In January I wrote a letter to my local Costo making the case that they should change their ways. It was a very important and vital issue.
I never received any response.
Today I decided to escalate and send my original letter, with a couple of edits, to the CEO of the company. I hope my sophistic practices are still sharp as ever. Here's the letter I sent. Comments welcome!
Got this from the Library of Congress this morning
Seems that crowdsourcing is one way that the Library can continue to do expensive, time-consuming, and precise sorts of research like this. I think it's a good idea, given where research funding is at the moment (and presumably for the future).
I don't think any future administration, even if they are Democrats, will return the research funding to Universities that it once had. I think they will be very happy not to take the political cost for cutting something they don't care about either. So long term, we all need to be thinking about alternative ways of performing research. This is a great one but only works because it's a popular, famous author and a very interesting sort of project.
As for me, I think publishing work on the blog and YouTube is the way to go. My university cut all research support with the exception of thoughts and prayers, and would have done so under a Harris administration as well. There's no material support for the job of professor anymore. They just want you to teach, and by that they mean make the students feel that they are getting something worth the tuition.
A rhetoricians challenge indeed. I should be more into it, but I miss the energetic combination of research and teaching together. And I am not in a financial position anymore to fund my own archive excursions. I also feel my field, run by the inept NCA, prefers a private, walls-up approach to scholarship and publication.
A lot of challenges exist for sure, but there are still some good ideas, or at least the inspiration for some good ideas out there if you are looking around.
Am I getting too cynical? Hardly. Although I am highly critical of both the National Communication Association and the national debate organizations such as NDT and CEDA, I haven't said that much about the World Universities Debate Championships.
In this podcast I try to lay out the roots of my criticism, so it's not just particular to WUDC. I think any debate organization that turns toward propagating its own format and culture versus contributing to rhetorical pedagogy is not useless, but dangerous.
These organizations celebrate themselves before they reach out to those outside the walled gardens they labor to perpetuate. At this time, facing these autocratic and plutocratic threats, they have nothing to say. In fact you'll see in this episode an NCA division leader continuously repeats "There is nothing that can be said" in response to the political climate of the United States.
You are a communication organization. What value does NCA have if it has "nothing to say?"
Likewise, large debate organizations should be showing citizens how to engage productively with loud, angry, undereducated people instead of dismissing them as improper. This is the replacement of the universal audience with the vanguard audience (Perelman & Olbrects-Tyteca).
As the years go by I feel more and more alone in my conceptions of rhetoric, debate, and argumentation. A World Debating Council should be offering helpful approaches to debate and argument, not staying silent unless there are fees to pay for an upcoming tournament.
Here's my listening report for May: https://www.last.fm/user/Professor_Steve/listening-report/year/2025/month/5
Lots of Charli XCX and who can blame me after the great tour clips on social media and her amazing Coachella performance?
In the Bin podcast is on a regular Wednesday schedule, once a week. I feel like that's the most sustainable model I can do at the moment! It's also on YouTube, so here's the link if you would like to start listening over there (I'm sure you listen somewhere already!)
In the latest episode of my podcast In the Bin, I ask why we don't just teach people how to debate instead of trying to avoid debate. Substituting debate with another form of discourse is stealing from ourselves.
Here's the episode. First time doing a video podcast so let me know what you think!