Milo Y is a troll, and I would never deny that he is very good at it. The purpose behind most of what he says is to get under people’s skin and gain notoriety, and through his notoriety he is able to make a substantial income. Good for him, he has a right to free speech and he uses that right to his own benefit. He is seen by some as a champion of the alt-right, but the reality is that they hate him as much as the progressive left hate him. Like most trolls, he is best ignored, unless you find his trolling entertaining (which I don't).
Dinesh D doesn’t, from what I’ve seen, seem worth the effort. Those videos are from his YouTube channel and he appears to see them as great examples of him pwning the progressives who oppose his points of view. As I said, I flicked through the video and watched two exchanges. In one he avoided addressing a student’s valid points about privilege by steering well away from what the student was saying and going to an apparently pre-canned ad hominem attack on the student, attempting to label him a hypocrite for not giving up his spot as a student to a less privileged person. An ad hominem attack is, of course, a logical fallacy. In the second exchange he employed a different logical fallacy, which could be variously described as a false dichotomy, an “all or nothing” logical fallacy, or a false dilemma, regarding the recognition of land rights for indigenous peoples. Recognizing one group’s rights to a piece of land does not require unravelling every single change of ownership that took place everywhere in the world, ever. Regarding Al’s question on how much it would cost to compensate Native Americans (or any other indigenous people) for the wrongs done to them and for the land stolen from them… the amount would, of course, be astronomical, and such a level of compensation would be impractical to implement. BUT if you can reach an agreement with a group of indigenous people that rights some of the wrongs of the past, an agreement that both parties are happy with, how is this precluded by the impossibility of righting every wrong ever?
I admire Al’s patience in wading through the output from people like Milo Y and Dinesh D for the gems of well supported and logically sound wisdom that they must serve up occasionally. I don’t have the patience for that, if people are presenting bollocks to me and claiming it as some pyrrhic victory over the progressives, then I’m going to move on and try to find someone to listen to who can do a little better.
