12 ms·

To the people posting how the author is just whining re the meta, and to those saying young people should challenge society, etc... The author is arguing that

To the people posting how the author is just whining re the meta, and to those saying young people should challenge society, etc... The author is arguing that the rise of K-s is killing true debate (where anything can be advocated for and one wins based on the quality of arguments) with something else (clever appeal to authority and personal attacks). The aim of debate is to foster people who form their own opinions, but the current structure instead fosters people who blithely subscribe to the current social norms. Critical theory is not revolutionary. Socially, it is dominant (particularly among that demographic). It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour. I also think a white elephant in the room, is that a) a lot of critical theory is incredibly badly reasoned / detached from reality and b) a significant amount of the use of it is done in bad faith (e.g., for virtue signalling, and to shoot others down, invalidate others rather than engage with their arguments and views)

imtringued 3y ago
>It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour. Is this supposed to be satire? According to neoclassical economics, "capitalism" (to be precise, neoclassical economics actually denies the existence of capitalism) is a mathematically unimprovable system that is already as perfect as it gets and any alternative will make things worse. Economists are literally blind to the things that cause recessions and they will deny any potential solution because those are already assumed to be implemented implicitly.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tekla 3y ago
K's are not new. People have runs K's since at least the 2000's. I myself ran a Zizek K that was quite a lot of fun to run with back then. I'm wondering if the author simply thinks the current K's are simply just worse.
- atypicaluser 3y ago
  Genuine question--if one isn't willing to debate the question at hand, then why debate at all? Why not, as a point of pride or honor or authentic rejection of the topic, withdraw from debate and take the L? It seems the side bringing up the K either is an activist for a different topic no one else wants to hear or is just someone(s) wanting to get one over (even embarrass) their opponent(s) by blind-siding them.
  - tekla 3y ago
    Because its all part of learning how to think critically. Policy Debate is not about actually expecting policy outcomes. It's about learning how to think and argue. These kinds of questions are not interesting, because EVERYONE ASKS IT. Every single HN question on this topic of "why would you do this" would have reams of evidence/theory to refute it and explain why you're a crazy person for questioning this strategy. Even back in my day, we definitely had debates where the argument effectively was "This debate is racist, and if we don't win you are all racists" And so you would have to figure out strategies to fight back. You can see it all the time in the rhetroic online with activists and whatever, people who don't know how to argue, arguing with others that are making either bad faith arguments or trying to figure out how to deal with Kritique style arguments. It waste's their time and everyone elses time. By being able to argue for/against Kritiques, you gain the ability to quickly call out the fucking bullshit and go straight to the meat.
    - atypicaluser 3y ago
      > By being able to argue for/against Kritiques, you gain the ability to quickly call out the fucking bullshit and go straight to the meat. I'm not so sure about that. Because, if what Bodnick says is true, the judges never go for the meat but always vote for the sizzle. As she herself wrote, 'For example, many leftist judges will not accept a response to a Marxism kritik that argues that capitalism is good.' Sounds more like the K advocate (with the aid of the judge) is more interested in diffusing aromas than putting ribeye on the table.
    - acomjean 3y ago
majormajor 3y ago
Two things here that seem unconvincing: > It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with [Critical theory], e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour. There is not a lot of abolishment of capitalism going on in the west these days in practice. Dominant in certain demographics, sure, but claiming it's "actually revolutionary" to disagree seems to be a sidestep of actually engaging with the claims of why changing things would be important to anyone involved or affected in the first place. "It's revolutionary to say things should stay the same"? So instead of debating the premise, you then try to pull a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-to of saying "you're just following the crowd" as a justification for... following the crowd among those really calling the shots instead of the crowd of high school debaters. > I also think a white elephant in the room, is that a) a lot of critical theory is incredibly badly reasoned / detached from reality and b) a significant amount of the use of it is done in bad faith (e.g., for virtue signalling, and to shoot others down, invalidate others rather than engage with their arguments and views) This, similarly, shifts from "here's why I don't support the formats/tactics" to slipping in "just take it for granted that the contents of the arguments are actually wrong, regardless of format."
- brmgb 3y ago
  > There is not a lot of abolishment of capitalism going on in the west these days in practice Anti-capitalism is very pregnant where I live (France) with one mainstream political party embracing it and the Green supporting it covertly. It's a position which is popular amongst parts of most Green parties in Europe.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > not a lot of abolishment of capitalism going on in the west these days in practice It’s a fair question to debate. What’s nonsense is turning every economic question into this one.
  - majormajor 3y ago
    Wouldn't that be a very different complaint, focusing on what judges reward vs what the actual arguments are? The original article touches on that more than the comment here. Instead of talking about if the tactic is valid or if the judges are doing a good job with it the comment here took a major tangent towards "actually the whole line of thought used is obviously flawed and wrong" with a dose of "nobody here is thinking about it they're just following the crowd." Which is suddenly not about tactics or scoring at all.
DiscourseFan 3y ago
>Critical theory is not revolutionary. Socially, it is dominant (particularly among that demographic). It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour. There is simply nothing revolutionary about advocating for things the way they are, even if that doesn't reflect the majority opinions of those making and judging the debates. I agree that personal attacks and virtue signaling is detrimental to a reasoned discussion, but these are highschool kids that live in a country with the highest incarcerated population in the world (the majority being black), extreme wealth inequality, a political system that offers geriatric candidates who have no interest in introducing radical social policies that might give them a future to be hopeful for. What, you think they're just going to sit back and listen to a bunch of old people tell them that everything is cool and the system works? The system clearly doesn't work! They don't even have a baseline for a reasonable discussion, to them the whole world is fighting against their futures and the "truth" doesn't matter if it will crush them.
- rezonant 3y ago
  Agreed. Another factor here is how the audience for debate is changing. The author of the article themselves is mass reviewing debate arguments on YouTube. Not so long ago this would have been far more difficult (and thus be seen by far less people). Making these debate arguments widely available to the wider Internet implicates that a simple intellectual exercise where you argue a policy position you see as problematic could help to make that policy position more likely to pass in the future if you are very effective in your arguments...
zzzeek 3y ago
> It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour. how on earth is it "revolutionary" to express "the current economic system that dominates 95% of all countries on earth with little to no challenge is actually just fine" that is the opposite of "revolutionary"
- hotdogscout 3y ago
  Different spaces have different cultural values and taboos. It's revolutionary for an Anglo-Saxon educational setting, I'd imagine, because I'd infer Marxism is enforced as a moral standard by a significant number of teachers in some schools. It's a leftist moral pocket inside the US. Muslims would be a conservative moral pocket. Saying gays should die is taboo in most of the country but not inside most islamic religious gatherings. Etc.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    You imagine and infer but do you have direct evidence? The only place I've heard that argument is right-wing propaganda (i.e., not direct evidence), though I don't have enough experience or direct evidence myself to rule it out. > Saying gays should die is taboo in most of the country but not inside most islamic religious gatherings. Again, any direct evidence? I'm pretty sure that is false. Note the Christian scripture and some leaders say similar things, but the vast majority of Christians do not.
- gigatree 3y ago
  “Revolutionary” is relative to the context it’s in. It doesn’t matter if the rest of the world is capitalist if academia is Marxist. Also - the world isn’t capitalist for ideological reasons. You have to work hard against nature to destroy the notion of personal property.
lambdaloop 3y ago
There was a radiolab episode about the other side, interviewing the people advocating for critical theory in debate: https://radiolab.org/podcast/debatable https://radiolab.org/podcast/debatable It's true that it goes against the debate in the moment, but if you zoom out and look at the role of debate within greater society, I think it makes sense to challenge the topics brought up for debate and the whole system that we live in.
- cmdli 3y ago
  The trouble is that it ignores the very thing that debate is trying to teach: the ability to sympathize with, understand, and argue for a position even if you don’t agree with it. It is meant to encourage a greater understanding of the world through different perspectives.
  - kalkin 3y ago
    People do exactly this with Ks in policy debate - the same person presenting a K in one round will be defending against it in another round. Nationally competitive debaters don't (in my experience) choose Ks because they believe in them, but because they're tactically effective.
- msla 3y ago
  Nothing is solved by high school debate. Nothing. Ever. The only point it has is teaching kids how to debate, which is negated by giving the kids instant-win buttons in the form of Correct Opinions they can spout to adoring judges.
  - kalkin 3y ago
    Good thing nobody gets an instant-win button! (That would actually kill the activity which is why even this rather poorly-argued article doesn't claim it's happening.)
    - nvm0n1 3y ago
      It doesn't? It says judges openly advertise things like "I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist" along with many other positions. It also says they routinely award wins simply because they happen to like a particular "K", all this sounds a lot like a collection of instant win buttons.
themitigating 3y ago
with something else (clever appeal to authority and personal attacks) One thing about personal attacks. Some people take sides on an issue based on their political alliance. That means many times their arguments are contradictory. Pointing this or hypocrisy out is a personal attack but it also shows their arguments are disingenuous.
shortrounddev2 3y ago
High school debate is not a good event for this kind of argumentation. It's a very technical event with stupid rules and ridiculous "speeches" which consiset of someone screaming facts at you at 300wpm in between gasps of air https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0
- digitaltrees 3y ago
  This feels like a fire fighter showing up to your burning house and saying “well I can’t save your house until we debate the merits of private property ownership”. There is a time and place for policy debates, turning every social interaction into an opportunity to thrown in a red herring is immature and ultimately ineffective. None of these debates are going to move the needle and the aggregate effect won’t move the needle either.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    To be fair, we're talking about a very specific, competition, high school debate format. Not the more pure phiilisophical kinds of debate. The former is more like a sport and the "athletes" are simply minmaxing the game. The goal and how you gain point do not necessarily reflect real world values. We can certainly discuss if they should and how we can encourage/discourage certain tactics, and it feels the article focuses on that. Not so much the comments here.
- howinteresting 3y ago
  This. American high school debate format makes no sense. This is just the latest contradiction to be heightened. Debate is just not a thing that subjects itself to being gamed in this way.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    I disagree, I think the skills taught are portable to lay persuasion, and this can be seen by the fact that debaters from the 'weirder' events will often enter a slow, lay debate format, win the tournament, and then return back to the 'weird' format.
kaonashi 3y ago
> It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour. Ah, the status quo, truly the highest form of revolution.
ctrlp 3y ago
[flagged]
- goatlover 3y ago
  Maoism was about keeping Mao in absolute power, such that questioning his terrible policies meant your eventual downfall as traitor to the party. He was as bad as Stalin and Hitler.
  - ctrlp 3y ago
    Among other things
- mikrotikker 3y ago
  Well said
dragonwriter 3y ago
> Critical theory is not revolutionary. True. It may overlap with revolutionary views, but is not, inherently, itself revolutionary. It is a view of what is, not a view of what should be done about it. > Socially, it is dominant No, its not. > (particularly among that demographic). There is essentially no demographic, other than one defined specifically by adherence to critical theory, for which this is true. > It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour. This has been the dominant view, across society (at least, as weighted by social power, maybe not in pure number of adherents terms), in the developed West for longer than capitalism has had a name (which it got from people disagreeing with that dominant viewpoint in the mid-19th Century.) It is not truly revolutionary to hold what is both the dominant elite viewpoint and the viewpoint supporting the dominance of the elites.
- banannaise 3y ago
  > There is essentially no demographic, other than one defined specifically by adherence to critical theory, for which this is true. I think the parent comment means for the audience to substitute whatever minority group the reader finds the most loud and obnoxious. In other words, it's nonsense when read literally because it's not meant to be read literally; it's a dogwhistle.
tptacek 3y ago
Your premise is faulty. The aim of debate isn't to foster people who form their own opinions any more than baseball is designed to foster people who can reliably strike fast-moving objects out of the air to a stick. It's a sport, it has rules, and it rewards tactics and strategies devised within those rules. Read Patrick McKenzie about this; he's written a bunch about how competitive debate was unintelligible to outsiders as far back as the 1990s.

imtringued 3y ago

>It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour. Is this supposed to be satire? According to neoclassical economics, "capitalism" (to be precise, neoclassical economics actually denies the existence of capitalism) is a mathematically unimprovable system that is already as perfect as it gets and any alternative will make things worse. Economists are literally blind to the things that cause recessions and they will deny any potential solution because those are already assumed to be implemented implicitly.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

tekla 3y ago

K's are not new. People have runs K's since at least the 2000's. I myself ran a Zizek K that was quite a lot of fun to run with back then. I'm wondering if the author simply thinks the current K's are simply just worse.

atypicaluser 3y ago
Genuine question--if one isn't willing to debate the question at hand, then why debate at all? Why not, as a point of pride or honor or authentic rejection of the topic, withdraw from debate and take the L? It seems the side bringing up the K either is an activist for a different topic no one else wants to hear or is just someone(s) wanting to get one over (even embarrass) their opponent(s) by blind-siding them.
- tekla 3y ago
  Because its all part of learning how to think critically. Policy Debate is not about actually expecting policy outcomes. It's about learning how to think and argue. These kinds of questions are not interesting, because EVERYONE ASKS IT. Every single HN question on this topic of "why would you do this" would have reams of evidence/theory to refute it and explain why you're a crazy person for questioning this strategy. Even back in my day, we definitely had debates where the argument effectively was "This debate is racist, and if we don't win you are all racists" And so you would have to figure out strategies to fight back. You can see it all the time in the rhetroic online with activists and whatever, people who don't know how to argue, arguing with others that are making either bad faith arguments or trying to figure out how to deal with Kritique style arguments. It waste's their time and everyone elses time. By being able to argue for/against Kritiques, you gain the ability to quickly call out the fucking bullshit and go straight to the meat.
  - atypicaluser 3y ago
    > By being able to argue for/against Kritiques, you gain the ability to quickly call out the fucking bullshit and go straight to the meat. I'm not so sure about that. Because, if what Bodnick says is true, the judges never go for the meat but always vote for the sizzle. As she herself wrote, 'For example, many leftist judges will not accept a response to a Marxism kritik that argues that capitalism is good.' Sounds more like the K advocate (with the aid of the judge) is more interested in diffusing aromas than putting ribeye on the table.
  - acomjean 3y ago

majormajor 3y ago

Two things here that seem unconvincing: > It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with [Critical theory], e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour. There is not a lot of abolishment of capitalism going on in the west these days in practice. Dominant in certain demographics, sure, but claiming it's "actually revolutionary" to disagree seems to be a sidestep of actually engaging with the claims of why changing things would be important to anyone involved or affected in the first place. "It's revolutionary to say things should stay the same"? So instead of debating the premise, you then try to pull a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-to of saying "you're just following the crowd" as a justification for... following the crowd among those really calling the shots instead of the crowd of high school debaters. > I also think a white elephant in the room, is that a) a lot of critical theory is incredibly badly reasoned / detached from reality and b) a significant amount of the use of it is done in bad faith (e.g., for virtue signalling, and to shoot others down, invalidate others rather than engage with their arguments and views) This, similarly, shifts from "here's why I don't support the formats/tactics" to slipping in "just take it for granted that the contents of the arguments are actually wrong, regardless of format."

brmgb 3y ago
> There is not a lot of abolishment of capitalism going on in the west these days in practice Anti-capitalism is very pregnant where I live (France) with one mainstream political party embracing it and the Green supporting it covertly. It's a position which is popular amongst parts of most Green parties in Europe.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> not a lot of abolishment of capitalism going on in the west these days in practice It’s a fair question to debate. What’s nonsense is turning every economic question into this one.
- majormajor 3y ago
  Wouldn't that be a very different complaint, focusing on what judges reward vs what the actual arguments are? The original article touches on that more than the comment here. Instead of talking about if the tactic is valid or if the judges are doing a good job with it the comment here took a major tangent towards "actually the whole line of thought used is obviously flawed and wrong" with a dose of "nobody here is thinking about it they're just following the crowd." Which is suddenly not about tactics or scoring at all.

DiscourseFan 3y ago

>Critical theory is not revolutionary. Socially, it is dominant (particularly among that demographic). It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour. There is simply nothing revolutionary about advocating for things the way they are, even if that doesn't reflect the majority opinions of those making and judging the debates. I agree that personal attacks and virtue signaling is detrimental to a reasoned discussion, but these are highschool kids that live in a country with the highest incarcerated population in the world (the majority being black), extreme wealth inequality, a political system that offers geriatric candidates who have no interest in introducing radical social policies that might give them a future to be hopeful for. What, you think they're just going to sit back and listen to a bunch of old people tell them that everything is cool and the system works? The system clearly doesn't work! They don't even have a baseline for a reasonable discussion, to them the whole world is fighting against their futures and the "truth" doesn't matter if it will crush them.

rezonant 3y ago
Agreed. Another factor here is how the audience for debate is changing. The author of the article themselves is mass reviewing debate arguments on YouTube. Not so long ago this would have been far more difficult (and thus be seen by far less people). Making these debate arguments widely available to the wider Internet implicates that a simple intellectual exercise where you argue a policy position you see as problematic could help to make that policy position more likely to pass in the future if you are very effective in your arguments...

zzzeek 3y ago

> It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour. how on earth is it "revolutionary" to express "the current economic system that dominates 95% of all countries on earth with little to no challenge is actually just fine" that is the opposite of "revolutionary"

hotdogscout 3y ago
Different spaces have different cultural values and taboos. It's revolutionary for an Anglo-Saxon educational setting, I'd imagine, because I'd infer Marxism is enforced as a moral standard by a significant number of teachers in some schools. It's a leftist moral pocket inside the US. Muslims would be a conservative moral pocket. Saying gays should die is taboo in most of the country but not inside most islamic religious gatherings. Etc.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  You imagine and infer but do you have direct evidence? The only place I've heard that argument is right-wing propaganda (i.e., not direct evidence), though I don't have enough experience or direct evidence myself to rule it out. > Saying gays should die is taboo in most of the country but not inside most islamic religious gatherings. Again, any direct evidence? I'm pretty sure that is false. Note the Christian scripture and some leaders say similar things, but the vast majority of Christians do not.
gigatree 3y ago
“Revolutionary” is relative to the context it’s in. It doesn’t matter if the rest of the world is capitalist if academia is Marxist. Also - the world isn’t capitalist for ideological reasons. You have to work hard against nature to destroy the notion of personal property.

lambdaloop 3y ago

There was a radiolab episode about the other side, interviewing the people advocating for critical theory in debate: https://radiolab.org/podcast/debatable https://radiolab.org/podcast/debatable It's true that it goes against the debate in the moment, but if you zoom out and look at the role of debate within greater society, I think it makes sense to challenge the topics brought up for debate and the whole system that we live in.

cmdli 3y ago
The trouble is that it ignores the very thing that debate is trying to teach: the ability to sympathize with, understand, and argue for a position even if you don’t agree with it. It is meant to encourage a greater understanding of the world through different perspectives.
- kalkin 3y ago
  People do exactly this with Ks in policy debate - the same person presenting a K in one round will be defending against it in another round. Nationally competitive debaters don't (in my experience) choose Ks because they believe in them, but because they're tactically effective.
msla 3y ago
Nothing is solved by high school debate. Nothing. Ever. The only point it has is teaching kids how to debate, which is negated by giving the kids instant-win buttons in the form of Correct Opinions they can spout to adoring judges.
- kalkin 3y ago
  Good thing nobody gets an instant-win button! (That would actually kill the activity which is why even this rather poorly-argued article doesn't claim it's happening.)
  - nvm0n1 3y ago
    It doesn't? It says judges openly advertise things like "I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist" along with many other positions. It also says they routinely award wins simply because they happen to like a particular "K", all this sounds a lot like a collection of instant win buttons.

themitigating 3y ago

with something else (clever appeal to authority and personal attacks) One thing about personal attacks. Some people take sides on an issue based on their political alliance. That means many times their arguments are contradictory. Pointing this or hypocrisy out is a personal attack but it also shows their arguments are disingenuous.

shortrounddev2 3y ago

High school debate is not a good event for this kind of argumentation. It's a very technical event with stupid rules and ridiculous "speeches" which consiset of someone screaming facts at you at 300wpm in between gasps of air https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0

digitaltrees 3y ago
This feels like a fire fighter showing up to your burning house and saying “well I can’t save your house until we debate the merits of private property ownership”. There is a time and place for policy debates, turning every social interaction into an opportunity to thrown in a red herring is immature and ultimately ineffective. None of these debates are going to move the needle and the aggregate effect won’t move the needle either.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  To be fair, we're talking about a very specific, competition, high school debate format. Not the more pure phiilisophical kinds of debate. The former is more like a sport and the "athletes" are simply minmaxing the game. The goal and how you gain point do not necessarily reflect real world values. We can certainly discuss if they should and how we can encourage/discourage certain tactics, and it feels the article focuses on that. Not so much the comments here.
howinteresting 3y ago
This. American high school debate format makes no sense. This is just the latest contradiction to be heightened. Debate is just not a thing that subjects itself to being gamed in this way.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  I disagree, I think the skills taught are portable to lay persuasion, and this can be seen by the fact that debaters from the 'weirder' events will often enter a slow, lay debate format, win the tournament, and then return back to the 'weird' format.

kaonashi 3y ago

> It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour. Ah, the status quo, truly the highest form of revolution.

ctrlp 3y ago

[flagged]

goatlover 3y ago
Maoism was about keeping Mao in absolute power, such that questioning his terrible policies meant your eventual downfall as traitor to the party. He was as bad as Stalin and Hitler.
- ctrlp 3y ago
  Among other things
mikrotikker 3y ago
Well said

dragonwriter 3y ago

> Critical theory is not revolutionary. True. It may overlap with revolutionary views, but is not, inherently, itself revolutionary. It is a view of what is, not a view of what should be done about it. > Socially, it is dominant No, its not. > (particularly among that demographic). There is essentially no demographic, other than one defined specifically by adherence to critical theory, for which this is true. > It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour. This has been the dominant view, across society (at least, as weighted by social power, maybe not in pure number of adherents terms), in the developed West for longer than capitalism has had a name (which it got from people disagreeing with that dominant viewpoint in the mid-19th Century.) It is not truly revolutionary to hold what is both the dominant elite viewpoint and the viewpoint supporting the dominance of the elites.

banannaise 3y ago
> There is essentially no demographic, other than one defined specifically by adherence to critical theory, for which this is true. I think the parent comment means for the audience to substitute whatever minority group the reader finds the most loud and obnoxious. In other words, it's nonsense when read literally because it's not meant to be read literally; it's a dogwhistle.

tptacek 3y ago

Your premise is faulty. The aim of debate isn't to foster people who form their own opinions any more than baseball is designed to foster people who can reliably strike fast-moving objects out of the air to a stick. It's a sport, it has rules, and it rewards tactics and strategies devised within those rules. Read Patrick McKenzie about this; he's written a bunch about how competitive debate was unintelligible to outsiders as far back as the 1990s.