hamas, Yisrael Beytenu party chief Avigdor Liberman claimed Saturday night.
“Both Egypt and Qatar are angry with Hamas and planned to cut ties with them. Suddenly Netanyahu appears as the defender of Hamas, as though it was an environmental organization. This is a policy of submission to terror,” he said, adding that Israel was paying Hamas “protection money” to maintain the calm.
With Israel’s approval, Qatar since 2018 has periodically provided millions of dollars in cash to Hamas to pay for fuel for the Strip’s power plant, allow the group to pay its civil servants and provide aid to tens of thousands of impoverished families.
This is all a bit different to the simplistic “Israel can do no wrong because Hamas! October 7!” bromides incessantly spewed by the likes of Kirk, isn’t it?
Honest discussion draws upon the facts, no matter how unpleasant or unfashionable they may be.
Dishonest debate relies on trickery, on selectively and carefully packaged soundbites designed to fool your audience into accepting your fallacious arguments.
On that note, I present you with the videos that Kirk never wanted you to see, certainly not in their entirety (true to his nature, Kirk included strategically edited versions on his social media).
In May of this year, Kirk took his show to the UK, where he took on students at Cambridge University. Let’s just say things didn’t go too well for him.
The first video is a most illuminating snippet featuring one of the especially memorable debates. Kirk’s opponent is Sammy McDonald, a former president and debates officer of the Cambridge Union Society.
It quickly becomes evident McDonald is neither impressed nor intimidated by Kirk.
McDonald takes the stand accompanied by raucous applause. Kirk responds by raising his eyebrows and demonstratively downing a glass of water, an attempt to show indifference and dominance.
From the word go, it is clear Kirk is being taken into unfamiliar and uncomfortable territory, the kind he’s not normally forced to traverse when belittling far less experienced opponents.
As Kirk starts to drown, he throws everything he has at the young Brit. He tries pompous lecturing, the Gish gallop, the “we both agree” ruse, and spraying his opponent with his usual rapid-fire barrage of fallacious nonsense.
When that doesn’t work, he loses his composure.
At 9:00, Kirk becomes visibly angry (check out the facial reaction of the young female audience member immediately to Kirk’s right).
Kirk starts stuttering and losing his train of thought - the very thing he loved to ridicule flustered young US students for doing.
It is here that the Kirk fraud is unmasked for all to see. It’s not just his limp-dicked Trump defenses, nor his galling portrayal of the genocidal IDF as some sort of downtrodden Doctors Without Borders unit that never gets credit for all the wonderful humanitarian things it does, like dropping flyers on Gazans to let them know their houses are about to be blown to smithereens.
It’s not just Kirk’s outright lies (Trump did not broker a ceasefire between India and Pakistan, for example).
It’s the confirmation that Kirk’s entire persona - the boldness, confidence, calmness, the air of intellectual omnipotence - was a complete farce. The laidback alpha vibe was a shambolic construct, one that instantly vaporized the moment he faced a capable opponent.
While Kirk’s anger at being shown up gets the better of him, McDonald remains unflappable. He doesn’t get angry, he doesn’t stutter, and he keeps pulling Kirk back to the topic at hand.
When Kirk tries to create a strawman argument about Trump being better than Biden, McDonald calmly reminds Kirk he is not a fan of Biden either.
When Kirk egregiously feigns moral indignation at being interrupted by McDonald, the latter promptly shoots back, "You're famous for not interrupting?"
Here’s the video with McDonald. Below is the complete video in which Kirk gets upstaged by numerous other UK students. It’s not hard to work out why Kirk’s platforms never published the full, unedited versions.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of bullshit is that good men should do nothing to identify and neutralize it." - Edmundo Burkarelli.
Bravo Anthony! On point as always.!!!
I do not want to be snarky or insulting. Which statement I suppose won’t convince anyone.
But when I read this following statement, I gagged: “All the usual logical fallacies that routinely win debates won’t even get off the ground in a properly-reviewed journal paper.” Even reading the first sentence of your next paragraph left me disappointed: (paraphrasing) “…sometimes the process goes off the tracks”.
A little further and the takeaway I got–maybe sacrificing accuracy to haste–was (paraphrasing) “The big culprit in fake science studies that almost no one questions or challenges has been paharmaceutical companies.” Pharmaceuticaal companies are roaming predators in the Zoo set up by government regulations and licensing restrictions.
Science has been nearing extinction in the political West (anglo nations and their followers) for years and years. The problem has not been profit grasping companies, because profits are essential to the process of production. No profits, no people oriented production.
The big problem with science–the dying epistemological approach to achieving rational understanding of empirical phenomena–is the decline in respect for reason over the last 175 years. It is under assault on every front and its defenders are outcasts, or even today, outlaws. If reason is proclaimed to be unreliable and dangerous (in applications defined by the political class), then people taught and trained to believe this in government schools, will regard reason with disrespect and hostility.
The renunciation of reason brings nihilism and with it the unending quest for power. Power is the use of force as means to dealing with other people. As reason had declined, the political class has grown more powerful, and many aspects of life today are coercively regimented. At the top of the “coercively regimented list” in Western societies is science, or as brilliant political operators prefer to express it, “The Science”.
Peer review serves as gatekeeper to exclude from publication evidence and proofs unwelcome to the state-science establishment. There will be no rescuing science from within the establishment. Science stands on the proper use of reason which the peers and “the educated” ignore and sneer at. Thanks, sorry for the length of my comment.
Hi Rider,
I deliberately included the qualification of a *properly*-reviewed journal paper.
Yes, you could argue that a *properly*-moderated debate is a great way to get at the truth, but is inevitably a performance in which numerous visual and auditory factors aside from the plain facts have an important influence on the outcome. As for the facts, no-one stops a debate when someone makes a claim and say, “hang on a minute, do you have a reference for that, we just need to look it up and verify it?”
“The problem has not been profit grasping companies, because profits are essential to the process of production. No profits, no people oriented production.”
I respectfully and wholly disagree. When drug companies are allowed to make exorbitant profits from drugs that don’t work for conditions that don’t exist (serotonin deficiency/chemical imbalance, hypercholesterolemia, viral infection), of course they are going to have a corrupting influence on science.
When researchers at the FDA and CDC collude with drug companies, then subsequently go to work for those drug companies, do you think it is purely due to “the decline in respect for reason over the last 175 years” – or the massive increase in earning capacity being dangled in front of them in real time?
Is it “the decline in respect for reason over the last 175 years” that causes governments to not just ignore, but to actively participate in pharma corruption? Or is it simply their own greed and corruption?
Even a cursory examination of history shows humans have been behaving like irrational dickheads for a lot longer than 175 years.
Thoroughly agree.
Cheers to this statement: “Peer review serves as gatekeeper to exclude from publication evidence and proofs unwelcome to the state-science establishment. There will be no rescuing science from within the establishment. Science stands on the proper use of reason which the peers and “the educated” ignore and sneer at. ”
Great analysis, Anthony, but to my mind debates are a waste-of-time form of engagement at the outset. In a debate, you’re simply out there to win and people use whatever tactics they can get away with.
I think a much better form of engagement is where people who disagree have the points that the other person wants to make put to them before the discussion – not debate – so that they can have their arguments marshalled and go from there and the whole thing should be framed as non-confrontationally as possible.
I remember at school thinking debates were silly – the time limit, the complete nonsense that someone would put forward to support whatever silly side of the argument they had to make. I’d rather stick pins in my eyes than watch Q&A and I wonder what happened to us. Why can’t we have the open kinds of discussions as in Monday Conference. If you watch Lex Watson discuss homosexuality in Mt Isa! in 1982 … it’s a million miles away from where we are now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dV5be0fDnH4
Hi Petra,
I hope I didn’t give the idea that debates are good form of engagement for getting at the truth. I’ve always considered them entertainment at best, but more often ego-driven and pointless bickering.
I much prefer the written, cross-check-in-real-time method.
Q&A … ugh. I used to be able to tolerate about 5 minutes of that. My current average is about 0.3 seconds.
Speaking of the art of bullsh*t…I was just reading some virology papers this morning and jumped to the Methods sections. I can see why people get put off – it’s a language in itself and to a lay reader can appear very sophisticated sounding and impressive. But it’s just sophisticated sounding nonsense, with incomprehensible words densely packed together.
I dunno if you’ve seen this video but the way this guy sounds is exactly like what most virology papers sound like: https://substack.com/@controlstudies/note/c-156482573
It’s just as well scientists never read their papers aloud…
Jokes aside, just wanted to say thanks for suffering through CK videos of “debates” to distil it down for us
Enjoyable and well written and absolutely perfectly suited if it were written in 1992 (research papers that is).
Any exchange is meant to sway and the best way to sway and convince is to control the dialogue and/or the written word if you are presenting a paper.
“properly-reviewed journal paper” is a process which is no longer followed. I have read hundreds of medical submissions and the very first thing a researcher employs, is a well-known peer to be listed as part of the research even if that well-known expert is sunbathing on the coast of Alabama. By enlisting this fellow researcher both parties have subterranean needs being fulfilled (the author has leverage to convince his colleagues and the well-known expert as another notch on his holster)… there are additional subtleties but that is a rabbit hole for another day.
The COVID scam exposed the politics within medical journals; you couldn’t get squat printed unless you supported the government narrative because of the fear of losing government funding. The peer-review process was hijacked and it will be interesting how, or even if, the tide can be corrected.
A well written paper will normally not tear down the opposing belief, the paper will provide either a once neglected idea or present a newly found component that enhances what was previously thought. Very rarely does a paper get published if you take the slash and burn approach.
Anthony did a marvelous job in delineating oral debate… just outstanding!
Let me support an additional “trick” that CK employed and every excellent debater inserts into the discussion.
Within the first moments of interaction the good debater will get the narrative to his side. First, you rarely attract bees with vinegar, so you need to sow your opponent and the live audience, if there is one (televised political debates are a different beast). CK did this better than virtually anyone else; if the debate was about homosexuality, CK would immediately and overtly personalize the person as a whole human being and notate their beauty was more than just a single characteristic and that their focus should be much broader than just homosexuality. CK could and did control where the discussion goes and he did that by not tearing down his opponents argument, he did it by conjoining his stance to theirs and it was completely sleight of hand. The guy was brilliant!
Second, CK didn’t get angry, he would provide a “third party” attribute to every “fact” he explained. This establishes that these are not his words but rather these are words of wisdom and intelligence. CK made sure that the debate was not about him.
Thirdly, don’t make your opponent look stupid instead make your opponent look like they were just missing important information and that information is the difference. This way you are agreeing with the other person.
Fourth, get your opponent to agree with you and when they do, keep pouring it on. CK did that by doing everything that I posted in this post.
Fifth and most important… you are the one who determines when the debate ends.
Anthony, you wrote a great piece and I certainly hope that many others have the opportunity to read this…
WELL DONE!
What a play, eh?
The sale of the snake oil is contingent on your ability to put on a show, not on the fact whether it cures anything. At this point, I really do not care whether people are buying cure-all snake oil or not, just do not try to showe your favorite brand of snake oil down my throat.
I can’t believe I’m going to make another comment about Charley Kirk. It was just recently when someone on Substack posted a Charley Kirk video saying that it should be mandatory for every American to watch it. That lit my fire as it is very much unAmerican to force people to do something. Kirk is one of those Christians that the late Christopher Hitchens, another Brit, would have had for lunch. You may have whatever religious views you like, just don’t use them as political weapons. I thought your comparison of science with politics was a poor choice seeing how much science has been politicized. Okay, I’m done with the whole Charley Kirk thing unless someone declares him to be the messiah. Oh, one more thing. That picture of Kirk holding up the the Israeli flag is telling. No true American would do that.
Well no, because the people that are born within the imaginary lines known as “the USA”, (and also mislabeled “Americans”, because America is actually 3 continents, North, Central, and South America, which means technically that “mexicans”, “canadians”, “argentinians” etc are all “Americans”), are indoctrinated in government schools to worship the government’s flag here (which is also the flag of the IRS!), even though the actual true “patriots” of this area, had no flag, and no organized crime gang (government) for over 20 years. Flag worshipping is one of the divide and conquer tactics the real hidden rulers of this world do to all the peasant class; they get you loving the imaginary lines they created, as if the lines themselves are some special meaning, and that humans born within those lines are any different than humans born outside those lines; they aren’t. No matter what imaginary lines your mother gave birth to you in, that literal tax slave plantation you are born into, you would be indoctrinated to worship that tax slave plantation’s flag, and take pride in it; this is how they rule everyone. It is very much like getting people to worship sports teams in their area or school they attended, even though like for instance, the Chicago Bulls, when it was Michael Jordan, Scotty Pippin, Dennis Rodman, etc., that was a great team; but now they are not on the team, and yet people still worship the team, they are basically just brainwashed into worshipping a logo. Same thing with university sports, “Go Gators!” for example, and yet the team itself constantly rotates players, the players don’t seem to matter at all, what matters are the catch phrases and the logos and jersey colors, that’s what people are worshipping, in essence, worshipping nothing! Same thing with the imaginary lines known as “countries”, people are worshipping a logo, not anything of substance. Great article and book that explains this in detail: https://artofliberty.substack.com/p/to-see-the-cage-is-to-leave-it-25
Not in disagreement with you. I don’t/won’t fly the “American” flag in front of my house as many of my neighbors do. I don’t work for the government, or represent the government and I don’t worship the flag, nor do pledge allegiance to it. My point was that someone who has declared themselves to be “American” and particularly defends its policies shouldn’t be holding up the flag of a foreign power.
“My point was that someone who has declared themselves to be “American” and particularly defends its policies shouldn’t be holding up the flag of a foreign power.”
That’s an interesting point. It’s true that America’s leaders aren’t American at all, strictly speaking. They are necessarily, given their myriad actions over many years, under the control of a foreign power, as is much of the rest of the world.
Extraordinary article.
Calling Charlie Kirk a pseudointellectual is actually insulting to pseudointelligence:).
A
Yes, Bravo, Anthony. A tour de force essay. I am wholly unschooled in the persona of Charlie Kirk as his reputation amongst writers that I follow did not expressly identify him as enlightened in any way. However, I am aware and knowledgeable about the historical roughshod gangsterism of Israel, how they finagled their way into stealing Palestine, and then topping it off with a cruel and brutal genocide. You handled that sad history deftly. From what I gather, Charlie Kirk toward the end seemed to get on the right side of that issue which apparently caused him to fear for his life. He was eliminated, not by a .30-06 bullet, but removed none the less, dead or alive. What actually happened to Charlie Kirk will likely remain a mystery, at least for a while.
Anthony,
The little I knew of Kirk had him as just another booster of “The Firm”. Yet he got himself sent back into the fog. Seems he went off script.
Very nice, great that you wrote about the history of all these false flags operations, some of which I had never even heard the details of. Too bad you weren’t doing the “debate” instead of that Cambridge student, as I was expecting to hear some of that from him. I love that you use the correct words for things all the time, but you missed one when you said “UK seizing Palestine from the Turk…” ; “seizing” is their slave speak language they have us all using.. it makes the actual action of “stealing” or “invading” etc sound very benign, as if they had a right to do it! If a mugger steals your wallet, does anyone ever say, well I was in the park today and a mugger seized my wallet! No, no one ever says that, it sounds ridiculous; but we’ve all been brainwashed and indoctrinated to say (and think) that when a professional organized crime gang (all governments) steals something from us, they have a moral right to do it! (they don’t) Anyway, I see the slave speak language now whenever it is used (hence my username Slave Speak), and am working on a browser extension that will automatically translate Slave Speak English to De-slaved English, on any article you read in your browser, Chrome, Firefox, Brave, etc; it is fascinating to read mainstream articles with the correct words substituted in for the euphemisms we are bombarded and propagandized with regularly, it makes things perfectly clear; use the correct words and there is no reason to even argue or debate. The only thing holding up finishing this browser extension is some grammatical problems for usage of words and phrases, building an accurate slave speak translation dictionary that understands context but can be self contained in the extension itself; I could make it server based and feed it to an AI trained on slave speak, but I really would like to make the whole thing self contained, and not rely on servers
Interesting concept for a browser extension!
All these Kirk “debates” are completely staged fake productions which are scripted and done using paid extras. Phony baloney.