High Technology

As you probably know, I spend a good bit of time involved in policy debate. If I’m not blogging for a weekend, it’s because I’m at a debate tournament. Usually, my partner and I get to the round of 32 or 16 at a tournament, and then lose to a better team. This weekend, at the Stanford Tournament, was different. We were 5-2 in the first seven rounds, and then when we got to elimination rounds. We hit the two best teams at the tournament in quarterfinals and semifinals, and won both of them on very close 2-1 decisions (one judge voted against us, two voted for us). We won the finals on a 2-1, and for getting to finals, my coach, my partner and I got 80 gb iPods. So, yeah, I’m a happy dude.

The Liberty University Debate Lie

Radar Magazine, while otherwise eviscerating Jerry Falwell U as the “Worst Christian University in America,” repeats the media popular canard that “the debate team won the national championship last year.” This has come up in other accounts, that Liberty’s debate team was ranked #1 in the country and had thus “beat Harvard.” This is a huge misrepersentation based off fudging what being ranked first in the country in debate actually means.

The first thing to understand is that ranking college debate programs is an inherently misleading, fuzzy enterprise. The way policy debate works is that teams of two compete against each other. At tournaments, a team of two is the winner - not the school. The Copeland award, given at the end of the college debate season, is given to the best team, not the “best” school. So then, by what metrics is Liberty better than Harvard, and all other schools?

One way to evaluate what school is the best is to look at the number of teams they send to the big, end of the season tournament - the National Debate Tournament - the rough equivalent of the NCAA basketball tournament. Well, in 2007, Liberty sent one team, which finished 3-45 in the seven eight preliminary rounds and didn’t advance to the elimination rounds (the equivalent would be not getting out of group play at the World Cup). They finished 51 out of the 78 teams. An Emory team won the tournament, defeating an Oklahoma UMKC (OU lost in semis, my poor memory - mz) team in the final round. Schools that sent multiple teams were Harvard, Emory and Dartmouth with three teams each, and about ten others with more than two.

So why is Liberty the number 1 team in the nation? It’s because they simply have the largest amount of teams, and thus accumulate a high ranking for sending the most teams to every tournament at the novice, junior varsity and varsity levels. Their ranking isn’t indicative of their success in debate, just that they win a lot of small, uncompetitive tournaments and send many teams to them. At the varsity level, the Liberty program is fairly mediocre, and certainly not deserving anywhere near the amount of attention they get. A Liberty team has never won a single varsity level tournament and has consistently ranked in the 40s-60s among varsity programs. Saying that Liberty is the number one debate program would be like claiming that (if this were allowed) a basketball team with more people and that played against mostly Division II opponents was better than Florida.

This deliberate misrepresentation has been noted and deconstructed before, but it’s good to remind people that the inspiring story of the little Christian school beating Harvard at debate is just a lie.

Rove Resigns

Well, at the end of August.  I don’t have a ton to add except that in a strange way, I always liked Rove.  There was his admitted atheism, absolutely amoral election strategizing, extreme ambition, lack of entitlement, intelligence and, of course, he was a policy debater.  He had all the qualities of a good debater - competitive, willing to fudge rules, ability to learn a lot on his own.  There’s a great story about how he showed up to a debate tournament in Utah with 20 boxes, seemingly full of evidence.  It turned out that 15 or so of the boxes were just for intimidation, and of course he won his rounds.

Assertive Women (Girls)

I don’t have a ton to add to the entire blogosphere diversity debate, except that anyone who’s surprised that a solitary, narcissistic activity like blogging that involves early and enthusiastic use of technology is heavily male hasn’t really been paying attention for as long as the internet has been around, but I digress. Garance Franke-Ruta has this to say:

My experience in Washington is that virtually every woman who is in charge of anything has a reputation as either crazy or a bitch. It’s really striking how many times people preface their remarks about women leaders to me with, “She’s crazy, but,” as a kind of apologetic move they feel is necessary before they can quote a female figure, and as if they would somehow be tainted by quoting or referring to her without first running her down. It’s a tiresome tic.

As the article she links to in that post shows, this is true just about everywhere there are women in leadership or competitive positions. This has a whole slew of negative effects, not only is it clearly biased and misogynist, but it means that women can’t win. As is the case for female graduate students, the only way to get to teach classes is to be assertive and ask for them, but there are, of course, social costs for women being so aggressive. Everyone knows this, but I’ll talk about a specific example closer to me. Policy Debate.

To put it simply, policy debate is an activity that rewards and demands aggression. While there are some very good debaters that are calm and quite pleasant in round, there is certainly positive feedback for aggression in round, whether it means being extremely assertive, over confident and even borderline rude. Debaters trade stories about the times where they’ve cowed their opponents into an incoherent, whimpering mess because of their overbearing aggression. Additionally, policy debate is quite the male dominated activity. I haven’t seen any great stats, but until this year, no two girl teams have won the college national championship, and a two girl team has never won the top high school tournament. Oftentimes, the best female debaters can be quite aggressive, just like the best male ones. And it’s incredibly rare to hear of a male debater criticized for being assertive and overbearing, but for girls, they’re always “bitches” and “mean.” It’s an unfortunate, widespread reaction to assertive women anywhere, but it’s hardly specific to Washington, media or blogging. On the other hand, as bloggers we should criticize damaging double standards and misogyny in our own backyard, so we’re really back where have started.

Should We Let Iraq “Burnout”?

In the policy debate world, Edward Luttwack’s famous article “Give War a Chance” has become very prominent.  It’s common for teams to claim to end various civil wars and “low scale conflicts” (there was an entire UN peacekeeping topic in the 04-05 school year).  Luttwack’s argument is useful for saying that we shouldn’t intervene to end civil wars and instead let one side win, because otherwise cease fires are just times for both sides to re-arm and prepare to fight for even longer than they would under a scenario where one side wins a decisive, conflict ending victory.  This argument is oh-so-charmingly referred to as “burnout” - and we seem to be encouraing the same dynamic in Iraq.

Charles Krauthammer’s new column illustrates what’s so disastrous about keeping a civil war afloat (albeit somewhat unintentionally) by providing weapons to multiple sides (Shia in the Iraqi army, Sunni tribesmen for use against Al Qaida).  We are just making the inevitable full scale civil war (if we’re not there already) worse by artificially inflating both sides capabilities to fight it.  So yes, there will probably be some sort of humanitarian crisis - or at least increased ethnic/secretarian bloodletting - when we live Iraq.  But once you accept the inevitability of us leaving eventually, and the total inability for the current arrangement to foster any sort of political solution - the only hope for preventing this inevitable increased conflict once we leave - it becomes clear that we should leave as soon as feasibly possible, or at least stop giving the two sides weapons to make their inevitable conflict longer and ultimately bloodier.  With every passing day, the logic of burnout becomes more appealing.

Edward Luttwack himself had similar thoughts in a Times Op-Ed in February.

Tip of the Hat to Yglesias (that’s 2/3 posts this morning, but I never claimed to be all that original)

RIP Richard Rorty

The philosopher Richard Rorty (via Yglesias) died today. I’ve never actually read any of us full length philosophical work, but I’ve read enough excerpts, secondary literature and summaries of his work by himself to roughly understand his oeuvre. The work he’s done that has most inspired me is his popular work on American leftism, especially, Achieving Our Country. Having grandparents who were actively involved in the pre 60s left he describes, and parents who came to age in 60s and 70s, his work was able to explain the faultines that separated two generations of American leftism, as well as inspire me to be a little less cynical about the sausage factory quality of leftist politics and realize the generalized struggle we’re in, as well as how ineffective “cultural politics” are. Any post about identity politics, or about the 1st order issues for leftist politics are surely inspired by Rorty.

The real reason I’m so acquainted with this facet of Rorty’s work is because of my beloved policy debate. Rorty’s work is often used to rebut, or answer, “critiques” of certain policy positions. For example, let’s say one team proposed expanding AmeriCorps, specifically their service learning branch. This would strengthen our democracy, get more people involved in policy making and help fight corporate-military domination of the public sphere, which is currently lurching towards fascism. The negative team could read stuff by Foucault, or by Foucauldians, saying that the educational system is actaully a disciplinary apparatus of the state and that engaging in it is really just being seduced by power. Instead we should reject this specifc instance of biopolitical control and try to create new identities to resist the state (this is vastly oversimplified). Here’s where Rorty comes in. Rorty hates quietest approaches to left wing politics, and wrote really well about it. Here’s a typical bit of Rorty a team would use to respond to such arguments.

focusing on national politics as citizens is vital to engaging society and achieving structural change—the appeal to the nation is the only way the left can remain relevant

Rorty 98 (Richard, Stanford Philosophy Professor, Achieving Our Country, pp. 98-101)
The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-state is obsolete, and that there is therefore no point in at- tempting to revive national politics. The trouble with this claim is that the government of our nation-state will be, for the foreseeable future, the only agent capable of making any real difference in the amount of selfishness and sadism inflicted on Americans. It is no comfort to those in danger of being immiserated by globalization to be told that, since national governments are now irrelevant, we must think up a replacement for such governments. The cosmopolitan super-rich do not think any replacements are needed, and they are likely to prevail. … When we think about these latter questions, we begin to realize that one of the essential transformations which the cultural Left will have to undergo is the shedding of its semi-conscious anti-Americanism, which it carried over from the rage of the late Sixties. This Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for “the system” and start trying to construct inspiring images of the country. Only by doing so can it begin to form alliances with people outside the academy—and, specifically, with the labor unions. Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place. If the Left forms no such alliances, it will never have any effect on the laws of the United States. To form them will re- quire the cultural Left to forget about Baudrillard’s account of America as Disneyland—as a country of simulacra—and to start proposing changes in the laws of a real country, inhabited by real people who are enduring unnecessary suffering, much of which can be cured by governmental action.¹³ Nothing would do more to resurrect the American Left than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People’s Charter, a list of specific reforms. The existence of such a list— endlessly reprinted and debated, equally familiar to professors and production workers, imprinted on the memory both of professional people and of those who clean the professionals’ toilets—might revitalize leftist politics.¹⁴ The problems which can be cured by governmental action, and which such a list would canvass, are mostly those that stem from selfishness rather than sadism. But to bring about such cures it would help if the Left would change the tone in which it now discusses sadism. The pre-Sixties reformist Left, insofar as it concerned itself with oppressed minorities, did so by proclaiming that all of us—black, white, and brown—are Americans, and that we should respect one another as such. This strategy gave rise to the “platoon” movies, which showed Americans of various ethnic back- grounds fighting and dying side by side. By contrast, the con- temporary cultural Left urges that America should not be a melting-pot, because we need to respect one another in our differences. This Left wants to preserve otherness rather than ignore it….If the cultural Left insists on its present strategy—on asking us to respect one another in our differences rather than asking us to cease noticing those differences—it will have to find a new way of creating a sense of commonality at the level of national politics. For only a rhetoric of commonality can forge a winning majority in national elections. I doubt that any such new way will be found. Nobody has yet suggested a viable leftist alternative to the civic religion of which Whitman and Dewey were prophets. That civic religion centered around taking advantage of traditional pride in American citizenship by substituting social justice for individual freedom as our country’s principal goal. We were sup- posed to love our country because it showed promise of being kinder and more generous than other countries. As the blacks and the gays, among others, were well aware, this was a counsel of perfection rather than description of fact. But you cannot urge national political renewal on the basis of descriptions of fact. You have to describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope it will become, as well as in terms of what you know it to be now. You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning. Unless such loyalty exists, the ideal has no chance of becoming actual.