Chomsky commented somewhere that debates ate not helpful for thought or discovery.. it's a competition to win not a conversation where you might change your mind. I think Chomsky said it was stupid.

Debate is a sport, and some people are very good at it, as he was, and it is not a reliable route to truth or clarity or anything else except who is more ruthless, relentless, has more rhetorical chops, etc. I mean it's dueling by verbiage and vehemence, and just like dueling with pistols or jousting with lances, all it settlesis better at the sport. (I know there is debate with rules in high schools and colleges, and then there's the free-for-all versions....)

He let college students pose questions and then (often, not always; see first comment) trounced them and somehow that was very appealing to a lot of people, which says a lot, but not that he was right or had his facts in line. Someone better than him at the sport--a top-notch courtroom lawyer, a lot of grownups--could have probably destroyed him in a debate not corrupted by interruptions and crowd roars, because he repeated a lot of MAGA nonsense. The clip I heard was him demanding his interlocutor say only yes or no to "can a man have a baby," and of course one thing I've learned in a lifetime of trying to avoid bullies is when you let them frame the argument you've already lost. Biological sex as all up-to-date people is a complex formulation, and also a number of trans men have given birth to children.

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