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War of '09: Match #7 - Maxx Hero vs. CM Dealer

581 views 2 replies 3 participants last post by  CM Dealer 
#1 ·
Is it appropriate to debate anything?​

Deadline to hand in your debate will be Sunday March 8th. Failure to show will result in an automatic disqualification. As previously mentioned, your debates are to be posted in this thread only.

You have the option to choose your own side of the topic so you may debate the same side without consequence.

Good luck.
 
#2 ·
OCC-This is a a modified version of a speech that I frequently used last year in my high school debates. It has a 15-0 record, so it is quite successful. It is a five and a half minute speech, and uses the ideas of one American political scientist and three French philosophers. It is extremly revelant to the topic so I figured I would go for it. Enjoy, and if anyone has questions, just PM me.

Hillside over the sea. A man sits...on a...seat...Near him we...see...convulsed forms...corpses to the sky ...The man takes a ...sandwich out..."Safe at last" he says...The man...is Doctor Lee...He was...lacerated ...to...organisms manifesting wills different from...his own...He decided to end the whole...thing...by turning everyone into himself. This he proposed to do by a virus...that would spread waves of tranquility...until the world was a fit place...He called it the "beautiful disease"...He painted a culture of image meal with radium paint and put it in an iron box...He...opened the box. "Ladies and gentlemen of planet earth introducing 'Johnny 23'”...He had convinced himself that "Johnny 23" would simply remove from the planet hostile alien forces...through peaceful penetration...The doctor was not a man who argued with himself. The first public appearance of "Johnny 23" demonstrated a miscalculation. ..."Johnny 23" was one hundred percent fatal. The...doctor had...a narrow escape...when the worthy vessels found out who "Johnny 23" is. Fortunately the epidemic was well advanced by that time and "Johnny 23" finished the job. He finishes his sandwich...It is... peaceful...on the hillside...Last man here now.

I quote this chapter from Will Burroughs' novel, Exterminator! not as another card, but as a story for us to consider in relation to our lives and our participation in debates. While we don't wish to mock my interlocutors' advocacy, I'm trying to recognize how by debating we engage in risky utopian discourse that ignores the disturbing implications of our own thoughts and actions. The above tale teaches us that sometimes our resolve to make a better world comes attached with a refusal to question ourselves. This propagates the image concentrate which Doctor Lee called the 'beautiful disease'. For this reason I negate the resolution and take the position that not only is it not ok to debate anything, but that we should instead not debate anything.

Debate practices concentrate argument into a polemic commodity with pre-packaged cards, forced negation, timed speeches, and a fixation on winning to the detriment of debate's revolutionary potential. Deleuze and Guattari discuss this in their book, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

How poor ... literature is ... starting from the ideology ... Ideology, it is the most confused notion because it keeps us from seizing the relationship to the literary machine ... The moment when the emitted sign breaks though this "form of content" that was attempting to maintain the sign ... when language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes it a signifying thing, but by what causes it to move, to flow, and to explode.... literature is ... schizophrenia: a process and not a goal, a production and not an expression. ... oedipalization is ... the most important factors in the reduction of literature to an object ... It is not a question here of the personal oedipalization of the author and ...readers, but of the Oedipal form ... The work of art is supposed to inscribe itself ...between the two poles of Oedipus, problem and solution,...he ... regressive, ... redistributes the nonresolved conflicts ..., and the ... progressive, ... invents... paths leading toward a... future of man....and revolution...The Oedipal form of literature is its commodity form.... any literature that ...sets ends for itself, instead of being a process ... transports the weak,....

The critical issue here is not the misinterpretation of content, but the reduction of content to a restrictive format. No one in debate has pointed this out more than Gordon Mitchell. ('Pedagogical Possibilities for Argumentative Agency in Academic Debate'), He explains how the laboratory model of debate desensitizes participants to human suffering and enslaves our activity in a spectator-mentality :

... the notion of the academic debate tournament as a sterile laboratory carries with it some disturbing implications, when ... the barriers demarcating such space from other spheres ... beyond the school grow taller...When such barriers reach insurmountable dimensions, argumentation in the academic setting unfolds on a purely simulated plane, ...students ... argu[e]...beyond the walls of the academy as spectators, ... The ...detachment ...with the spectator posture is highlighted during episodes of alienation in which debaters cheer news of human suffering .... Instead of focusing on ... negative responses to news ... debaters overcome with ...competitive zeal ... concentrate on ... the strength of ... debate arguments.

Mitchell comes close to mentioning fascism. I define fascism as an ideal system of total power which seeks to suppress criticism. On the governmental level, this equates to dictatorships, but when we focus too much on the state, it can blind us to the micro-political groups that sustain fascism. D & G again, from their book, A Thousand Plateaus:

... there is no reason to define fascism by a concept of its own devising: ... fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular forces in interaction, ... every fascism is defined by a ...-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others, ...What makes fascism dangerous is its micropolitical power,...microformations already shap[e]ing postures, attitudes, perceptions, expectations,... It's ... easy to be antifascist ...and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you ...sustain ... nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.

Micro-fascism in debate has many facets - from paternalistic schools to representative framers. One is right to immediately notice that I link to my own kritik. Here I am reading cards, appealing to a judge. But I’m aware of these links, and I’m self-critical. While I don't believe in the panacea of communication, I’m adjacent to a debate machine that's continually recreated, one I hope will engender a liberatory of arguments. I offer an alternative of what debate could be when we move beyond performance theater to real inorganization. D & G in Anti-Oedipus:

Pure positive mulitiplicities where everything is possible, without exclusiveness or negation, ... operating without a plan, where the connections are transverse, the disjunctions included, the conjunctions polyvocal, indifferent to their underlying support, ... support receives no specificity from any structural or personal unity, but appears as the body without organs that fills the space each time ...signs of desire that compose a signifying chain ...that are not ...signifying, and do not answer to the rules of a linguistic game of chess, but instead to the lottery drawings that sometimes cause a word to be chosen, sometimes a design, sometimes a thing or a piece of a thing, depending on one another only by the order of the random drawings, and holding together only by the absence of a link... having no other statutory condition than that of being dispersed elements of desiring-machines that are themselves dispersed.

One may ask, why are you still following the rules? I wish to avoid being anti-debate. I act to sneak explosive creativities through the back-door, using the appearance of a legitimate carded position in order to further illegitimate questions and to light those critical fires that burn away the micro-fascisms of debate. Experimenting with new articulations requires a method of lodging oneself in collective assemblages, gently tipping them toward their own self-critique. D & G in A Thousand Plateaus:

You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you ... keep small supplies of significance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their ...systems when the circumstances demand it, .... You don't reach the BwO, ... by wildly destratifying. ... Staying stratified - organized, signified, subjected - is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. ...We are...a social formation; ... see how it is stratified for us ...descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage ... tip the assemblage, making it pass over t...the plane of consistency. It is ...there ... the BwO reveals itself ...: connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities. You have constructed your own ... machine, ready ... to be plugged into other ... machines.

I ask for your support not to certify that I’m a better debater, but to assist me in plugging my kritik into the debate machine. You don't have to agree with me, but I hope you agree that there is a question worth discussing in this and future rounds:

How can we unhook ourselves from debate's micro-fascistic practices that nail us down to dominant reality?

When that question is not asked the mindset that has allowed innumerable atrocities of the past is justified and allowed to proliferate. David Berube describes this snowballing effect (“Nanotechnological Prolongevity: The Down Side”).

...its destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on record – and its potential danger to the quality of life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation. For that reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse… Behind the genocide of the Holocaust lay a dehumanized thought; beneath the menecide of deviants and dissidents... lies a dehumanized image of man. While it may never be possible to quantify the impacts dehumanizing ethics may have had on humanity, it is safe to conclude the foundations of humanness offer great opportunities which would be foregone. When we calculate the actual losses and the virtual benefits, we approach a nearly inestimable value greater than any tools which we can currently use to measure it. Dehumanization is nuclear war, environmental apocalypse, and international genocide. When people become things, they become dispensable. When people are dispensable, any and every atrocity can be justified. Once justified, they seem to be inevitable for every epoch has evil and dehumanization is evil’s most powerful weapon.

The restrictive axioms of competitive debate crush opportunities for collective rethinking. Mitchell in 98. ('Pedagogical Possibilities for Argumentative Agency in Academic Debate').

Academic debaters nourished on an exclusive diet of competitive contest round experience often come to see politics like a picturesque landscape whirring by through the window of a speeding train. They study this political landscape in great detail, rarely ...entertaining the idea of stopping the train and ...alter the course of unfolding events. The ... spectator mentality deflects attention away from roads that could carry their arguments to wider spheres of public argumentation. ... academic debaters possess considerable latent agency to change the set that serves as the backdrop for their discussions ...They can accomplish this by turning their attention beyond a narrow exclusive focus on competitive success in tournament contest rounds and toward possible roles they might play in broader fields of social action.

Within the anti-oedipal form of debate we can never reach our truth revolutionary potential. Foucault in 84. ('Polemics, Politics, and Problemizations: An Interview').

...The polemicist...proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. ... the person he confronts is not a partner in search for the truth but an adversary, ... who is wrong... his final objective will be not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied. ... it isn’t dealing with an interlocutor, it is processing a suspect; it collects the proofs of his guilt, designates the infraction he has committed, and pronounces the verdict and sentences him. In any case, what we have here is not on the order of a shared investigation; the polemicist tells the truth in the form of his judgment and by virtue of the authority he has conferred on himself.

Even if this position becomes just another kritik, it's better to be a failed Foucault than a successful Doctor Lee. What's essential is rooting out all forms of fascism in our speech-acts as an ethical art of living. As Foucault explains in the preface to Anti-Oedipus:

...the ...adversary is fascism ...and not only historical fascism,...but also the fascism ... in our heads and...everyday behavior,...How does one keep from being fascist,... when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary ...This art of living counter to ... fascism, whether already present or impending, carries with it a certain number of essential principles ...Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization...Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic. ... It is the connection of desire to reality ... that possesses revolutionary force. Do not use ...political action to discredit, ... Use ...analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.

In summary, debate as we know it is antioedipal and polemic. It's nature is microfacist in it's suppression of the opponent, and our acceptance of this reentrenches us within the mentality of the dehumanization world. For this reason I reject deabete, deeming all topics appropriate to debate and instead ask each of you to join me in the body without organs until the polemic machine has been torn down.
 
#3 ·
Is it appropriate to debate anything?

There are reasons for debating some things, but some stuff just shouldn't be subject to debate. There are certainly reasons to debate important things like government budgets or what car to buy. However, too often, people get into long winded debates about trivial things; debates that aren't necessary and only cause problems. However, since the question asks if anything should be debated, the answer is yes, some things should be debated.

One part of debating that is often forgotten is that some people enjoy debating. All of the participants in the debate league are probably pretty argumentative people who simply like trying to convince other people that their ideas are wrong. I know I said earlier that only important things that affect many people should be debated, but said debate is a friendly one, then I don't see why any topic should be off limits. This topic is a perfect example. It is a purely philosophical question, and even if Barack Obama and Gordon Brown were debating, it still wouldn't have a huge effect on our country. However, I like debating, and Maxx probably does to, which is why it is fine in my mind for us to be talking about this subject.

However, too often, unimportant subjects are debated when there are better solutions. Instead of one side winning out on a trivial matter like where to eat dinner or what kind of chips to buy, people should compromise. That way, one party won't feel cheated. Debating over small issues usually leads to a bigger issue forming, which is why such unimportant arguing should be avoided and is not appropriate.

Without debating, it would be very hard to change people's minds at all. In the 1850s, many people were convinced that African-Americans, even if they weren't slaves, were simply inferior. Going back even farther, to the early days of Christianity, Jesus and his followers almost certainly had to argue their case many times. In both of those situations, debating changed people's minds about two pretty important issues and facets of life.

The most important reason for debating is, without it, there would be no changes. If it weren't for debating and arguing, the consensus would never change. Think of how moral issues have changed in the last 30 or 40 years. People have become more tolerant of homosexuals; euthanasia has become legal in some areas; women have become treated as equals; minorities have gotten much better civil rights, and there are many more changes. Without debating, the people who started these changes for the better would never have been able to change anyone's minds and gotten these changes to happen.
 
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