Because he would then hand you a mic to challenge his point. In a healthy debate. And you connected your own dots on the second point to satisfy your sick sense of justice.

How about him handing the mic to children killed in school shootings and bombing?

A healthy debate about genocide ? ?

Isn't that what happened in 1994? We debated if what was happening in Rwanda was genocide. We debated if there was Genocide in Bosnia between 1992-1995. And then debate what to do about it if we do recognize it as genocide

Wow what an upstanding guy. He would hand us the mic. For what? To create a thumbnail on YouTube on how you pre-determinately got "owned" before you even received it?

How can a civil exchange of ideas not be healthy? Agreement is not a requisite to the definition. If such a debate feels unhealthy to you, I’m not sure what to say.

name a time and place and come debate me why your mother is a fucking whore and your father in-breed redneck - both wasting oxygen for other humans on the planet… would that work or was your heart rate just elevated reading this invitation to a civil exchange?

Because his abhorrent ideas have already been rejected by civil society.

At that point, you're not having a useful debate, you're platforming them and lending their ideas legitimacy.

For neo-nazis, appearing on the debate stage is itself a win, and a chance to spread their ideas to the crowd, even if they "lose" the debate.

The Paradox of Tolerance requires neo-nazis be told to go back under the rock they crawled out from, not given platforms.

> Because his abhorrent ideas have already been rejected by civil society.

I hate to break it to you, but judging by the outcome of last year's election, this statement is provably false.

This means his opponents' ideas are by-and-large rejected by civil society, and the amazing irony is, he invited those ideas to be tested out in the open. Kirk gave a platform to ideas he and his audience abhor.

If someone's views are "too egregious" to be tested openly, it's almost always the case that the person suggesting this knows their own views wouldn't hold up. It's a tell that they know they've lost the argument, before it even happened. Calls for censorship and deplatforming are the key tell for how feeble a person is.

If their ideals are so great, why can't they survive under scrutiny?

I would retort that a sizable fraction of society isn't civil, the gleefully malevolent who long to punish minorities. And a larger fraction is ill-informed about the first part, due to platforming liars and psychopaths, like you suggest.

Only part of Trump's voters thought this would be the outcome, but we're stuck with the results.

Please, quit playing word games. We've moved past that, and America won't survive if you treat this like your high-school debate club.

You would probably get more out of debating with an LLM. Let's have an LLM with a mic on every campus for these "healthy" debates that are progressing humanity.

Or maybe we can fine-tune an LLM with all his dialogue that has been recorded.

I guarantee in the latter case no one would care, because the showmanship aspect would be gone, which is what it really was about. Entertainment.

What's unhealthy and double-standard-y about this is, people like Kirk in many quarters on the right have been talking about taking away constitutional rights like second amendment, maybe even first, for transgender people.

For some people those issues exist in a realm of debatable topics because they're not affected by it. It's apparently within the realms of debate to justify mass holocaust of babies abroad. Kinda like a video game. And clearly, people shouldn't be assassinated for merely playing video games.