Debating is bad. Professor Watchlists are bad.

To my best recollection, I've only been in one debate. It wasn't my choice to be involved, but I kicked serious butt.

It was my upper-division course in Evolutionary Biology, just for Biology majors. Near the beginning of the the semester, the professor make the ruinous curricular decision to have a debate on the validity of the theory of evolutionary biology. He assigned half of the class to take up a young-earth Creationist position, and the other half were representing contemporary evolutionary science.

It was over before we even started. My classmates who had the misfortune of being assigned to represent evolutionary science never saw it coming. They were as helpless as a newborn fawn caught in a hurricane, swept into the sky only to fall to the earth at terminal velocity.

My professor took me aside afterwards and asked, "Wait a second, do you.... believe in that?" and I reassured him I didn't. I summon the appearance of passion and commitment to bad ideas to win a debate, but I took him by surprise.

I imagine that my professor thought he was training the course how to debate against creationists, but I think the primary learning outcome is that on a debate stage, creationism will win. This is because "falsehood will fly from Maine to Georgia, while truth is pulling her boots on." In the debate of evolutionary science vs. creationism, one side adopts an evidence-based position that evolving the careful evaluation of ideas, and the other side of the debate takes a position that is unsupported by facts and is founded on a logically inconsistent worldview. The scientist is walking into a gunfight with a rubber band and one hand tied behind their back. The creationists have the luxury of claiming that they are making decisions based on evidence and are doing deep critical thinking, but history shows that they show disregard for the veracity of facts and are prepared to develop falsehoods to defuse evidence that their conclusions are specious.

In other words, anybody can win a debate simply by making a bunch of shit up and by pretending that their invented facts are as valid as actual facts.

When I was an undergrad, creationism was on the upswing. Creationists were filling up school boards, and some scientists and science advocates made the inadvisable choice of meeting these folks publicly and give them equal time on big stages. In hindsight, it's rather cute to think that so many scientists thought the way to combat anti-intellectualism was to elevate these folks by debating with them. At the time, the term "Gish Gallop" had yet to be uttered, Pastafarianism was more than a decade away, and the National Center for Science Education was still a nascent organization. As late as 2014, long after creationists rebranded as "intelligent design," one of the world's most prominent science communicators platformed a creationist in a widely-publicized debate.

Considering the long history of liars winning debates by lying, you would have thought that intellectuals might have learned to stop debating liars. Moreover, you would have thought that thinking people would have already dismissed debate as a useful way to come to an understanding of how the world works.

Shouldn't thinking people have stopped taking other seriously when they show an unserious attitude towards facts? thought that thinking people would stop taking other people seriously when they show an unserious attitude towards facts. But no, our broader society keeps falling into this same damn trap over and over again.

Which brings us to current events. Not long ago, in a staggering act of political violence, Minnesota State Senator Melissa Hortman was assassinated in her own home. Her husband was also brutally slain. Considering that the balance of the Senate was her seat, this murderous act may well shift the balance of power in this state, and as a swing state, may shift control of elections and the control of our entire country.

Oh wait, that's not the assassination that folks are talking about. Nobody seems to give much of a hoot about Hortman. The one that's got everybody so upset about political violence is the murder of the guy who invented the Professor Watchlist. The guy outed private information of professors who chose to teach information that was in conflict with his (hateful) worldview, and encouraged his followers to harass and threaten our peers. An overt misogynist, racist, transphobe. His shtick was to advocate for political violence and spew hate while couching it as debate, and in his media platforms he gave visibility to literally the worst that our society offers. At the very moment he was shot, he was in the middle of falsely attributing the mass shootings in the United States on gangs (in his world, that's code for brown and black people).

Was it right that one person empowered himself to unilaterally impose a death sentence on this man for his innumerable sins? No. Do I feel bad about it? Not really. It's okay. I should not be expected to have empathy for him. I feel far more concerned about the motive behind the assassination of Hortman, as it was a calculated to trigger political change in power. Because it passed by with relatively little notice or concern, this only empowers those who wish to conduct more political killsings. Considering the political violence that's happening now like an actual genocide that the United States is fueling with weapons and money, it seems genuinely weird that non-fascists are so torn up about what happened to this hateful and harmful man who fostered political violence and met his end using the means that he advocated. My main concern about this guy's murder is that regardless of who did it, it's going to be used as a pretext to elevate violence against Americans by our own government. But I also realize that they'll find or invent such pretext regardless, but this might help grease their rails a little bit and that's bothersome.

I'm upset about the litany of eulogies that showed some level of respect or deference for this guy who was the architect of so many vile ideas. Whitewashing his legacy serves to amplify the harm that he created during his life. His willingness to debate and present factually-deficient arguments in a public forum with people who were less hateful didn't make his hate any less hideous.

Should we use debates as a method of grappling with facts and ideas to come to understanding and developing a worldview? Hell no. Because debates favor the disingenuous and the dishonest. But is there a place for debate in our society? There has to be, because we are often faced with binary choices and the outcomes are more serious than serious. Who we vote for, whether to support a ballot initiative, who gets denied tenure, who gets convicted, who gets supplied with weapons to commit genocide, should the buses be free, and so on. We know all too well in the public sphere that intellectually honest rhetorical tactics often lose to dishonesty and deception. So yeah, debates are here to stay. But when we're in the realm of the university and when we're among scholars who are genuinely in pursuit of knowledge and understanding, let's stop debating and let's start discussing. Lets stop being in it to win it, and let's help one another learn and grow. And let's stop elevating the men who pretend that debate is honorable.