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Why Ben Shapiro's Debate Challenge To Ocasio-Cortes Is Basically Date Rape (NYT)

Last week, Ben Shapiro, the right-wing pundit, elicited outr...
Charismatic senate wrinkle
  08/16/18
None of the past debate examples come off as sexist. Libs wa...
vibrant boiling water immigrant
  08/16/18
...
Charismatic senate wrinkle
  08/16/18
women are pitiful and need to be put in their place
violent exhilarant house quadroon
  08/16/18
Politicians are all self serving retards but I don't get the...
Dull Genital Piercing Elastic Band
  08/16/18


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Date: August 16th, 2018 8:25 AM
Author: Charismatic senate wrinkle

Last week, Ben Shapiro, the right-wing pundit, elicited outrage on his behalf from conservatives when he asked the Democratic congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to debate him and she said that she did not owe a response “to unsolicited requests from men with bad intentions.”

Mr. Shapiro had offered an hour of his time, $10,000 that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez could keep for her campaign or give to charity, and the opportunity, as he put it in a taped request, to make “America a more civil and interesting place.”

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and her admirers doubted the sincerity of someone who on his website, The Daily Wire, once posted a video cartoon characterizing Native Americans as murderous savages until Christopher Columbus arrived to enlighten them. (He later apologized.) Mr. Shapiro and his followers saw in her refusal further proof of the left’s antipathy to engaging with ideological difference.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, of course, is under no obligation to debate someone who is not running for anything. She does find herself, however, in the comparatively unusual position of igniting the interests of men who want to argue with her, whatever their motives.

It has not always been this way. When a victory over Joseph Crowley, the 10-term congressman she challenged in the Democratic primary seemed so improbable, he did not rush to join her on stage and argue about housing policy. The two candidates debated once, a few days before the polls; on two other occasions Mr. Crowley said he could not attend because of scheduling conflicts, and on one of those he sent a surrogate, Annabel Palma, a former City Councilwoman, which left the impression that the girls ought to just work things out among themselves.

Feminism’s grand resurgence this past year — striking in the results of the Democratic primary in Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District on Tuesday in which Ilhan Omar, a young Somali immigrant, won in a six-way race that had three male candidates cumulatively receiving less than 9 percent of the vote — seems to have had little effect on heightening the sensitivities of male politicians to the optics of dismissing their female opponents. When women in politics are not facing the tediousness of having men explain things to them, they are often up against the indignities of their apathy.

Debates in particular have long wielded a special power to trigger male condescension. During the first with a female candidate to be televised nationally — the 1984 vice-presidential debate between George H.W. Bush and Geraldine Ferraro — Americans bore witness to Mr. Bush patronizing a prominent congresswoman, who served as the secretary of the House Democratic Caucus, on the subject of foreign policy. (“Let me help you with the difference, Mrs. Ferraro,” he said, “between Iran and the embassy in Lebanon.”)

Before Donald Trump stalked Hillary Clinton on stage, commandeering the frame in one of the 2016 presidential debates, Barack Obama had derided her as “likable enough,” in a primary debate eight years earlier.

Not showing up at all amounts to another expression of entitlement, and when men are the ones not showing up, the implications easily become gendered. In 2014, Zephyr Teachout, a law professor challenging Andrew M. Cuomo in the Democratic primary for governor in New York, hoped to stand next to him and talk about corruption in Albany, Wall Street influence, money in politics, education funding — but he refused, saying, at one point, that he had participated in many debates over the course of his career and that he found some to be “a disservice to democracy.” Later, in the general election, Mr. Cuomo debated his Republican opponent, Rob Astorino, and two other men running on alternate party lines.

As it happened, Peter King, the longtime Republican congressman from Long Island, borrowed the governor’s logic last year, when Liuba Grechen Shirley, a Democrat now challenging him for a seat he has held for 13 terms, invited him to participate in a town hall about Donald Trump’s nascent presidency. Town halls, he said, wind up becoming “screaming matches” that “diminish” democracy.

The indifference only fueled her resentment and propelled her to run. There are few things that can spark both rage and agency among women quite like being ignored.

The Grechen Shirley campaign maintains that it has asked Mr. King to participate in five debates and that he has only agreed to one; he denies this. So far one debate is scheduled.

And yet indication that he may be taking his challenger more seriously was supplied in a Facebook update he posted on Tuesday, one day before her campaign released its first ad, a short film shot in Ms. Grechen Shirley’s home in which she talks about the difficulties of life as a working mother. Representative King announced to his followers that he was collaborating with Ivanka Trump and other members of Congress on the issue of paid parental leave.

Several years ago he voted against the benefit for federal employees. “Changing economic realities now often require both spouses to be working,” he wrote, as if newly awakened to that idea.

Often incumbents will try to forestall debates with opponents who are new to the political scene for fear of advancing their celebrity but Governor Cuomo has been slow to debate his primary opponent, Cynthia Nixon, even though she is already famous. In July, the governor skipped a forum in Westchester with 700 people, and Ms. Nixon sat next to an empty chair. Her campaign had been counting the days since it had first tried to schedule a debate with the governor, and Wednesday would have been the 100th day.

Then, on Day 98, the Cuomo campaign accepted an invitation from the CBS affiliate in New York to debate Ms. Nixon at Hofstra University on Aug. 29, a few days before the Labor Day weekend, when most of New York will be paddleboarding. The Nixon campaign has said that the terms of the debate were presented to it as a fait accompli.

“We understand this isn’t a level playing field,” a spokeswoman offered in a statement. “It hasn’t been since the very beginning. Nothing is easy when you’re an outsider, and it’s even harder when you’re a woman.”

Regardless, Ms. Nixon will be there.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4053169&forum_id=2#36625646)



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Date: August 16th, 2018 8:42 AM
Author: vibrant boiling water immigrant

None of the past debate examples come off as sexist. Libs want women to run for office, but to also play the victim card when the going gets tough.

With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, we will see feminism, and in turn alleged misogyny, be used as an excuse for her intellectual failings.

Libs' next move: "I don't have to debate you because you are a white male." This is already how the "racist" and "bigot" label is used. Call someone a bigot, and you don't have to listen to a single thing they say. Therefore, your ideas are left unchallenged in your ideological safespace.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4053169&forum_id=2#36625662)



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Date: August 16th, 2018 9:04 AM
Author: Charismatic senate wrinkle



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4053169&forum_id=2#36625723)



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Date: August 16th, 2018 9:05 AM
Author: violent exhilarant house quadroon

women are pitiful and need to be put in their place

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4053169&forum_id=2#36625725)



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Date: August 16th, 2018 9:31 AM
Author: Dull Genital Piercing Elastic Band

Politicians are all self serving retards but I don't get the thesis here. Is the idea that all politicians must debate everyone who challenges them when they are running for office, but never when they are not running for office?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4053169&forum_id=2#36625763)