Hoppriori Posted July 6, 2014 Posted July 6, 2014 If you're familiar with college (or, to a lesser extent, high school) policy debate, you might be aware of this situation already. If not, I'll give a brief description of the activity first before describing the particular controversy. Brief Explanation of Policy Debate So, policy debate is a competitive activity in which students (generally a pair of students from a given university) compete in front of a judge, who awards the "team that did the best debating" (note, this is the only mandatory, established parameter of the ballot) a "ballot" (the judge votes for the team that "did the best debating", and they advance, having won the round). Generally speaking, this is the structure of competitive policy debate: every year, a committee gathers and decides upon a resolution. It's generally some sort of statement along the lines of: "Resolved: The United States Federal Government should X", with X differing from year to year (last year's college topic dealt with limiting the war powers of the president, this year's will probably deal with decriminalization or legaliztaion of a number of substances/activities, like prostitution, marijuana, etc.). In each round, two teams are given the positions (either randomly or by a coin flip/mutual agreement - it depends upon the round) of either "affirmative" or "negative", and we generally expect the affirmative ("aff") to somehow "affirm" the truth of the resolution (that the USFG should do X). The most common way of doing this is by presenting a plan - one specific policy in which the USFG's doing X is justified (example: if the resolution is to increase transportation infrastructure investment, one conceivable plan is investment in a particular highway or rail system), and the affirmative will provide advantages to such a plan (investing in high speed rail solves global warming, and global warming is bad because <Day After Tomorrow>). The negative ("neg"), by contrast has to negate the truth of the affirmative, which doesn't mean they have to disprove the entire resolution, only that they have to disprove the plan (they may offer disadvantages to the plan, like that building this specific highway could kill some animals that are important for the environment, and damaging in the environment in this way hurts people because <hippienonsense>, or they might offer "counterplans", which are other policies the United States could adopt that solve the reasons why the plan is a good idea - we could imagine things like cloud whitening or carbon taxes solving warming - but avoid the disadvantages to the plan - a carbon tax doesn't build a highway, which means it doesn't hurt biodiversity). In general, most debates are decided by some calculation of whether or not the plan is a good idea. Teams are expected to take positions that they don't agree with (I'm an anarchocapitalist, but I took the hypothetical position that a certain trade agreement with Europe was a good thing because it would make the American empire sustainable, and I defended reasons why the American empire is a good thing, which basically came down to "American hegemony stops wars between big nations, a decline in hegemony would cause those nations to fill in the vacuum to become local powers", which is obviously something I don't believe in real life), because the theory is that debating multiple perspectives (state good/bad, imperialism good/bad, capitalism good/bad, environmental regulations good/bad, etc.) will make us more educated about these sorts of issues, and education is important. Also, it's a generally fun activity. Now, one thing that is really important is that there are no strictly enforced rules in this activity. There might be guidelines set by the tournament and, depending on who the judge is, enforcement of these guidelines might differ (example: let's imagine the tournament says students have 8 minutes of "prep time" that they can take before their speech to gather their arguments - a judge might arbitrarily just set this to 10 minutes, because there's no policy debate police who come in to check and make sure they're playing 'according to the rules'). This also means that the teams are not actually obligated (by any enforced mechanism) to debate in the style I've described ("aff presents a plan that affirms the resolution+advantages, neg presents counterplan+disadvantages, judge votes for the least-bad policy"), because, in policy debate, "anything is up for debate", including the rules themselves. So, let's say that an affirmative presents their plan to put a lot of troops in Asia, reason being that the Chinese are evil and want to take over the world, and only Uncle Sam can stop from. Well, the negative could conceivably respond not by talking about the reasons why putting troops in Asia is bad (because it could provoke China, is expensive, etc.), but why the affirmative's speech was bad and they should be rejected for it. The negative could conceivably say that the way the affirmative has portrayed China relies on assumptions that are racist or irrational (there's literature on why a constant fear of security threats is bad and results in "threat construction" - the nuances don't really matter for this example), and that the affirmative should be rejected on the basis of these assumptions (even if they aren't actual reasons why the material consequences of the affirmative's plan are bad). Another example: Affirmative says we need to send troops to Iraq to "get the terrorists" or something, with a "terrorism bad" advantage (terrorism causes Middle Eastern war, which kills a lot of people, troops stop it - on face, this seems like a good thing). Instead of reading reasons why sending troops to Iraq is a bad thing (we'd screw up Iraq), the negative reads reasons why the motivations and justifications for "getting the terrorists" are a bad thing (this logic is the sort of thing that justifies eroding civil liberties, that justifies killing innocents, and that creates terrorists in the first place). Some of these might also be reasons why the plan results in bad stuff, but the reason why the affirmative should lose, the neg argues, is that their speech advocates bad representations and the representations/way we speak is (for whatever reason - things like "it's the only thing we learn in this actual round - obviously the judge's ballot doesn't actually change policy" or "representations inform our policy decisions, which means examining them is a prerequisite") more important than hypothetical consequences of the plan. This is called a kritik (the German word for "criticism") because it criticizes one assumption of the plan. Now, going even further, the fact that there are no rules in debate has led us to debate what debate itself should be about. As above, should the judge be voting for a team based on the consequences of the policy that they advocate, or because of the representations and justifications for that policy? It's not entirely clear, because the only condition on the judge's ballot is "Vote for the team that did the better debating" - so debaters debate about what the role of the ballot is, and this is called framework. In other works, the "framework" or structure by which debate should operate. One of the simplest and most common ways this plays out is called "topicality". So, this previous year's resolution on the high school circuit was "The United States Federal Government should substantially increase its economic engagement towards one or more of the following countries: Mexico, Venezuela, or Cuba." One thing that's problematic about this and every other resolution is that we're not really sure what a term like "economic engagement" means. So we could imagine a plantext like "remove the Cuban embargo", which is pretty uncontroversially economic engagement (like, there are certain definitions of the topic that might make this "non-topical", but it's obviously an expected advocacy for the aff). But let's imagine an affirmative that has the United States reform its immigration policy (for simplicity's sake, the plan is just to have open borders). Is that "economic engagement"? Well, that's sort of unclear - some definitions of "economic engagement" say that it's basically just trade agreements, so, in that case, it might not actually affirm the resolution. We could even imagine an argument that this affirmative isn't "towards Mexico" because it reforms immigration policy for immigrants of every other country as well, and the actual object receiving the engagement isn't Mexico, but immigrants from Mexico. So the question of "what should we debate about" is something that frequently comes up, and teams will offer differing interpretations of words on the topic to either exclude a plan (if they're negative) or justify that plan (if they're affirmative). Generally, it's not so clear which definition is right (one definition says immigration is part of economic engagement, another one says economic engagement is solely trade policy. What should the judge prefer?), so debaters debate about what the parameters of the topic should be as well. Generally, this comes down to two arguments: 1) Fairness - we need some predictable barriers on what can be discussed in order to actually have a fair discussion (in which teams are prepared to discuss a topic in-depth). Obviously, if the topic is Iran policy and you start talking about ice cream regulations, I'm not going to be prepared, which is unfair. Fairness is important because it's a prerequisite to having an in-depth discussion of the affirmative (which is the only way I can actually productively engage you and we can become educated about the topic), and because debate is a competitive activity and teams deserve a level of equity in which both can play (if the affirmative's plan is completely unpredictable, they're going to have an unfair advantage and win an inordinate amount of the time). 2) Education - this subject matter is important to discuss because it's educational in nature. We could perhaps limited the topic down to one specific policy (if I'm only allowed to discuss the Cuban embargo and no other area of the topic, the debate is easier and "fairer" for the negative, but we lose out on discussing a lot of important things. Similarly, immigration policy is hugely important, in constant media focus, and constitutes a pretty substantial part of the United States' interactions with Mexico. It seems like an important area to discuss). So this is the basic set-up for policy debate that you have to know. There are some expected standards for discussion that most people approach debate with, but, ultimately, everything is up for debate, which means people have to justify not only their positions in debate, but why those positions should be discussed in the first place. Open borders and free immigration may be very good things, but if they aren't part of the topic and if we shouldn't actually be discussing them in the first place (in this particular forum/debate round), then it doesn't matter how good your plan is, because it should be excluded (for reasons of "fairness" and "education") from the parameters of our discussion. Recent Controversy (Skip Here if you understand current debate) http://www.reddit.com/r/cringe/comments/24py6m/black_university_students_fervently_stutter_about/ Here's a reddit thread that (kind of immaturely) addresses the basic thing I'm going to talk about. There exists a contingent of debaters that do not conform to the traditional model of policy debate. These "kritikal" debaters, instead of advocating a plan text, may affirm the resolution in other ways (again, because there's no set rule that they have to offer a plan text and, even if they were, that rule could probably be up for debate in front of many judges). So, instead of topic about immigration policy, for example (if the resolution is: "Resolved: the USFG should substantially liberalize its immigration policy."), they might talk about the racist motivations for current US immigration policy, without actually endorsing a specific change to the policy. This can make it difficult to be negative for a number of reasons, mostly that the lack of a plan text or stable policy advocacy means the negative doesn't really have policy reasons why the affirmative is bad, so they lose a lot of their traditional "offense" (or routes to win the round). The neg doesn't get to read "open borders are bad" disadvantages because opening the borders isn't something the aff is necessarily advocating. The aff is just saying that their speech (talking about racism in immigration policy) is important irrespective of whether or not the policy is good/bad, and because they don't change the policy and the judge is only voting for "whoever did the best debating", their speech should be rewarded with the ballot. This is not what the debaters in the link I've provided are doing - they are practicing this form of criticism in a more extreme way. These debaters ("race" or "alternative" debaters) are criticizing the institution of policy debate itself. Here are the basic assumptions: 1) Debate is an activity for white privilege - rich suburban debaters (who are predominantly white or Asian) are able to used their privileged position in society (their private schools fly them to tournaments at prestigious universities, they have access to extensive libraries, they have time to do research on their own) to win debate tournaments, so this entire activity is an exercise in white privilege. 2) We debate about "white" issues without any regard for issues relevant to the black community, which: 2a) reinforces "whiteness" in that we talk about the United States federal government (which is racist - the US is a racist, "white" institution that oppresses black people, and forcing black debaters to advocate it because they are 'affirmative' is evil, because they're being forced to advocate an evil institution that oppresses them) and issues pertinent to white debaters (imperialism, trade policy, etc., all of which are "white" issues). 2c) excludes black debaters and ignores issues relevant to the debate community (we don't discuss things like poverty, race, or how the United States is racially oppressive - instead, we generally talk about foreign policy, hypothetical wars with China and Russia, global warming, etc.). In other words, the current model of debate is either itself racist (because it is an institution of 'white privilege') or excludes discussion relevant to the black community, which is by extension racist. So, let's imagine a topic like the one I mentioned previously. "Resolved: The United States Federal Government should substantially increase its economic engagement towards one or more of the following countries: Cuba, Mexico, or Venezuela." An alternative debater goes into a debate round and is selected to be affirmative (to prove that the USFG should increase its engagement). They would not affirm the resolution. Instead, they would either: A) Talk about how US policy towards Latin America is racist and they cannot morally advocate it (please remember that debate is, by nature, a "switch side" competitive activity, so we are assumed to advocate positions with which we do not necessarily agree, because this is educationally productive). In other words, they would ignore their traditionally conceived obligation to be "affirmative" and negate the resolution on kritikal terms. or B) Ignore the resolution in its entirety and talk about their experiences as oppressed black men/women, how society and debate are racist, and why the judge should vote for them to condemn this racism and approve of some sort of anti-racist, "counter-oppressive pedagogy" that tries to reform debate (or at least doesn't sanction the prevailing racist institution of debate). Obviously, negative teams will read arguments like topicality and framework against these affs, saying that they do not affirm the resolution and that they have a prima facia obligation to do so, but the affirmative will respond that these arguments are exclusionary (obviously, because they try to exclude some type of debating style) and, by extension, racist. Remember that the only two reasons why topicality and traditional framework matter are fairness and education, but, these teams respond: 1) Debate isn't fair, because they're oppressed by it and excluded, and the sort of "fairness" that favors a white, oppressive institution like debate shouldn't be preserved anyway. The fact that the game is "fun" for the privileged white boys who play (because it is fair) is not a reason why that game should be preserved. 2) The subjects that we become educated about in debate do not matter, because our debate round does not actually effect US policy and, even if it did, the US is racist and we should have nothing to do with it anyway, except burning it down. Education about the way racism operates in society and how the affirmative team is oppressed by white institutions is more important because it can change the way that we, in the round, actually interact with one another and confront racism. In other words "screw the rules - they're racist". Many of you might respond that "why would they engage this institution if they think it's racist", and the general answer they'll give is: A) Because they can reform this institution. B) Because they need to prove that it's racist, and exposing racism is a good thing. C) Because they can win prestige and prizes by being awarded in tournaments, which helps them personally (essentially, their lives suck because they're black and oppressed, debate is a form of therapy that ameliorates that oppression). D) Even if they can't reform the institution, racist institutions just need to be destroyed. The author they most cite talking about this (point D specifically) is a guy named Frank Wilderson, who wrote a book called "Black, White & Red". The basic philosophy (Afropessimism) goes something like this: 1) Blacks in the US had their identity stripped away from them through the slave trade. 2) The new cultural identity of "the black" is linked with negativity and slavery ("negritude") 3) This means blacks are beyond the bounds of respectable "Civil Society", which is an 'ontologically white' institution. 4) Being outside civil society means you socially don't matter, so blacks live in a state of "social death" (this means someone who is phenotypically black but within "civil society" like Barack Obama is actually "ontologically white" - he's part of the white power structure). 5) Blacks cannot be integrated into civil society and retain an identity independent of whiteness, nor can they create some positive black identity outside of civil society, because they're still "ontologically dead" (blues music et al is fundamentally linked with slavery). 6) If that's the case, blacks need to "burn down" civil society (institutions of whiteness - the USFG, collegiate debate, etc.) and destroy white institutions, because they're evil and exclusionary. Question Time So, my question is twofold. Anyone can respond with their thoughts - I'd be particularly interested in what Stefan Molyneux (or anyone with policy debate experience) has to say, because, if I recall correctly, he was a successful policy debater in high school or college on the Canadian circuit? (I'm on the US college circuit, so things may be different internationally, because Wilderson's philosophy is very particular to racial culture in America and because its takeover of debate is a pretty recent phenomena in the last ten years or so): 1) What do you think of debate framework in general? Can you come up with a theory for why traditional policy debate should be preserved, why allowing this sort of alternative debate (not just in the abstract, but specifically in traditional policy debate forums) is a bad thing, and why retaining a competitive environment to discuss policy in this way is productive? 2) What do you think of the alternative debate argument? That debate is racist and white or, at least, the attempt to exclude sorts of discourses that do not conform to debate is a racist policy? I'm open to clarify anything about the state of policy debate if you want, or if anything above is unclear. Thanks.
500 Posted July 6, 2014 Posted July 6, 2014 As a long-time debater, I'm aware that most people don't care about competitive debate. If you're looking to get broader engagement on your questions, which can spark some interesting conversation, I'd recommend that you truncate your OP. The section explaining policy debate can be largely cut without loosing much explanatory power. If you start with the standards of fairness and education, you'd capture the important internal standards for framework setting in a round, while having a significantly shorter post. I was on the edge of asking for a tl;dr before I even started reading. To your questions: 1 - competitive debate was valuable for me because it provided a framework to hone my critical thinking & research skills faster than any previous educational experience. Learning to get to the point within a short time-frame, and delivering a clear speech are skills that have spillover applications to any profession you will engage in later down the road. Retaining debate structure is valuable because it fosters those skills for most people who engage in the activity. I don't think that allowing the alternate framework is bad, I wouldn't pick up a team that ran that case (unless their opponents became so flummoxed that they allowed the alternates to steer the entire conversation). The aff's job is to run with the motion. Neg might have more grounds for running the alt case, but they can integrate that into the traditional speech structure. 2 - i don't think debate is any more discriminatory than any other school activity that can correlate success with funding. All other things being equal, wealthier teams will tend to do better, whether sports or debate. There are racial / social correlates to wealth, which have been established and maintained through state power, and insofar as policy debates focus on government action, the perpetuated narratives will trend towards reinforcing the interests of policy makers. That would be true whether a policy circuit was in Canada, Morocco, or Malaysia. As such, I think it might be more classist than racist. Despite that, learning to develop critical thinking skills is valuable, even if it takes place in a biased context. My biggest problem with policy is that the debaters' primary goal seems to be destroying the sound barrier with their mouths. The top level debaters in the American high school national circuit win simply because they drop the fewest amount of 'cards' (pieces of evidence). When policy debate becomes a comparison of the length of footnotes, actual discussions about debate paradigms may be a welcome change, even if the current iteration that you illustrated is cumbersome. Exempting the alternative race discussion, what do you think of the state of policy debate?
Hippehoppe Posted July 6, 2014 Posted July 6, 2014 1 - competitive debate was valuable for me because it provided a framework to hone my critical thinking & research skills faster than any previous educational experience. Learning to get to the point within a short time-frame, and delivering a clear speech are skills that have spillover applications to any profession you will engage in later down the road. Retaining debate structure is valuable because it fosters those skills for most people who engage in the activity. I don't think that allowing the alternate framework is bad, I wouldn't pick up a team that ran that case (unless their opponents became so flummoxed that they allowed the alternates to steer the entire conversation). The aff's job is to run with the motion. Neg might have more grounds for running the alt case, but they can integrate that into the traditional speech structure. 2 - i don't think debate is any more discriminatory than any other school activity that can correlate success with funding. All other things being equal, wealthier teams will tend to do better, whether sports or debate. There are racial / social correlates to wealth, which have been established and maintained through state power, and insofar as policy debates focus on government action, the perpetuated narratives will trend towards reinforcing the interests of policy makers. That would be true whether a policy circuit was in Canada, Morocco, or Malaysia. As such, I think it might be more classist than racist. Despite that, learning to develop critical thinking skills is valuable, even if it takes place in a biased context. My biggest problem with policy is that the debaters' primary goal seems to be destroying the sound barrier with their mouths. The top level debaters in the American high school national circuit win simply because they drop the fewest amount of 'cards' (pieces of evidence). When policy debate becomes a comparison of the length of footnotes, actual discussions about debate paradigms may be a welcome change, even if the current iteration that you illustrated is cumbersome. Exempting the alternative race discussion, what do you think of the state of policy debate? 1. I'm a little confused on what your view of the "aff's job" is? I'm in favor of allowing a debate over framework, but I ultimately think that there is a "correct" framework for debate. Here's more or less my belief: 1a) Debaters should have to defend the value of their model of debate against the alternative framework - that competitive debate with predictable parameters and policy focus is a worthwhile activity. That is, they have to win education and fairness style impacts in a traditional framework debate. 1b) If the negative's offense comes down to "you are excluding us from debate - our issues are important as well", I think that the "wrong forums" argument makes sense. I.e., that the presupposed basis of our discussion was a traditional engagement of the resolution. Disengagement of the resolution through a discussion of race in society might be worthwhile, but that doesn't mean excluding it from this forum is somehow uniquely racist, any more than excluding a discussion of the Syrian civil war from a medical conference implicitly supports Syrian genocide. On the aff, I think this sets up a strong permutation of the race K ("Race is important, we should discuss that - the fact that we haven't done so here is not a problem. All my framework standards - why debate is good - are offense for the permutation"), on the neg I think this sets up defense to the alternative aff's framework standards ("Discussing race and oppression are good, but other forums solve that better, which means they aren't unique offense for your framework interpretation" - in other words, a link take-out because those standards aren't intrinsic to policy debate). 2. I'm not sure that debate really reinforces entrenched interests of policymakers - debaters are required to think rationally about issues and critically examine them from multiple perspectives. Policy makers adopt bad policies primarily because they do not make policy based on rational examination of issues, but because they adopt one perspective when approaching an issue (Example: "Bob legislates in favor of unions not because union rights are good and he's weighed the advantages and disadvantages of this policy, but because unions give him cash and votes, so he has a personal incentive to give them benefits"). Debate divorces ideology from policy, which forces debaters to approach issues ground-up (notice the complete lack of debaters who are against open immigration - that's because there's basically no offensive literature against immigration). Even so let's accept that debate pushes people to accept hegemony and imperialism as good, because this is the strategically "best" impact in debate (in terms of leveraging offense against the other side/turning their impacts) - so debaters are incentivized to advocate imperialism, and this serves policy makers' interests (american security thinktanks/military industrial complex). I don't think the activity of policy debate somehow uniquely contributes to an entrenchment of these positions, because these are publicly held beliefs anyway (in other words, the "serving the state DA" is non-unique). The only way debaters change is by a shift to the "left" (in either the anti-state/biopower libertarian left or towards an anti-cap left), which isn't the "entrenched interests" impact that the race K is talking about. In other words, policy debate controls uniqueness on this question, which means the only direction of offense is in anti-state education (everyone joins debate loving American imperialism because they're a microsm of American society, so there's only a chance that some of them will be convinced by the heg impact turns or cap K and turn out "good", so traditional debate has a net positive impact on critical education). 3. Speed issues - I don't find that this is actually a problem. Debate has a bad learning curve for novices in the first few weeks, and spreading makes the rounds unbearable for older debaters who haven't judged in a while or for spectators, but, ultimately, it's a net positive for the educational experience. Top level high school debaters very rarely lose rounds because they run out of time or drop arguments - the pressure of time limits+tons of arguments means they have to prioritize sections of debate, which forces them to think about arguments logically (in terms of identifying them syllogistically and picking out the weakest parts they can win on) and in-depth. I'm upper-medium range speed, which means that I'm en par with most debaters but will have a hard time matching the top level of the college brackets in speed. But this means that I just have to get better in "big picture" debate (on the high school circuit, this is why I always went for long-term hegemonic decline impacts, because it allowed me to disregard some of the nuances of the disads, "homogenize" and group the offense, and win the impact debate through deeper analysis) - in other words, this lends itself to different styles of debate. Slower debaters will specialize in big impacts and kritiks (smaller schools also specialize in trickier strategies, because they can't overwhelm bigger programs with huge research resources through evidence quality), faster debaters will try establishing multiple points of offense (I'm a 2A, so our 1ACs on high school would have maybe two advantages, but they'd be long and well-developed: versus the 5 advantages that would "spread out" the other team). Speed forces debaters to interact with a lot offense and get an in-depth discussion of a policy in 8 minutes. I ran a trade aff with a hegemony (and european war) impact, and instead of debating the predictable: Trade good/bad Imperialism good/bad I had to debate these issues as well as biopower, the nuances of that trade agreement's passage and the strategy of the US trade representative, immigration, Mexican energy policy, cartels, the Asia Pivot, German automobile industries, Senate ratification process, Iranian nuclear proliferation, Brazilian relations, etc. etc. Oftentimes, 6 or 7 of these in one round, and getting into the nuances of how they interact with on another. Bad teams might lose because they drop an argument and don't know what to do, but the top of the high school and college circuits, even if they are incredibly slow and drop an entire flow, will still be able to win because they'll be able to do better big picture analysis on the intersection of these arguments. Speed has a learning curve, but once debaters figure out how to overcome it, it doesn't make debate just a contest to see whose faster - it compresses more arguments into less time, which makes debaters think more critically. I don't really see any problems with policy debate other than the conflict between debaters and those who kritik debate. Big teams (well-funded teams) obviously have strategic advantages, but these can be overcome through dedication (like Stef says, "the poor have advantages in society because they'll work harder than the rich - they'll find creative ways of displacing them"). I came from a smaller school, but I did a huge amount of research and probably matched or surpassed the total output of the best schools on the national high school circuit, and we regularly got into "upsets" and beat top-tier teams. So I don't think most of the problem arises from poor debaters just being helpless, but from those debaters disregarding the structure of the activity and using their poverty as a tool to "buy the ballot". Otherwise, I think debate is a very productive activity. Some of the discussion on the high school circuit is a little shallow ("hegemony good/bad", for example - almost nobody understands IR, so these sound terrible when novices or even mid-level debaters debate), but that's just the nature of the game (13 or 14 year olds aren't going to sound like Mearsheimer or Nye - doesn't mean that the sort of immature discussions they're having aren't worthwhile, though). I do think that the policy "game" of debate disregards "first principles" philosophy, but: 1) That's not necessarily a bad thing - monopoly and Risk disregard philosophy too, but it doesn't mean it has to be included (again, race and kantian ethics don't have to be included in a forum just because they're worthwhile) 2) If people are interested, they can learn about these things on their own - debate would be a much smaller activity if this year's resolution were: "Resolved: Objectivist ethics are correct", because nobody would care, and the only people who would care/still participate in the activity are people who are already thinking about these things on their own (again, a reason why point 1 - the inclusion of these topics is not necessary - is true).
Hoppriori Posted July 7, 2014 Author Posted July 7, 2014 EDIT: Apparently I had created two accounts for FDR, both variants of Hoppe's name (Hoppriori, and Hippehoppe), and just forgot about the earlier one. I goof'd. That post above me is the same user^
TDB Posted July 14, 2014 Posted July 14, 2014 2) What do you think of the alternative debate argument? That debate is racist and white or, at least, the attempt to exclude sorts of discourses that do not conform to debate is a racist policy?It sounds silly to me. Do they want to reform it somehow, or just abolish it?
AustinJames Posted July 15, 2014 Posted July 15, 2014 2) What do you think of the alternative debate argument? That debate is racist and white or, at least, the attempt to exclude sorts of discourses that do not conform to debate is a racist policy? The alternative debate argument reminds me of conversations I have had with women who refuse to accept logic and rationale as standards for discussion. They say that their understanding is more "emotional" or "abstract," and assert that throwing arguments around based on logic and rationale is misogynistic, because their female brains aren't wired to understand it, and I, as a man, have an unfair advantage in producing logical arguments (oddly, they often call themselves feminists). I point out to them that they are using logic and rational thought to produce and articulate their responses. If someone can provide a method whereby we may compare ideas logically, outside the construct of debate, I am open to hearing it. It seems, however, inevitable that someone providing such a methodology would have to work within the very construct they decry. If you use rational arguments in order to convince me of the truthfulness of a claim, you are debating. So in other words, debating the invalidity of debate is like using logic in order to invalidate logic; self-detonating.
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