Ave, Malcolm!

Malcolm's reaction to the Hitchens-D'Souza debate can be found here. I like how Malcolm expresses his dissatisfaction with the debate's format and how the format affected the debate's substance:

These things are always unsatisfying. What one really wants is to get the two parties to spend an evening together at one's house, ply them liberally with good food and strong drink, and let them simply talk to each other for a few uninterrupted hours, with the ability to interject as needed to keep things on track. But these public debates have such a rigid format that areas of contention are never explored in any depth, and certainly not with the extended interplay of point and counterpoint that would be possible in an evening's conversation. Instead we have single-shot matchups of statement and rebuttal; the effect is more like a game of "Rock, Paper, Scissors" than a Socratic dialogue.

No disagreement here.


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