Ben Shapiro

VP89

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(@fcbforever and @Zarlak love this guy)

I learned about Ben Shapiro on youtube and I'm quite sure he'd receive mixed or negative reactions on this thread after reading a couple of posts in the STAR WARS tread (unrelated topic nonetheless).

He's a right wing debate guy pretty much and a former editor-at-large for Breitbart and left after knowing how crooked they are. He has his own show called The Daily Wire on youtube.

Anyway I know very very little about American politics and general politics too. I do enjoy a good debate though and I do find him extremely logical and intelligent in the way he puts himself across. He's certainly rude/offensive at times but I don't think anyone has actually argued him and won in a debate from what I've seen on youtube.

One thing I dislike is his constant mentality that bad things are solely made by the left wing and conservatism is the way forward. Despite this I do think he broadly talks sense and would like to share some of his debates:

NB: Some titles here are annoyingly with stupidly overreactive titles. Ignore these obviously because its just a fan uploader but the videos are still good to watch.

Also I do not mean to offend anyone who are strongly against his views, I just see logic in his words and also find him very intelligent in the way he comes across. I know there are a lot of very clever and knowledgable folk on the caf so I wanted to hear everyone's opinions about him.

Where do you disagree with him? Where is he wrong in his arguments?




 

Scarecrow

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I just recently started paying him attention. I like him, as a whole, we share a lot of opinions. As a person he's a lot more likable when he's talking one-on-one though. Thought he was great on Rogan's podcast and in his Rubin interview. His more "public" persona, i.e. on Twitter and on his show, is not as appealing.
 

MTF

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I find that he's in the club of people that are just looking to be polemic and somewhat controversial. And not that its a necessary indictment of a commentator, but he is just a commentator not a subject matter expert on anything. I find the experts usually more worthwhile reading or listening to.

Then on his views, I feel like they're almost entirely partisan and not independent. The general treatment of Obama's foreign policy as somehow anti-american, and not just a disagreement, that he seems to have participated in along with the Republican party was very pathetic.
 
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Zarlak

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Truth like rain don't give a feck who it falls on.
He's a complete bell end with disgusting views on trans people and generally just a troll who likes to poke people and run away or antagonize then deliberately to infuriate them and then claim he's got the moral high ground because he antagonizes them calmly. Absolute tosser of a person.
 

Massive Spanner

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He's a complete bell end with disgusting views on trans people and generally just a troll who likes to poke people and run away or antagonize then deliberately to infuriate them and then claim he's got the moral high ground because he antagonizes them calmly. Absolute tosser of a person.
Nailed it.

Not sure why it's become so popular to like him. He's a racist, homophobic prick.
 

VP89

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Read the thread I linked to.
That is very racist. No defence for that but it seems his view on Isreal is clouded very much by his own religion and personal stance on the issue.

I'm eluding more to the other things he talks of - from feminism to transgenders to media handling of Trump and so on.
 

NinjaFletch

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That is very racist. No defence for that but it seems his view on Isreal is clouded very much by his own religion and personal stance on the issue.

I'm eluding more to the other things he talks of - from feminism to transgenders to media handling of Trump and so on.
Genuine question, but why does that matter?
 

Rado_N

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That is very racist. No defence for that but it seems his view on Isreal is clouded very much by his own religion and personal stance on the issue.

I'm eluding more to the other things he talks of - from feminism to transgenders to media handling of Trump and so on.
Like when he says transgenderism is a mental disorder?

Yea he's awesome.
 

Ødegaard

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I still maintain that his way of discussing makes it easier (for someone who sits on the sidelines) to understand where he's coming from or his train of thought. I value that in him as a debater as I struggle to get a lot of people on the right side (which i seek out more often because I like challenging my own views of things).
But with that said, his views are horrible and obviously I don't value his views at all and disagree with just about everything I've heard/read him say.
 

Pogue Mahone

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That’s gas. I only heard of him through the two threads on here. Based on what I read about him I was expecting some sort of super-charismatic evil genius who - if I wasn’t careful - might remove the scales from my eyes and convince me of the error of my liberal ways.

Just watched that trans video and he’s about as charismatic as genital warts. I’m guessing he’s highly educated so I won’t call him stupid but he’s no Sam Harris or Jordan Peterson. Comes across as a less flamboyant, less interesting, frat boy version of Milo Ianoppolous (no idea how to spell his name). Colour me disappointed.
 

Pogue Mahone

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On a side note, you can always spot bullshit artists by how they insist they have an armoury of “facts” to back up their opinions. Anyone who has a genuinely rigorous intellect talks about “balqnce of evidence”, accepts that data often conflicts and will only very rarely talk about anything in terms of absolute facts.
 

Scarecrow

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That’s gas. I only heard of him through the two threads on here. Based on what I read about him I was expecting some sort of super-charismatic evil genius who - if I wasn’t careful - might remove the scales from my eyes and convince me of the error of my liberal ways.

Just watched that trans video and he’s about as charismatic as genital warts. I’m guessing he’s highly educated so I won’t call him stupid but he’s no Sam Harris or Jordan Peterson. Comes across as a less flamboyant, less interesting, frat boy version of Milo Ianoppolous (no idea how to spell his name). Colour me disappointed.
I'd suggest watching more than the trans video. He's only known for that because it was a bit of a scandal, he's not really some anti-trans champion. He's much more diverse than Milo and their intelligence is not even comparable (Shapiro is not as smart as he thinks, but still). Though they both have very irritating personalities.
 

Mockney

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Just watched that trans video and he’s about as charismatic as genital warts. I’m guessing he’s highly educated so I won’t call him stupid but he’s no Sam Harris or Jordan Peterson. Comes across as a less flamboyant, less interesting, frat boy version of Milo Ianoppolous (no idea how to spell his name). Colour me disappointed.
He's the villain from a high school outsider comedy who runs the rich preppy school's debate team/evil snobby frat house and who with the help of his dad, whose also the Dean, conspires to frame the cool but sensitive loner/valley girl/inner city kid/stoner that threatens to up upend the system and score a victory for the little guy!

He’s got no charisma at all and I feel sorry for anyone who thinks he’s some kind of trendy young Hitchens. He debates college students, cherry picks facts and insults their identity then acts all smug and superior when they get emotional about it.

He also revels in saying shit like this, for the lulz...


Whadda guy.
 

Pogue Mahone

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"like a man in silk pyjamas shooting pigeons
He's the villain from a high school outsider comedy who runs the rich preppy school's debate team/evil snobby frat house and who with the help of his dad, whose also the Dean, conspires to frame the cool but sensitive loner/valley girl/inner city kid/stoner that threatens to up upend the system and score a victory for the little guy!

He’s got no charisma at all and I feel sorry for anyone who thinks he’s some kind of trendy young Hitchens. He debates college students, cherry picks facts and insults their identity then acts all smug and superior when they get emotional about it.

He also revels in saying shit like this, for the lulz...


Whadda guy.
Eesh. The one thing that unites all of these clowns is that their opinion on absolutely any issue you can think of is 100% predictable. As Sam Harris said, that’s how you spot a fundamentalist. It’s nothing to do with analysing evidence to come to an informed opinion, no matter how much they bleat about “facts”, it’s a fecking doctrine.
 

Eboue

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Shapiro’s position on transgender people is very simple then. He rejects “the pseudo-scientific nonsense that a man can magically turn into a woman,” because it is no different than thinking an undergraduate can turn into a moose. Shapiro says that“individuals who believe they are a different sex than that of their biology are psychologically ill—self-evidently so” and has compared the idea of being transgender to his schizophrenic grandfather who thought the curtains were speaking to him.

But for a man who loves Logical Argumentation and would never “mischaracterize his opponents’ positions,” Shapiro doesn’t actually seem to grasp what the left argument about gender actually is, or what it is he’s actually supposed to be disproving.

Here is the actual argument that is made: the traditional conception held by people like Shapiro has treated “sex” and “gender” as synonymous. You’re either a man or awoman. Which one you are is defined by your chromosomes. And because chromosomes are part of biology, and can’t be altered, you can—as Shapiro says—no more change your sex/gender through your state of mind than you could change your age. There are men and there are women:



The argument made by the left is that this simple story doesn’t account for something important: in the real world, we don’t form our understanding of whether someone is a man or a woman by their chromosomes. Instead, we form it by how they look and act. What people mean when they say that “gender is a social construct” is not that “chromosomes are a social construct” but that in practice, gender isn’t reducible to chromosomes. In the two pictures above, the person on the left is actually a transgender man and the person on the right is actually a transgender woman. It would seem strange to call the person on the left a “woman” and the person on the right a “man,” because the fact that we associate gender with “masculinity” and “femininity” rather than just “chromosomes” means those words don’t seem to fit those people very well.

This is the reason why people started to draw a distinction between “sex” and “gender,” with sex referring to the biological component and gender referring to those qualities that seem much more fluid. Transgender people do not “think they are a different sex.” Instead, they realize that their “gender” doesn’t match their sex. As a transgender person explained in response to Shapiro, “most of the trans people I know, including myself, are under no delusion about what we were born as or what biological sex we are, we just feel uncomfortable with the features of our biological sex and seek treatment, usually, to alter those features and minimize our dysphoria.”

The dysphoria is not the “delusional belief that you don’t have a penis when you in fact do.” It’s the distress that comes from feeling like a member of the “female” gender despite having the “male” sex, or vice versa. The argument being made is that the existing way we classify sex/gender is not adequately describing the actual fact, which is that because gender captures more than just chromosomes, the traditional terminology causes confusion and needs revising. Scott Alexander has a poignant and funny essayexplaining why categories like “male” and “female” are malleable and why we should adjust them depending on the goals we’re trying to accomplish:

In no case can an agreed-upon set of borders or a category boundary be factually incorrect. An alternative categorization system is not an error… Just as we can come up with criteria for a definition of “planet”, we can come up with a definition of “man”. Absolutely typical men have Y chromosomes, have male genitalia, appreciate manly things like sports and lumberjackery, are romantically attracted to women, personally identify as male, wear male clothing like blue jeans, sing baritone in the opera, et cetera. Some people satisfy some criteria of manhood and not others, in much the same way that Pluto satisfies only some criteria of planethood… For example, gay men might date other men and behave in effeminate ways. People with congenital androgen insensitivity syndrome might have female bodies, female external genitalia, and have been raised female their entire life, but when you look into their cells they have Y chromosomes. Most people seem to assume that the ultimate tiebreaker in man vs. woman questions is presence of a Y chromosome. I’m not sure this is a very principled decision, because I expect most people would classify congenital androgen insensitivity patients (XY people whose bodies are insensitive to the hormone that makes them look male, and so end up looking 100% female their entire lives and often not even knowing they have the condition) as women. The project of the transgender movement is to propose a switch from using chromosomes as a tiebreaker to using self-identification as a tiebreaker.

Shapiro thinks being transgender is a mental illness, just as he believes homosexuality should still be considered a mental illness (and was only taken off the list thanks to “pressure group influence”). But mental illness is another situation where the classifications we choose are choices: homosexuality does not “inherently” fit in the category of mental illness; a society decides what it wants to call “illness.” And since there seemed to be very little good to come from calling some perfectly ordinary human trait an “illness,” all this did was create unnecessary stigma. Likewise, it was decided that there was no reason to see “believing your gender identity to be different than your biological sex” an illness, so the DSM was revised accordingly, to focus on what did actually seem a problem, namely the distress this can lead to.

Gender and sex are complicated topics. There are a lot of unanswered questions (e.g. What is identity? Should gender be entirely subjective? What are the differences between racial and gender identity?) All of these, though, are attempts to work out how we should revise our categories in the way that best reflects the human reality and allows us to talk coherently. The traditional categories were just too simple to capture the more complicated facts of how gender actually works. (Actually, Shapiro himself inadvertently proved this. In discussing why he would never recognize Laverne Cox as a woman, Shapiro accidentally referred to Cox as “she” before quickly correcting himself. Why did he slip? Because Laverne Cox doesseem like a woman, based on how the category “woman” is applied socially, and it feels weird to call her a man. Even Shapiro’s subconscious is telling him that transgender people should be referred to by the gender they present as rather than by their biological sex.)

Shapiro isn’t interested in discussing any of this seriously. Just look at how he distorted his questioner’s response about moose: he says “Why aren’t you a moose?” and when she replies “That’s different,” he interjects “That’s right, men and women aredifferent.” She clearly said that species and gender are different (which they are, in that there’s a good argument for revising one of the categories but not for revising the other). But he tried to convince his audience that she had essentially conceded his point, by seizing on and spinning the word “difference.” (We call this “sophistry” rather than “logic.”)

At every turn, Shapiro shows that he simply wants to make his questioners look foolish, rather than present the facts fairly.
 

Zarlak

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Truth like rain don't give a feck who it falls on.
That it's a mental illness that people suffer from, that giving them equal rights is humoring their delusions, praised Trumps ban on transgender people in the military and purposely went out of his way to refer to a transgender person face to face by the wrong gender just to antagonise them. He's just a troll who knows how to replace words in sentences with different ones from a thesaurus to make it sound like he's intelligent.
 

VP89

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That it's a mental illness that people suffer from, that giving them equal rights is humoring their delusions, praised Trumps ban on transgender people in the military and purposely went out of his way to refer to a transgender person face to face by the wrong gender just to antagonise them. He's just a troll who knows how to replace words in sentences with different ones from a thesaurus to make it sound like he's intelligent.
Its a mental illness that he said he wishes them god speed to fight and said they are more than free to fight it in whatever way they wish. He said that they can't tell him however to call them a female when their actual gender is male or vice versa.

He said you do what you want it doesn't bother me but please dont tell me how to call you because I go by science and I don't think it helps the disease. To quote him its something like ''telling a transgender they're the opposite sex is like telling a schitzophrenic that they're right and the radio is talking to them''. Its not a nice way of putting it and I'm not exact on the science but some of the views here almost suggest as though he has a problem with transgenders. He doesn't seem to have an issue with them but only has an issue when he is dictated to call them a sex which he scientifically believes they're not.
 

Minimalist

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He's what dumb people think a wise person sounds like. /thread

Look at who he actually 'debates' against for a start (dopey college kids etc).

Sorry if this isn't about Ben Shapiro and there's some other bloke called Sharipo.
 

VP89

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He's what dumb people think a wise person sounds like. /thread

Look at who he actually 'debates' against for a start (dopey college kids etc).
He debates often on news channels, had a healthy exchange with congress and so on.

I'm not dumb and I think he articulates his points well. I kind of see some of his views too.
 

Minimalist

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He debates often on news channels, had a healthy exchange with congress and so on.

I'm not dumb and I think he articulates his points well. I kind of see some of his views too.
You don't debate on news channels.

"I'm not dumb" - Don't say that. Even if you are dumb, don't say that again.
 

Fener1907

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He must be making some good money from touring universities. He makes it all look easy, but I wish the people who engaged him were a bit more clued up and/or good at speaking.
 

Minimalist

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Oddly hostile post. I'll say what I want, thanks.
:lol: Wasn't being hostile. If you say 'I'm not dumb', that's literally what people will think you are (and that you're paranoid about it).

In all honesty, you'd be better just offering up one of Shapiro's points in detail and why you agree with it.