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

https://blogs.loc.gov/manuscripts/2025/06/new-walt-whitman-manuscripts-ready-for-crowdsourced-transcription/?loclr=eamss

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!

It's summer, so it's time to make some YouTube lectures again!

See what you think of my suggestions for setting up a debate. Comments welcome!

Last weekend I was so lucky to be able to participate in an event at the University of Rochester celebrating Prof. Sam Nelson who has been a debate coach and teacher for a very long time. 

His old students and assistants from all over the U.S. attended the surprise and shared their stories of how Sam transformed their lives. It was really an honor to be present for all of that testimony. 

This is the vlog I made of my perspective of the trip and everything I did and thought about when I was there. This really inspired me to think about debate (what doesn't you might ask) from a variety of different perspectives. 

It was so good to see Sam and to catch up with some of the old friends and students from my time working there. I was coaching at the University of Rochester from 2001 - 2002, and again from fall 2003 through 2004. From the Fall of 2002 to the spring of 2003, I lived in Syracuse, NY and attended Syracuse University. I did stop by from time to time to say hi to the folks working there at the time and Sam. 

I'm looking forward to visiting Rochester again already!

It took forever - blame Taylor and Francis because, well, it's most likely their fault - but I finally got another essay out about debate theory and history. 

This was a special issue that was supposed to come out a long time ago about the so-called 'joint championship' of Wake Forest that year, winning both the CEDA and NDT championship tournament. If you don't know what that means, that's fine - that was the point of the special issue. So join the club: What does it mean? What should it mean? 

I reread my piece and it seems ok, however I prefer the one I originally wrote which bled a lot to bring this version to the publication. I'll present them both here for you to take a look at and determine which version of the essay you think is your preference. I wrote them both so I'm happy with however you feel about it.

In the age of digital everything, why don't we have a public "track changes" way of sharing our research and work? Seems like there would be a lot of value in there for those commenting on our work or moving forward in the areas we research and write about. Comparing versions of documents is easy and interesting, yet in most publishing we only see a "final version" as if it fell out of the sky. It can really be a great source of invention for an essay to ask the question "Why was that section removed or moved?" "When did that citation first get placed?" I figure sharing the first and last version might be a good starting place. Here's the original draft:

And here's the final version that appears in Argumentation and Advocacy

Comments welcome!!

I'm really sick so I can't go to campus today. I could go and teach I suppose, but I don't want to spread germs. I always tell my students to stay away if they are sick to cut down on absences. And since it's nearly Final Exam Eve I don't want to be responsible for lowering someone's grade due to illness.

So this evening at 5PM Eastern time I'm doing a YouTube Livestream for my debate class, check it out if you like. It's open to everyone.

There’s a disturbing lack of rhetorical principles being applied to AI when they have been applied to a number of less-obvious targets like science, medicine, urban cityscapes, video games, disability signs in public places, mothering at academic conferences, air travel, grocery store aisles and so on. Maybe it’s just that AI is new, or maybe we aren’t sure how to write about it. 

It’s becoming clear to me that the decline (not death) of debate is going to have a third act like the million dollar man - “We can build him back better than he was” so goes the show’s opening line. The rhetoric of AI and AI’s rhetoric and the rhetorical implications of AI in our daily life needs a lot more publications about it. I would like to contribute if I can, but when I sit down to write about it what can I say? It seems I don’t know enough.

Then I read this great essay in Time magazine (it’s always telling me about responsibility!). I think this writer gets how to rhetorically talk about AI and digital data in a rhetorical way that scholars haven’t caught up to yet. Or perhaps scholars are less interested in talking to their students and the public about these issues (very likely). I mean, why write about something if it can’t be in a paywalled boring academic journal that most people can’t read or can’t find. 

Anyway the best part of this essay is the comparative aspects. The argument is very powerful about how something becomes policy through advocacy and then becomes an everyday way of speaking, and then an everyday way of speaking. I think this is a great start to a rhetorical theory of kindness!

See what you think: https://time.com/7273469/data-monitoring-kindness-essay/ 

It might be upside down because of how it was mass-scanned with a lot of other paper material that I cleaned out of my filing cabinet years ago, but this appeared today as I was moving some files around, cleaning up, and making sure to get most of my documents out of my University administered OneDrive account. The way politics are going at Universities and with AI scraping and all that nonsense, it's time to leave Cloud City before a deal is made to keep the Empire out of there forever. You know what sort of deal I'm talking about. I've been at my university around 18 years now and I guarantee they would sell me out to any agency for a low price. Furthermore, they would sell all my OneDrive data to an AI miner and never tell me about it. So goes the OneDrive terms of service!

But back to the list - this list hit me with nostalgia and impressed me. In 2005 I was a second year PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh. I knew I wanted to study and write about the Beat Generation - not as poets but as communication and rhetorical theorists. This list indicates that. But also it indicates a student who feels their foundations aren't quite there in rhetoric or in what inspired the Beats. It's a great list from my point of view but it also makes me want to make a summer reading list 20 years later. What should be on it? What do I need to know as I move forward into the next big project, teaching against the rising waters of authoritarianism and the dismissal of process in favor of "known truth?" There's nowhere to go; the blue waters are just as dangerous. What readings will help create an island, a base of operations? Stay tuned.

(This link is an example; there are tons of NDT debates to watch on the Policy Debate Central YouTube channel)

The National Debate Tournament is seen as a tradition, the oldest, the most continuous, and the highest level of debate competition in the United States for intercollegiate debate. What’s funny about it is that the NDT is most notably an index of change. The more people think of the NDT as some traditional institution that always does debate in some traditional way, the more the motives are fanned to defend that tradition so the more changes are made to the way debate is done to preserve it. “We had to rebuild the village in order to keep the property values high!”

The NDT has changed so much even in my brief brushes with it never as a competitor, barely as a coach and most commonly as a critic and scholar of debate pedagogical history. The most important thing that has changed in order to preserve the NDT’s hold on the purest, best, most rigorous form of debate is technology resistance.

Even though we have laptops, internet, and all kinds of tools to word process and share information with one another it is still a necessary and incontrovertible part of the NDT that speeches must be orated in a room live at the same time as opponents. In contemporary debate anywhere but the NDT, recordings, blogs, social media posts, and video editing are a part of powerful arguments. It seems even a slight modification here to avoid the super spreading speeches would be for all cases and 1NC arguments to be released by the teams to one another so the speech time could be spent in investigating the connections, missed connections, and gaps in the arguments. I think this would improve the quality of debate but leave many people unmoored once they discover they have no expertise in argumentation or debate and plenty in how a tournament should be run. The gap here is huge and unnoticeable until you start trying to make the NDT look more like reasonable debate that occurs in contemporary institutions of all kinds.

Secondly is the desperate amount of energy spent to insure that nobody knows the NDT is happening except the NDT participants and the converted. If a tournament of this quality with this caliber debaters was happening at my university, I would be sure every single person walking around the perimeter of the campus knew it was happening and that I and my department (or division) were responsible for it. Such attention is unwanted, who knows why. Perhaps the NDT believes that their event is unintelligible. Most participants don’t notice this because the practice is a part of their traditions and culture. They also have the full text of anything being chirped in the air by a speaker on their computer. There’s nothing being preserved here except a very quirky and very esoteric understanding of “good debate.”

In rhetoric we have a very simple way to understand good debate: Look to the audience. Are they getting something out of it? NDT answers this question by rug pulling – there won’t be an audience; we will work hard to exclude one. Seems strange if you are the most prestigious debate competition for undergraduate students in the United States.

All this would take is the small adaptation of some video guides, commentary, commentators, and things to look for. Audiences could have access to outlines of the arguments that are coming. They could have video and audio access to expert commentators saying what’s going on in the debate and why it was a good move. NDT could keep their professional sport model of debating and just do what every other professional sport in the world does – offer commentators to explain the action and why the audience should be impressed. Also, allowing most of the debate to happen online prior to the NDT – the sharing of arguments in particular so the speeches can be more general – would be great. If you need a model for how this might play out in practice and still produce good arguments, look to the U.S. Supreme Court or any Federal District Court.

The biggest change, and the strangest one to me is the eruption of Go Fund Me pages of all kinds to bring our team to the NDT. If a team qualifies for the NDT, why don’t they just get to go? It seems like something that should be funded regardless of the institutions commitment to the tournament or debate in general. NDT should try to gather sponsors for this, but this also means accessibility must be a part of the tournament. This cuts against – like all the suggestions I’ve written above – the idea that the NDT is preserving some kind of true or better form of debating than could exist outside the annual terrarium that it puts together in some midwestern hotel. This is obviously false; there are tons of good forums (fora?) for debating out there that simply don’t meet or click with those who have identified the accidental sentiment of practice that has been passed down to make a tournament easier to win with being good at debating. There is no necessary connection between the habits of good NDT debate and good debate. There might be other good reasons to do the NDT, but those will vanish too unless the NDT and the practitioners of it can solve the funding issue.

If a Dean or VP of Student Affairs saw the video linked here they would probably feel very confident about their decision not to fund intercollegiate debate on their campus. They need an interpreter – and anyone who loves American debate traditions needs one. The NDT along with commentators needs a team of Sherpas to help those interested and not part of the high school workshop to debate recruitment pipeline understand what they are seeing and why it is powerful, it matters, and most importantly why it’s a necessary part of university life that is quickly being eroded into a job training site. The crowdfunding angle is so depressing to me and I see it everywhere. I think it should be addressed by the NDT directly and with an eye toward preserving whatever the value of doing NDT debate might be (I’m unfamiliar with the evidence other than the anecdotal and the post hoc law school success stories. There’s got to be better data out there somewhere ya?). It might be that the NDT has nothing to do with teaching rhetoric, debate, or argumentation and it does something quite different than the package suggests. We should change the packaging, or make the appeal coherent in some way to ensure that the funding will be there to have such an event.

The other solution is to distribute the NDT away from a center and to the margin. NDT could be a style of debate meant to inquire after complex, complicated, deep disagreement about national and international policy. It could become a way to approach it, much like TED has become that for research ideas or socially trendy curiosities. It could become like The Moth has become for storytelling. Both of these organizations are models for the NDT’s future – what’s the brand? High intensity, high structured debate on a policy question that is research heavy. It’s not evidence based debate, it’s evidence centric debating. That brand could make NDT something that is replicated in small venues here and there not to discover a champion, but to discover the insights on policy issues that only NDT debaters know can be revealed. The fact that the amount of people who truly get what this style and approach to debate can reveal about thought, evidence, the mind, and human communication is so slim is a source of embarrassment. It can be addressed.

As I discussed on In the Bin, National Parliamentary Debate Association nationals had about 20 teams at their championship tournament.

Cross Examination Debate Association, by contrast, just had their national tournament and hosted 86 teams.

Globally, the World University Debate Championships held in Panama hosted 232 teams the last two weeks of December at their championship, which an American team won from Dartmouth.

Why the disparity? If debate is dying, how do you explain these numbers?

Debate is not dying; debate is inconsistent based on context. I agree these numbers are not what they were 20 years ago, but what was the same as it was 20 years ago? Nothing!

What are some explanations as to the relative health of some debate formats and not others?

The best explanation of the distinction between NPDA and CEDA is CEDA has a long history of being rooted in the curriculum of speech communication departments. There are still a large number of Boomer and tons of Generation X professors who came up in a system where a CEDA/NDT program was just an unquestioned part of the department whether they participated in it or not. There could still be some tensions in such departments between those who don’t understand or aren’t a part of the debate program and those who are. This is mostly because of a failure of the debate program to communicate to the larger department what they do.

I remember being profiled as “not a debate person” when I visited the University of Pittsburgh in 2004 to see if I wanted to get a Ph.D. there. Since it was CEDA nationals weekend, the students I met were not from the debate tradition, and were quite critical of debate and the people involved – mostly because there was not much communication about what goes on in the debate program, and these graduate students had to put it together based on what they saw from time to time. This is not their fault but the fault of the program to communicate its curricular connection (or even better, necessity!).

Having an assumed curricular connection is not working for debate in CEDA or NDT as the discourse is much more akin to sport today. Social media and University coverage of debate accomplishments is in the rhetoric of a NCAA team. This doesn’t help debate’s numbers because it doesn’t display fiscal need to the university. For example, the necessity of a lab to teach science or the necessity of a language center to help the foreign languages department is much clearer to a Dean than “We won a tournament!” appears. In that case, it sounds like athletics, which funds itself through donations and ticket sales (somewhat). This is directly connected to the large amount of “please donate to our debate team” crowdfunding posts I see on social media these days. Curricular connection is vital to the health of a debate program, but also requires the debate director to do a lot more than go to 13 weekend tournaments in one format as their entire program.

NPDA’s issue I think is related to this “assumed curriculum” connection where there is no basis for understanding it among the faculty. Most who did CEDA might not understand or see the connection to communication or rhetorical theory at all. Most debate directors have a lot of anxiety about having faculty come watch practice – either the practice will not be valuable (edited to look like some imagined 19^th century debate to deceive the faculty member) or it will be a real practice, risking alienating the faculty member and making them really question the value of the program. The best way through this is of course to integrate the debate program into the campus life very much how writing programs have done it.  NPDA should try to connect it's more open style (although it has really raced toward the CEDA model as a way to survive) from the earlier days to things on campus such as democratic deliberation centers, the writing center, dialogue initiatives, and the like. The contrast would be very powerful: NPDA format could be another addition of things that can be done to investigate a controversy, share perspectives on it, or help people find their way through disagreement.

What about the international numbers? This is explained through a few factors. First, debate is a club activity in most countries with no curricular connection whatsoever. There are some student club funds for that. But most importantly, non-American students do not have to pay huge tuition bills to attend university. This allows for the annual expense of travel and participation in an event that might be fun, interesting, and a chance to meet a large amount of international peers. Also the international attitude toward education is a lot less carceral than the American – not a lot of attention to attendance or completing a daily task to pass the course. There’s also not a lot of pressure to have a part time job to pay for school.  There’s more time for practice and engagement in debate as something enjoyable rather than another addition to an already stressful, surveilled college experience.

The biggest thing to increasing the numbers of participants in any debate format is more connection to a diverse, broad sense of audience. Although WUDC has its issues with how it theorizes audience, it offers an experience to debate the widest distinction between people with the widest cultural and geographic diversity of participants to judge. NPDA offers the most narrow in this experience. Diversity is great for rhetorical training as the rhetorical theory of argument isn’t about getting it right as much as it is getting it across. Practicing the same types of audiences before different types of people is educational. This is rhetorical education, something that a lot of people in debate don’t want – they want something more philosophical: The correct argument, with the correct information, said the correct way – and if you vote against it you are clearly stupid, wrong, an idiot, or worse, a conservative!

Shifting what debate’s goals are is the way to get the numbers up. Look at Worlds – the only distinction here is the diversity. It’s a tougher travel and a tougher amount of time to be away (although it is a holiday which makes the travel easier for those obsessed with class performance). This kind of integration might not be possible for NPDA or CEDA but imagination can come into play, as well as following the model of the writing center from composition studies.

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.

A quick question for you all - 

Do you think video is necessary for teaching online? Would audio work?

Another question: Is audio instruction superior to video? Would students interact with it more, watch it more? Would they get more from it?
When making a teaching video of course students can just listen to the audio on their phone or tablet wherever they are. This doesn't address the issue in my mind.

When I am creating audio only content I speak differently and present differently. I articulate differently. Video is the same - the difference is there and palpable. So can audio from a video presentation be as good if a student is distracted, doing something else, and listening to your course through their headphones/earbuds?

What do you think? Should audio be the gold standard of online teaching?

Video might be essential for some online teaching, but certainly not all of it - unless you are addicted to slides.

Comments Welcome!

Tenure is not compensation. I'm really bothered by all the social media posts where tenure is being (to me) not so subtlety defined as some kind of reward, some kind of currency, something of value - it is something about the conferral of some kind of power or some kind of authority that is a result of working hard. 

Maybe I'm off base, but this capitalistic understanding of tenure tends to play into the hands of the far right and the conservatives in general. When people come for tenure, this presentation makes it easier to think of tenure as a kind of compensation that has no peer in any other job, career, or role in the economy. The only things that are close are things like U.S. Federal judges, Supreme Court Justices, and so on.

Tenure should be rhetorically constructed to be necessary equipment for the researcher. This is pretty easy to do – once you prove you can do effective research and that you can communicate the basic insights of the field to undergraduate students in a meaningful way, you should then be given the equipment of tenure so you can pursue inquiry where it leads you. You now have the authorization to look into whatever matters you think are worth writing and speaking about, from the perspective of your field.

Too often on social media, particularly Facebook and Bluesky, we see academics using tenure in a way I find to be Trumpian – that is, they use it as an excuse to speak down to their commentors, use offensive language without strategic considerations, and dismiss detractors without reasoning, rationality, or any consideration for reaching them. I don’t think this is a good use of tenure, to prove you are an expert who can say what they want however they want about whatever issue they want.

Rarely do we see the power of academic fields on social media. We don’t see the power of the rationality of a field, or links to the things to look deeper at that kind of thinking. We often see “get f-ed loser, I’m a tenured professor,” which doesn’t address the criticism, is a weird kind of ad hominem/appeal to authority – and often fuels the distrust and now rising hate of higher education professionals.

Tenure should make one feel comfortable sharing perspectives that are rooted in one’s field – the rationality of the field is what I would call it – to show people reading that there is a system of reasoning and logic here although it might be unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and unpredictable by the general public. This is the best way to respect it – to say “I am tenured” means I am an expert in the methods my field has determined to produce ‘good’ knowledge and understanding.

The other problem might be the nature of social media. Even if you are a scholar with tenure and can handle quite a bit of tedium from either the text you are studying, the sample you are analyzing, or the university grants office you are dealing with, social media tends to reward visible anger in short bursts, the rhetoric of “lashing out,” which is quite Trumpian – the move of “owning the libs” but on the side of higher education.

Trump’s rhetoric and the rhetoric of his circle works because it makes us feel instantly rewarded for schooling the dumbasses. It’s great fun to tell someone off, and that rush of pleasure is like no other. Social media keeps us coming back for more and more of that. Perhaps the best thing to do is for scholars to abandon it, or perhaps use it as a way to publicize longer pieces that can engage politics in the way that they might find valuable. Of course the trick there is to write in such a way that your detractors or your opponents (Whoever they might be to you) are going to be willing to read the longer piece.

Tenure is an incredible tool. I’m fortunate to have it. But it certainly doesn’t mean I know more than you. It means I’m authorized to conduct whatever research I would like to do and I can’t be stopped by the university or other authorities where I work. This is definitely an accomplishment, but it means I don’t have instant answers that school my opponents. It means I have a method of inquiry and that I can inquire about unpopular ideas. The scholar should determine scholarship, not the political, not the popular or entertaining/exciting. Sometimes these things overlap of course, but that is another thing to bring up when discussing this issue.

Social media has a lot of photos and excited people getting tenure. I sure hope they are excited about the license, not the reward, and I certainly hope we can craft a rhetoric around it where we can distinguish it from capitalist reward or workplace reward. It’s more like a proper set of safety equipment for a welder than it is an annual bonus because your division did well.

News of the Day (NOTD) really is the best blogging site out there. I really think their model is the best.

Not sure my reasons for abandoning it, but after thinking about it, I think I'll post over there too. 

Check it out!

https://notd.io/s/NYsophist

Here's my take on Biden's farewell address. I didn't think it was very good and actually was really kind of pathetic given what it could have been and what he could have focused on. I don't understand why this speech was not that much different than a campaign speech. I feel like he thinks he's leaving office too soon - but that's speculation on my part.

All we have is the words he said - so let's take a look at the structure, language, and arguments of this speech and see what he could have done better. Comments welcome!

I have a debate course nearly oversubscribed starting in a week. The course is a part of the University's new committment to having social justice imbedded in the curriculum.

I'm interested to see what topics they would like to turn into motions, and off we go. I'm teaching some light policy debate theory because it really does present some nice grounding for the students to figure out how to engage one another instead of just announcing the facts. 

I'm entering the class with one question: What is social justice? Would we know it if we saw it, or is that too easy? Is it a process, a moral attitude, a policy framework - what? 

I think I'll intervene with some ideas from the de-incarceration movement as well as questions about power and the U.S. Constitution - are the rights outlined in this document a good guideline or fundamental rights? 

I hope the students find the class valuable in a University and higher education system that communicate with great clarity, daily, how little they value the transformative, creative student experience and paint a future of having the attitude of consumerism, the attitude of a commodity, and the only path to success is being a commodity that consumes other commodities. 

This is a conference presentation by Dr. Lisa Piccirillo, a professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin. This video is remarkable for many different reasons. Many of these reasons will have to do with math and her research on fourth dimensional objects. I have nothing to say about that so this is the wrong blog to read for mathematical insights. What I find remarkable is how this video violates a number of conventional views about conventions that those who should know better – rhetoricians – subscribe to either explicitly or implicitly.

The first thing here is that she is not reading a research paper, something that not only happens at rhetoric and communication conferences but is baked into the culture. She knows her material, is confident in it, and is expressing it in a way to communicate to the audience that it is interesting and valuable. Notice the grammar here: She is communicating that the material is interesting and valuable, not what we see at NCA, I am very interested in this material, this is my research. Instead, Piccirillo communicates the insights and thoughts about the research that she has had as a progression of that research. Perhaps she is able to do this because she’s actively thinking and working on this every day instead of throwing a presentation together the night before her talk after a couple of drinks at a Hilton or Sheraton bar – another cultural practice of NCA, RSA, and the lot.

Secondly, and really incredibly is the use of visual aids here. It is super rare for anyone to present at a conference in the way that they would be presenting this material in a teaching environment. Why do we not insist on having “a board” of some kind when presenting our work in communication or rhetoric? We do have power point, and she could have easily employed PowerPoint, Canva, or any of the numerous slide presentations here, but she did not. Is this part of the culture of the mathematics conference? Is it just what is done, or is there some reasoning behind it? I could have it wrong, but perhaps Piccirillo is using the board because it is an effective means of communication here. She organizes her thoughts, without notes, without a paper to read, using the board as a mnemonic device, or something that helps her get to where she wants to go after surveying where she has been in her living notes. The audience gets to have an easy to follow (for them, not me) source of the ground that she is surveying and moving through. It’s a map that is being revealed as she move through the thinking. At the end, the board is a reference she can return to in addressing questions, making clarifications, and generally orienting the audience toward what she would like them to walk away with. In my experiences at rhetoric and communication conferences, I have never seen anything that comes anywhere close to this. There is no consideration for the audience, there’s no attention paid to orienting the audience toward an interesting issue or work in the field. Instead, all orientation is about the presenter; it’s all about what brought them to the research and their personal investment.

I also think that it’s funny that it would be hard to convince rhetoricians and others who regularly attend NCA that a mathematics conference would have incredibly rhetorically valuable insights in a presentation that would put our own standards of presenting to shame. I’m guilty of it too, although I try not to be. I think that it’s super easy to slip into what’s culturally appropriate, the groupthink of the field, when one attends a conference. Also, there’s a performative opposition happening here: Picarillo’s topic is difficult to understand without years of specialized practice and familiarity with it, so the way she presents it is very much on the surface – she provides the audience the orientation they need to appreciate what she is sharing. She works on how to communicate it in a way that allows her to reach her point – she wants the audience to get where we are in terms of this research based on where we have been. Contrast this to NCA, where the topics are pretty easy to understand and get – popular Netflix shows, media coverage of politics, and the like – I think we feel, since it’s an academic conference, that the work should be difficult to understand and get since it’s pretty easy to access and get. So perhaps we read a lot of boring citations and complex quotes in our papers to convince ourselves, and our audiences of those like us. that we are indeed at a very intense, very intellectual, very deep conference – not just sharing our favorite moments from Bridgerton or the Marvel films, but really making some inroads in the theory of rhetoric, communication, or whatever theory de jour is the popular one that will call attention to the personality behind it.

Another big insight here is that the Harvard Mathematics department found this presentation good enough to post to YouTube for a global audience. They, and Picarillo I assume, agreed it should be shared for pretty much anyone to view who has internet access. Although this is a highly specialized video, that didn’t stop them from sharing it. And as of this writing, the video sits at about 1.2 million views, something that is shocking for a presentation in complex mathematics. This again points to the rhetorical value and insights from the presentation. No presentation from any conference in rhetoric can get anywhere close to this number of views I bet, primarily because our conference presentations do not invoke or use any rhetorical standards of effectiveness in which we claim expertise. What is our expertise if not how to give an incredible presentation? It seems of all things a mathematics professor has whipped us across the board in this without even trying. Her focus on her work and her interest in conveying the importance of that work to those interested is all she had to concentrate on in order to succeed here. It begs the question: What are we concentrating on when we present at NCA? What are we interested in? Who are we trying to reach? What are we trying to invoke in our audience? Is it care and interest in the questions that move us? Are we trying to advance interest in the field? I’m afraid that the answers I’m coming up with as I’m writing this paragraph aren’t great – I think many are trying to own the field rather than promote it. I think that people are more interested in their name appearing in a citation than appearing for a global audience on YouTube. I think most NCA attendees would rather have the lead essay in The Quarterly Journal of Speech than have 1.2 million views on YouTube because they have convinced themselves that publication in a journal that isn’t read or cited by anyone outside of NCA is the sign of “making it.” What is the value of rhetoric if it is kept in such closed quarters?

My final comments here are about the incredible value of the comments section for the promotion of the field. Looking at the comments for this video is incredibly insightful for anyone interested in rhetoricians.

This short sample here is mind-blowingly amazing insight into the minds of the audience. We don’t get this at the traditional conference. All I’ve ever received from the traditional Q&A is dishonesty. It’s a question, but it really all boils down to “Why am I not speaking about this and you are?” Our arbitrary and poor review process for conferences is part of it, but this kind of honestly is really only possible in the culture of YouTube. I am not sure if at the mathematics conference if there is the same academic dishonesty as the Q&A that I experience at communication conferences, but there are probably a few people like this there. I call them “snipers,” and these are people who attend a panel just to take down the speakers and show themselves (mostly) that they really are smart and intellectual people.

But this comment section is a refreshing change from this, showing the audience’s relationship to the speaker and speech in so many interesting ways – references to the accessibility of this talk, on the toilet no less, is an amazing commentary on where audiences can find meaningful rhetoric. Comparisons to popular culture, and a general appreciation for intellectual work are also here. It’s really something that helps the mathematics field cement themselves in the larger world and defend the value of university work.

Is this talk a keynote or a plenary? Perhaps. I ‘m thinking to the plenary presentations I saw most recently in Leiden at the Argumentation conference there, and they were way too structured for insiders to be this valuable. In this mathematics talk, the value is there – the commenters prove it. The audience is the judge of whether your rhetoric is effective. Although many of these audience members do not understand the specifics of the claims being made here, they understand that it is valuable and important to the world. This would not have been the case from the Leiden talks, where one presenter even announced that “Nobody cares about rhetoric.” You don’t need to say it, buddy. We all can see it. These videos would be lucky to hit 500 views, and engender a number of comments about how the talks prove that higher education is a failure. You don’t see those comments in this video at all.

Here’s more of the audience now going meta, speaking about her speaking style. There are also a large number of references to her attire and to her body, which might be dismissed as inappropriate or even sexist by many people in my field. But the comments about her attire, or her body, are created out of the topoi of contrast. They read her appearance through her speech. Her identity is identification, with what she appears consubstantial with.

This topoi of contradiction might also be contrast or it could be considered evidence of her overall excellence. The commenters point out how she “never skips back day” but at the same time indicate they cannot understand half of what she’s saying (although they recognize it as valuable and good). These elements together become reasons why the video and the speaker should be praised as someone who is amazing and incredible all around – an identity that the audience assembles through her delivery, style, and manifest content. The way she speaks and uses the chalkboard is as much a part of the manifest content as the point she wants to prove to the immediate audience (and the mediated audience on video that has the background to get what she’s after).

The meta comments on this talk provide some powerful insight into how rhetorically savvy the audience really is in the world. For example, they all buy into the argument that lack of notes means you are a serious expert. This is an important insight. If one reads a paper to an audience and purports to be an expert, you are really disadvantaging yourself with that audience. The comfortable cultural practices of a conference like NCA are not the best rhetorical model or practice for what really works and helps audiences understand and appreciate the work that is being done in rhetoric and communication. Even if we believe what goes on at NCA could not be understood by the general public, having it filmed and shared like this would change those unhealthy insider practices (the cult of the last minute presentation written on the plane). A difficult question: Why are the Arnold Keynotes not put on YouTube by NCA? Why are the Presidential panels not shared? It’s because these rhetorical research panels and talks are not for the world, they are for insiders only, which is a real shame. Think about how “insider” Piccirillo’s talk is and now look at these comments. What really is an exclusive talk if not the performance of one? Shouldn’t we be outclassing the mathematics field in YouTube by the millions?

The judgements on her nature, character, and who she is as a person are reflective on the rhetorical efficacy of her presentation. Although humorous for the most part, these “joking” comments only work as humor because they directly stem from her rhetorical choices in presenting. Anything the audience says must be taken in at face-value. Rhetoricians are the worst at this – they are suspicious of the general public’s ability to understand their “important work.” This video proves that sentiment wrong without doubt. It proves that this sentiment probably stems from a fear that perhaps the field isn’t intellectually tough or rigorous the way math might be. This might explain why so many rhetoric scholars don’t identify as such: “I study politics,” “I study race,” “I study argumentation,” the list goes on. It’s rare to find someone who says “I study rhetoric,” as such a claim seems baseless (see Burke, “The Paradox of Substance”). The fear that there’s nothing rigorous here warrants a creation of a performance of exclusion in our conference presentations and public talks. It warrants a gatekeeper mindset in our journals and our conference admission processes. We have to have the things that prove to ourselves that this is not something anyone could do, only the special, smart people can do it. But the value of rhetoric comes from teaching. It’s a teaching art; it’s a teaching field. It’s meant for people to access it and be able to do it with some instruction. The value of it isn’t intellectual; it’s in the preparation of others to be able to appreciate the intellectual, to appreciate complex thought and see a place for themselves in relation to that complex thought. It’s about appreciation and love for passion and dedication to a craft, an art, a serious realm of thought. And in these ways, Piccirillo is as good a rhetor as she is a mathematician.

Communication and rhetoric scholars work hard to indicate their identity as “serious scholars” outside of their rhetorical presentation, that they are complex and complicated theoretically, that most people couldn’t understand their complicated research. This math lecture shows that working to make something accessible and interesting – the realm of rhetoric – always engenders success with the audience even if they don’t have the background to fully appreciate everything you are saying. If only we actually followed the principles of our own art.

During the election , any election we are treated to numerous “persona on the street” interviews where people announce they are “ready for change.” Supporting change is like supporting our troops, willfully dodging the more difficult and concerning act of supporting what kind of change or what activities our troops are sent off to do. Supporting change in general – saying “it’s time for a change in X (the variable standing in for the place where government meets or the large, nondescript category of political activity like “the economy” or “Wall Street,” etc) is really saying that you don’t want to get into the important, specific, researchable elements of why you should support something. You just can’t be bothered to be engaged.

Photo by Stanley Morales on Pexels.com

This reminds me of the shocking, and continuously shocking frequency of poor opinion among those who should know better, i.e. professors. Many expressed to me no concern that young people were devouring the Harry Potter books at breakneck speed, claiming “well, at least they are reading.” When I pointed out they would have a different opinion if it turned out they were reading Mein Kampf, I was met with silence. Many colleagues opposed this with that bane of evil, the mobile phone: “At least they are reading and not on their phone all the time.” With the average mental age and culture of my colleagues hovering around 78 years old, I suppose they wouldn’t know that what one primarily does on a phone is read and write. Professors pine for the epistolary age, not even thinking about counting the thousands of words that students write every day on text message, mostly about the ineptitude of the professor to provide a meaningful class. I resolve in 2025 to eliminate my expectation that a professor should know better.

Supporting change, or reading, is also like supporting the university, or tenure. What good are these things as they are? Should they be defended for merely existing? There are many good arguments out there for tenure or for having universities, but we have abandoned most of them. In our froth to retain students, stay open, be competitive, we have reduced the entire arsenal of arguments to one: You’ll have no chance of getting a good job without these skills. But this begs several questions: What good jobs are out there that are directly connected to the university experience? And secondly, does the university teach or provide skills?

It’s anecdotal to be sure, but most of my students are ready to go for a career that isn’t much of one. They will work at one place, then another, then another – skills notwithstanding. What does work is their ability to speak, listen, communicate, and most importantly – rearticulate ideas back to the people who are sloppily groping their way toward a conclusion. The university provides a practice ground for expressing opinion in a meaningful way, a way that gets people to speak back to them or rearticulate their ideas to them so they can be re-expressed in a different way. This practice is somewhat essential not only for career oriented people, or someone who wants a job, but for people who plan to exist and function in a democracy. Expressing doubts about an opinion seems like an ability that the university could really get behind, particularly in a world where we frequently see someone shot or stabbed because of a disagreement about who was in line first.

Skill is a fraught term at best, generally a cover for discrimination – “She didn’t have the requisite skills for the position” is an unassailable position to take for an employer that discourages pushback. However, critical approaches on what counts as a skill reveal the term to often serve as a discriminatory smokescreen. Irena Grugulis, Chris Warhurst, and Ewart Keep note in the introduction to their book The Skills that Matter, most are your race, class, and luck of your educational experiences at a young age. Transferable skills tend to gravitate around whiteness, maleness, and middle-classness. So serving the corporate demand for “communication skills” or “teamwork” need to be interrogated by the university to determine if this is something that is actually demanded. Better yet, the University could just ignore the corporate demand for skill and teach appreciation, practice, and evaluation of critical thought through speaking and writing.

Tenure is another thing that’s easy to defend without a lot of specifics. Defending this as the ability to set the agenda for your research and then what becomes of your teaching seems pretty straightforward. The discussion of this kind of research freedom becomes easy to eliminate when the university, such as mine, pulls back all the research support it can. There’s little value to a tenured position if there is no sabbatical, no course reduction, no office to help you secure a grant or apply for a fellowship, and so on. A redefinition of tenure as having the expertise to evaluate whether students have demonstrated evidence of grasping, understanding, grappling with, or taking into consideration the elements of the course could be helpful. Things like assessment on objective measures fail because we then seek out what is easy to measure and measure it. It’s much more difficult and complex for a teacher to make a professional judgement on the quality of a student’s work and defend it. What is it based on? The professor should be able to show some example of what that quality would be like and explain the gap. This is the function of a rubric, as far as I understand it, but so many rubrics are boxes that contain points and serve as ways to distribute points to students who, from the first day of class, are preparing their case for passing during the last week based on the distinction between a 2.5 and a 3. The ancient argument of the sortie consumes many professors’ time at the end of the term as they hear “Well there’s not much difference here between getting 3 points and getting 5.” This reduces the professor and the student to equals who are at the mercy of the “syllabus as a contract” and interpreting it based on the objective standards of point distribution based on the rules established in this document. Instead, the professor should work on the articulation of what excellence is and how to meet it, with them as the gatekeeper of their field. Tenure is about quality standards, not a permanent protection from political disagreement. It should be thought of as where the power to interpret quality lies. This can of course extend to research as well at those institutions that are not quite to the point of being a “skill factory” like mine is quickly becoming. These confrontations on the level of critical interpretation are vital for students to practice articulation of why and how they might have met these difficult, non-objective standards of excellence set up by someone very well read, very practiced in what they are teaching.

Most young people are not invested in a career unless they want to be a doctor, an airplane designer, a bridge inspector – something like that. There are more than a few of them, and for these disciplines there are hard and fast abilities that need to be learned. Teachers are the best resource for determining what and how these things should be learned and understood. The core curriculum and the liberal arts come in to the grey areas of this – what to say when your boss indicates that perhaps a reduction in final checks of a wing, or a reduction in the quality of bolts on construction of a bridge would save millions, how will the former student engage? Will they feel a need to, or will they feel like they’ve done their part for the points in the box? Will they have a taste for engaging with those who are empowered to decide in ways that matter?

Getting into the specifics of change, reading, tenure, skill, etc is what the university should be up to. It should be a begged question detector – opening up the more difficult and taxing conversation that we are too lazy to have these days. Much easier to binge a series on streaming media which requires all the effort of a finger to indicate that you are “still watching” – yes, you are active! The university can be one of the last places where we have space and time to have this kind of tough and taxing engagement, an example of how it can be rewarding to “end” a conversation unsure, unrewarded, and unexpectedly thinking about it hours later when trying to go to sleep.

I got a new GoPro so what better way to break it in than to walk and talk through something on my mind about teaching.

I think what explains the lack of student motivation best is that they have only one measure to evaluate things in this world: entertainment. Is it entertaining? If not, they won’t do it.

How do we engage a generation of people whose only reason to engage anything is that they think it is entertaining?

On Friday I’ll post the second vlog on this topic. Subscribe to my YouTube channel to get the first look!

Is asking someone to consider the broader impact of supporting a policy out of place? Disrespectful? Is it hostile? Is it inconsiderate?

The Governor of Louisiana thinks so. An LSU Law professor asked students that if they felt comfortable voting for Donald Trump because of his policy agenda, they should consider how that makes people of different identities feel.

This is a great argument, one that is great because of the element of surprise. Most people who are voting purely on policy issues – something like the southern border for example – wouldn’t be connected to the rights of the groups that Trump and a lot of his supporters don’t appear to have respect for or care about.

This probably won’t go anywhere as in a classroom teaching a class a professor has a lot of protection. They have academic freedom and first amendment freedom. Professors often rely on saying controversial or surprising things to stimulate class discussion and thought. Where else in the world would highly-educated people be permitted to stimulate thought at this level without university protections?

It’s a great thing to think about for a lawyer: How would supporting the letter of the law, or a policy, have adverse communication effects that could be interpreted as a policy choice, or worse, a principled stand? Sometimes in choosing what we think is the best policy we are happy to let the lives and bodies of others serve as the lubricant to let the gears of our lives operate unimpeded. Occasionally this is done willingly, more often this is done out of a cursory awareness but an unwillingness or perception that there can be no other way. What this professor is suggesting is that perhaps the decision of how to vote or support policy should be done via a different kind of rubric, one that doesn’t force a choice.

The university today is often thought of as a job-training site. Students are there to learn how to do a job, and that’s it – it should be apolitical. This model strips the university of a number of its more important and vital functions which can be thought of through different narratives and discourses. The job training model is the least relevant namely because it would be so much cheaper to enter the job after high school and be taught by your employers. This wouldn’t take public money, it would be corporations footing the bill, and they would get employees who did things exactly the way they wanted. But most corporations would be against this; they want the university system. But why? Someone with a degree commands more salary and also probably has the tools to push back on poor decisions made by bosses, asking annoying questions and wanting reasons why the policies are the way they are.

Let’s think of the university as a seed bank, as the place that ideas we have rejected are allowed to live in a terrarium of sorts, where we can repopulate the world with the extinct ideas if we ever needed to. This is why universities teach things that are “useless” to many people outside the university. Teaching these things allow people to understand that these perspectives are around and available, and can be used if needed to address something, solve an issue, or provide some new light to old perceptions. The seed vault keeps ideas and methods alive and available in case society realizes that their quest for progress and innovation didn’t check the blind spot. This is insurance at the minimum.

But also the seed vault model encourages different ways of thinking by exposing students to types of thinking and approaches that seem incorrect and out of place. Academic freedom is essential to allow professors to introduce ways and approaches to thought that aren’t popular or automatic. We are the products of many things when it comes to our thought: The media, our relatives and friends, what we choose to read, watch, and listen to in our spare time. We need direct intervention in this, and that intervention is unlikely to come on the path of least resistance. That is, it has to come from an agitator who is protected and encouraged to agitate – a teacher.

A teacher cannot just say whatever they want. Academic freedom is the responsibility to be free to interrogate and speak however they wish about anything that will encourage or spark different ways of thinking. In this case, this incident is justified. The professor is not dismissing the people who voted for Donald Trump, he is pushing on the question of whether or not it is ethical to vote for someone purely on policy. What a question! Isn’t that what we are supposed to do, make logical decisions about what’s best for the country? This professor pushes back – best for whose country?

Unfortunately our elected officials are starting to think of dissent – even the intellectual exercise of dissent – is a threat to the country. Which is one of the biggest threats to the country that we could possibly face. If we are no longer permitted to question authority and criticize how we make decisions, what sort of democracy do we have at that point? Who is really free to express ideas? What kind of culture will that attitude produce?

Happy Thanksgiving, readers!

Tomorrow is Turkey day and if the Northern State Parkway was any indication on Monday, stress is high. I’ve never seen so many accidents. Perhaps our minds aren’t where they should be because we are dreading that Uncle or Aunt coming to dinner and trying to start fights about Trump or Harris or whoever with everyone in the family who thinks the other way. Facing people who see the world differently than you do can be the source of great anxiety. But it’s not the people or the ideas that cause this. It is the lack of training in argumentation that causes us the most grief.

Argumentation is not a breakdown of communication or a failure to care. It is an essential discourse that is necessary for human interaction and even human thriving. We are meant and designed to argue with one another in order to sharpen and improve our thinking. But shouting at one another and attacking people personally isn’t going to help. Neither is bragging, gloating, or blaming someone for the destruction of the world. Instead, we have to think about argumentation as a way to get people to think and understand things differently. Luckily, argumentation works this way rather naturally if you approach it in an appropriate way. Sharing our ideas is sharing who we are, and that includes disagreement and argument. But we have to do it in a way that allows for the productive effects of argument to come to the forefront. Argumentation is not fighting and not related to hate. It is respect for another human mind at work, and it shows that respect by interrogating that mind’s moves. Much like analyzing a chess game or a football match for strategy, it gives us an appreciation for error that improves all thought going forward, optimally.

It is a good thing to argue and defend your point of view. But you definitely need to be able to explain yourself as well as have reasons and evidence for your beliefs. If you don’t have those things, you can still participate but you might have to ask more questions or listen more than you imagined you would. One of the most shocking things that can happen in argumentation is that the other side offers up an idea you haven’t heard or thought about yet. This is a good thing – it’s why we argue. We argue to improve our thinking, knowledge and understanding not of the truth or the facts, but about perception and other people.

Here are some suggestions on how to engage with others productively tomorrow.

How to initiate an argument, or participate in one

Argument is invitational and it’s a group project! People forget this, but argumentation is not the firing of the cannons, it’s the invitation to dance. It’s asking someone to help you carry things. It’s asking someone to open a door for you, reach something on a high shelf, or taste something that you are cooking.

I often refer to cooking when I’m discussing argument. The reason why is Socrates, according to Plato, dismissed the study of argumentation and rhetoric by comparing it to cooking. For Socrates, cooking makes things taste good that are unhealthy for us, so it’s dangerous. It’s also not an art! For Socrates, an art can only be something that has total benefit as its goal. 

I would hate to go to a dinner party at Socrates’s house. 

Cooking is something that brings the family together, brings us all into a room to do that one basic thing all humans have to do to survive: Eat. While we are doing one of our most basic survival tasks, albeit symbolic for many people this time of  year (I know I don’t really need that much food, or these fancy types of food) it’s a celebration of what it means to be alive and human, thankful for being able to take a moment and sit down and eat together. 

Argumentation is something similar. We should be thankful for the chance to “cook up” our ideas and “serve” them to others to see what they need to “taste better.” Like food, everyone prefers different levels and kinds of seasoning in their arguments. 

If someone rejects your argument they are not rejecting you. They are saying “More garlic please!” And a good cook wouldn’t take that as a personal attack. Yet we do in argument!

Another thing to think about in argument is that it’s not about being right, it’s about making a connection with someone and sharing something together. Argument is more like a conversation than like warfare. People don’t see it this way because they forget that argument, at its heart, is an exchange. You can’t have an argument if the other person doesn’t offer anything – that’s just a lecture. And I can tell you that after teaching for over 20 years,, few people really enjoy a lecture. They would rather be participating in a conversation. If you want to have an argument you must have an exchange, and you want that exchange to be substantive – it can’t just be two or three lines. It has to take you both somewhere new.

Knowing something is true is not the ending point. This isn’t how you enter an argument. Knowing something is true should make you want to think about how to make it convincing to other people – that is if you really do care about the truth. Having the truth is not like having power or being dominant. It’s the first step in thinking about how to bring people over to something that is beneficial without question. A good thing to look into if you are interested in how difficult this can be is how doctors are taught to convince patients to change their habits and become healthier. They don’t tell the patients they are wrong or stupid; they explain to the patient what the facts are and what this can mean if they don’t address certain actions. 

Another basic rule is that being right is very different from being convincing. If you think you are right, and you are comfortable with that belief, you aren’t really going to understand why you should work hard to believe it. If it took you some time to come around to it, you are in a better position to argue because you can tell the story as to how you came around to your belief. Saying something is obvious and “only an idiot” would think otherwise isn’t convincing to anyone – you just called your argument partner an idiot. Not helpful. 

Instead, think about how to tell a story about your belief that starts with common concerns, grounds, or ideas that you both might share. The secret trick to winning an argument is to not speak before you have reminded yourself that the person you are speaking with has a human mind and human experiences just like you do. As you eat together, remember that you are both human and have similar capacities for thought and feeling. Then you can say something that will be convincing. This is the root of it, but not the total picture of course.

Finally, think about your goals in initiating an argument. Why do you want to argue? If it is something other than to improve the quality of thought and feeling with others, then you should probably stay quiet. It’s easy to cause a lot of harm expressing anything – even a phrase you think is innocent. In Buddhism they have the saying: “Mouth open; already a mistake.” Think about this before you start to invite others to argue with you about politics or anything for that matter.

If you have the goal of correcting others, think to yourself whether or not this is your role. Should you be the one to correct them? Are they doing great harm? Or is it more that you feel annoyed that they don’t think like you do? If you think about it, and you believe engaging in argument with this person will improve thought and feeling about things, then go for it!

How to get out of an argument

A lot of us fear being cornered by our political relatives and smothered in a bunch of discourse about the election. How do we handle this? 

The best way is to decline. A lot of times people will see this as a “victory!” – oh too scared you are going to lose, huh? Nothing to say!

What I suggest is staying quiet or trying to change the conversation to something else. It might really bug you that they claim this as a “victory,” but a victory over what? What exactly has been won? You have offered nothing and they have offered nothing. Things are as they were when the conversation started. They didn’t gain anything; they are still convinced like they were when they initiated.

Also, if someone feels they are right about something, and they really do believe it, why challenge others to argue in such an aggressive way? To me, this communicates deep doubts. They need the exchange of aggression to convince themselves that they are correct.

Silence annoys people who want to have arguments, who demand to argue because it denies them of the pleasure of expressing their frustration and anger about – well who knows what! It’s too simple to think that their anger and frustration is about politics. It has to be deeper than that. But you are (probably) not a psychologist, so it’s best to just talk about something more fun and interesting and avoid the argument entirely.

You can always respond that you only argue with people when you think there’s a chance to learn something new, change minds, or think – and that you don’t think that the suggested topic and attitude is going to get you there. 

Another thing to do to get out of arguments is to ask questions: I would love to know what good things you think Trump will do his first year, what will be best? Or, what do you think we are missing out on since Harris lost? This usually defuses the debate and allows them to talk but they will talk in terms that pretty quickly get exhausted since you aren’t pushing back, you are just asking for more information. Here’s some other starter questions:

What’s the most important issue to you?
How is Trump going to address that/fail at that?

What policy are you most scared of/looking forward to?

What challenges do you think will be toughest to take on?

Sometimes people don’t really want to argue, they just want someone to listen to them. As I have been told many times using this technique, “thank you for listening to my views.” It seems people don’t want to do it – they are afraid of hearing views they don’t like, or hate, or think are evil. But if you feel this way about those views, what harm is there in listening? Are you afraid you will change your mind? 

Now on to some specific advice for some of you arguers out there.

Advice for the Trump People

Now is not the time to celebrate like you’ve won the big game. People who you want to argue with will find this inappropriate. Social convention, things like appropriateness and timeliness, are vital to successful argumentation. It’s not just important that you have the best information or good phrasing, it’s vital that you also have a sense of when it’s in good taste to bring up what you want to argue about. 

If you just want to make your Democratic relatives feel bad, they probably already do. So there’s no reason to gloat – it’s not an argument and it doesn’t improve thinking, reasoning, or understanding.

But understanding is the bedrock of all good argumentation. You can’t agree with someone if you don’t understand what it is they are saying, what they believe, or how they connect multiple facts or phenomena. If you think you could increase understanding, that’s a good reason to invite an argument.

You should be prepared to defend Trump as a criminal. For many, a criminal is someone who doesn’t respect the law. How will you engage this argument? You can re-define the idea of a criminal – you could argue most businesspeople at his level are criminals, he just got caught – or you can take the approach that the laws he disrespected have no relevance to being President and enforcing constitutional principles. 

Some will argue that Trump has no respect for the Constitution because of January 6th. You should be prepared for this argument. The evidence is pretty strong and convincing that he incited the violent mob to attack the capitol and didn’t want to call them off. This is a tough one.

With any tough argument the best thing to do is research. Have some notes on your phone and take a look at some sources you think are good interpretations of what happened that day. 

But it’s best overall if you can avoid talking about Trump “the man.” One thing to consider is that Trump won the election in spite of all of these things against him as a person. You can always pivot such arguments to policy. This sounds like: “I understand you think Trump is a bad guy, but I like his plan for ________ .” This shifts the argument onto ground about what policies you voted for. You can ask: “I voted on policy as I’m sure you did, not personality.” 

Now this only works if you did vote on policy! I hope you did!!

Be ready on Trump’s big plans for the tariff and the border – what is the evidence that these policies are going to solve major issues in the country? Find some experts who think that these things are going to work. For example, many financial analysts believe the tariff is a negotiating policy to get compliance from our neighbors on a particular model of border safety. That might be a good addition to the argument! Anything that gives another point of view other than the tired views we see on CNN is helpful. 

Remember, the goal of having an argument is to get buy in to your perspective, not to be right. A victory isn’t rendering people into silence. That simply means they need time to think (a good sign for your argument). What true victory would be is hard to say. Perhaps it would be willingness to talk politics with you again in the future? Or saying to you that they have thought about what you said and have changed some of their articulation of their beliefs (but still hold the same beliefs)? Rarely, if ever is it that you face-crushed them. Reserve that for the football game chat. Argumentation never works this way and if you think you have done that in an argument, you most likely didn’t have an argument. That was a fight, and best avoided.

Advice for the Harris people

Kamala Harris ran an entire campaign based on the idea that Trump is a terrible person. This is the argument of ad hominem, or “at the person,” a strategy of discounting someone’s position or claim in an argument by pointing out that they are a mess, evil, or incompetent.

Many logicians believe that the ad hominem is a fallacy, which is an illegitimate way to argue. Instead of taking on the ideas you criticize the person offering the ideas. You dodge your responsibility in the argument to prove the idea or suggestion to be a bad one. 

If you want to argue with Trump supporters, it’s a good idea to abandon this strategy. It didn’t work too well in the general election. Now you see pundits and journalists claiming that the reason the Democrats lost was because they went “too far left.” I think it’s more reasonable to think that they didn’t spend enough time on the policies and values that they believe and support.

If you want to have an argument with Trump supporters, it would be a great strategy to focus on values and policies that you think are better for the country and/or better supported by the Democrats.

Being right about Donald Trump being a terrible person doesn’t help them see why they should support the Democrats, who might – from their point of view -support terrible policies. Start somewhere else in your argument. Perhaps with a Democratic policy that really has done good things in the country or the world.

One of the best strategies here is to localize your arguments. What’s a policy of the last administration that directly impacted you or someone you know in a positive way? Better yet, what’s a policy that impacted them or someone they know? This is a great way to talk about the benefits or even generally the effects of these big policies – such as the infrastructure act – that often get overlooked ironically because they are so massive.

You can even go very general if you like. You could talk about what a good government should do in different situations, and align Democratic party thinking with that principle. You can then point to things Trump supports or has said that indicate difference or some static/conflict with that principle. 

The goal here is not to prove that Trump is a terrible person. A lot of people who voted for Trump would agree with this. They voted for him because he doesn’t support “wokeness,” or because of the border or something like that. You should shift to policy and principle as a way of engaging these ideas to get the other person to see your position. 

Point out that our system works by voting for policy not promise. The record is essential even if you don’t like the people or personalities in a party. You should always try to direct the argument toward policies and what these policies mean for our everyday lives. 

General Advice for Anyone

Establishing an argument requires you to really figure out what idea you’d like to defend or what idea the other person is defending. You can then choose ways to engage with it. By the evidence, by definition, by degree, or by action. There’s also a other way to deal with it and that’s to say wrong forum or wrong place for the conversation. That might work for some argument averse people, but it’s not often what people who wish to share their views will choose. 

The best reason to engage an argument, particularly at a gathering of family or friends is not to make fun of them, belittle them, troll them, or watch people get angry. The reason is to reflect on your own ideas and views. What are our beliefs if not their articulation? We articulate our principles to ourselves every day. And if we don’t, we run the risk of losing the reasons why we believe what we do. Argument with other people is the way in which we examine and understand our own reasoning, or lack thereof, and correct it in ways that not only allow us to communicate our views better to other people but explain them better to ourselves, to really understand why we feel and think the way we do. There’s no other tool quite like it.

I must remind myself that education and learning is practicing something. We don’t have the convenient reminders like doctors and dentists do, that they work in or at a practice; that they own a “medical practice” and “practice medicine.” I think we “practice education” but we don’t have the reminder all the time that we are doing well at the thing by trying to do it at our best level.

Practice goes deeper than preparation. In Buddhism, practice is the thing. There’s a famous story about the Zen center in New York that people would arrive and the master would sit them down and say “we’ll get started soon.” Then everyone was just sitting. They were doing the thing they were waiting to do, unaware of it. This was somehow the perfect kind of practice – not concentrating, not thinking about it too much, and letting your mind go and think and imagine what is coming. Seems like good Zen practice to me.

Practicing something is being in it and doing it, practicing it not to prepare for the real thing, but practicing it because we care for it and we want it to be good all the time, every time. Practice is something that is done to improve or get better right now. Certainly not for when it “really matters.” This is a big mistake that a lot of well-meaning teachers make. We have the following well-meaning but horrible trope:

“In the real world, this work/behavior will not be accepted by your boss or employer”

I hear this one a lot. I think this is lazy. This is a fear appeal, that whatever practices are going on in the classroom are permissible to a degree, but not the degree that you are preparing for in the world. In other words, your behavior would be rejected in a situation that really mattered, where the stakes were high (translation: the classroom doesn’t matter; low-stakes). The teacher pins their authority on the questionable one of the forced labor market of capital and the idea that they are saving the student from a material punishment in the future.

Another related one is that the student “disrespects” the instructor through their lateness or poor work. I don’t understand this one either. Why are instructors in the immediate position of deserving respect straight away? A more equitable relationship is one where respect is the finishing place not the starting place of the teaching relationship.

These two examples misunderstand the role of practice. What are you practicing? How to be yourself. This requires intense attention daily. When you are reading you are practicing being yourself reading; when in class, you are practicing that. You are practicing speaking when you share your thoughts; you are sharing yourself, you are practicing how to be in the world with others.

This doesn’t mean that what happens in class is less than or somehow not high-stakes, it’s the highest stakes as it is the real world. No distinction. Whatever happens in a classroom is as real as it gets. The students and instructor have to face it together and account for it. There’s no game or fakeness. It’s the real deal, it’s the same practice you will do for the rest of your life out there without a classroom to “protect” you or a school to make sure you don’t mess up.

Practicing practice is the focus of education and what higher education should really be thinking about right now. How do we encourage serious practice of our practice? Are there multiple practices? How do we engage them and make sure the practices are good? How do we sustain the focus and attention on our practice of thought, writing, speaking, and reading? This isn’t just up to each individual; this is a community effort and at the same time is and becomes the practice of community.

The ICC indictment against Netanyahu is getting a lot of attention in the media as being out of line. U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham has said that if an ally arrests him, the United States will tank their economy. Joe Biden has said the charge is “outrageous.” But what other method or manner should be used to investigate whether a head of state with a powerful military has violated the rights that all humans should enjoy by default?

It’s clear that powerful world leaders are not a good source for evaluating this on face. They have a narrow goal of self-preservation, often couched in the rhetoric of the nation-state. The state must defend itself not only territorially, which is obvious, but also symbolically – the permanence and obviousness of borders is best conveyed through material violence. The state has no other tools other than slaughter to convince others that their borders are real.

There are times when border defense via weapons is necessary but these times should be rare. The further you live from a border the more real it seems. The closer you get, the more it seems to be somewhere else. You are never quite there. Sometimes we have to put big signs and facilities on borders to make sure people don’t mistake where they are.

The symbolic necessity of a hard border in the logic of the nation-state means that leaders of nation-states will defer to going hard on defending them – including violating other borders and territorial integrity, invasion, and other such actions that one would see at a pre-school such as breaking your stuff because you broke mine; knocking over your brick tower because you didn’t like mine, etc.

The suffering people on and around the border and the state or organization that has been determined to be at fault pay the price. The ICC makes sure that the state’s actions do not violate the rights of those who happen to be close to these borders, or in a geographically inconvenient spot. The ICC is the agreement that the governments of the world should step back and check one another to determine if state reaction to the flimsiness of borders goes too hard or too devastating on the physical lives and practiced rights of the people who happen to be in the area chosen for this demonstration of force.

The ICC seems like the perfect place to this rhetorician to stand and defend one’s actions. It seems like the best forum we have of this writing to make the argument that the nation-state has no alternative but material destruction and casualty when there is an existential threat to the state. The ICC prosecutor has the burden to argue when and where that line exists: That the defense of the nation-state has limits that should be respected and enforced in order to secure the fundamental rights of the people of the world. This discourse would be incredible to have access to in order to help people have conversations with one another about military reaction to violation of state sovereignty, and why violating peoples’ right to life or right to safe passage, might not be a valid way of re-establishing the symbolic certainty that “borders make the state” (to the tune of the clothes make the man).

Maybe I’m naïve, but I think stepping back and having the arguments articulated as to why such destruction is not only appropriate, but necessary, or perhaps the only option available versus the arguments that this kind of state action is illegitimate because of the cost on human rights, life, etc as well as the interesting argument that perhaps it further de-legitimizes the state in ways that it can’t recover (a very cynical reason to sign on to the Rome Statute, but I would think some governments had this conversation in their parliament or perhaps behind closed doors) is essential for us to figure out not just who to vote for or what policy to protest against, but the very nature and role of things like voting and protest in our world that we increasingly feel as more real and simultaneously deeply, deeply symbolic.