I get your point, but there were bipedal dinosaurs.
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I can’t think of a time my own acting out of anger has accomplished something positive.
But I’ve known too many great people born outside the country or with skin the “wrong” color. So every time someone starts bandying about the idea of a white ethnostate or suggesting that with recent African ancestry are little better than chattel, it really feels like my blood is starting to boil. If the jackass were there in the same room, I think I might be hard pressed to avoid some rash action, even if it turned out badly.
Someone forwarded this link on Twitter, and immediately gripped me with the urge to forward it around with all caps outrage. After typing a bit though, the idea of Spencer smirking at the free publicity the controversy would bring stayed my hand.
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As most everyone has mentioned… It doesn’t really matter how obviously idiotic this guy’s view are, since people motivated to believe this kind of crap will do so despite all logic. Also, it’s dangerous to give Spencer a platform to just broadcast these types of views without proper context/refutation… It’s the classic ‘gish gallup’ where the person just throws out so many patently false statements that the challenger is flummoxed… They can’t possible go into enough detail to refute all the bogus claims, so they’re left unaddressed and a viewer might take this to mean they’re actually valid points… These people should not be met on their own terms because they are not operating with the same standards of evidence.
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Consider how Rush Limbaugh appears as a more dramatic version of himself on Family Guy. I think there’s a lot too this.
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Nazis/TGOP do not have any intelligence requirements, apparently…
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Ok, and it is worth noting the degree to which it is a performance.
Also, choosing to act like a terrible person to make money is functionally indistinguishable from being a terrible person.
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No. Stop that.
I definitely was not trying to split any of those hairs: they are all terrible people regardless. Simply speculating at how much they actually believe in what they say.
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At the end of the day, it doesn’t even matter if any of them actually believe the horrible things they say/post; they not only promote and enable evil, they profit off of it.
That makes them ‘evil adjacent’ as far as I’m concerned.
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Don’t worry. At least bourbon is safe:
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I am afraid to see where Knob Creek spokespeople fall on the spectrum though.
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This video was followed up by an Op-Ed by Younge addressing exactly these concerns. He does a good job of explaining his motivations and why Spencer and not others such as KKK reps were chosen. Basically, his voice is already out there and quite widely distributed, except, instead of being in he form of expository debate it is mostly in the form of hot takes and catch-phrases that dint do a lot to inform the listener.
I agree with your original point, though. He really didn’t have anything of value in his responses. I mean, these were big fat meatballs and he totally missed them. For instance, his argument that African Americans lives are better because of their diaspora is based upon the logic that Africa is one fundamentally decrepit society. A great response would have been to point out that a) Africa is a massive continent with a massive variation in political advancement, quality of life and socioeconomic makeup and b) that any examples of African nations that are deficient in these realms are the direct result of slavery, colonialism and the collapse of European empires (and he subsequent restroom of “rights” to those former colonies natural resources).
The upshot of the op-ed is that he was surprised just how thin the veneer of academic thoughtfulness was with Spencer and how little he actually had to offer.
EDIT: Forgot the link
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That happens on another layer of the networking stack, and it’s going on all the time. 
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Well heck I think I may go buy a bottle of Mr. Beam right now after reading that.
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I have yet to see anyone really best Spencer at his stupid game. People who interview him typically get angry and frustrated at how he can say such wildly immoral shit, and so never effectively fling it back on him, and then his fans can claim some kind of douchebag victory; you can’t assume that Spencer saying some obvious bullshit is going to be obvious bullshit to anyone idiotic enough to side with him.
Example: if he’s going to say blacks benefited by being stolen out of Africa and forced to work, then you ask “so slavery was good then?” Make him own it.
You also have to point out the obvious holes in his arguments. If today black Americans are better off than black Africans then A.) does that justify the great moral crime of slavery (it sure wasn’t the intent when slavery was legal in the west), and B.) does the plight of Africans today have anything to do with centuries of colonialism and exploitation? The Hutu/Tutsi conflict and genocide was basically instigated by Europeans who (deliberately or inadvertently) pitted the two groups against each other.
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i don’t know. consider what’s worse. to mistakenly believe something and try to push those views? or, to knowingly disbelieve something and push those views to gain profit and power?
i think you can (sometimes) reach people of the first class; those of the second are pretty much beyond all hope.
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So Spencer is never going to change his mind or admit he’s wrong, but there are people who will watch those interviews who are susceptible to being influenced and if you can trip him up you have a real chance at changing their minds.
The problem is if you don’t know what you’re doing it’s probably really tough to win an argument against Spencer because you don’t spend much time arguing with White Supremacists, but he spends a lot of time arguing against normal people. I’m sure Spencer has a youtube channel full of instances of well meaning people trying to beat him in a debate and ending up looking like fools.
For instance one, of the first ideas Spencer throws out is that whites deserve a “safe space” of an ethnic homeland like Jews. I see a couple obvious responses, that Jews, unlike whites, were heavily persecuted, or that I don’t support the idea of a ethnic homeland for either. I have a feeling that Spencer is really well prepared for either response.
The interviewer actually has a pretty good counter of pointing out how bad those states were in reality. That somehow leads Spencer into staking out the bizarre position that slavery was good for Africans, I don’t think he meant to do that and you could hear him try to walk it back. If the interviewer really caught on to the dynamic I think he could have hammered the point home.
But that’s the difficulty with interviews like this, that’s the first time you’re seeing those lines of questioning and it’s happening in real time, it’s really hard to figure out good counterarguments in real time.
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Sad thing is, the more interviews Spencer gets, the more his message gets out.
In one of Michael Moore’s books he tells of an interview with a white supremacist. The guy pointed out that every time he and his ilk do an interview they expect most of the audience will boo. They expect that and it does not deter them. In their hearts they know they are right. They are true believers.
They’re doing the interview solely so they can be seen by the people who don’t boo.
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Relevant to the exposure vs no-platform debate:
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