I have no idea who this Destiny mf is but he is giving me some very strong Ben Sharpiro vibes. Just talks really fast with rapid fire bad faith arguments and dragging things down to the lowest common denominator.
It's fun watching Big Dick Wolff get really irritated by this little shit stain lol.
I'm trying to understand how and why Wolff got roped into doing this debate at all
Yeah. It really seems beneath him. Why should a lifelong academic Marxist economist waste their breath on an edglord gamer? And right off the bat the "moderator" said something along the lines of "both of these people are titans of their respective fields." Like... what is Destiny's field? Filling jugs with piss while he plays League of Legends?
At least Wolff did a good job of explaining shit.
It fell on deaf ears, but fortunately not to all the people watching the video.
The commentary he does at the end (which I watched about 30 seconds of) where he's like "I'm a dumbass that didn't understand anything Wolff said" was a pretty great and totally oblivious self-own tho
You make the assumption the point was to argue with Steve to convince him of other stuff, the target was the audience though. Public debates are never about the person in front of you, but the people in the audience and the people hearing about it via 3rd degree.
Communism is when you stay moral and such and don't talk to an audience of 15k people life and 40k people at a later time.
As Mao said:
We don't want to isolate ourselves inside of an ivory tower, but as far as audiences go, 15k, or even 100k over 10 years is pretty small. You might as well debate Ben Shapiro. You'll get a bigger audience and the retorts will be equally stupid.
The debate culture is shit, but that isn't even my main issue here. It's the mismatch in stature. It would be much cooler to see someone with the pedigree of Richard Wolff dunk on some Brookings Institute clown like Ben Wittes than a powerless, forgettable twitch streamer. The reason the Zizek v. Peterson debate owned is because they were roughly on the same tier and Peterson still got fucking swirlied.
When you have such an imbalance, it's more like the typical Shapiro shtick where he "debates" random college sophomores picked off the street and just talks fast over them and interrupts them. It proves little. Fash vs. Communist debate is stupid, but even on the terms of what debate is supposed to achieve - challenging viewpoints from a critical perspective - it fails to live up to that objective when you pit an expert against a solipsist.
I don't even know the institute nor the person, maybe we ought to try multiple bubbles instead of just the one we know?
The comments and people writing in the chat proof otherwise.
Sure even better would be door to door and company to company organizing, but we aren't there yet. To ignore social media - like twitch - is to ignore material reality (esp. without empirical data analysis) for moral superstitions.
The heroes of the working class aren't academics.
Yeah I'm pretty sure Wolff and his team had him in that debate just to introduce marxist ideas to the twitch community, so I have mad respect for him putting up with that insufferable anal polyp for 1.5 hours :fidel-salute: