Sorry, I know debatebro-ism is the 12th type of liberalism :denguin:
Disappointed by Wolff tbh. He's too moralizing, comes off as a Christian Socialist. He's also long winded, yeah I know it was a live debate but he should've been able to make his points more focused. He also hangs on to dead ends (Socialism's definition isn't amorphous, Mondragon is good, etc.) which he doesn't need to. He basically rolls over to Destiny's weird hostility to using history and class relations to explain modes of production, doesn't put enough emphasis in them as processes instead of things that people just enact one day.
There was an event at my school in which the 'ambassador to Venezuela (Guaido guy)' was speaking alongside some other imperialists on a panel. There was a q&a portion. Some fedora wearing marxist 'how dare you, sir'ed the dude for like 6 minutes. While he wasn't wrong, he was so unconvincing and such an ass that even I was cringing and looking down on the floor.
What he was saying was entirely correct, the way he said it was entirely fucking cringe and totally lacked any charisma or understanding of how to play to an audience.
So in the future, don't shoot yourself in the foot with diatribes of 'well actually...' debate broism. Make your points short, make your points obvious, make them incisive, make them in a way the audience will understand and keep up with. That definitely matters more than truth content in those contexts. Don't lie, of course. But because the ambassador looked somewhat normal in comparison, he came away looking like the better of the two in the exchange.
That's what matters the most for liberals, the herd wants to attach itself to people who look normal/are funny/seem informed. It's all a balancing act.
Edit: Buenaventura Durruti was described by others in the union as 'speaking like a woodcutter'. He would listen intently, quietly. He would rarely weigh in and speak until hearing from others. He would make his points like an axe through wood: cutting quickly, cleanly, clearly and then resting again before speaking the same way.
Holy shit was that me????????????????
During the protests last summer in my very liberal area I was able to grab a megaphone for a few minutes in front of several hundred people. I'm a local politician so this was not the first time I had spoken before a big crowd, but the difference here was that I was completely unprepared. I was just kind of angry after listening to speaker after speaker tell us to GET OUT AND VOTE!!!!!!!!!!!!! I went up there and talked for several minutes. I can't recall exactly what I said, except that we were standing on stolen land, the people there should read Marx, and genetically random individuals have much more in common than socially constructed races. The audience of white liberals was super not into it! Most of them just watched me in silence.
However, at the following protest the next week—same time and place, similar if not identical crowd—we were completely surrounded by cops. There were at least two cop infiltrators at the protest. No cops had been present, as far as I know, when I spoke during the previous protest. Also, open mic was no longer allowed by the organizers. As far as I can recall, I was the only radical who spoke. I was also quietly running in a low-level local political campaign at the time, and the local liberals went absolutely into overdrive trying to stop me. They had pretty much been ignoring me before then. Months later, when the election took place, they succeeded in stopping me. One even spread rumors that the handful of black people at the protest had asked me to be quiet, which absolutely never happened!
So although I pretty much blew it here, the powers-that-be take this shit seriously. We talk about how the internet isn't real or how debates between Wolff and Steve are stupid and pointless, but capitalists do not want socialists (even mediocre ones like myself) speaking in the media or in public spaces.
And also it's not entirely a bad thing that I lost the election. Had I won, I would have been one Marxist surrounded entirely by liberals and reactionaries. I would not have been able to get anything done, and my family certainly would have started receiving death threats. There is no organization where I live and no protection of any kind. So I'm pretty much over it and ready to move on to the next battle. I had only run for that particular position in the first place because the friend who asked me to said that I wouldn't have to campaign. Once Bernie lost the primary I went full ML and pretty much stopped caring about winning, but that was several months before my own election took place.