To think we need to learn how to debate again

Ok, well maybe stop using social media as your basis for what large groups of people (like "the left" or "the right") think. It really isn't representative.

You say people don't like debate but then go on to blame the left for it. I think you need to listen to your own advice, and be honest about your intentions as you seem to be trying to persuade people without hearing them out first. Why try to conceal the fact you are trying to do this?

We seem to have a lot of these 'persuasive' threads on here all of a sudden. It's all very strange.

I find both the extreme left and right aren't as open to debate as they used to be. I don't fall into either as I refuse to be manipulated by what seems to be a new means of divide and rule. I want to be in control of my own mind and actually realise that the needs of the country sometimes need both right and left wing policies at the same time to make things work because things are constantly changing. I thought that was obvious to most people?

It's madness because when you look behind people's fear and motivations at both ends of the political spectrum they all want the same things - quality housing, good health and some financial security and time to spend with their loved ones.

If you have the ability to critically think without anger or emotional outbursts, then right vs left won't matter to you because what you care about is your impact on other people and not theirs on you. You actually do things rather than just having an angry opinion about something.

Anyone trying to convince me that you can only pick one side of either left or right can fuck, fuck, fuck off. We all need to do this as this is just getting tiresome now and getting in the way of any actual progress.

I don’t bother with those, or Twitter. I’m sure they’re full of wannabe Katie Hopkinses who say inflammatory things that they don’t mean to get a reaction and feel powerful. They’re not worth arguing with.

There are loads of such comments on reddit, Bluesky etc.

No. Of course I wouldn’t want to be friends with them.

CK wasn’t a nice man, but I still feel sympathy for his family. There’s a time and place for criticism but I don’t believe that is within hours of someone’s death.

I have never seen anyone on the left laughing about rape victims. The main argument I see is asking why right wingers overlook similar sex crimes by white perpetrators. I’ve never seen anyone revelling. All sex crimes, especially against children are horrendous.

Similarly with the brutal killing of Iryna Zarutska, I’ve seen comments pointing out that the assailant has schizophrenia, but that isn’t ‘minimising’ her death. It is a tragedy for the victim and her loved ones; but if the killer was having a psychotic episode then it is also a tragedy for him and his family too. That doesn’t make the victim’s death any less tragic.

But obviously I haven’t read the same articles as you, so i couldn’t really say unless I knew what the comments were.

One thing the right get offended by?

People making jokes about the Charlie Kirk's murder, even though just a few months ago the right were doing the same about Melissa Hortman.

Football players kneeling and Nike adverts featuring football players who knelt leading to them burning their Nike trainers as a result

Keurig deciding to pull their advertising from the Sean Hannity show due to his support of Roy Moore who had been accused of having sex with 14 year old girl, leading to them smashing their Keurig coffee machines in protest.

So called 'threats to free speech' while simultaneously banning over 15,000 books from schools because they don't like what they say about women, ethnic minorities and LGB, racism and slavery.

That a school shooting was carried out by a trans-identifying individual and calling for people who identify as trans not being able to own guns. This after systematically and actively preventing any attempts over the years to limit gun ownership for people with severe mental health issues or domestic violence convictions and hero worshipping the likes of Kyle Rittenhouse, citing the second amendment.

A milkshake being thrown over Nigel Farrage while failing to condemn and expel party members with domestic abuse and sexual assault convictions.

Constant claims of not having a voice and perceived media 'bias' even though the majority of UK newspapers are right leaning, there is a dedicated right wing 'news' channel and Tufton Street lobbyists have a stranglehold on the Tory party.

(Quite rightly offended at) the grooming and rape of women and girls by Pakistani gangs to the point of sometimes violent protest while (hypocritically) not getting offended or even mentioning the fact that over 60% of those arrested for violently protesting had been accused of domestic abuse and sexual assault.

The decisions of judges in the (UK) Supreme Court because they don't like the result and subsequently calling them the 'Enemy of the People' on the front page of the biggest selling newspaper in the country.

That no-one respects 'family values' while electing the likes of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson who are both well known for having a number of affairs and in the case of Trump being a proven rapist.

I know you only asked for one - but these were just off the top of my head!

It wasn't 'falling down a rabbit hole.' It was responding to what you had said.

I probably agree with your general point - my DC are keen student debate candidates - and its something I've pursued with other students in years gone by. However, I'm not sure I see the value in your little 'gotcha,' if indeed that's what it was. It seems to be a distraction from the question in terms of how the thread is flowing.

I would have enjoyed a genuine discussion about the subject, but your smirky little comments as posters fail to recognise your astonishing cleverness in 'planting' your chosen debate starter are a little bit too irritating for me at this hour.

I was particularly disappointed in the Oxford debate with Charlie Kirk. The Oxford speakers where not seasoned public speakers, they displayed a general lack of command of the English language, used slang, sentence fillers “Emm, ahh”

Surely at this level of education one would expect that their best speakers would take the stage with Charlie Kirk and be seasoned debaters, having built some experience along their educational path. Most importantly understand the basics of debate and be able to hold intelligent conversation, recall information and engage the audience.

And when Melissa Hortman and her husband were shot and killed by a right wing, evangelical, Trump supporter there were hundreds of thousands of people saying things that were just as horrible including senators blaming 'Marxists' and Trump using it to have a go at Tim Walz - which could very well have put his life in danger too.

I tried to look, out of interest, at Kirk's twitter feed to see what he said about it - but it seems to have been scrubbed of any posts pre-August. Could be an algorithm thing due to this week's events - who knows? But looking at what he does post, I suspect it wasn't too dissimilar to Trump and Mike Lee!

Political violence is never right - it is abhorant that political leaders, influencers and the media have pushed us to the point where a significant number of people think that it is OK to say such horrible things about someone who has lost their life just to further their own ideals.

But...while I would never celebrate or cheer the death of someone like Charlie Kirk, I also find it difficult to have any sympathy or reaction beyond a shrug of the shoulders.

He thought that gun deaths were an acceptable price to pay for the second amendment - presumably because it didnt matter when it was someone else's children.

In answer to a question about what would happen if his 10 year old daughter was raped and got prgnant as a result he admitted she would be forced to have the baby.

He said that emapthy was a made up woke construct that existed because it was useful politically - he prefers sympathy - which makes sense because sympathy is basically thoughts, prayers and pity and requires no further action whereas empathy, means really putting yourself in someone else's shoes, it's hard and painful and generally leads to compassion and change.

Be was both a climate change and covid denier.

So no - I don't feel bad for him in the slightest and if there is an afterlife, then I assume he is happy that he is playing his part is maintaining the argument for the 2nd amendment.

I do however feel a massive amount of empathy (whether he believed in it or not) for his wife and children who were there and witnessed his brutal murder - even if they don't fully remember it, his kids will live with that trauma forever and given the nature of the internet they are likely to be reminded of it regulalry.

I am also sad for what it means for society in general as this will just be one more step down the road of intolerance and hatred, widening the gap between left and right and reducing the opportunities for compromise and partisan co-operation and that will not be good for anyone in the long run.

The BBC are absolutely brazen in their extreme liberalism and censorship now.

Where on earth do you find all these comments? Do you go looking for them?

Just so you know, I don't see any of this sort of stuff. Some algorithm somewhere has really latched on to what it needs to feed you to trigger your outrage. Go outside and chill.

I'm not saying that none of these nasty people exist, but some of the smearing of left wingers or right wingers on this thread is crazy. Most people, left wing or right wing, are perfectly nice, reasonable people.

Please stop taking comments you read online as being representative of the way most people think, especially if those comments are fed to you by an algorithm.

Defo the intolerant left here. Also not helped by all these right wing bro types who love nothing better than videoing themselves 'schooling' woke people for their channel.

these comments are unforgivable and ignorant. I don’t know why you keep banging on about the far left; there are nasty people everywhere. Just like all oranges are orange but not all orange things are oranges. Some horrible people are on the left but not all lefties are horrible. I think you will find there are some atrocious things said by some who declare themselves to be on the right as well. Just take individuals and stop trying to label.

Literally hundreds of thousands of people online today have liked posts that celebrate and made the most obscene comments about Charlie Kirk and his family.

I have seen posts saying all sorts of horrendous, racist, sexist and classist things about the hundreds of thousands of girls raped and tortured by the rape gangs.

I have seen posts laughing about and minimising the murder of Iryna Zarutska.

Most of these comments are from people who identify on the left (have socialist/marxist in their profile description) etc. Would you want to be friends with them?

My politics are to the right of yours but I am with you in abhorring anyone's delight in the death of an innocent. It really isn't exclusive to the left to regret needless loss of human promise.

To get the basics clear, I do think that most people paying traffickers for Channel passages on small overcrowded rubber boats are economic migrants planning to repay their traffickers via seven years servitude in cannabis farms or brothels, before they get a Deliveroo bike. I do not think they will be future citizens with Times obituaries. One in a million maybe. But the other 999,999... no, almost certainly not eligible. And so, on balance, my position is that we already have a population of roughly 70m, and we do not need more people; we need to make the most of the people we have, and to get the best from them. Sadly, too many view the normal cut and thrust of life as too difficult and opt out entirely.

I would broadly agree. Although I would say that the classic debate club style is not necessarily the right approach.

Debating as a sport encourages approaches that are less about listening and more about scoring points. An example is the gish gallop which is a strategy based on bombarding the opponent with facts/opinions/bluster/bullshit at such a volume that they end up struggling to counter them all. If you want an example look at Ben Shapiro.

As well as raising thinkers and talkers, we need to raise listeners. More than anything else we need to encourage critical thinking when it comes to information gained through social media and the like. Mainstream media has its problems but the alternative is often a teeming cesspit of wild-eyed conspiracy theories, astro-turfing, and heavy influence from deliberate misinformation campaigns from other countries.

Back before Trump won his first presidency reddit's r/TheDonald and similar subreddits were a raging hotbed of memes, conspiracy theories, blatant lies about the Democrats and outright adulation of Trump. Then reddit instituted a policy of deliberately blocking a lot of Russian IP addresses and the number of subscribers to r/TheDonald etc dropped dramatically. This wasn't a coincidence although all it meant was that Russia started using VPNs more.

Much more recently there were the number of right-wing US commentators such as Tim Pool who were exposed as taking Russian money and promoting pro-Russian talking-points. These aren't isolated incidents and they're not by random Russian members of the public; these (and a lot of other similar cases) are indicators of a deliberate and well-funded campaign of misinformation.

If you check some of the timestamps of some of the posters who have suddenly sprung up on Mumsnet passionately posting about Charlie Kirk then they make sense when you consider the timezone that Russia sits in. And it's not only Russia. Iran is getting into this too as is China and even North Korea, although the latter is more aimed at crypto-currency scams.

We need to be extremely careful about who we listen to and to carefully vet the crap we're being fed. Putin knows that a shooting war with the west would be expensive in both lives and money. A disinformation war, by contrast, is vastly cheaper and can achieve his ends just the same.

absolutely this. I do have friends who are conservative (not many these days), but anyone who supported Reform no way. Just because their values are not mine and we would be arguing all the time.

Well, In my experience, the right fall for misinformation more than do the left. The likes of GB news know how to stoke fear and negative emotions. They misrepresent facts and statistics to make people think a certain way and hijack any rationality that they might otherwise possess. This is well known, and that’s not to say the right are stupid. The right wing media just know how to play on natural human evolutionary fear instincts. They are doing this for a reason.

When people are fearful, they pay more attention to that which is making them scared, this is why fear propaganda is so successful. There isn’t any balance to the debate because fearful people keep seeking out information that cements their fears and dismissing things that challenge them, because, evolutionarily speaking, it’s safer to be fearful and wrong, than to not be fearful of something you should be.

We are living in an age where opinion is seen as holding the same weight as facts. Fewer and fewer people are questioning the motivations behind information or seeking the other side of the debate. Higher education, which the right wing media keep dismissing, teaches people to dissect and question things in a healthy way. They don’t want people to learn that skill. The centre for migration control, for instance, who told people that 70% of sex crimes are commited by Afghan man, is made up by a reform U.K. activist who has a vested interest in pushing that agenda. Say something enough times and it becomes believed

The right are motivated by fear and emotion, by and large, which is why GB News exists solely to push the narrative, there is no impartiality whatsoever. They might have a token left wing guest, but it’s for nothing but appearances.

legislation is often the right way to change behaviour- think plastic bags! That’s what we elect a government to do, to do the things that individually it is impossible to do. Society is helpful. None of us want to be doing everything alone and for that there have to be shared rules.

I think in some cases forced changes to behaviour are justified of course. For example, legislation introduced that stopped people enslaving others, or burning women as witches. At one time people believed these things were acceptable, but the forced change in the behaviour means the belief that they are wrong is now embedded in the mainstream.
The consequences would be legal sanctions as with any other behaviour banned under law. Whose philosophy is a big question which I'd need to think harder about.

I agree wholeheartedly, the art of debating and thoroughly researching and evidencing a point is being lost. We need to raise thinkers and talkers so that people question and query what they hear rather than accept mindlessly a version of the truth

I’m on the left, and I have friends across the political divide. But there are some people whose views are abhorrently right wing to me and I couldn’t be friends with a person that held them.

So for example earlier today there was a news article about 2 children drowning in the Channel. There had been over 8,000 reactions, and over 2.2 thousand were ‘laughing’ emojis. Now I wouldn’t want to be friends with someone who laughed at the deaths of children. You could argue that I’m choosing my friends based on their political beliefs, but I’d argue that I’m actually choosing my friends based on their decency and morals.

I have friends who voted for Brexit. I have GC friends. But if someone was racist, or horribly misogynistic they’re not people I’d choose to spend time with. It’s not political.