A method of debate dating back to the 4th century BC has secured opponents of GamerGate a decisive victory during a panel discussion at the Society of Professional Journalists' Airplay event in Miami.
The debate, which pitted leading proponents and opponents of GamerGate against each other, ended prematurely after a bomb scare called by unknown parties opposed to GamerGate caused the building to be evacuated.
The act of calling a bomb scare as a means of decisively winning an argument originated in classical Greece. Its first recorded use occurs in one of Plato’s dialogues between the philosopher Socrates and a man named Alcibiades.
Having been bested by his younger opponent the elderly sage announces that he has spied a large explosive device concealed behind a nearby olive tree and that the party must flee at once.
Socrates is later hailed a hero and pronounced winner of the debate while his presumptuous opponent Alcibiades is exiled in chains.
In modern times Socrates is best known for his oft-quoted maxim:
“The only true wisdom is in learning that there is a bomb in the building. Please leave your belongings and vacate the premises immediately via the fire exits.”
The method has since been adopted by other renowned philosophers and debaters, most notably Immanuel Kant who concluded his seminal work “The Critique of Pure Reason”: “My God, a bomb! The source of this infernal ticking is cruelly revealed before I can fully draw together the disparate strands of my argument and reach full resolution. My friends, I beg of you, drop this book and flee this place at once. I will apply the little knowledge of explosives I gleaned from my Navy Seal training and attempt to defuse the device. Hurry! Away with you at once! The final grains of sand cascade through the neck of the hourglass. The time of detonation draws inexorably near!”
Following the bomb scare at Airplay the journalist Milo Yianopoulos, who represented GamerGate at the event, praised Anti-GamerGate for their commanding performance in the debate:
“What I find deeply humbling is the fact that whoever deployed this argument against me and my co-panelists was able to do so without even attending the debate itself. In the face of such mastery of the dialectic arts I can do little more than respectfully doff my Fedora. As an act of submission I will be dyeing my hair turquoise.”
Mode 5 approached multiple opponents of GamerGate and in each case queried whether the Socratic bomb scare method should have any place in contemporary debate.
On each occasion a bomb scare was announced before an answer could be given.
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