The video in this tweet is enjoyable, in its own way:

It’s sad that it should be enjoyable, because we’re watching a very decent fellow arguing against someone whose problems go well beyond believing the wrong things. The white fellow in this exchange either doesn’t know how to put together an argument, or is willfully avoiding a real argument for rhetorical purposes. Invoking the men and women who died for our country has nothing to do with anything, and specifically has nothing to do with refusing to sing the national anthem. The white fellow may as well be Walter Sobchak:


The obvious answer is that they didn’t die for a song; they died so that we’d have the right not to sing a song. But engaging with that particular line of argument is pointless, precisely because the argument is nonsense. Either its speaker can only string together nonsense arguments; or he’s capable of doing otherwise and chooses not to, in order to score rhetorical points with his audience. Either way, there’s no reason to engage with it.

Next up is his rhetorical question about why his sparring partner doesn’t leave the U.S., if things are so bad here. Again there’s an obvious answer: we live in a country that, in principle, allows us to improve things. Even asking that question is stupid; it’s meant to bait his sparring partner into a defensive response.

I wish it weren’t like this. I wish that both sides were arguing in good faith, but they’re not. And what do you do when the other side is not arguing in good faith? You either engage with them and lose, or disengage and talk past them — which is exactly what we see in that ‘debate’.