Twitch Streamer Destiny and an Economist Debate Capitalism, Achieve Nothing
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Steven 'Destiny' Bonnell II and Richard Wolff debated economic theories for 90 minutes on Twitch.

I can't believe this is real lol

Throughout the debate, Destiny groaned loudly and twisted around in his chair. He put his hands on his face and rolled his eyes. The Twitch chat rolled along, arbitrarily scoring the debate and getting excited when either participant seemed to get mad.

“You’ve told me a bunch of things that capitalism isn’t. You’ve given me a bunch of random collected facts of history,” Destiny said after Wolff had given what he felt was an unsatisfactory definition of capitalism.

“Why would you talk about the history of it? That’s not relevant,” Destiny said, after asking Wolff why he refused to call the modern American democratic party a socialist party.

I've seen people IRL talk about him and Hasan. Truly the darkest of ages

  • Ziege_Bock [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Debates are so lame! They only appeal to people in the center of a vent diagram where one circle says "fetishizes logic" and the other says "has pretensions of being an intellectual".

    I know this from shameful experience.

    Most debates are shit, moderators are slow or conflict averse to call out sophistry, people don't show up with agreed on terms and definitions.

    You know what's superior to debates? Written correspondence. One person writes a letter, one reads it and takes day or two to respond, and so on. Cools the passions of the moment and allows for people to be their most eloquent selves.

    • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I think the trouble is bad faith debate, debate among people legitimately trying to clarify a unified position and agree on a solution to a shared problem is a good thing

      high school debate teams and the idea you can win a debate and their consequences

    • AHopeOnceMore [he/him]B
      ·
      2 years ago

      Debates can be great so long as you know how they actually work.

      Aside from doing basically nothing they are proported to do, they are opportunities for:

      • Raising your profile if you can get someone with a higher profile to debate you.

      • An opportunity to share ways of thinking that are otherwise not platformed. We usually think of this as a downside because it's used to platform fascists, but we should understand that we are also in nedd of a platform and can use it to our benefit.

      • Make the other person look like an idiot.

      • Get paid money to just say things.

      Obviously Wolff did bad calculus here, I think he thought this would simply raise his profile among internet gamer kids or something, but he didn't know what this audience responds to and defaulted to "professor teaches a class of 23 students" mode when he forgot to make Destiny look like an idiot.