The New York Sophist

It’s been a couple of days since Binghamton, which I thought ran quite well. There were of course, some issues that I think American debating could do without, but they are for a couple of separate posts that I am working on. I don’t think I will ever understand judge allocation that puts five judges in some rooms, and two in some others. This makes little sense to me, as it seems to say low rooms, which we all know are very messy and generally have newer debaters in them, require less attention, less ears, and less eyes. Top rooms, which usually have more experienced debaters who understand how judgements within the game are made (“debate shorthand,” I call it) and usually provide a very clean and deep debate, need more ears, and eyes and minds. I think people who are doing well require less judges, and people who are doing poorly require more. After the round, during lunch, or between elims, those students now have 3-5 people to ask for tips on how to improve. Perhaps someone will explain to me the judge allocation thing one day, but so far nobody has successfully done so.

As far as debate quality in the Northeast region, this is clearly a rebuilding year. The debates I saw in elimination rounds reminded me of 2008 vintage. Here’s a good example, from quarterfinals.

Debate: Media Time Spent on Gun Violence – Binghamton 2012 from Steve Llano on Vimeo.

In this debate, you will see how everything becomes very muddled and very unclear very quickly because all of the speakers are showing off how “American” they can be in debate style. Not one speaker takes a step back and analyzes the question of principle – “why we do what we do.” They are all talking about consequences, impacts, and causation. If anything signals to a judge that you are from an American debate tradition, it is that style of argument.

I do think that there are a couple of debaters in this round who are novices, and I think they are closing opposition (who had the hottest argument in this debate, in the extension speech, but sort of miss developing it fully) and I don’t want you to think I am saying they are responsible for not being good. The question is regionally, community wise, how do we ensure that the tide does not go out so far from year to year?

The other criticism, and it’s a fair one, of what I am saying here is that this is a pretty good debate by debate’s standards, and I am way out of the normal way of evaluating debates. It’s true – I have very little interest in debate. I am interested in rhetoric and argument. On that metric, this debate is really bad. As a debate, I think there are enough tiny causal weird “turn your argument around” strategies to make any debate junky smile. We seek to avoid an inward looking game and seek to offer this game as an examination, a laboratory, an event that causes us to reflect on our discursive practice in our other roles in life.

I want us to live up to our ostensible standard – that we are debating for reasonable, general people – and try to hit that mark. It is the only legitimate, ethical mark to hit if we are going to keep spending this amount of money and professional, scholarly time watching and evaluating these contests. If we are not working to hit the Universal Audience with our discourse, what exactly are we aiming at?

Growing up in the south I was taught never to point a gun, loaded or unloaded, toy or real, at something you didn’t intend to shoot. Where is that standard in our argumentation practice?

Or perhaps all of these people are new. But they aren’t, not all of them. And even if they were, someone is teaching them what to do. I hope that someone reads this.

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A Look at Downtown Billings, Montana, USA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Last weekend, I was at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana to conduct a debate workshop and scrimmage for three schools there interested in moving from NPDA to BP debating.

I say interested – but in my opinion they were well on their way.

Director of Debate at RMC Shelby Jo Long-Hammond and I met at the International Debate Academy Slovenia two years ago and taught together this past summer at the IDEA Youth Forum in Leon, Mexico. She hosted the event, inviting me out to give a bit of instruction to her students and students from other colleges. She has transitioned her students over to BP expertly from what I saw.

Likewise for Carroll University, which is located about three hours from Billings. The students there are speaking very well and very persuasively. I think both teams are going to be quite a force in WUDC and BP to watch out for. It was great fun teaching BP in the west, a fantasy I have had for a long time. Great Falls University was there as well, and the two students representing that institution were new to debate and I think really enjoyed the tournament.

I think I overestimated the difficulty of transitioning to BP from NPDA. NPDA used to be a lot more like BP in speaking style and in types of acceptable arguments. To throttle back from the rapid and highly technical style of argument that NPDA has become might not be as hard as I thought it would be since NPDA’s roots of where arguments come from are nearly the same.

The transition from policy debate is more difficult due to the very different conceptions of refutation, rebuttal, evidence, and extension in the two formats.

These students might not be representative because they have had such good instruction before I got there. I would like to teach more of these sorts of weekend workshops in the future.

See for yourself the quality of the debaters – many of whom in this video are first year students. You will be very pleasantly surprised at the quality of the argumentation.

Debate: Images of Mohammad should be considered hate speech or incitement from Steve Llano on Vimeo.

MOTIONS FROM THE RMC SCRIMMAGE 2012

1. THB that the only people in society who should be allowed to possess firearms are active duty military personnel.

2. THW facilitate access for school administrators to the social media pages of their students in order to actively police bullying.

3. TH supports a unilateral strike by Israel on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

4. THB that austerity measures have failed to solve the problems of the Eurozone.

5. THB that professional athletes should not be permitted to compete in the Olympic Games.

F: THB that any contemporary depictions of the prophet Mohammad should be considered as hate speech or incitement.

A Look at Downtown Billings, Montana, USA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Last weekend, I was at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana to conduct a debate workshop and scrimmage for three schools there interested in moving from NPDA to BP debating.

I say interested – but in my opinion they were well on their way.

Director of Debate at RMC Shelby Jo Long-Hammond and I met at the International Debate Academy Slovenia two years ago and taught together this past summer at the IDEA Youth Forum in Leon, Mexico. She hosted the event, inviting me out to give a bit of instruction to her students and students from other colleges. She has transitioned her students over to BP expertly from what I saw.

Likewise for Carroll University, which is located about three hours from Billings. The students there are speaking very well and very persuasively. I think both teams are going to be quite a force in WUDC and BP to watch out for. It was great fun teaching BP in the west, a fantasy I have had for a long time. Great Falls University was there as well, and the two students representing that institution were new to debate and I think really enjoyed the tournament.

I think I overestimated the difficulty of transitioning to BP from NPDA. NPDA used to be a lot more like BP in speaking style and in types of acceptable arguments. To throttle back from the rapid and highly technical style of argument that NPDA has become might not be as hard as I thought it would be since NPDA’s roots of where arguments come from are nearly the same.

The transition from policy debate is more difficult due to the very different conceptions of refutation, rebuttal, evidence, and extension in the two formats.

These students might not be representative because they have had such good instruction before I got there. I would like to teach more of these sorts of weekend workshops in the future.

See for yourself the quality of the debaters – many of whom in this video are first year students. You will be very pleasantly surprised at the quality of the argumentation.

Debate: Images of Mohammad should be considered hate speech or incitement from Steve Llano on Vimeo.

MOTIONS FROM THE RMC SCRIMMAGE 2012

1. THB that the only people in society who should be allowed to possess firearms are active duty military personnel.

2. THW facilitate access for school administrators to the social media pages of their students in order to actively police bullying.

3. TH supports a unilateral strike by Israel on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

4. THB that austerity measures have failed to solve the problems of the Eurozone.

5. THB that professional athletes should not be permitted to compete in the Olympic Games.

F: THB that any contemporary depictions of the prophet Mohammad should be considered as hate speech or incitement.

Nobody to my knowledge has done any research or collected any data on the social norms, stories, and narratives that accompany debating tournaments. I do know of one research project that was a sociological study of high school debaters in the U.S., but nothing more than that.

I have a few strange books in my apartment, and one of them that is always interesting to flip through is a collection of American Folklore. This is the sort of thing I have in mind.

No doubt one of the most frequent and repetitive urban legends would take up a good chunk of that study. I don’t know what to call it, but the formula is something like this:

1. A team does very well running arguments based on a cutting edge thinker. They use cards from this author on both sides of the resolution.

2. People begin to also use cards from this same author, but not with the level of success as the team who first used it.

3. The reason for this is that the author himself or herself teaches at their University and is helping them with the argument, or they are in a special high level class with that famous thinker, where they get all the secrets about the thinker’s philosophy and advocacy.

I’ve heard this urban legend several times, about Shapiro, Spanos, Zizek, and Spivak. But I’m sure there are other names that would fit into this urban legend.

The trope would be funnier if it wasn’t for the tragedy in it.

The tragedy is that debate is still firmly connected to a modernist philosophical tradition. It’s evident in the way this urban legend operates discursively.

Instead of a team being successful because they have found a way to make a very complex system of thought palatable to an audience, the success has to come from the source. The debaters are closer to the source of the actual argument than anyone else, so they win more.

Modernism is not a straw person. This should be apparent when people who regularly dismiss modernism as vapid and decrepit nonsense are the first to turn to the internal logic of it to explain why a team is doing so well when they are using new theories.

Why is a rhetorical explanation, an explanation that should be very closely hinged to what debate supposedly teaches, not persuasive?

The various ways of grappling with this question will reveal the sad truth of modern debate teaching practice. Emphasis on modern.

On campus early today to participate in filming a new web series about public speaking, debate, and political discourse. I am even wearing a jacket, which lets you know how important today is.

The series is called Podium, and it’s produced by Radical Media. They are creating a new and contemporary series about political speech.

Today I am to be interviewed about debating, presidential debate, and rhetoric. I wonder what they will ask me. I’m interested to talk about our activities in competitive debating, but I wonder who would be interested in that outside of the usual monastic audience?

I see this as a challenge to connect my feelings and thoughts on presidential debating to how and what I hope I am teaching when I teach competitive debating. I hope I can figure out some interesting strategies.

I will post the final video in two weeks once the editing and post-production is complete.