He has recently begun producing a video series on his Daily Wire website called “Debunked,” in which he “dismantles or debunks a common leftist myth in 15 minutes or less.” He has also written these arguments into a series of articles for the site. To understand what kind of world we live in, then, it is necessary to test the position above by examining Shapiro’s recent output. If the quality of Ben Shapiro’s thought has improved, his popularity may be justified within a Rational Society Model: Perhaps, in the time since we last encountered him, Ben Shapiro has become more sensible. But as social scientists, we must consider another story consistent with the data.
You may think this top ten list conclusively falsifies the Rational Society Model and thus we must conclude we live in a world where free, accessible lies continue to triumph over costly, less available truths. (Dan Bongino, with whom we are not presently concerned, is a former Secret Service agent and unsuccessful Congressional candidate who has said his “entire life” is about “owning the libs.” He has called masks “an object on your face that does nothing to stop the transmission of. Consider what the Top 10 most popular Facebook posts were on June 17th, 2021 (a day that occurred long after the point where the Rational Society Model would have predicted that Ben Shapiro ought to have been reduced to delivering his thoughts on trans athletes to none but his cats and long-suffering wife): However, there is increasing evidence that we do not live in a society of perfect Habermasian whatever-it-was. (Shapiro has since evaded multiple challenges by leftists to debate him, and when he has accidentally allowed himself to encounter a moderately intelligent interlocutor, he has crumpled almost immediately.) In a rational society where, through the “marketplace of ideas,” good ideas prevailed over bad ones through an unfolding dialectical process of Habermasian public speech (or, if you’re not trying to use rapid-fire big words to sound smarter than you are, people talking to each other about important politics stuff), there would be an inverse relationship between the number of times Ben Shapiro has been proven wrong and his popularity as a public intellectual.
A few years ago, after the New York Times dubbed conservative pundit Ben Shapiro “the cool kids’ philosopher,” I wrote a widely-shared article showing why he was an intellectual fraud who did not actually believe in “logic, facts, reason, and debate” as he had claimed he did.
0 kommentar(er)
