PRay TeLL, Dr. Hash

<p><font color="#000000">Keep cutting with a razorblade and eventually the oak will fall; even the weakest of debate positions can be won with tenacity & perseverance. Longterm debaters, especially in the political realm, practice Debate by 1000 Cuts. </font>Our political structure is such that issues can be won or lost because it seems too petty, contentious, or te...

<p>In my debating experience, which is formidable, the most caustic, hysterical & threatening debate competitors are male. Females may be insulting & antagonistic but they rarely resort to serious name-calling; they may say you’re narcissistic, stupid, or immature but that’s about the extent of their verbal arsenal. Males, on-the-other-hand, will go right at the core of your self-res...

<p>Social Media is defined by plagues of brigaders swarming any idea they disagree with and destroying it’s credibility & impact. Brigading is a coordinated troll attack; popular because everyone can do it, knowledge or intelligence not required; it's easy, just click what they tell you; and there's a dopamine reward, usually from virtue signaling but perversity often plays a part. The m...

<p>Outside of actually changing someone's mind, which never happens, trolling is the most satisfying of all debating tactics. The word “troll” has a bad connotation, people who call names or post nonsense to disrupt a debate, but if trolling is done properly, no one even knows they were trolled. The word comes from fishing, hanging a line with a piece of juicy bait, off the back of the boat...

<p>You're going to get called names while debating. If you respond by getting angry, you lose. If you try to defend yourself, you lose, and though Blocking people admits defeat, if a name-caller persists, you may have to. There's only two ways to handle name-calling: first & easiest, ignore them; just let the name-calling posts scroll by without responding, even if there's an alluring ti...

<p>Argumentum Ad Verecundiam, Appeal To Authority, is the common debating tactic of invoking an expert to prove you're correct; linking to an article is how it's normally practiced online. It's also a major source of shutting you down via the sanctimony of so-called “fact checking:” you make a statement then somebody throws up a couple links that imply you're uninformed, wrong, or a liar. To...

<p>Debate has gone on as long as more than one human gathered together, and after evolving past Might-Makes-Right, some traditional debating strategies emerged to beat an opponent with words; for example, Aristotle's Reductio Ad Absurbum, which means Appeal To Extremes, a method of proving the falsity of a premise by showing that its logical consequence is absurd or contradictory. There is a...

<p>It doesn't take long in an online debate before someone calls you names, or tries to attack you personally; that's called an Ad Hominem attack. Though amateurish, it's an effective tactic because most people will try and defend themselves, and that's a hole they can't climb out of; best to ignore it. Also, your opponent will often try to misrepresent your position, “so you're saying you k...

<p>Real debating, not that namby-pamby fluff in high school, is not for the faint-of-heart; the requirements are thick skin, controlled anger, and the optimism that you will eventually prevail, or at least exit the fray with your honor & reputation intact. Here are some things to be warned of:</p> <ul> <li> <p>First, avoid staged debates against people whose main...

<p>The goal of debating is to entertain yourself, and probably others, because it's a rare thing to ever change anybody's mind. If you're just getting started, here's a few debating tips:</p> <ul> <li> <p>First, you need a point then support your point with some facts; personal anecdotes or authority help but you might get trumped by someone with more.</p> </...

<p>A lot of people don't really know what debating is; they have some vague notion of young men in bow ties making points of order, or panels of political partisans yelling over each other, but the denizens of the Internet, Social Media specifically, have turned debate into a sport. Sometimes, very rarely, somebody actually changes their mind, but the entertainment and the fun is in the cont...

<p>Free Speech is under attack like it has never been before; lets review why and by who:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Without Free Speech Warriors, there will be no free speech.</p> </li> <li> <p>There is no such thing as Free Speech on the Internet.</p> </li> <li> <p>Egalitarians get to define who The Freedom Champions are, and it...

<p>Free Speech includes the concept of a whistle-blower, someone who risks their job & reputation to report a government misdeed they have knowledge of. There’s actually a law that protects whistle-blowers but it’s seemingly ineffective except when abused as a political weapon. In fact, phony, partisan whistle-blowers get all the protections while the people the law was actually intended...

<p>Banning has always been a favorite of the sanctimonious, and always filled with hypocrisy: the Confederate flag is banned but not the ISIS flag; common gestures like an okay sign are now banned as symbols of hate, but not a clinched Communist fist; and classic songs, like “Baby, it’s cold outside,” are banned as encouraging rape, but hip-hop songs that actually include rape are hits. Ther...

<p>The concept of Blocking, where a person can deny another person from following them on social media, is a new one. In the past, we had private clubs where groups of people could be selective, but never before have we had such exclusivity at a personal level. The primary advantage of Blocking is that it facilitates your Freedom of Association, ridding yourself of odious personalities who m...

<p>One of the common tropes used by the people who want to restrict speech is to give an example of restricted speech: “you can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater,” they smugly claim. This piece of folk legalese permeates popular culture but the simply fact is, you can yell “fire” in a crowded theater; there’s no law against it, knock yourself out. The old 1919 case that inspired that canard...

<p>The Proud Boys were created to counteract the anti-Free Speech movement, and they were successful for a short while by basing their credibility of their leader, Gavin McInnes, co-founder of influential Vice magazine. However, Proud Boys made the fatal mistake of thinking they could respond to the anti-Free Speech organization, Antifa, in Democrat-controlled cities, and having identifiable...

<p>Under the guise of Safe Spaces, the campuses of liberal arts colleges are no Free Speech zones; which is the source of the contagion against Free Speech that has now permeated into Democrat-controlled cities, and enforced on the streets by Antifa. The origins of Antifa go back to the 1930s as Communists in Italy & Germany fought back against the Fascists, then defined by the National...

<p>As bizarre as it seems to older people, there are organized efforts to disrupt Free Speech in America, primarily discriminating against Conservatives, and it's gaining steam. It’s rooted in ideology, one intent on overturning the status quo, and Free Speech counter to their narrative of Social Justice makes that difficult. Their argument is the distorted, egalitarian view of liberty, with...

<p>The world strives to be egalitarian; only the U.S. is a bastion of liberty, which promotes meritocracy, creating inequality, the opposite of egalitarian. Therefore, whenever some world ranking emerges that purports to measure something with an egalitarian bent, the U.S. tends to do poorly; even something as fundamental to America as freedom. In the eyes of the German think tanks that prep...

<p>When people think of Free Speech, they don’t consider the nuance that the guarantee only keeps the government from restricting speech. In everyday life, your employer, the businesses you patronize, even your church can restrict what you say. With the rise of Tech giants that control Social Media where most speech occurs nowadays, restricting speech seems to be the norm rather than the exc...

<p>Social Justice Warriors unironically named themselves that, and maintain their self-proclaimed title proudly even though it’s ridiculed by The Right, actually reaching the status of a slur. Similarly, the term “Free Speech Warrior” is denigrated by The Left, even though Free Speechers don't get offended by the title. Unfortunately, SJWs seem to far outnumber their Free Speech counterparts...

<p>Liberty has value, more than most people even consider; let's review:</p> <ol> <li> <p>Conservatives, Liberals & Collectivists are separated from each other by their treatment of liberty.</p> </li> <li> <p>Americans didn't used to be afraid to proclaim their liberty; in fact, they were proud of it.</p> </li> <li> <p&...

<p>Liberty is under the greatest threat in our lifetime from people making equality, rather than liberty, the goal. This isn't the first time egalitarianism has had a substantial foothold in America; it was stronger than it is now in the late 19<sup>th</sup> century, and almost lost during The Depression, but WW2 caused the goal of liberty to come rushing back. After that liberty...

<p>Before the lockdowns, I used to think the most dangerous threat to liberty was democracy, that people would eventually vote away their liberty a piece at a time, but to my utter surprise, people surrendered their liberty, virtually all of it, to the pandemic without so much as a whimper; and were seemingly resigned to continue like that indefinitely. It's especially worrisome how few peop...