The lawyers in the audience will be very quick to recognize what this is: The Socratic Method. To quote the University of Chicago Law School website on the topic:
In practice, it is not always about finding contradictions, but about exposing assumptions and basically teaching people to literally question everything. Of course, as the old saying goes, you don’t want your mind to be so open your brain falls out, but you should always check your own assumptions.
For instance, applied here, we should note that we have no idea when that video was shot. We aren’t even sure where it was shot, or who was participating. We are sharing it because it has recently gotten attention and it speaks for itself. But we admittedly don’t know much beyond that.
The Socratic Method is also a fun way to drive a person crazy on TSMSFKA Twitter (The Social Media Site Formerly Known As Twitter), Socratically interrogating the positions of leftists and showing how incoherent it is. But it’s also probably why this author is on a lot of leftist block lists. As one TSMSFKA Twitter user noted a while back:
The most extreme version of the Socratic method used to be practiced at Harvard Law School. The movie The Paper Chase is a pretty soap-opera version of what Harvard Law used to be in the 1970s, but the Socratic Method is on full display in the film. A more grounded version is found in the book One-L by Scott Turow. Turow is now one of those lawyers-who-became-a-novelist types, most famous for writing the book Presumed Innocent. But One-L is nonfictional, discussing his first year at Harvard Law School and we recommend it for anyone interested in law school. But these days no school is truly as tough as Harvard Law was back then, using a gentler variation of the Socratic Method.
Going back to checking our assumptions, in the video the student bases his entire argument on these posts from Rowling:
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