I’ve recently gotten my self off of short-form instagram reels slop, but an unfortunate consequence of this is that what’s replaced it is equally brain-rotting political debate slop; something along those lines, because I’m not exactly sure how to describe this kind of content. Think Jubilee’s Surrounded series, more specifically think to clips of a really heated debate between some 20 year old Gen Z’s and Charlie Kirk where one party is “humiliating” the other.
What really irks me is that almost always at the end of these debates they’ll calm down from yelling and say something like “good conversation”, “nice talking to you” and they’ll end the video with some yappy monologue from one of the participants saying something along the lines of “You know, we may not agree on everything, but it’s really important that when we disagree we cant sit down across from the table from one another and talk about it.” and “That’s what’s so beautiful about this country, is that we are able to freely discuss our ideas with one another.”; it’s always a bit jarring because really? to me it seems like these debates don’t accomplish anything at all.
It seems to me that the concept of a debate just isn’t made for having good faith conversations where we actually dig in and resolving issues of opinion between two parties. It’s more so a performance where the parties are able to present a caricature of the two competing opinions: that being the other side is irrational, illogical, doesn’t know what they’re talking about, unable to engage and defend their points, and emotional. When going up against an unprepared party the well-practiced, rehearsed performer will always win, sometimes deservedly because their ideas are genuinely well substantiated and good, but sometimes because they are just a better showman, they know the game and they know how to play it, they will:
Speak fast and Gish Gallop in order to overwhelm you with weak points their side already agrees with, then criticize you when you can’t rebut all of them at once.
Ask overloaded, pointed, and leading questions that make it seem like you agree with something you actually don’t: “So you agree abortion is murder?”.
Bring everything back to their few rehearsed talking points 1 that they’ve practiced, memorized facts for and can start rattling off on.
They’ll make you look like a fool and they’ll clip and ship it off to their audience and call you a “woke feminist college student” or “MAGA cultist” who got “humiliated” in a debate.
And if two well trained debaters go up again each other then the same thing will happen, simply because your haters are 100% right about you. Those who already buy into one side will selectively see the highlights where their side looks good.
It begs the question, does this actually change anyone’s mind, does this move the needle forward at all. Maybe a neutral undecided third party will change their mind but I just find it frustrating hearing two well-practiced debaters talk past each other, rattling off logical fallacies their opponent committed while presuming beliefs they already implicitly have that are obfuscated by their use of language. I struggle to believe that this type of content is genuinely informative and actually makes the undecided viewers more informed on an issue. Even in the cases where such a debate is able to effectively move a viewer to one side, I think they just move to which ever side is simpler, matches what they culturally or socially are influenced to believe, and then think that it’s because one side just made a better argument.
What made me realizes what I was watching was complete slop is this video. There was a lot of stuff that irked me when I was passively listening to this video in the background. But one particular thing was when the person reacting said that people just want “working definitions that allow them to cruise through life easily and efficiently” and earlier that “Things [definitions] have to be organized in order for efficiency”.
Personally I think that definitions should be expressive, they should capture this vague notion or idea and put it into words as so it matches how people actually use and understand words. Words themselves are also constantly changing definitions because words are just tools we use to communicate with one another and they are overloaded with different meanings and connotation. Therefore definitions are complicated and long and weird because human beings are complicated and weird and language is complicated and weird. I think as humans we want things to be simple, we want things to just make sense, but sometimes things are just complicated.
Another thing that frustrated me was when Parker would constantly rap off his definition of what a woman is in response to the question of “What is a woman?” 2. I think giving this rehearsed answer is a poor way to reach the audience; honestly gender identity is a complicated concept that requires a conversation to understand. It’s not something most people can just hear once and immediately internalize, but also, that would be a poor debate tactic. (If you want to understand why read the footnote later).
I suspect that this type of content will continue to grow and fuel people’s confidence in their own beliefs and the confidence that opposing beliefs are irrational, especially as this type of debate content is pushed onto apps like TikTok and Reels where younger audiences are going to engage with it. I think this type of content is a poor model for how to how to have conversations to resolve ideological issues. I think this is what irks me when I heard “thanks for a good debate” or “great conversation” because it’s not a good conversation merely a performance.
If you want to change someones mind I don’t think you debate them, I think you listen to them, meet them where they’re at, and translate ideas into their belief systems.
I hate the phrase “talking points” because people often say things like: well that’s just a left/right wing talking point with the implicit connotation that the point is a invalid. But it’s only really a problem when the point is unrelated to the debate at hand.↩︎
I think the question “What is a woman?” is a really brilliant rhetorical device. It is a really simple question, and it’s a concept people are familiar with so you’d expect a simple answer, but the answer is nuanced, the word refers to different things, both sex and gender (people use it that way, it might seem confusing but again human beings are confusing, language is confusing), and gender is a complicated concept that can describe a trait / set of traits such as masculine or feminine or something else entirely.
In Samantha Fullnecky’s infamous essay she describes how “women want to do womanly things”. We can see that used in this context being womanly is a character trait, it makes sense to describe a biological woman as being manly and we can also describe a biological man as being womanly or even girly, what we mean when we say manly or womanly is what people may use the terms man and woman to mean. What makes this more interesting is that this concept of being manly or being a man in the gendered sense of the term or being womanly is indeed culturally dependent. What people meant when saying the word (or it’s equivalent) “man” in athens and sparta were probably not the same things. Gender is in part a linguistic concept too!
This context which informs how people interact with the words man and woman make defining it difficult because definitions should match expression.
So coming back the question, in some ways “What is a woman?” is like asking “What is a monad?” or “What is a game” (many times conceptually simple mathematical concepts will have obtuse definitions) the actual definition is complicated and confusing but it has to be that way because of how we use it.
You can’t really answer this question, because the audience is primed for a simple answer, you can’t give a long answer because the audience is primed for a simple one and you can’t give a short answer because it will have to be terse and obtuse. But if all you want is to look good to your audience then of course the best strategy would be to give that short obtuse answer.↩︎