I dont think arguing with out facists on their terrain is the right tool for the job. Merely by acccepting those terms, their dumb shit is given unearned credibility, not to mention that they are not honest brokers. They aren't trying to prove a point, they want you to look dumb. It's arguing how many angels fit on the head if a pin with asshoses, though instead of angels, it people, and instead of pins it's ovens. No good will come of it. And that's why God invented swirlies.

Not a believer in rationality or rational actors as an empirical concept, more into “imaginative reflection” stuff lately

> So you don’t change your mind when presented with sound arguments? You ever go to an academic conference, or a seminar, and find a single person providing an entirely sound argument? That’s not how it works man. Einstein won a Nobel Prize not for relativity but for his work on the photo-electric effect because at least that was demonstrable on good solid Earth: it took years for astronomical observations to demonstrate that relativity was even roughly correct. Point being: when we do arguments well, whether this way or that, we employ a bunch of discursive norms, some of which are just holding high claims to high evidence and some of which are just ignoring people talking our their arse, amongst many others. Nobody convinces everyone all the time, you only need to go over to Conservapedia (used to be my favourite madcap website for a while) to find an alleged refutation of established Einsteinian physics. I don’t see any reason why that’s significantly different from uneducated people holding naive views about HBD - besides that one person is building the website, and the other is commenting on reddit - and I don’t see any reason why engaging with such people in adversarial or even persuasive debate as an anonymous stranger behind a username is gonna change their opinions. What’s the test case? What reason do we have to believe that engaging in that kind of discussion is gonna change people’s minds? Obviously there’s room for manoeuvre, helping people out with info and such, moving things in the right direction, but why can’t that sit alongside just ignoring the idiots now and again?

By the way, I don’t know your background as such, but my “official” background is that I’m either an ex- or aspiring academic focusing on epistemology and philosophy of science (economics), but also - as such - what I used to call when I was an undergraduate analytic philosophy student a “barbarian at the gates”. I came into philosophy as an accident because I wasn’t “allowed” to study art in a complicated way I won’t go into. I’m an unfocused kind of guy and I always hated the way people in analytic philosophy *talked* about philosophical issues in this kind of debate P1, P2, Conclusion sort of way but I had to learn it to work out why I hated it so much and find out how to make fun of it (and I got pretty good at both of those things), the only thing I hated more being the Continental pontificators who just wanna tell you how much shoddy pop-history books they’ve read that are just *so important*. I came into university in my late teens from a background as a sort of minor prodigy in literature and literary criticism, so I learned all about Derrida and blah blah blah before any of my hardcore analytic philosophy peers were even aware of it (monologuing here). But whatever you think about the shit (and a lot of it is shit) that Derrida et al. came out with it’s got a certain resonance with correct scepticism about how things come off as tools of communication in difficult circumstances (Derrida himself was both Jewish and an Algerian-Frenchman in an era where both of those were a pretty hectic thing to be, and wrote letters as an undergraduate to friends expressing profound depression at his own in/ability to unpack and dismantle philosophical ideas without being able to put them back together). There’s *got* to be more to communicating with somebody than facing off one to one (even if you’ve got a second to back you up) about who’s got the greater percentage of good arguments or who turns out to be the most convincing, it’s just fundamental to the whole thing of communicating. If you want to tie this personal story back to the topic at hand just look at my erstwhile friend Ryan from when I was in undergrad, who I just don’t speak to anymore. Very good multiple degrees in philosophy and theology (top marks at Oxford for his Master’s), also a conspiratorial Protestant bigot who thinks that permitting abortion is a deliberate attempt to undermine Ireland’s constitution (he does not and has never lived in Ireland, and identifies strongly as “British” despite living in Northern Iron). Man sometimes you just can’t talk to these people. I’ll give you another example. For personal-historical reasons I, more than any academic I know, habitually hang out less with “debate me” type people than with weirdos and outsiders. That isn’t a boast about my street credentials it’s just that I prefer chatting with street people and barflies and underpaid strippers and all that shit than I enjoy sitting in a seminar (although those are good too, if they’re good seminars). Nobody. Fucking *NOBODY* in the real or at least the semi-underground or “just trying to make a payday” world thinks that any of that cross-purposes talk about having “sound arguments” means anything more except as a process of working things out between each other, with all the social caveats that go with the process. My question ends up being, why the fuck would you think that sound arguments are the foundation of opposing even the mildest kind of racism?