god damn there's nothing more satisfying than listening to D*stiny get dunked on by Norm Finkelstein for 5 hours
jesus christ the arrogance of this man. what the fuck possessed him to get on this stage with people who wrote the books that his Wikipedia research is summarizing. this man couldn't find israel on a map until a couple of days ago and thought Erdogan is the president of israel. and Norm just calls him on it over and over while continuously mispronouncing his name.
my favorite quote: "if Israel nuked Gaza and killed all 2 million people living there, I'm not sure it would count as genocide."
bonus: Hasan's coverage was so brutal that he rage quit his own stream 2 days in a row. he knows he got owned.
God what a naked attempt to minimize the body of work of a guy like Finkelstein while trying to elevate the completely empty cavity that is Destiny's skull. Lex Freedmen is just Joe Rogan in a suit.
By putting these guys in the same room he's drawing equivalences that don't exist.
it backfired with anyone who actually watched it. twitter is flooded with clips of him owning himself and Finkelstein owning him. he did so poorly that he made Benny Morris somehow look more insane than he already obviously is. and he himself is trying desperately to keep his audience from actually watching it while malding about it publicly. literally if he'd just sat there and said absolutely nothing the entire time, he'd have done a much better job of letting Fridman launder the false equivalence between himself and these academics. but obviously he can't shut the fuck up so here we are.
The nuke take was insane. His argument was that there was no "special intent", as if bombs, you know things made SPECIFICALLY to kill and destroy, just happened to materialize out of thin air above Gaza.
To quote Deng: "this person may seem smart but in fact is stupid."
Christ almighty I hope people’s takeaway is about the astonishing level of knowledge and poise on the pro-Palestine side rather than “hehe funnyman norm didn’t know this irrelevant streamer’s name”
Also it’s so obvious destiny prepped with Dronerbox, a goddamn two person human ouroboros of shit. All the “intl law is meaningless” and “realistically…” is straight of their playbook
Lex Friedman’s audience are the most credulous goons imaginable, totally ignoring Mouni’s arguments because he’s the most straightforward and even-keeled, nothing but tone
Also I’m sorry to keep spamming this thread, but Benny totally dodged the Cecil Rhodes point. Just absolutely ignored any comparison between colonialisms
Sadly, this sort of shit is exactly what people like this want. He wanted to "win" the debate, obviously, but more importantly, he wanted attention. and his audience will laugh and clap at his "Finklesmell" pre-school level insults and ignore how hideously ignorant he was being.
His ideas were treated with equal time and equal respect to Finkelstein's. That is what fascists want, normalisation of their ideas. To his target audience, Destiny is saying "it doesn't matter how much of a failchild you are, if you support my ideas, you get to be the stupidest, worst version of yourself and be applauded for it."
I've seen this time and time again when a fascist "debates" someone who actually knows what they are talking about. They get "owned" but their audience insists they actually "won" the debate because they did, they got the attention they crave, their ideas were spread to a much larger audience, their hate and vitriol was normalised.
This is probably the only time Destiny's fans will have got to listen to Mr Finkelstein speak. Destiny platformed Finkelstein, not the other way around.
I think you give them too much credit. Most likely they just listened to a "highlight reel" of Destiny's best "owns" and didn't actually listen to anything Finkelstein said.
So far the peak moment for me was when mr morelli was like "why would the israelis ethnically cleanse Palestinians in 1948, wouldn't that have cost them legitimacy with western powers?" and Norm is just holding his head in his hands while his debate partner calmly explains that western powers were endlessly comfortable with the displacement dark skinned people
There was a moment in the Hasan stream where a chatter came in saying Destiny had studied for thousands of hours for this debate and that Hasan should address his points directly instead of making fun of him. Hasan laughed hysterically for like a minute straight.
Norm was there to go at it with Benny Morris. Mr. Bonerelli inserted himself into that repeatedly so Norm started telling him to shut up and sit down you sniveling worm.