The New York Sophist

Friends!

You might already be aware, but I'm back at it with the In the Bin Podcast. If you are tired of reading my ideas now you can find a new way to be tired of my ideas through the power of audio! The podcast keeps to its traditional roots of discussing intercollegiate and tournament debate but also uses debate as a way to offer critique and conversation of things going on in our broader rhetorical, argumentative, and debate world.

I've set up a page for the podcast as I don't want everything to get confused on this site, so if you want you can go subscribe to that blog here.

The podcast is available anywhere you already get your podcasts. Give it a listen, let me know your opinion, or if you have a subject you'd like me to cover, let me know and I'll make an episode about it.

What gives? I am reading Deliberative Democratic Theory for the first time – never really been much of one to have faith in democracy other than a rhetorical commonplace that really comes in handy – perhaps more than any other commonplace out there, even family (Sorry Vin Diesel). But this is some good stuff. It’s making me think that our Constitution in the United States won’t survive, since it – like deliberative democracy – is founded on the assumption that a particular kind and a particular intensity of literacy will be a given, a priori status. This is not the case. Perhaps this is the true security threat from social media, not the Chinese government.

Anyway for a bunch of people who bray and yap without pause about rights, freedom, liberty, and oppression, NCA rhetoricians who come from a debate background don’t really mention or even cite generally any deliberative democratic theory. I’m kind of surprised (but not really). Maybe it is because this stuff wasn’t really out and circulating when debate publishing was at it’s peak (I’m saying this is the early 1980s but you can disagree). It could also be the repeated pattern we see in NCA work where people don’t cite anything other than the popular and accepted sources. The NCA folks are nothing but trendy, all racing toward whatever the popular source is for their work. The funniest moment of this for me was a paper on Buddhist monastic debate pedagogy I wrote with a Buddhist Priest and submitted only to have it rejected because it didn’t include Heidegger. This is funny for so many reasons but tragic for the stand-out reason: People who volunteer to review are somewhere between cops and authoritarians, decrying people like Trump while enjoying enforcement of the “social norms” of NCA on submitted papers.

Deliberative democratic theory has the potential to rewrite debate pedagogy I’m thinking. It’s pretty incredible, and would solve a lot of the issues that contemporary NCA debate faces: Cost, tournament norms, high level of entry, lack of judges – the list goes on. What it seems to do (and I’m not going to say too much in particular as we are submitting this idea to Alta) is recenter the practice and pedagogy of debate on the idea of the second persona instead of some abstract, technical “rules” of debate arguments. Who cares if you link if the people believe it? Studying the reception not the accuracy of transmission is a turn in rhetoric that happened in the 1970s. We should stop ignoring it and start teaching it maybe.

I watch the TV show Catfish quite regularly, to the point where I now see a pattern in pretty much every episode. The Catfish gets the victim to love them, then takes advantage of them because the victim thinks they are in a relationship with someone who is only benefitting financially, personally, or in terms of their mental health. The victim sacrifices a lot of time and money because they are so happy to be "in love" with the idea, image, text, and so on that the Catfish provides.

This is the relationship between the National Communication Association and the publisher Taylor & Francis. I am not exactly sure how this works, but from my vantage point it seems that NCA takes a lot of pride in having such a reputable publisher behind almost all of their journals that "matter." This is some kind of credential, some kind of point of pride that the journals are published here. What does NCA get for this?

I know that the editors of the T&F journals are paid, but they don’t do that much. Most of the labor comes from faculty who are enamored with the idea of being a reviewer (the cops), people who have an ethical compulsion to review articles (the scholars), and others who just feel bad about the situation and understand that people’s livelihoods are at risk if articles aren’t reviewed expediently (the helpers). None of the money that goes to the Editor nor any of the money Taylor and Francis gets from subscriptions to these journals from libraries and other institutions, such as databases and indexes goes to any peer reviewer. The Catfish has convinced us this is an act of love of some kind – albeit a toxic relationship.

This system is crazy. I have heard of people waiting 10 to 12 months for an initial decision from an editor in the T&F journals, such as Quarterly Journal of Speech or Argumentation & Advocacy. I am often just sent a random email from T&F expecting me to review an essay without any context or explanation from the editor, or even a please. I’ve gotten rejections from editors that say things like “this doesn’t fit in the journal” and then under the next editor, I see something along the same lines that I wrote about. It seems that the people Editing do not care about the actual work in the journal, but the relationship and the status it brings them – they get some money, they get to say they are the editor of one of our ‘important’ journals.

Any professional work such as consulting or offering a professional opinion on something should be compensated if the people asking you to or requiring this consultation for someone else’s livelihood. That’s just the way it should work ethically and fairly in a system where one cannot provide for basic needs without working.

Reviews for the most part are not professional. Mostly you get someone with an ax to grind, for the compensation for reviewing essays is only to feel good about yourself. The pleasure most people get is from disciplining someone who doesn’t know ‘the field’ as well as they do, and the joy of beating them back into their box. The rarer reviewer is someone who wants to help the essay become better – I’ve only had that twice over a career of about 15 years trying to publish in these journals. There are no professional standards. The editors just announce, like an aristocrat, what they like and don't like, and those who are in the know get published while those who submit get a desk reject within a week.

Taylor & Francis will allow anyone to read my work published with them for a one time fee of 50 USD. They also will let me publish the article anywhere I like without fear of copyright violations for 5,000 USD. How generous! This money does not go to reviewers. Where does it go? Who am I paying to access my work? Surely I am just paying for the PDF formatting. Is this a fair price for that kind of work? Absolutely not.

Furthermore, Taylor & Francis sold all of our writing to Microsoft to train their Artificial Intelligence models last year. NCA had nothing to say about it, but it is possible I missed the press release. NCA, oddly, isn’t very good about communicating much to anyone who isn’t already a member of the organization. Even then, it’s spotty at best.

With all this money being generated by NCA members and only a trickle going to the Editors of the journals, why do most departments insist on publication in these Taylor & Francis journals as necessary for tenure and promotion? Why is such an unprofessional system being leaned on for such high-stakes professional results? Either there are some secret financial kickbacks NCA and it’s leaders get from this deal (nice dinners at convention or something) or there’s some necessary funding of the convention, which is quite expensive, that comes out of the Taylor & Francis money. One thing we do know is that there is no transparency as to what happens with that money. Most of it goes to making Taylor & Francis very profitable. And they should be rewarded for formatting some bad looking PDFs and messing up source citations in the copy edit over and over again.

NCA has alternatives here, and it blows my mind they don’t pursue them. The first would be obvious: Pull all the journals and make them Open Access. A deal for an organization this large with this much text being produced a month would make any OA site very happy for the traffic. Another solution would be to demand OA status on everything Taylor & Francis publishes. Another great idea would be to have Taylor & Francis pay the full transport, food, lodging, and other fees for any 3rd or 4th year Ph.D. student to come to the national convention. There also should be a room that has free food all day for graduate students. This might sound expensive, but remember: Taylor & Francis was paid 10 million US dollars for the first installment of stealing our writing and handing it to Microsoft for AI training. They did nothing to create that, or help create it, or anything – all they did was format it and put it in their journal when we said it was done. It’s really unbelievable that any NCA members tolerate this nonsense.

But then again, it’s always amazing to me how much the victims on Catfish tolerate. Maybe they have low self-esteem? Maybe they don’t think of themselves as really being able to offer much to a partner? The speculation goes on and on, but we never really find out. NCA can and should offer another alternative if they are going to host journals of some kind, and that should be a professional model where everyone is compensated fairly, the money is transparent, and scholars and others can trust that their work won’t go to nefarious purposes to make executives rich by doing nothing. Right now we have no transparency, no professionalism, and a sea of graduate students and junior faculty who are caught in a horrible system that they have to participate in. Hopefully NCA will remember that it is there to serve its members.

I love News of the Day, the concept the site, everything about it, but I do get that the paywall is frustrating for most people. Although you get about three months of my writing for free there just signing up, I'd rather my writing be easy to access. So I'm just putting everything over there on here. You can read it in either place!

If you like what's going on consider leaving a tip on my Ko-Fi site. As higher education starts to spiral here in the United States, support for this kind of writing becomes more important daily. I believe the way we have been doing things - debate tournaments instead of public debate events, high-cost low-quality academic journals that are inaccessible by journalists or even engaged public intellectuals, and courses that focus mostly on discipline and obedience than material that matters are all responsible for the climate we find ourselves in.

The politics of the moment must be slow, thoughtful, well written, and not dive into the anxiety and panic that traditional media benefits from. I have colleagues and friends who watch Fox News or MSNBC religiously because they want to figure out what's going on - this only whips ones emotions into a frenzy and creates a crippling anxiety about wanting to act and not being able to act. 

Acting is not politics as it is a reaction not a response. Reading and writing, thinking things through is the democratic way. Anything else plays into poor power dynamics. But we are addicted to the "clap back" of social media.

I'll try my best to pump the brakes on this site but there's a lot of black ice on the road. 

Anyway, love that you are here reading this. I'll keep trying to bring my best in a climate where the students just cynically want to know how to get an A, the administrators just want to appease the government, and the public wants to march around in circles holding signs. Not a lot to get excited about out there. 

There’s a lot of feel-good social media content circulating that is proudly declaring that if someone holds an idiotic or hateful position, you cannot disagree with them. Instead, all you must do is reject them as enemies, or worse, a flaw in the system, someone whose point of view does not even factor into politics.

This can never be the perspective that someone who supports democracy would take. Instead, we have to assume that our political opponents, or enemies, or whatever, have formed their ideas based on reasoning, experience, and exposure until they communicate that they have not. Then we have to shift gears into an even more uncomfortable or inconvenient attitude.

This uncomfortable position is to distinguish between the undereducated and the uneducated. These are not the same thing. Both are the result of the politics of capitalist austerity – there is not enough money for education that does not directly convert humans into obedient workers. When people vote against public school budgets (another way of doing this is to vote for charter schools), they are voting against democratic stability and good democratic practice.

This funding cut often leads to undereducation, which is apparent in the United States right now in a very clear way. Undereducation is most notably marked by the hermeneutics of suspicion, where people are taught to doubt everything they hear and see. This sounds like good critical thinking, but doubting everything is not the same as questioning it. Doubting is a never-ending exchange where no matter what someone offers as evidence or proof, it “isn’t enough” or can be undermined. This violates the burden of rejoinder, a basic tenet of argumentation theory, where the person being pushed to change their view is responsible for addressing evidence and reasoning that meets the burden of proof. You can’t continuously say “I don’t buy it” as a reasonable, democratic position when confronted with information you might not know.

This isn’t taught in undereducated classrooms, where questioning, no matter the source or information or process of how it was created, is rewarded as the act of a smart person. Dismissing these claims or these people as stupid or ignorant only fuels the flame. They see this as a marker that they are thinking properly, thinking outside the norms of society and the social control that comes from the government and media, and they will feel proud that they made you angry and cut off the conversation.

The thing to do here is to discuss the difference between doubt and questioning and the legitimacy of questioning until you get a substantive answer with acceptable proof. The biggest example of doubt versus questioning here is in the words and thoughts of RFK Jr., who many people admire for his doubt, seeing it as critical questioning. The issue with Kennedy’s approach is that no evidence for vaccines can be accepted – no data will end the discussion or stop the doubt. That’s the difference – doubt is a self-fueling machine where status and intelligence are conferred by never stopping the questioning.

This is tough to address. Undereducation, as I’ve described here, is a process flaw. The reason why is the questioning is, in and of itself, a positive social good. Unraveling everything you see and hear is the good work of an intelligent citizen.

Uneducated people are people who don’t have any connection to long term principles of judgement that either come from literature, history, or some other liberal art. These have been eroded by charter schools, low public school funding, or the desire of the plutocrats to have the school system create for them ready-made workers who are obedient, polite, and resist conflict.

Having a principle that you stand for is necessary for critical questioning. The questioning has an end goal of revealing what reasons, thoughts, and evidence are there under the position that is being advanced, and you can find through the wording and rewording of it ways that it can connect or disconnect from your principle. For example, if you have a principle that the government should legislate things that help those who are in dire circumstances, your questioning will continue until you find that your opponent either 1) isn’t interested in that principle, 2) the proposal either accidentally or wilfully denies the principle or 3) your opponent or the principle willfully thinks that principle is bad. Then you can articulate an alternative, or what modifications would be needed for you to support that idea.

Uneducated people are not at fault; this comes from their schooling and the lack of society to consider schooling important to alter it to fit what students need. Life is complicated and difficult, requiring multiple income sources and ways to care for the elderly and the very young, which can break anyone’s budget. School versus survival is often the choice some young people must make, and it’s very easy when school lasts from 7 AM to 3 PM with no alternatives. For example, a nighttime high school might be a great option for those who have to provide elder or baby care in their families when the parents are out working their two or three jobs.

I digress, but the point is that to engage those who really need engagement in democracy the task is tiring. One has to reorient the virtues associated with endless doubt back toward critical questioning while often simultaneously trying to get them to articulate a principle or virtue that they would use as a ruler, rubric, or measuring stick as to the good and appropriate. These conversations are hardly ever had these days, and the roots of these principles come from identification with literature, theater, art, or music – all programs that are the first to go in the public schools.

To preserve democracy, we cannot exclude these people as being too ignorant to participate. This will just encourage the further practice of doubt. Without a literature base, we also do not have unlimited time to help establish shared values and principles. The best thing we can do if we don’t want to take Socrates' approach and stand in public all day instigating conversations is to publish more thoughtful, long-form content on the internet and share the links via social media. Social media as a form rewards the “clap back,” the snooty, snarky quick response that is always in a dismissive style since we assume our audience is either an idiot or someone who totally agrees with us about the disposition of the “idiots” out there. Instead of seeking a cheer from the loyal fans, we need to seek camaraderie in the difficult task ahead, which is the practice and art of good writing for audiences we dis-prefer. The salvation of democracy is a rhetorical problem, yet again. Focusing on the art as a practice that is a massive group project – complete with all the frustrations and exhaustion – is the way forward.