Thank you for posting this.

I don't think I have seen an actual debate in my lifetime. The closest thing has been watching litigation of a court case. Nowadays, what is called "debate" is simply rhetorical chaos.

It has been a bizarre realization, for me, that some of the thorniest issues facing our societies have relatively simple -- even elegant -- solutions; but I honestly don't believe people want true solutions. The only solution they want is dominance and the silence of dissenting voices.

And this points to another fundamental societal change. Universities, as the speaker indicates, are supposed to be about the discovery of truth; but that isn't true anymore. People aren't interested in truth anymore; they're interested in power. The really interesting question is why. It seems to me that people stop being interested in truth when they stop believing in its existence or in its relevance to their lives. I don't know how you fix that; it's essentially a moral problem. The speaker mentions that the extremes now isolate the middle; I wonder if that isn't because the middle has lost its integrity, its moral cohesion, its substance. With nothing to hold it together, people seeking solidity and substance drift to either extreme.

People in the trans community -- and I am trans, myself -- fail to realize that the current ascendance of the anti-trans Right in America is in significant part due to the excesses of the trans activist community, or the political Left's use of it. (Saying that is enough to get me canceled in some venues.) And now the Right has shut off dialogue in principle; there is no interest in understanding, and the trans community in America is facing significant suffering and death unless this movement can be shut down in the courts. I think it will be, in time; but power is not a true solution.

I don't know how you fix this. There is such inertia behind this situation. I fear the catharsis will be violent.