Ezra Klein: Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way

ThatRobGuy · Monday at 7:29 PM

Tropical Wilds said:
There was no deep insight. No profound remarks on why FMLA was important, how it helps families, how extending it would benefit people, he stated he doesn’t know how it goes anywhere else, and gave a non-answer that he didn’t even bother to think about for more than 2 seconds. There’s nothing special, intelligent, articulate, or profound about that. And that’s how he rolls with all his debates… Steering the topic to his comfort zone, throwing darts at buzz topics, maybe generating a clickbait sound bite, and announcing he won.

A master of marketing with a dynamic personality that appeals to a certain group? Yes, absolutely.
A schtick that people remember and is easy to execute? Yes.
Profound intelligence that distinguishes him from the herd? No.
A thinker and profound articulate who challenges free thought like MLK, Angelou, Dylan, and other modern social/political luminaries? Absolutely not.
A person who’s words will be quoted and studied and seen as a guiding light to the advancement of society? Not even close.

Why is that standard applied selectively to who's allowed to be "rightfully considered influential"?

What you're listing are things that are "quotable" and it's just that... things that are catchy, or rhyme, or make use of creative alliteration.

By that logic, a person who confidently and charismatically says "those who would sacrifice liberty in the name of safety, deserve neither" (to argue for a pro-gun position) is somehow "more deeply insightful" or "more correct" than a person who says "well, um, we have all these deaths from guns, and um, well, if we had some of the laws like the United Britai...sorry, I mean United kingdom had, then um, I think we'd be better off in terms of all the killings" (to argue for more gun control)

We need to be playing by a consistent set of rules here.

If we're going to be giving elevated status to poets purely based on the number of people who claim to be inspired by it, then Charlie deserves the same courtesy.

ThatRobGuy · Monday at 7:37 PM

Bradskii said:
The questions would all be about his views. What he had said. His positions on politics or gender or immigration. The students were there to talk to him about him. Of course all the questions were predictable.

Seems like they should've been better prepared then...

Given that not all of his debate opponents were students (and some of them were professors and/or his political podcast counterparts from the other side), someone should've been able to make a compelling case in front of an audience.

This is similar to the Ben Shapiro situation...

They open the mic up to anyone at the institution (students, professors, onlookers, etc...) and they're given weeks notice that they're coming... there's not a single person in any of those institutions that can go toe to toe with them?

If anything, that's a sign of cowardice on the part of the professors... they're supposed to be the smart ones, they're letting their protégés get sent into the rhetorical woodchipper that is Kirk/Shapiro/Crowder, and they do nothing but make a tweet about it an hour later?

iluvatar5150 · Monday at 8:03 PM

Chesterton said:
My point is that he's being criticized for talking with people who were not as good at thinking than him. Again, like criticizing Michael Jordan for being better than his opponents. Voluntary oppenents.

As others have pointed out, no, that's not what he's criticized for.

ThatRobGuy said:
But why is that only viewed as "performative fraud" in certain circumstances?

When "academic consensus" is invoked to make a case for some kind of position in the soft sciences (which are subjective by their very nature), and everyone pops up to say "we should trust the experts", isn't that just emblematic of a memorization exercises based on parroting back some stuff they were told in that environment?

I've harped on it before, but a perfect example is the fact that both Milton Friedman and Paul Krugman are Nobel winners in economics despite having very different views on most things...they both can't be right simultaneously.

So in the realm of soft sciences, how is what a Poli Sci or philosophy professor does for a living, different than what Kirk did? (getting young people to be political sympathetic to their position (that was likely instilled by someone else) based on their speaking abilities)

How is debating on a stage different than the academic process? Really?

The difference is time. The "academic consensus" isn't achieved in 3-minute segments on a stage in front of an audience. That process affords the participants time to consider arguments, check facts, and reproduce experiments, which the public debate does not afford at all. In the earlier example I gave about Kirk's bible verses, that trick only works in a live debate when the other participant can't "fact check" you, but in an offline, asynchronous process like submitting to academic journals, or even posting on a message board, that trick falls flat, because people have the opportunity to call you out on it.

Bradskii · Monday at 8:05 PM

ThatRobGuy said:
Seems like they should've been better prepared then...

Given that not all of his debate opponents were students (and some of them were professors and/or his political podcast counterparts from the other side), someone should've been able to make a compelling case in front of an audience.

An example of them being better prepared is this:

That includes one of their professors. And it's a slightly longer form discussion. Each lasts for approx. 10 minutes. And this will always be a matter of opinion, but in mine he does very badly. Just check his body language throughout the discussions. He's outside his comfort zone.

Tropical Wilds · Monday at 8:06 PM

ThatRobGuy said:
Why is that standard applied selectively to who's allowed to be "rightfully considered influential"?

Why is what the standard? Saying or doing something above the ordinary, making an above-average contribution to be considered culturally significant? Because there’s nothing revolutionary in being uneducated, inarticulate, or not insightful, and doing something average isn’t that big a deal.

ThatRobGuy said:
What you're listing are things that are "quotable" and it's just that... things that are catchy, or rhyme, or make use of creative alliteration.

Based off of profound, unique insights that strike a chord with a populace. They’re quotable because they’re the right combination of memorable, insightful, and culturally-relevant to where we were or where we are going. The difference between a contribution and a slogan. It’s the difference between saying “I have a dream” and “Redbull gives you wiiings.”

ThatRobGuy said:
By that logic, a person who confidently and charismatically says "those who would sacrifice liberty in the name of safety, deserve neither" (to argue for a pro-gun position) is somehow "more deeply insightful" or "more correct" than a person who says "well, um, we have all these deaths from guns, and um, well, if we had some of the laws like the United Britai...sorry, I mean United kingdom had, then um, I think we'd be better off in terms of all the killings" (to argue for more gun control)

Correct… Ben Franklin would be more insightful than anybody who says the latter word salad. That would be why we still quote and paraphrase Ben Franklin 270 years later, not the guy who stood up and said “um, yeah, well, but, uh…”

ThatRobGuy said:
We need to be playing by a consistent set of rules here.

If we're going to be giving elevated status to poets purely based on the number of people who claim to be inspired by it, then Charlie deserves the same courtesy.

Who’s being inconsistent? Poets don’t become elevated because they are poets, but because in their role of poets they say something unique, something that is profound, something that shapes society in some way, something that people draw on and quote from. It’s the difference between Robert Frost and an angsty teen with a Tumblr account.

I did pay Charlie Kirk some courtesy. I said he was charismatic, good at marketing, good at cold readings. However, even in those people saying they’re inspired by him, there’s no quote, no body of work, no book, no article, no cinema… Just they had a YouTube they liked and opinions they agreed with. People are telling me they like him and was a good person, but liking somebody doesn’t make him an icon.

To quote the Facebook meme going around, nobody had to say Bob Ross was a good guy, or Mr Rogers, or Lennon, or Angelou, they won’t need to say that about Meryl Streep or Tom Hanks or Bob Dylan. We can see it in their body of work, their interviews, and how they lived. Nobody will be saying “well they were taken out of context” or “you’re just picking the bad quotes” like people are doing for Kirk in trying to build that legacy.

Hans Blaster · Monday at 11:37 PM

Bradskii said:
That includes one of their professors. And it's a slightly longer form discussion. Each lasts for approx. 10 minutes. And this will always be a matter of opinion, but in mine he does very badly. Just check his body language throughout the discussions. He's outside his comfort zone.

I saw an interview over the weekend with the woman who is opposite him at 30 minutes. She lead him around, sliced him, and diced him. (Also, he is such a smug pig.)

Stopped_lurking · Tuesday at 12:17 AM

ThatRobGuy said:
So in the realm of soft sciences, how is what a Poli Sci or philosophy professor does for a living, different than what Kirk did? (getting young people to be political sympathetic to their position (that was likely instilled by someone else) based on their speaking abilities)

Written arguments and/or time to check factual statements. Allowing the students to come back the next day with questions, comments and new arguments. How are the situations even remotely similar?

Bradskii · Tuesday at 12:25 AM

Hans Blaster said:
I saw an interview over the weekend with the woman who is opposite him at 30 minutes. She lead him around, sliced him, and diced him. (Also, he is such a smug pig.)

As I said upstream, he's got these questions that he thinks are gotchas where he'll demand a yes/no, true/false answer and then head off into the weeds with a black and white view of reality. He wasn't 15 seconds into the talk with that girl when he asked 'Can a woman have a prostrate?'

All he was doing was reconfirming that he can't accept biological and gender differences. Not that he disagreed with the differences but that he denied that they existed. A woman to Kirk is one half of a marriage who stays home, submits to her husband and has children. Period.

Then...in the video with Cenk in post 27 and around the ten minute mark he says 'But how about this? Instead of $200 billion to Ukraine, $200 billion to say that moms can stay with their babies for 12 weeks?'

We'll skip the nonsense that you could swap one for the other, but he's actually saying that he's OK with getting paid leave for working mothers to spend time with their new born. Which obviously contradicts his previous position. You can't demand that women stay home and demand that they get paid leave for 3 months.

You'll see this quite often. In a situation when he's mixing with people who agree with his views he'll push them to the extreme. Then put him in an actual debate with someone sharp enough who disagrees with him and he'll come out with comments like 'Well, that's a fair point' and walk his previous comments back.

ThatRobGuy · Tuesday at 6:23 AM

iluvatar5150 said:
The difference is time. The "academic consensus" isn't achieved in 3-minute segments on a stage in front of an audience. That process affords the participants time to consider arguments, check facts, and reproduce experiments, which the public debate does not afford at all. In the earlier example I gave about Kirk's bible verses, that trick only works in a live debate when the other participant can't "fact check" you, but in an offline, asynchronous process like submitting to academic journals, or even posting on a message board, that trick falls flat, because people have the opportunity to call you out on it.

By "invoking academic consensus" I don't mean actually forming it, I mean espousing that it's been reached. Convincing younger students of that doesn't take very long.

A professor in the soft sciences merely has to espouse something, and first semester students will trust it, and think they've been instilled with knowledge that makes them smarter than everyone else.

The soft sciences are different than the hard sciences.

ThatRobGuy · Tuesday at 6:30 AM

Stopped_lurking said:
Written arguments and/or time to check factual statements. Allowing the students to come back the next day with questions, comments and new arguments. How are the situations even remotely similar?

Apart from some historical factoids or quotes, there isn't the same kinds of opportunities for "fact checking" in the soft sciences like there are in the hard sciences.

There's no double blind placebo controlled trial that can determine whether Friedman or Krugman were right about an economic theory. Nor is there any test one can perform to see whether the Freudian or Jungian "school of thought" is correct in the realm of psychology (as there are professors that still align each of them)

ThatRobGuy · Tuesday at 6:31 AM

Bradskii said:
An example of them being better prepared is this:

That includes one of their professors. And it's a slightly longer form discussion. Each lasts for approx. 10 minutes. And this will always be a matter of opinion, but in mine he does very badly. Just check his body language throughout the discussions. He's outside his comfort zone.

But he still showed up to debate, yes?

That's what Ezra and Van Jones were referring to with regards to "doing politics the right way" and having a certain admiration for his style even though they disagreed with him.

He didn't stand outside with a protest sign feigning outrage over the progressives professors that would be there, he didn't try to get the event shut down. He grabbed the mic and got to it.

Stopped_lurking · Tuesday at 6:57 AM

ThatRobGuy said:
Apart from some historical factoids or quotes, there isn't the same kinds of opportunities for "fact checking" in the soft sciences like there are in the hard sciences.

There's no double blind placebo controlled trial that can determine whether Friedman or Krugman were right about an economic theory. Nor is there any test one can perform to see whether the Freudian or Jungian "school of thought" is correct in the realm of psychology (as there are professors that still align each of them)

There are a lot of data for discussing economics, and almost all economists rely heavily on published data sets when building their models (these are things that can and should be be scrutinized). A current example https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/140/3/1683/8152916

The same is true for sociology and criminology. Political science often use historical comparisons and economic data, one can check those. I don't know enough about psychology to have strong opinion.

In school the students can go to their rooms and check all and any factual statements and come back with questions, comments and new arguments to their professor the next day. How is this similar to what Kirk offered when visiting a college or university?

In his long form debates he was sometimes plain wrong, even when he brought the point up himself. I'm thinking specifically of how many jobs were created in Appalachias coal industry during the first Trump presidency (in reality it was in the low single thousands vs Kirks claim of hundreds of thousands). Such a mistake wouldn't ever fly in the classroom.

Hans Blaster · Tuesday at 8:46 AM

Stopped_lurking said:
There are a lot of data for discussing economics, and almost all economists rely heavily on published data sets when building their models (these are things that can and should be be scrutinized). A current example https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/140/3/1683/8152916

The same is true for sociology and criminology. Political science often use historical comparisons and economic data, one can check those. I don't know enough about psychology to have strong opinion.

In school the students can go to their rooms and check all and any factual statements and come back with questions, comments and new arguments to their professor the next day. How is this similar to what Kirk offered when visiting a college or university?

In his long form debates he was sometimes plain wrong, even when he brought the point up himself. I'm thinking specifically of how many jobs were created in Appalachias coal industry during the first Trump presidency (in reality it was in the low single thousands vs Kirks claim of hundreds of thousands). Such a mistake wouldn't ever fly in the classroom.

The most sophisticated statistical analysis I did in any undergraduate course was in a social science class. (And I was doing a double major in two physical sciences.)

durangodawood · Tuesday at 8:54 AM

ThatRobGuy said:
But he still showed up to debate, yes?

That's what Ezra and Van Jones were referring to with regards to "doing politics the right way" and having a certain admiration for his style even though they disagreed with him.

He didn't stand outside with a protest sign feigning outrage over the progressives professors that would be there, he didn't try to get the event shut down. He grabbed the mic and got to it.

I wonder if the outrage he does express is feigned?

iluvatar5150 · Tuesday at 8:56 AM

ThatRobGuy said:
By "invoking academic consensus" I don't mean actually forming it, I mean espousing that it's been reached. Convincing younger students of that doesn't take very long.

A professor in the soft sciences merely has to espouse something, and first semester students will trust it, and think they've been instilled with knowledge that makes them smarter than everyone else.

The soft sciences are different than the hard sciences.

The hard sciences and soft sciences aren't really different in that regard. Few people at the undergraduate level are doing the sort of research that would generate enough first-hand knowledge to allow them to stake a position on a subject without having to rely on regurgitating info they've learned from others. Even for the professional scientists and academics who do do this sort of research, their work is so specialized, that they're unlikely to be able to speak with such authority on subjects outside of an extremely narrow window.

ThatRobGuy said:
Apart from some historical factoids or quotes, there isn't the same kinds of opportunities for "fact checking" in the soft sciences like there are in the hard sciences.

There's no double blind placebo controlled trial that can determine whether Friedman or Krugman were right about an economic theory. Nor is there any test one can perform to see whether the Freudian or Jungian "school of thought" is correct in the realm of psychology (as there are professors that still align each of them)

I can't speak to psychology, but economics has become a lot more data-driven in the last few decades than it used to be. It may be hard to launch experiments, but one can look at natural experiments and study their outcomes.

Stopped_lurking · Tuesday at 9:22 AM

Hans Blaster said:
The most sophisticated statistical analysis I did in any undergraduate course was in a social science class. (And I was doing a double major in two physical sciences.)

I just remembered, Jacob Cohen and Charles Spearman were psychologists in addition to statisticians (as I think of them). So there is enough of interest of statistics in psychology to spawn estimation statistics and factor analysis at least.

Chesterton · Tuesday at 10:40 AM

Bradskii said:
No. He's being criticised for the manner in which he held his 'debates.' Two or three minutes on subjects he'd been asked about dozens of times, so his responses were rehearsed over very many interactions. You might as well have been asking ChatGPT for a three minute diatribe on feminism.

That makes him even better. If he'd been asked about the same things dozens of times, then the people who stepped up to the mic would have known his responses and could have come up with something to counter him.

iluvatar5150 · Tuesday at 10:51 AM

Chesterton said:
That makes him even better. If he'd been asked about the same things dozens of times, then the people who stepped up to the mic would have known his responses and could have come up with something to counter him.

That’s at least the second time you’ve grossly overestimated how clever and well-prepared the average politically-engaged undergraduate is.

Nithavela · Tuesday at 12:44 PM

Is there any footage of evidence for Kirk ever being convinced of a counterpoint during one of his debates?

Bradskii · Tuesday at 5:51 PM

ThatRobGuy said:
But he still showed up to debate, yes?

Yeah. Nobodies denying that. But when he was out of his comfort zone, granting 5 minute audiences to kids, you could see how poor his arguments were.

Ezra Klein: Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way

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