John Stuart MIll was recently quoted in a book I am reading. I found the quote appropriate to this issue.
I think it poses a fine argument. In order to ingrain a firm belief against an idea, you must engage that idea and their believers directly.
The problem does not appear to be that smart, thoughtful people who are taking the time to try to sort out what's true are finding themselves unprepared to grapple with evil ideas because they're unfamiliar with the arguments for those ideas. The problem is even less that these people end up being
persuaded by these arguments. Almost without exception, thoughtful people believe these positions to be evil and ridiculous. Grappling with the real arguments is not a problem because there aren't any real arguments happening. What happens is what you see here: when confronted, the proponents of these ideas sort of dance around the things they otherwise proudly say, they throw out made-up statistics where the whole point is to elicit Maher's shrug because nobody has these sorts of numbers ready to hand (although of course Maher could have prepared), and they generally fail to honestly argue that the most objectionable things that they want to do are things worth doing.
There is probably some benefit in people who are concerned about this becoming familiar with the kinds of things a Milo-type might say so as to be better prepared than Maher to handle them, but most of us will really never be in a conversation like this except I guess in like the comment threads to news articles. Instead, we'll mainly be involved in small, possibly 1-on-1 interactions with people who are not thoughtful who have been led into this ideology not by the strength of its arguments but mostly by the force of their prejudice. These people will basically never be able to provide good reasons for their beliefs. They may throw out something about sex crimes statistics but if you ask where they're getting their information from they're not going to have anything. And they're not going to believe you if you tell them they're wrong. They believe their fake statistics
because they believe the conclusion that they're using the fake statistics to support, not the other way around.
The service people like Milo provide is to give lazy people who have a prejudice something that sounds like rational cover for that prejudice. It's not really
supposed to stand up to intellectual scrutiny, and engaging it as if it is is missing the point. It's like a much more harmful version of those The Case for Christ -type books - they're not for people who don't believe, and they're not intended to be useful when arguing with people who don't believe, but they're something a believer can skim and then half-remember when they encounter something that makes them doubt.
When the whole point of someone's rhetoric is to give people the illusion of justification for what they want to believe anyway while relying on them not thinking about it too hard, you don't really get anywhere having a big public debate. You're simply not going to reach the people you need to reach that way even if you annihilate/eviscerate/destroy the other guy. The most important thing is to communicate that these are not serious ideas. Maher should not have had him on the show. Not because he's a bigot but because he's a clown. Yes, his ideas are evil, but they're also
stupid, or at least dishonest. This should not be presented as a serious argument, because the entire purpose of this rhetoric is not to be genuinely persuasive but to kind of look like a serious argument if you don't think too hard. You don't let him talk for the same reason that you don't have on an anti-vaxxer or a creationist (I realize that Maher is an anti-vaxxer; this is a problem). It's purely an opportunity for them to spew bullshit while leaning on your credibility.
