So there’s a LIVE debate tonight between Matt Binder of the Majority Report with Sam Seder and a fellow you may have heard of by the name of Paul Elam. Since Elam evidently refused to debate on the Majority Report — for some reason he doesn’t like to debate people when he doesn’t control the venue — Matt Binder agreed to debate on A Voice for Men, with Dean Esmay as the, ahem, neutral moderator. It’s at 6 PM Eastern.
I expect some shenanigans.
Here’s the video that inspired Elam’s debate challenge:
Here’s Matt’s video accepting the challenge:
Check out Matt’s other videos on Men’s Rightsers and our dear friend Stefan Molyneux.
I’m pretty impressed with Binder actually. Typically “debates” with people whose ideology has a tenuous relationship with reality involve a lot of attempting to debunk glib talking points that sound impressive but have no real meaning. Binder got him in a pretty nice gotcha right off the bat, and Elam did himself no favors by reading prepared statements which were honestly not very memorable. I don’t know if I could even recall the content of Paul’s first two 4 minute statements, except that the second one said that there were female MRAs and that Binder is a fascist.
That would be comedy gold. It must be killing Elam to see so many people essentially saying he bombed. Imagine his horror when Binder sprang the Molyneux trap on him. I’m positively giddy about that!
This one is my fave:
Heehee. Guy doesn’t pull any punches. I look forward to part two if he has the guts to follow through.
I wonder how long Elam can keep his cool if people keep telling him that he bombed.
@brooked,
Merci madame!
Oh, man, just made it through the whole thing. What a disaster for Paul. Reading his ridiculous prepared statements, getting flustered every time Binder asked him a question, having his grand rhetorical points undercut completely — e.g., Binder’s “so what” response to him reading out his list of AVFM women.
The ramshackle ending was probably my favorite bit, with Dean asking for a link to “the article” about stop and frisk, and after being told that it’s been a giant issue for years plaintively replying that AVFM is a volunteer organization and they can’t get to every issue.
The technical glitches at the end were just icing on the cake.
Oh, Paul Elam (and co), you are definitely not ready for your close-up.
@David I loved how his prepared remarks said that feminists don’t care for the plight of men. Paul read them despite the issues Matt brought up. This is why having one set of prepared remarks isn’t good preparation. If you are going to prepare, set up traps for Gish Gallops and have more prepared arguments than you’ll need so you can discard less useful ones.
I’m still blown away by the lack of knowledge about stop and frisk. They really must live in a bubble. Probably a doody bubble.
opium, I know, it made the debate surreal. Matt brought up and discussed issues affecting men in detail, then ten seconds later Paul, obviously reading from his prepared statement, accused him of saying men have no problems. I thought I saw Paul pause for a second before reading his notes to think to himself “wait, should I still go ahead and read this?” before going ahead and reading it.
You know how they keep claiming the MRM isn’t only for white men? If it wasn’t they’d already have known about stop and frisk.
I didn’t watch 100 percent of the Elam statements because they were way too tedious, but I watched the last 30 seconds or so of Elam, followed by the Binder statements. What I noticed was that Elam engaged the ad hominem fallacy over and over — every statement was about what an awful person Binder is. But Binder actually addressed Elam’s statements.
Not only does Binder win handily by classical debate rules, but it calls into question Elam’s whole purpose. All he really seems interested in is calling people names, and why do you do that? Because you’ve got nothing else, and you’re hoping to simply intimidate your opponents (alpha your opponents?) into giving up. .
Emilygoddess — nothing troll like really, but LBT is Orion’s “gay muse”. Pretty sure LBT finds this more amusing than creepy, so whatever. (The bug made it outside, though I saw another flying around in here)
Kitteh — there was a miniseries of The Shining, without Nicholson, that kept very closely to the book. I enjoyed it a great deal more than the movie. But I read the book, my mother’s a huge King fan, so his novels were yet more books around the house for me to read, so I did.
As for the debate, I guess I should watch it, if only to play Spot! That! Fallacy! (I’ll prove a full gameshow play by play if I do watch it) It sounds like Elam made a complete idiot of himself, while proving he doesn’t actually know shit about the real problems men face, since they tend to be rooted in racism and it should be A Voice for Cis Straight White Men.
::waaahhh!::
“Arrest occurred more frequently in cases involving intimate partners if the offender was white. This effect was weaker in states with preferred arrest laws.”
Domestic Violence Cases: What Research Shows About Arrest and Dual Arrest Rates (Pg 8)
http://www.nij.gov/publications/dv-dual-arrest-222679/Documents/dv-dual-arrest.pdf?Redirected=true
Sure but Donald Sterling donated a ton of money to NAACP and inner city charities, but that doesn’t mean we need to listen to that bigoted slumlord’s opinions on race and how to best combat racial inequality.
Not surprisingly AVfM’s brief articles on the subject didn’t earn Elam’s website a place among the twenty functional non-profit advocacy organizations mentioned here:
The New Jim Crow – Take Action
http://newjimcrow.com/take-action
Argenti, there was a mini-series? Cool. If nothing else, that would hopefully allow for more time and more detail than a film.
I made it about 5 mins in. Could Paul be any less charismatic? And is that chair glued in place? And what’s his plaque for? Creepiest staring contest?
I recall that it was Elam who came up with the debate idea, and was so attached to it that he attempted to pre-emptively shame Binder into it before he had any indication that Binder was going to refuse. If his only job was to “point out lies,” and on his home territory no less, to a sympathetic audience, there are far better ways to do that than a debate. Debating is a learned skill, and there are many ways an unpracticed debater can go wrong. Reading from prepared notes with no capacity to alter statements on the fly to respond to one’s opponent’s words, for instance, is one way a debater can fall on their face.
I actually see no reason for Elam to even want to do this debate. Assume that he had totally dominated the debate. Insisting that the forum be his home territory means that few would be exposed to his amazingness except his normal audience. He would achieve nothing with the debate that a blog post could not achieve. His ideal outcome is almost neutral. However, a total disaster for him would expose his lack of substance to his loyal fans and humiliate him in front of those who would otherwise be inclined to support him. This debate really had nothing for him but down sides. He could only have arrived at this plan by not thinking about it at all.
Ah, Woody. Paul could have spent the entire debate quietly sculpting a pile of mashed potatoes and you would have declared him the ultimate debate winner.
I would love to watch Binder debate JudgyBitch, although it would probably just be Binder making similar points as he did here, while Judgy just shouts a string of “whore” and “cunt” insults at him, and saying that the debate isn’t going to happen while it’s in the middle of happening.
It was somewhat hampered by being made for US network television, which meant that a certain amount of censorship was done and the pacing interrupted by commercials. (It also had some really unfortunate CGI and proved that while the hedge animals sounded plenty scary in the book, seeing them in action looked more like something Tim Burton would’ve done.)
[I freely admit to being both a fan of the Kubrick film and acknowledging that it’s a terrible adaptation of the novel. But then a lot of good horror films deviate wildly from their sources– see pretty much every movie version of Dracula ever.]
Is there somewhere I can go to watch the video that won’t do counts towards AVfM’s website or their YouTube channel? I haven’t watched it as I don’t want them to get more views.
@pallygirl–
Matt and Co. have it up here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3wlfBIIzjMs
Thanks, I’m now in minute 3 and it hasn’t started yet /yawn.
Nequam — I liked the movie, miniseries, and book, for different reasons. You’re so right about the hedges though!
Keeping this spoiler free, but you know the difference between the book ending and the movie? Yeah, the miniseries ends how it’s supposed to.
Oh wow. “Can we ask for clarification if needed?” “No, well, you can, but it’ll be answered in the next block of time” — so they’re gonna talk for four minutes and if someone doesn’t hear something clearly, or isn’t sure what definition someone is using, you can argue wih thin air for your four minutes? No wonder Binder is so willing to get his clarifications on his time. Unfortunately, I can see Elam abusing that to no end.
Also, I keep expecting Binder to have a cat interrupt, not sure why.
Wow Paul, continue to insult your debating opponents, stay classy. I thought Matt was good, he actually debated. Paul just seemed to want to read a prewritten script. And the script was just soundbites (with factually incorrect points), so there was no point being made by Elam.
He’s reading word for word. Not even just notes. Elam is effectively monologuing.
One of the major signs of a cult is when a setback is reinterpreted as a victory.
I mean, even the AVFM regulars seem to be able to see that they got stomped. But will they spin it? Will they refuse to believe it?
In three weeks, will they talk about how they kicked Matt Binder’s butt?
My money’s on yes.