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.
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.