To think we need to learn how to debate again

[MyHeartyCoralSnail]

There is ever decreasing tolerance for people with different views, People think they have the moral high ground and that their views are the only ones which matter.

This view is endorsed in schools, the work place, the Media (even the BBC has stopped any effort to be unbiased). The more intolerant we are the wider the divide is becoming.

Schools need to be teaching kids to debate, it needs to be part of the national curriculum, schools need to welcome all views equally and discuss them.

Universities and work places need to stop censorship of views.

It is largely the far Left who seem to dislike reasoned debate.

If we taught people how to explain, how to listen to alternative perspectives the world would be much better

I'll save you the time @childofthe607080s

It won't be.

This ^

Totally agreed until you blamed one side without proof or back up. I’ve found a wide range of people from all political sides to be unable to debate without becoming offended and defensive. I don’t really associate myself to one specific party so I find it very interesting when people argue their point, however often people have absolutely no comeback to a simple why?

It is largely the far Left who seem to dislike reasoned debate.

🤔

This is really true and a problem every time I’ve tried to discuss the Middle East or trans issues. People just don’t agree on basic truths. I’m interested in why we find it so hard to reach common ground on the facts. Is it education and critical thinking? Or is it more that the nature of how we get information has changed to the extent that we have too many different narratives going on? Perhaps it was easier when it was just the Times vs the Sun instead of literally millions of points of view from TikTok, Twitter etc

I think it’s lack of knowledge mostly. I’m pretty good at debates as don’t tend to get offended easily, however I find it much harder when I have less information than the other person or if their knowledge is greater of the subject and it leaves me to have to research to make sure I actually know my own opinion.

I strongly disagree. This has been around forever. People being tribal isn't new.

There were children from miner's families kept away from the children of police families in the 80s because the police were used as Thatcher's private army to break up the strikes. "I'd never date a copper" was my pal at university's line in the sand.

My uncle's mates were all from the Working Men's club at the end of the road. Not a Tory within a mile of it. My second boyfriend said his father had never met a trade unionist before.

I'm guessing you didn't grow up in a mining community in the Thatcher years.

If you can’t accept the evidence of facts, data and statistics then you aren’t going to be able to engage in debate. Having seen you on previous threads, it’s very much a you problem and not a left problem.

I agree. You can debate opinion but you can't debate beliefs or values.

You lost me when you blamed one section of the political spectrum, and outed yourself ad someone who can’t debate.

I remember learning at some point that behaviour is rooted in opinion, opinion is rooted in values and values are rooted in beliefs, and that real change only comes when you reach the level of belief.
I don't think you do this through debate, as it only tends to happen through the believers own experience showing them they believed incorrectly.
There is an argument that forced change in behaviour can trickle down to change belief, as if we're not allowed to do something after a while it embeds itself as 'wrong' in our belief system. But again, that change is not achieved through debate.

The problem is, as someone else said, you can’t go into a healthy debate when views are not borne out of objective fact, but emotion. One side tends to debate using objective robust evidence, the other leans more heavily towards existing beliefs, fears and stereotypes (although both sides do this to an extent)

You can’t have a debate if, for example, one side thinks asylum seekers come here for the benefits and the cushy lifestyle and they are all rapists, white people will be replaced etc etc etc and the other side believes they are fleeing persecution.

I’ve tried having a conversation on this with a few people and they are so wedded to their own beliefs that are not based in fact that there is no reasoning with them whatsoever and it ends up in a situation where I want to bang my head against a brick wall.

To say the right never get offended about anything is the biggest lie because if it were true then they wouldn’t be punching down on minorities so much to start with.

Nobody wants open borders, we just believe that asylum seekers are human and don’t deserve to be scapegoated. We still believe that the problem needs to be addressed.

But which side in that is acting with emotion and which side is using the facts. Going to completely depend who you ask. As a clue. Both sides believe that they’re saying - neither is 100% right or wrong.

So you think we should force people to change? To what? To whose philosophy? What are the consequences for not changing?

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?