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Norm is legit OG gigachad, intellectually humble, incrediblly analytical. And my homie! Love him so much
To anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, look up “Norman Finkelstein Crocodile Tears” quite confrontational but very based
This one? That’s an accurate description
Holy shit that was awesome
No one should debate Ben Shabibo. It’s just more views to him. More media. He doesn’t debate he talks really fast and then talks over you when he is getting his ass handed to him like all the western propagandists. He’s not worth the time or the energy. You aren’t going to pursue any of his chud followers. If they unironically watch Shabibo regularly and actually take him seriously then they are so brainstormed they are without hope. Just ignore him and spend your energy and time trying to convince people that might actually be interested in hearing what you have to say.
Okay but what if when he talked over me I punched him?
I haven’t read the oxford debate clubs rules, but you are probably fine.
Then it’s not a debate anymore and therefore not beholden to my comment. I said we shouldn’t debate him. I said nothing about not, as one possible example, bashing his head with a 2x4.
So I basically agree with this whole take, including this part
You aren’t going to pursue any of his chud followers. If they unironically watch Shabibo regularly and actually take him seriously then they are so [brainwormed] they are without hope.
But last night, I had a loooooong conversation about Palestine with a friend who is not super political which started with him asking what I thought of a 40 minute video of Ben Shapiro talking about the history of ‘the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’. He said it just ‘came up’, so he listened to the whole thing while he was working on some chores the other day. He knew I had been spending lot of time thinking, studying, and talking about Palestine, even though I had tried pretty hard not to push him into talking about it too much because he hadn’t previously showed that much interest. (We had previously briefly talked about all this stuff when he sent me an excellent, short explainer from BreakThrough News about the racism of Israeli society that he’d stumbled upon online.) I agreed to give it a watch even though, y’know, yuck.
We ended up talking for hours, almost entirely about the history of Palestine, the Zionist project, and Palestinian resistance in general, as well as the Oct 7 attack and the Israeli retaliation. I tried to be direct about the parts of the history that I do and don’t know well at this point, and gave him a couple examples of things that stood out to me as big/obvious problems with the historical narrative Ben Shapiro presented in his video. My friend asked a ton of good questions and showed a real readiness to question all ‘sides’ without letting that critical outlook reduce to an assessment that both sides are equal or that the issue is just too ‘complex’ to assess.
All of that is to say that while I don’t know that Ben Shapiro can be a worthwhile debate opponent given his bad faith, hucksterism, and strategies of talking fast and talking over, there certainly are people exposed to his crap whose interest in this whole situation is increased by that exposure, and who, yet, don’t fully buy in and are absolutely ready to receive other perspectives and develop a more truthful picture of the situation.
Shapiro has pretty wide exposure well beyond his chud following. For that reason, I’m glad that experts like Norm, Rashid Khalidi, Ilan Pappé, and others are out there producing free video content online addressing the same subject as Shapiro here. I think my friend might watch Finkelstein’s video on the same topic and of about the same length next, but I’m not sure he even would have gotten worked up enough about the details of the history to do so if he hadn’t first stumbled upon Shapiro’s video and thought ‘I don’t know the facts here, but this doesn’t pass the smell test.’
That is fortunate, and I’m glad that worked out, but see, your friend is open minded. They smelt out the bullshit. Now imagine if they weren’t like that. If they were more easily swayed? They could have easily hopped on the bandwagon and then you’d have an uphill battle at best.
Now imagine if instead of Shabibo, they saw a video from Norm or someone similar? My stance is, the more this guy is allowed to have a voice, the more his content gets promoted, the more exposure he gets. His content isn’t made to persuade critical thinkers like your friend. It’s made to mass produce consent from people that don’t. He’s a quick talking “gotcha” man. There can only be a net negative to having more exposure for content like his. The more shit they fling at the wall the higher the chance is some of it sticks.
Totally agreed. And I still think the best reason not to debate someone like Shapiro is that his whole style is fundamentally dishonest and unfair.
On the one hand, Shapiro is definitely more widely known than Finkelstein, because his grift is very general. Shapiro’s a well-funded, all-purpose, professional right wing hack. For people who have heard of him and maybe seen some of his content but have never heard of Norman Finkelstein or Ali Abunimah or Nur Masalha and so on, some kind of engagement with the latter is a very good thing.
On the other, a debate with Shapiro is a trap, because his style of debating means that so much of who ‘wins’ (who comes across most persuasively) will be determined by who has the rhetorical skills (and a moderator with the right skills) to answer Shapiro’s bluster much more than just who is telling the truth. And at the same time, as you’ve emphasized, Shapiro’s core audience is not a very productive choice of audience when it comes to persuasion. So there’s a question of how much of the audience Shapiro’s name could ‘bring in’ would even be open to really learning something new.
Personally, I don’t think a Shapiro-Finkelstein debate would be a disaster for the cause, though I’m not sure it would be of any value, either. That’s why, imo, when it comes to dealing with Shapiro, it’s much better to have standalone counter-messaging, whether that’s a direct debunking or mostly just elaborating an alternative point of view: in that format Shapiro can’t just talk over people and make a scene to drown out the substance of the opposing arguments.
I would lose to Shapiro in a debate, but only because I couldn’t resist doing too many ad hominem attacks.
That’s huge on lemmygrad
He’s absolutely ancient. I’m worried him trying to listen to Ben Shapiro’s points in thr misplaced good faith he would most likely have ans get a stroke hearing so much dumb shit so fast
The Malzberg one was something else, I would almost feel bad for Shapiro in that debate.
Except it’s Shapiro.
you wouldn’t happen to have a link by any chance would ya?
The full show is here, assuming RT isn’t blocked in your country. https://www.rt.com/shows/direct-impact/586154-gaza-israel-conflict-history/
If it is, I found this one (sorry youtube) that is just the interview, from around the 3 minute mark of this video. https://youtu.be/XQFhFTVotL4?si=vbq3Rlxsx6BMFC1w
Basically Malzberg uses nazi talking points to justify genocide, and when Finkelstein calls him on it (and no punches were pulled) he accuses Finkelstein of hating Jews. Apparently forgetting who Norman Finkelstein is during his embarsassment.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
