The following is not a list of utterly one-sided smackdowns, where someone is clearly outmatched in debating skill or because the topic is lopsidedly against them. There are plenty of those out there for your amusment (or lack thereof), and I’ve already covered some of them here: https://scottthong.wordpress.com/2022/12/18/hot-take-james-white-is-not-that-amazing-of-a-debator/
This is instead a collection of debates I’ve witnessed where at least one of the participants is behaving extremely rude, condescending, unreasonable, does something shockingly inappropriate or etc.
So here I present to you for your viewing (dis)pleasure…
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Exhibit A: “As though you people have any f^^^ing clue what any of us are talking about”
James Tour vs Dave Farina, where when the latter’s turn came around he immediately went all in on insults, accusations, character assassination, and some swearing for good measure.
As the title quote shows, Farina didn’t limit his disdain to his debate opponent – anyone in the audience who didn’t outright support that Tour is anidiot, was similarly an idiot to Farina.
Substance-wise, Tour seemed to know the science while Farina kept citing merely the titles and abstracts of research papers – which is Tour’s whole point about titles of papers being hyperbolic of what is actually accomplished by the experiments described within.
For just the hot takes:
Exhibit B: “WOW!!!!” [shout reverberates through the room]
This one was so infamous that people who witnessed it still mention it to this day. It’s not much exaggeration on my part when I describe the Determinist side’s opening statements as Severus Snape at his most condescending, followed by Jim Carrey at his most overacting.
I cover this debate more at https://scottthong.wordpress.com/2020/08/19/severus-snape-jim-carrey-do-a-debate/
Exhibit C: “They complain that just by showing up we’ve lost the debate – they haven’t even bothered to show up!”
This would be a standard theist vs atheist debate, except White & Durbin decided to take a full-blown pure presuppositional apologetics approach… And sadly, they brought along the arrogant condescension which is stereotypical of many of its adherents. They constantly asserted their position rather than argued it out, hence the title quote by the atheist debator.
That White is very proud of his performance and thinks he did an amazing job is evident from the ‘Incredible’ which he appends to the title on his own channel.
Exhibit D: “Scurrilous and gutter ad hominem attacks against me”
Robert Spencer is a very well-read scholar and prolific author on the subject of Islam, including a book questioning the Standard Islamic Narrative about the life (and very existence) of Muhammad.
Adnan Rashid meanwhile obviously had not read the book or done much research on the subject (if any), and resorted to insulting Spencer and repeatedly harping on the one red herring point about challenging Spencer on the difference between Anas ibn Malik vs Malik bin Anas.
(On an aside, Robert Spencer is also the debate opponent that I feel James White got most outplayed by by simple virtue of the weight of evidence on Spencer’s side. See the link at start of this post.)
Exhibit E: “You and your husband have a good day.”
If you take Matt Dillahunty’s side of the story, his debate opponent Andrew Wilson brought personal insults to the table. So, Dillahunty walked out in protest.
If you take Andrew Wilson’s side of the story, everyone already knows Dillahunty’s standard trope of demanding evidence for God, smugly saying he is not convinced regardless, and then claiming victory – so instead, Wilson took the route of granting Dillahunty’s whole thesis (that secular humanism can form ethical foundations) and showing how it cannot even support Dillahunty’s own self-declared goal of human flourishing, by referencing transgenders (one of whom Dillahunty was dating!): “If you don’t call these strange lunatics something they obviously aren’t, they might self-terminate. So in order to avoid that, we need to make everybody on planet Earth – to them this is ‘human flourishing’ – just redefine, pretend it’s true. How laughably absurd this worldview is”.
So with Dillahunty knowing he was outmaneuvered, he feigned indignance (after himself having tossed insults like ‘bumbling God’) and walked out to dodge the rest of the debate.
On an aside, just look how much they’ve shifted the Overton Window. Wilson saying “You and your husband have a good day” is a perfectly polite phrase. But people got offended by it, because society insists we must affirm whatever gender someone self-identifies as – in the case of Dillahunty’s romantic partner, a genetic male who identifies as a woman.
THE SCOTTTCAST 