Sam Seder Never Actually Debates Anyone

Sam Seder had a great opportunity to debate criminal justice on Wednesday. Instead, he did what everyone thought he would do: Asked questions for two hours, and didn't actually refute anything his opponent said.

Sam Seder's only "debate" tactic has gotten quite old over the years. His debate style consists of asking his opponent questions until he might get lucky enough to catch his opponent in a question him/her might not be able to answer. He (unsuccessfully) tried his usual tactic again today (because it seems this is the only way he knows how to debate), and wasn't able to successfully pin down his opponent with any sort of "gotcha" question, but even more embarrassingly, he never actually refuted anything his opponent said, or even presented an argument to the contrary.

Seder's debate against Sean Fitzgerald (Actual Justice Warrior on YouTube) turned out to be so boring though that I had trouble staying focused for the duration. In between daydreams, I occasionally would muster up enough energy to re-focus my attention back to the conversation streaming from the Roku unit connected to the cheap-o Vizio flatscreen television in my den, and almost every single time I was able to focus on the screen without my eyes crossing, I watched Sam Seder attempt to bring Fitzgerald far out into the metaphorical weeds with dumb, disingenuous questions; and at one point, Seder actually tried to compare  the fluctuation of the temperature of his office in Brooklyn, NY to crime rates (and yes, I do know that sounds incredibly fucking stupid, and trust me, it most likely felt even stupider for me to type out on this blog a moment ago then it is for you to read it; but please just click the timestamped link above to watch this for yourself because there's just absolutely no way I can describe this moment in literary format in any sort of intelligible or coherent fashion).

Sam Seder did eventually claim that his counter argument to Fitzgerald's argument was that it was the pandemic that caused the uptick in crime rates. That said, I do need to stipulate that Seder never actually described how the "desperation" people may have felt during the pandemic would cause the New York City murder rate to rise, and much less how murdering people out of mere economic "desperation" makes the act in and of itself less bad, but I digress...

Seder then goes on to list off all the societal damage the government caused during 2020, 2021, and 2022 (with which I agree, by the way; even though Seder pretends it was the virus the caused all the damage to our country, as if the coronavirus was passing legislation and issuing edicts from its golden viral throne, and not federal, state, and local governments), including "learning deficiencies in kids" (which Sam Seder seemingly had no problem with up until that very moment, as he's spent a good time advocating that schools shouldn't be open during the pandemic, even during the "omicron surge," which statistically had significant lower mortality rates than the other variants), "increase in pedestrian deaths" (which, I'm assuming he's talking about the 2022 numbers specifically, because I investigated this claim briefly while writing this article, and it turns out that "pedestrian deaths" had actually already been on the rise anyway from 2010 to 2021 according to the data, from 4,302 to 7,628 respectively, according to the New York Times article I believe he was referring to; but the problem is, they actually went down in 2022, to 7,508 (and even though this is a small drop, that actually doesn't matter according to Sam Seder's own logic, and he proves this during his entire debate with Fitzgerald with his argument about the very small drop in crime last year, on which his entire counterargument relies); so Sam, if you're reading this right now, you're a fucking idiot, dude), "increase in inflation" (which Sam Seder probably would have told you wouldn't materialize back in 2020, as we approached the moment when the central bank decided to print well over 25% of the dollars currently in circulation, because it's not clear as of the time of this writing whether or not he even believes printing money creates inflation at all) and an "increase of destruction of uh... uh... of... sort of... all levels of society" (Seder's own words). Again, Seder never actually outlines at all during the entire debate specifically how "desperation" from a "once-in-a-lifetime pandemic" actually causes one person to go out and murder a fellow human being - but maybe he thinks it was just the "pandemic-induced stress."

But, as I stated earlier, Seder never really even refuted anything Fitzgerald actually said anyway, so the whole "debate" (if that's what you call Sam Seder asking his opponent a bunch of insincere questions to try to catch him in a moment of ambiguity (if he actually could, and he couldn't in this particular case), as if that would somehow disprove everything else his opponent says during the discussion) is a bit boring. But if you'd like, we've embedded the 2-hour long discussion below for you to watch for yourself, if you so choose (and if you do, you truly have my sympathy).