The Lexwerks

On Submarines From Space

So I’ve encountered another policy debate case which makes me sad enough to talk about it. The claim starts off with Columbian cocaine smugglers using submarines to put drugs on the US market. It then claims that that we should track these subs with 18 new satellites so that the Coast Guard can save the world. We know the Coast Guard will save the world because stopping the subs will save the rain forest which is being destroyed by the drug cartels and also prevent them from selling cocaine to the Russian underworld that will totally sell a nuke to terrorists to be used against the US to fund their drug habit. Or something.

This begs to be resoundingly negated. The only thing to really wonder about?

Oh, where to begin…

1. Topicality: Those 18 satellites the affirmative wants to launch aren’t exploring space and they’re not a particularly noticeable development compared to the 13000 satellites we’ve got blipping away overhead at this very moment. They add nothing to our space infrastructure; they are 0.13%-ish increase in the status quo, using a mash-up of existing technologies. So we don’t think they’re really affirming the resolution here, but that’s okay because there’s other problems with the case we’ll talk about more.
2. Inherency: Even if it were topical, we’re not hearing anything in the core of their plan that really couldn’t have already happened — there’s no status quo barrier to implementation. For all we know, some lackies may be putting the finishing touches on making it happen right now. We hope not, because it’s a bad idea, but other than that they’re not pointing to any law, practice, or precedent that has to be overcome to make this happen. But even if they turn around and say we’re going to a bajillion satellites so that we’re absolutely developing space and doing stuff well outside of the status quo, they’re just going to run into, if you will pardon the pun…
3. A Kessler Syndrome Disadvantage: This is where the satellites run into each other like they did in 2009. If you’re a policy debater, you should already have this in your files; if not, go look one up. Regardless, if they want to propose something interesting enough to be topical and interesting enough to debate, they’ll run smack into this. But you know what’s so far away as to not even pass like ships in the night?
4. Solvency vs. Coast Guard: While we like the Coast Guard, the fact of the matter is that the Columbian subs are going to El Salvador and not coming anywhere near the US. Or Russia for that matter, but we’ll come back to it. Oakland Ross reports on this in The Star January 21, 2012:
   

   “These submarines are such an innovation,” says Bruce Michael Bagley, chair of international studies at the University of Miami, who follows the drug trade closely. “They can go up to 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometres).”… The voyage is undoubtedly hellish — hot, stinking, claustrophobic and perilous. It ends at a pre-arranged rendezvous at sea, often near the Gulf of Fonseca, where three Central American republics — Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador — converge around a large salt water bay. Here, the submarine crew will be greeted by local fishing boats or small outboard vessels. The cargo is off-loaded…
   A 2010 police estimate, cited by a U.S. research and documentation centre called Insight — Organized Crime in the Americas, suggests that as many as 30 vessels unload their drug cargos in or near the Gulf of Fonseca on an average day.

   So the smugglers starting out from Columbia are stopping off the shore of El Salvador, and not taking their submarines with a 2000 mile range further north past the remaining 2000-ish miles of Mexico to the waters where our Coast Guard has jurisdiction. Why? Because they don’t go that far. So their plan to let the Coast Guard know about these subs is going to fail even if it works. You know who might like to know how to track drug subs? Mr. Bergman of the DEA.

5. Solvency vs. Smart Smugglers: But even if the aff changes their plan to ensure that Mr. Bergman knows where to be deploying agents and sending Columbian police and military, the satellites are a problem for us because they’re not going to adapt to tracking the smugglers as fast as the smugglers are going to adapt to them. The reason we’re having this conversation now is precisely because the smugglers are quick to adapt. In his article, Ross points out:
   

   If there is one constant in the South American drug trade, it’s change. The result is an always deadly game of snakes and ladders, pitting well-financed criminal organizations against the often beleaguered forces of the law, with tactics that evolve almost month by month, as the drug barons try anything and everything to bring their product to market.

   So if the satellites miraculously work, the cartels are just going to bust out new and stranger ideas to make them stop working and we’ll be back having a debate just like this — instead of on US transit infrastructure — next year. If we survive the rainforest depletion which isn’t going to stop because of boats. But we don’t want to sound like we’re giving into the drug cartels, so we propose…

6. Counterplan, with CIA Drones: We suggest that instead of using satellites that are expensive to launch and quickly rendered obsolete that we take some of our remote-controlled drones that the CIA operates, wire them up with the capabilities that the affirmative wanted to put on satellites and deploy them on the Gulf of Fonseca relaying information to the DEA until the drug runners come up with something different to throw at us — at which point we’ll land the drones, re-tool them and re-launch them ready to face the new threat. Of course, sending the CIA into Latin America hasn’t had great results in the past, but it’s still a better idea than what the affirmative presented. And that’s even before we get into…
7. Nuke War vs. Common Sense: This is just odious. Nothing short of nuclear disarmament will ever solve for nuke war. We may mitigate one excuse for being trigger-happy, but that’s hardly the same thing as every other case with a plethora of ways to cause nuclear war — inclusive of giving post office boxes to homeless people — would readily demonstrate. But what makes this even worse is the ridiculous fear-mongering: did you catch that “terrorists with WMDs will kill us all” card from 2001, when fear was whipping the American public into supporting not just one but two land wars in Asia?
   
   This is the part where I pull out a Politics of Fear critique — and if you don’t have one, why not? Go find one now and use it whenever you’re faced with a case that claims nothing more than to save us from nuclear annihilation or some other form of extinction — and explain that scare tactics are designed to lubricate the slide to bad decisions, that the evidence the affirmative presented for our impending demise is brinkless because it is bullshit, and that neither the Russian underworld (they sell us heroin) nor the Columbians we’re trying to stop here today want to see anybody cut loose with WMDs because it would be bad for their business to not have customers.

So, to recap, the affirmative is trying to cook up a nuke war scenario to make you scared enough to vote for a bad plan that would be better solved by CIA drones feeding information to the DEA to stop the current-and-temporary practice of drug-smuggling subs going from Columbia to El Salvador where the US Coast Guard has no business being. For the paltry amount of effort this plan requires to enact as-is, we’d not be surprised to hear that it’s already been done as some misguided “economic stimulus,” to which end we don’t see what it is the affirmative is hoping to explore or develop in outer space — unless they want to overkill it, in which case they’ll run into the Kessler syndrome and still not solve anything. That’s what we’ve got, please vote against their plan.

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On Being A Murderer

We won’t be happy / ‘Till we kill each other. –Curve, “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus,” Cuckoo

So I’m a bit late on explaining an affirmative position for Resolved: It is morally permissible for victims to use deadly force as a deliberate response to repeated domestic violence, but I do finally have one. It goes like this:

Given the resolution “Resolved: It is morally permissible for victims to use deadly force as a deliberate response to repeated domestic violence,” I could define all of the words individually but I think it’s more practical to simply read it as “Can a person who commits premeditated murder to exit an abusive relationship still be a good person?” I’m happy to supply pedantic definitions if necessary, but I think that sums up the topic nicely.

This is really kind of a grim topic. A typical round will have one side advocating for premeditated murder and the other side advocating for domestic violence. But I don’t think that’s an accurate set of readings at all, which brings me to

Resolutional Analysis: The deliberate use of deadly force is as implicit in the resolution as is the repeated domestic violence. If we say that domestic violence isn’t morally permissible, will it stop? No. If we say that premeditated murder isn’t morally permissible, will it stop? No. So the question of moral permissibility isn’t about the actions and the actors — they’re going to do what they’re going to do — but rather about how we might react to such actions and how they might alter our relationship with the people involved.

Coming from this point of view, dealing very directly with the people involved, I, like Dr. Jung, value individuals. When faced with such a bleak resolution, I turn to Dr. Jung’s assessment of the individual. He says: “I am neither spurred on by excessive optimism nor in love with high ideals, but am merely concerned with the fate of the individual human being — that infinitesimal unit on whom a world depends, and in whom, if we read the meaning of the Christian message aright, even God seeks his goal.” (The Undiscovered Self)

I can distinctly show my support for individuals through my adoption of Kant’s Categorical Imperative, specifically the second formulation: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”

Contention 1: My determination of the moral permissibility of an action has no impact on reality beyond my relationship with the individual who might take that action.

1. Let’s rewind briefly to the resolutional analysis. The resolution postulates that there is domestic abuse and that premeditated murder is going to follow it. But the word “permissible” indicates that it hasn’t happened yet, in the same way that it’s easier to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission. Now what’s odd about “morally permissible” is that there’s no impact to it. Ending world hunger — by feeding people instead of cows — may be morally permissible but it seems unlikely to happen any time soon. Similarly, there’s a schism between my determination of whether or not premeditated murder may be morally permissible and whether or not it happens, just like there’s a schism between the abstract role of the abuse victim which turns suddenly to the role of murderer when they deliberately use deadly force as a response to repeated domestic abuse without actually changing who they are or how they relate to me.
2. That was a strange jumble of moving and stationary parts, so I’m going to appeal to a higher authority for guidance on how to relate to this abuse victim that may suddenly become a murderer regardless of how I feel about murder. Saint Paul writes to the church in Corith in First Corinthians 10:23 (NIV) ““Everything is permissible”—but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible”—but not everything is constructive.” Put another way, Saint Paul releases all moral prior restraints, instead imploring people to think rationally about what they’re doing because as responsible and rational people, we understand that time is going to move and bring consequences with it.
3. Regardless of how I feel about moral permissibility of an act, actual and tangible consequences may follow. As Terry Pratchett elucidates: “No practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based.” (Going Postal) So disavowing prior restraint is not an invitation to anarchy, but rather an invitation to personal responsibility. And if I consider a person being murdered as a possible consequence of their being an abusive sadist, and of a person’s being institutionalized as a possible consequence of their murdering an abusive sadist, reality continues to go on without my ineffectually denying anybody anything.

Overall the point here is that moral permissibility doesn’t cause actions or prevent consequences of the action, and to that end it would be wrong for me to judge another individual as immoral — and, by extension, inferior — for a course of action they’ve not even taken yet. As Kant explained to Constant, I would be denying the rationality of the other person and therefore denying the possibility of there being free rational action at all which undermines their ability to be an individual. But there’s more to this than merely that because

Contention 2: Relationships rife with abuse are not comprised of individuals, but rather symbiotes in sadomasochism.

1. In Escape From Freedom (p 157), Erich Fromm talks about the ongoing abusive relationship as it is comprised of a sadist and a masochist. He says:
   

   Psychologically, however, both tendencies are the outcomes of one basic need, springing from the inability to bear the isolation and weakness of one’s own self. I suggest calling the aim which is at the basis of both sadism and masochism: symbiosis. Symbiosis, in this psychological sense, means the union of on individual self with another self… in such a way as to make each lose the integrity of its own self and to make them completely dependent on each other. The sadistic person needs his object just as much as the masochistic needs his… In both cases the integrity of the individual self is lost.

   So when we’re looking at a relationship with a prime feature of repeated domestic violence, Fromm’s telling us that we’ve got a symbiote, not two individuals — if they were actual individuals, they’d exit the relationship that provokes violence on one side and pain on the other. It is only through the destruction of the symbiote that individuals can emerge, ready to heal and to grow. Ideally I’d like multiple individuals to survive the relationship, but ultimately the dire calculus of the resolution says that if only one individual survives, then that’s the individual I should care about.

2. Now some people might object to the destruction of the symbiote in any way that results in fewer living bodies. But this is really little more than an attempt to treat the surviving individual as a failed means of supporting reductionist and dehumanizing biopower. Guttering summarizes Foucault (in Foucault: A Very Short Introduction) on biopower thusly:
   

   “The second level [of biopower] concerns the modern focus on a nation’s entire population as a resource that must be protected, supervised, and improved. Thus, capitalism requires universal medical care and education to ensure an adequate workforce; racist ideologies call for eugenic measures to protect the purity of the population ‘stock’; and military planners develop the concept of ‘total war’, as a battle between not just armies but entire populations.”

   Biopower at this level is an abstraction of people, increasingly as a group or herd, no more personal than a counted nose, actively inviting violations of the categorical imperative. And yet this is exactly how the resolution invites us to act by suggesting we cast judgment on an action which reduced the quantity of living bodies but may well have increased the individuals in the world.

Overall the point here is that in as much as I care about individuals, actual or hypothetical, I’m not going to condemn or denigrate the actions they find necessary to establish their individuality. And while I would prefer it if the unhealthy symbiotic relationship of incomplete people could be ended without murder, I’m ultimately going to go with what the individual required. Second guessing their deliberate decision, bemoaning the loss of a sadist, talking about all of the alternatives I think they had: these would only serve to reduce the individual into a screen for my smug superiority to project my ego upon. And while it may be permissible, it’s not beneficial or constructive.

To summarize, my determination of the moral permissibility of somebody else’s actions only affects how I’m going to relate to them. It doesn’t effect what they’ve done or the consequences that follow from it. So, on a wholly moral framework, it becomes my responsibility to treat a survivor of a sadomasochistic symbiote that ended in murder with dignity according to their individual humanity, rather than as an irrational and immoral subhuman for engaging in activities I believe to be morally impermissible. And that’s why I have to accept that it might as well be morally permissible for victims to use deadly force as a deliberate response to repeated domestic violence.

Now that seems like a hard case to run, so let’s clarify a couple of things:

• Did you just become complicit in genocide? Are you friends with Hitler? No, Hitler — who was extensively profiled as a sadomasochist by Fromm — is quite dead and so I don’t care about him as an individual per se anymore. I’m opposed to genocide hypothetically as a sadistic exercise of biopower, as well as being pragmatically devoid of benefit and utterly destructive, not constructive. But let’s take this one step further: Saint Paul, the guy perhaps as important to Christianity as Pope Peter and Jesus Christ together, got his theological start by torturing and murdering Christians. My point here is that I’m not going to bet against people who are still alive, still capable of becoming incredible individuals.
• But if you’re refraining from judgment, then doesn’t that avoid the question of permissibility and result in a negative ballot? Oddly enough, not in this case and the reason is we’re talking about creating a prior restraint. Remember that it’s easier to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission. But somebody asks me for permission to do something which they are capable of and I explicitly avoid denying it and then they go and do it, then I would be complicit in what they did — the permission becomes tacit in that I haven’t inhibited their capacity to do what they were going to do. So if we avoid the moral question by saying we’re not going to pass judgment then our complicity results in an affirmative ballot.

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Even More on the Costs of a College Education

Having judged a couple rounds of Public Forum on the issue of Resolved: The costs of a college education outweigh the benefits I decided I should spend a bit more time trying to elevate the discourse. It was, after all, predominantly statistics on one side and platitudes on the other with nobody really talking about how their plans for their lives were being impacted by the discussion. And frankly kids, if you don’t care then what makes you think you can make me care?

So here’s what I recommend: On the negative, talk about what you intend to study in college. Talk about colleges you know you can afford and colleges you doubt you can afford. Talk about the job market being forecast for the skill-set you intend to develop. Show that the cost/benefit analysis works for you. Then, for your second point, turn and call up Paulo Freire’s interest in relevant dialogue as a vital part of education, education made valuable because action can be taken based upon it. The point behind this tactic is to pull the affirmative team onto your territory: the affirmative will be able to talk about the ruination of people blindly following a cultural narrative, but everybody in the room is capable of running a cost/benefit analysis so why listen to evidence about people who (obviously) can’t? Reject the affirmative’s over-aggregated evidence and insist that they have a meaningful, personally relevant discussion. That case might look something like this:

This debate topic asks us to perform a cost/benefit analysis on a “college education.” And the affirmative wants (or will want) you to believe that a college education is a generic thing; expensive information dumped into a brain, then stamped with a diploma and sent out into a hostile and unwelcoming job market. And that might be true if we weren’t actively doing a cost/benefit analysis. It might be true if we were the sort of people who buy used cars on eBay based on their hood ornaments. We’re not. We’re debaters. We’re researchers. So,

Point One: Here’s more specific research.

1. Engineering degrees are relatively welcome in the job market. Any of Chemical, Electrical, Mechanical, Biomechanical, Material, Aerospace or Computer engineering have median starting salaries of over $50,000. I’m planning on going into insert your intended major here, my partner’s interested in insert something else here, they both come up around insert number near the top of the chart here. Conversely, Social Work, Elementary Education, Culinary Arts, and Child and Family Studies are hovering down near starting medians of $30,000. So not all paychecks are created equal: this isn’t a surprise.
2. Harvard is running at costs of around $50,000 per year. Insert reasonably aspirational brand-name college here is over insert a year’s worth of undergraduate tuition here per year. But for us insert your state residency group-identifier, insert a local state-supported university you might be willing to go to if you get jack-all in grants and scholarships from the aspirational college is coming in at a paltry and a year’s worth of their tuition per year. The big name universities cost more: this isn’t a surprise. Though I admit that them costing that much more is.
3. Overall, the point here is that there are plenty of rigorous degrees with generous paychecks available on the one hand, and not-outlandishly-expensive universities available for people who want to go into, for example, elementary education on the other. But above and beyond that, there’s even existing research on popular jobs for graduates by university! It turns out that a locally-popular university produces a lot of lowly job with small paychecks with a median pay of the small paycheck as well as some rather more glamorous job you might want (paycheck) and job you don’t want but pays more (paycheck). Specific research produces a veritable cornucopia of personally relevant and interesting information we can plan our future actions against.

Point Two: Ignore coarse aggregations.

1. We readily acknowledge and concede that there is a lot of student loan debt in America today, that there are a lot of expensive colleges willing to take however much money we can borrow (and then some) today, and that there are a lot of people who choose a college based on the brand name of the institution — and possibly the institution’s athletics department — rather than performing a critical cost/benefit analysis of what sort of educational benefits the institution can genuinely offer them. But here’s the thing: we think everybody in this room is smarter than that.
2. We want this debate to be relevant and meaningful to us here in this room. That’s how this debate will maximize its educational value. As Paulo Friere said, “there is nothing… more real or concrete than people in the world and with the world; than humans with other humans.” I’m not here to bandy questionable statistics and dubious cultural platitudes. I’m here to discuss how I’m going to make the transformation from adolescence into socioeconomic adulthood. And I earnestly invite the affirmative to join me in this discussion because I suspect that they’re in a similar situation to me and my partner here, and there is hopefully much we can learn from each other as peers.
3. But, conversely, if we get stuck on high-level aggregate statistics, distorted by people who — unlike everybody here — didn’t do a critical cost/benefit analysis, then this debate round will be idle chatter since there’s no generic college education, no generic college graduate that we could actively emulate. As Freire says,
   

   “When a word is deprived of its dimension of action, reflection automatically suffers as well; and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating “blah.” It becomes an empty word, one which cannot denounce the world, for denunciation is impossible without a commitment to transform, and there is no transformation without action.”

   We don’t want alienation, we want transformation and to get that transformation we need information granular enough to formulate personal actions on, unlike the frightful aggregated statistics that clutter magazines and news articles. We think that everybody in this room is smarter than that, so we should elevate our discourse to also be smarter than that.

For the people who take the time and effort to do the research before-hand, the benefits of a college education can readily outweigh the costs. In the same way nobody in this room would buy a used car — certainly not at full price — on eBay, we shouldn’t be talking about degrees that we here don’t intend to pursue at institutions we certainly won’t be attending. We’re all too smart for that, and discussing ways other people are wasting their money is of no particular benefit to anybody here.

Now that was kind of a mean thing to do, but if the affirmative is running a boring and predictable case then they deserve it. If the affirmative is wasting everybody’s time saying things everybody knows, then they deserve it. So what we need is an affirmative case that might not deserve it by avoiding mere statistics and instead going after systemics. Let’s try something for the affirmative like this:

This debate topic asks us to do a cost/benefit analysis on a college education — that is, studying at a four-or-more year institution pursuant to a degree. And there are lots of variables in college education: what you study, where you study it, and — most notably — who you are and how you live your life. So we could tell you about the trillion dollars of outstanding student loan debt in this country, and unemployment rates among the “emerging adults,” and all of the average people who isn’t actually any real person in particular. But it wouldn’t really prove anything. So we’re going to tell you something else, something even more macroeconomic and pernicious. But let’s start with dispelling a myth.

First Point: A great company won’t hire you just because you’ve got a degree.

1. As Simon Sinek says in Start With Why, “Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated people and inspire them.” But he’s just an author, don’t trust him — trust CEO (Southwest Airlines) Herb Kelleher “You don’t hire for skills, you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills.” So the fact-and-culture-indoctrination paradigm of education that we high school students are familiar with isn’t necessarily valuable to employers that we’re generally hoping will justify the expense of continued education. Now the negative may claim that a college education is supposed to operate on a transformative paradigm, but the participation of the student is something they can’t guarantee — can’t even prove, really, since we’re all high school students. So what’s the point behind a college degree?
2. Lots of people, James Miller inclusive, note that “many employers use college as a cheap and efficient sorting device and consider only college graduates when hiring for professional positions.” And we’d worry about that, except we already know that great companies hire motivated people. Sinek eagerly and repeatedly points out that unlike their competition, nobody on the Wright brothers’ aerospace crew had a college education. But really, what the person who wants to demonstrate their motivation by getting a college education should worry about is that “Between 1999 and 2009, enrollment increased 38 percent, from 14.8 million to 20.4 million.” (National Center for Education Statistics) This past year, the Oregon State University system clicked past 100,000 enrolled students for the first time. (KGW) Point is that the signals are getting weaker.
3. But what does the college education actually signal these days, anyway? The doctor writing at The Last Psychiatrist observes that “Here’s a little factoid about the medical school I work for: very few graduates go into hang-a-shingle private practice… No one told them how to open an office, hire three therapists and three NPs, bill insurances. But you know who owns all the private psych group practices? Foreign medical graduates, i.e. people who were comfortable “playing without a net,” improvising, seizing opportunity.” Put another way, the signal of a college education is that you’re motivated to work hard to conform, not transform. The people showing that they’re motivated aren’t waiting for somebody else to hire them.

Second Point: Don’t follow the beaten path — find and follow a passion

1. I could point to lots of people who ditched college as soon as they had a better idea — Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg — but I’d rather listen to a person who might be loosely described as our peer. Shree Bose, the teenage grand prize winner of the first Google Science Fair, described her process to a TED audience like this: “It was about finding my passion and making my own opportunities when I didn’t even know what I was doing.” Not getting the education first because that’s the order things happen in, certainly not following a prescribed curriculum from the admissions office over the course of several plodding years, but rather finding what needed to be understood and then chasing it, pursuing it, tracking it down and beating it into cognitive submission for her personal edification and the betterment of the species at large.
2. The Last Psychiatrist looks back at emerging adult Scott, reported about in the New York Times, and observes that “Scott and his friends at the Irish Pub are in the best position imaginable: young, smart, living debt free with their parents. Four of these guys, each borrowing 10k personally (at 4% — $400 a year to pursue your dreams?) they will have 40k startup capital to do anything they want… If they are serious, they cannot fail, and if they do fail, we have the most liberal bankruptcy laws on the planet. The point of those laws is to encourage you to try. All the pieces are in place for success at almost no risk. And he’ll be a better man just for trying.” That’s almost certainly less cost and more benefit than a Geology 101: Survey of Shale course in a lecture hall with 120 other students.

Third Point: Student loan debt effects everybody.

1. Note how the doctor points out that we’ve got the most liberal bankruptcy laws on the planet? Well one of the things that you can’t discharge is student loan debt. Putting it another way, if you’re one of the students exiting college with a slice of the trillion dollars of student loans, those liberal bankruptcy laws that are there to encourage you to try? They’re not for you after all. And to that end, they’re not for anybody who might’ve read that book, used that app, or admired that photograph that you didn’t think you’d be able to make enough money creating to bother with, either.
2. Earlier this month, the Christian Science Monitor was shocked to find that “Student financial aid fuels increase in college tuition.” I don’t see why. After all, most everybody who invests in college expects to get a job that gives them a positive return on their investment, loans or not — so their paychecks have to go higher than what they spent on college. But who spends the most on college? The professors with their Piled higher and Deeper degrees that are teaching the courses. When Andrew Kohut (director, Pew Research Center) claims that we’re “better educated than previous generations,” TLP rejects that assertion: “They’re not better educated, they just have more degrees… [and] if we all agree the degree doesn’t mean anything close to what we are pretending it means, then what’s the point of piling on? Isn’t this technically a Ponzi scheme?” Yes: we’re going to be borrowing money to pay our TA’s student loans that were taken out to pay for their Professor’s student loans, which were taken out to pay for their Professor’s student loans, which have been paid off for some time now but nobody ever willingly accepts a pay-cut.

So, to summarize, the rising costs of a college education are increasingly caused by trickle-down debt, not increasing value; the perceived value is being mitigated by the increasing quantity of people in college; and the cost of a college education sets up a diabolical value calculation against what benefits of liberty we might’ve taken the initiative to secure for ourselves and our posterity. If you don’t believe me, just listen closely to the negative team as they tell you how there are such great benefits to outweigh the costs and ask yourself where the little things of not-yet-known value can fit into their calculations.

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More on the Costs of College Education

“I’m cleverer, true, than those fops of teachers, Doctors and Magisters, Scribes and Preachers… For this, all pleasure am I foregoing: I do not pretend to aught worth knowing” –Goethe, Faust

Update: I went ahead and posted sample cases in the next post. Note that the negative case will still require an iota of research on your part.

But anyway, there are three things that make for a good debate topic: it needs to be relevant to the people debating it, have interesting research to be done for both sides, and be able to come to a not-unreasonable conclusion within the confines of the debate. The resolution “Resolved: The costs of a college education outweigh the benefits” gets two out of the three, and that ain’t bad. It is important that students be able to perform a cost/benefit analysis on furthering their education before they bury themselves in debt prior to even attempting to start a career. I’ve got students who want to get doctorates in stuff without really knowing stuff yet and probably not grasping how much more gratifying it is to have gainful employment is than paying to be a student. But since so much of the value of this topic is going to be derived from researching it, and not from debate rounds devoid of depth or clash, I’m not actually going to case something together this time… as noted above, I’ve done it anyway. But here’s some thoughts and links to get you started if you want to actually do some thinking about your future beyond that:

A typical affirmative case is going to pull up increasing college costs, decreasing college standards, and say that the average story is not that great and getting worse. A hyperbolic affirmative will dredge up tales of students racking up six-figure debts before being reclassified as “emerging adults*” — like Paris Hilton, but without the celebrity factor. They may even go so far as to blame student loan debt for precluding a romantic happily ever after. An unusual-because-it-comes-off-as-horrifyingly-sexist tactic would be to point out that the benefits of a college education will be increasingly mitigated by college-educated women becoming full-time moms instead. A serious inquiry into the affirmative position would reference Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft or something similar to provide a counter-narrative to the general belief that a college education is necessary to make somebody employable at any decent wage, even if it isn’t an argument in and of itself.

Generally, the negative should be able to get away with a simple (capitalist) analytic: the issue isn’t that the cost outweighs the benefit generally, it’s that people generally aren’t savvy consumers. Any investment in the self — whether by pursuing higher education, or starting a business, or taking private oboe lessons — should ultimately come down to a personal cost/benefit analysis. And if that projects higher costs than benefits, it’s not because it’s bad to pursue higher education or start a business or take private oboe lessons, but because they were Doing It Wrong — at least from a cost/benefit analysis point of view. You want to know what Doing It Wrong sounds like? It’s getting a bachelor’s in art from a private college with a whopping $0 of scholarships. Pro-tip: art students have an 11% chance of going on to do art professionally, even from the expensive college — and most of them do that by teaching it. Doing It Right, however, is loading up on cheap community college credits to get through the basic classes before going after, oh say, a dual-major of material science and quantum mechanics, with at least 40% subsidized by businesses and foundations — noting that the subsidy doesn’t reduce the net cost, but is born by people and groups that necessarily believe that the benefits outweigh the costs otherwise they wouldn’t invest in it/you. But the point isn’t that a college education is an inherent good, but rather that it is a product of a free market — and if you don’t think the costs of Underwater Basket Weaving outweigh the benefits of such a course then don’t bloody well take it. There are lots of people for whom the benefits of a college education are equal to the costs because they’re paying nothing to not pursue the benefits, and that’s perfectly fine — and frankly preferable to a load of debt for an idle art degree.

The coup d’etat maneuver for the negative, as far as I’m concerned, would be getting to the conclusion that college is least likely to be valuable to the uninformed consumers who do not engage in a cost/benefit analysis and most valuable to the consumers who do — as both sides in the debate have in the course of their research — engaged in a cost/benefit analysis. That the affirmative believes the way they do about their position vis-a-vis the system shows a masochistic desire to either be victimized by their education (when they go to college anyway) or a fear of their freedom to pursue their own goals (by fixating on what they won’t do). For example, they may well find private oboe lessons to not be worthwhile, and that’s fine — but up until now it never even crossed their mind because they had better things to do with their life. If they’ve fixated on the infeasibility of this life-goal, it’s not because it’s actually infeasible but because they want it to be infeasible so they don’t have to explain why they failed to achieve it despite having nothing better to do with their lives. (That’s based on Erich Fromm’s Escape From Freedom; do get it read before you graduate from college.)

* I find it almost impossible to describe how much I despise the notion of emerging adulthood. But I did put in a good attempt. It’s bullshit covering for the parasites who are either shameful wastes of potential or resources, and possibly both. Being an actual adult means trying to stop your parents from sacrificing their future for you.

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On Not Being A Murderer

“I did that,” says my memory. “I could not have done that,” says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually — the memory yields. –Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

So when I’m staring at Resolved: It is morally permissible for victims to use deadly force as a deliberate response to repeated domestic violence, I realize that these debate topics really are getting worse. I am afraid, I am genuinely fearful, of what some kids are going to go spouting off for their affirmative cases. See, they’re going to be merging two claims that I just can’t reconcile: “I committed cold-blooded premeditated murder. And I’m a good person.” And I just can’t imagine that they’re going to say anything that could re-affirm my alleged faith in humanity. What I can imagine is that they’ll make me want to go home and consult my liquor cabinet for the opinion of Dr. Rum, which is a terrible way to reaffirm my faith in humanity. So here’s what I’d generally say against them…

There’s an old saying that it’s easier to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission. And I suspect that it’s especially true when asking, as the affirmative is, for permission to commit not just murder, but premeditated murder. We know it’s premeditated because they’re asking for permission.

But let’s analyze the resolution a bit:

• Use Deadly Force: this indicates that somebody is going to die. Not just have a few bones broken. Not just be shown the error of their ways. But rather die, absolutely. That is what deadly means. It seems reasonable, in the context of a response, that it will be the person inflicting the Repeated Domestic Violence (but this is not an absolute certainty based on the result of the deliberations).
• Repeated Domestic Violence: this indicates that there are extenuating circumstances to the use of deadly force. But this is also low bar — we’re not talking about kidnapping somebody, or sexually abusing them, both of which tend to not be classified as “domestic” at all. Yet it is not an entirely low bar, as the domestic violence is repeated domestic violence. The thing about “repeated” means that it become a pattern of domestic violence and, importantly, is predictable.
• Deliberate Response: these words really slow down the action of using deadly force. This isn’t a matter of accidentally shooting somebody who is threatening you. This is deliberating over an assortment of options and deciding that the best response, the best option to be held response-able for, to the domestic violence that is predictably going to happen isn’t just murder, but murder that has — at this point — been premeditated.
• Permissible: indicates the source of permission, or what the person is coming to for authorization or consent prior to the action. In other words “Hey, I’ve gone over my options and I really think I should kill that son-of-a-bitch. Is that okay?” But “Is that okay” isn’t really the modifier because of the word…
• Morally: The question of morality is a question of “is it good or bad,” requiring judgment. So the question isn’t “is that okay?” but rather “can I still be a good person?” And that’s what the affirmative is really asking about: Can somebody still be considered a good person if they commit premeditated murder?

The crucial thing to bear in mind is that if the extenuating circumstances render the action amoral, then we have not demonstrated moral permissibility, but rather the limitations of appealing to morality for authorization to do what we think — whether rationally or irrationally — has to be done.

Now generally as a society, we like to not think that a victim is able to rationally deliberate their way to the belief that premeditated murder is a good thing to commit. When a victim uses deadly force, we believe that the abuse has driven them to irrational behavior, to primal behavior, to amoral behavior. Murder is bad, but the extenuating circumstances may prevent us from passing that judgment — and that prevents us from establishing that murder in those circumstances is morally permissible in the same way it prevents us from deeming that murder to not be morally permissible (though in both cases, after the fact so it’s no longer a question of permissibility at all).

But what if society is so rotten, so horrid, that the victim can be of sound mind and have no better recourse than premeditated murder? At this point, the murderer becomes amoral not because they have become primal, but because the morality of their society is not adequate to judge the goodness or badness of their actions. In as much as they are incomparable, they have gone beyond the definitions of good and evil (as Nietzsche would put it). The words exist only to communicate meaning between people, so the murderer would have to change the definition of “good” from what could be recognized, thus moving them into amoral territory. Had anybody else been available and willing to deem the murder “morally permissible” then there would have almost certainly been another option for ending the abuse that didn’t involve premeditated murder. I don’t think society is that rotten or horrid, but I’m not a young woman living in the tribal regions of Afghanistan so I understand that my perspective may be limited.

The affirmative wants you to believe that somebody can repeatedly find themselves in a bad situation — not so bad as being kidnapped or raped repeatedly, but still on the receiving end of physical violence — and rationally think about how to respond to the situation, and decide that premeditated murder — not leaving, not calling for help, not calling police, not even merely wounding the abusive bastard, breaking a few bones with a tire iron for example — but premeditated murder really is the right thing to do, based on our general understanding of how good people, morally upstanding people, behave. Because good people commit premeditated murder all the time, don’t you know?

I’m reminded of a story where some Jewish Rabbis thought it would be good to commit premeditated murder. So they take an adulteress — because they weren’t particularly libertine in their views on sexuality — to a leading philosopher of the day, a guy named Jesus (or Joshua, really — it was the same name, we’ve just translated it two different ways) asking for him to confirm that what they were going to do was morally permissible. And he says to them, “Well, the law says your actions are okay. But I think you really should let the one of you who is in every way blameless of any wrongdoing, ever, start the execution.” And there’s this quiet moment as they think about how good they are good at seeming to be, but they all know their shortcomings. They are moral upstanding people based on their society’s understanding of morality. But moral enough to continue being good while committing premeditated murder even though their law said it was okay? Maybe not so much. And as they’re thinking about this, as they’re thinking “Hey, I’m a good person” — because that’s how our pride, how our ego, defends our psyche — they realize “And I won’t be if I’m a murderer.” And so they wander off. They exit the situation. And when they’re gone, Jesus turns to the woman and says “Huh, they’re not condemning you to death after all. And neither am I. Live well.” And the thing that is deeply interesting about this story is that there is no moral permissibility given. There is neither consent nor condemnation for anybody in it. It is, on the whole, entirely amoral: nothing actually happens. And yet the one thing it shows is this: if we feel like we have to ask “is this morally permissible? Will I still be a good person if I do this?” and deliberate over the answer, then the correct answer is probably NO and we’re just trying to convince ourselves otherwise so we can feel better about doing the wrong thing anyway.

Is all that too long to use as a negative case? Probably. And the affirmative is almost certainly going to be using absurd definitions that will need to be overcome first. And I didn’t even propose a value because the resolution appears to be utterly devoid of higher values, with one side advocating murder and the other side apparently complacent to abuse.

In the simplest terms, when somebody says “Yeah we killed him; but trust us, this guy was horrid!” trusting them is not what I’m going to be doing because they’re the baddies.

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On Space Telescopes

Dear Policy Debaters:

The space telescope case makes me sad. Please improve it. To start with, watch this video and memorize all of the science in it:

It’s a beautifully nerdy video with Phil hitting the perfect level of geek-out excitement. Listen to his voice: it is full of hope for the things he wants to do. Phil would totally get perfect speaker points from me.

One thing Phil doesn’t mention is the difference between comets and asteroids, which isn’t much. You should know this as well before saying ignorant things about one, the other, or both of them. Another thing Phil doesn’t mention is the need for space telescopes… which could be a problem for your case. But I think that’s the least of your problems. Here are the greater of your problems:

Big Problem #1: You suck at math. The claim is that “while the risk of extinction is tiny, the infinite damage from extinction means that we have to mitigate the risk.” Here’s what that math looks like.

0.00001% × ∞ = Dead!

But guess what?

0.00000000001% × ∞ = Dead!

That’s what “× ∞” does to a risk measurement: it makes it really damned difficult to solve for. Because — and this goes back to Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — anything which is a finite impossibility must also be an infinite improbability. But the flip side of this is that anything less than a finite impossibility must also less than an infinite improbability, so if we multiply it by infinite damage to conclude that we have to solve for it, anything less than utter and complete solvency is a case failure. For example, if an asteroid suddenly coalesced out of a small mess of molecules and ruined our day, or Saturn dropped out of its orbit and into ours and ruined our day, then the affirmative has failed to solve for stuff from space ruining our day. And here’s the thing: the universe exists, so we know — we are living proof — that stranger things have happened. Existence proves itself to be a finite improbability, such that everything else may very well happen. Point is that those equations up there are bad for you, not good for you.

But this isn’t to say that we should do nothing; it just says that we can’t use simple math to justify doing something. The correct way to run this argument is to pull the issue into value territory. The risk is slight but the damage is huge and we know how to mitigate the risk at a cost of… (Why don’t you know how much your plan costs?) This is relevant because we’re increasing Hope and affirming Life, instead of the usual death and devastation that policy debate rounds unleash upon despairing judges: working towards a symbol of ongoing life for the planet is a desirable thing. And then back that up with increased data collection about the solar system and galaxy at large. But neither of these show up in the case because you’re too busy hyping up problem #2.

Big Problem #2: You think we’re doomed anyway. Seriously. Look at your case. How many ways do you claim that a nuclear war is going to start just because people are paranoid and trigger happy? I consistently hear two of them. You know what else the number “two” is? It’s the quantity of nukes that have actually been used in war. They were used by us about 65 years ago. None have actually been used since despite the quantity of policy debate rounds that have occurred. This is because nobody wants to end the world; the world is where we keep our stuff.

But there’s an unspoken impact here: reading between the lines of your case, I know that it doesn’t really matter that a rock may kill us because we’re hell-bent on killing ourselves already. That is what your, frankly, stupid nuke war claim tells us about how you percieve humanity: there’s no point to saving us from a rock because we’ll just find some other excuse to slag ourselves out of existence. Which is at odds with the reality that we’re still alive in, first of all, but secondly — for your case structure — means that you can’t actually solve for “accidental nuclear war” impacts if you’ve only solved one possible excuse for, not cause of, accidental nuclear war.

To put it another way, 0:45 – 0:57:

So here’s a better idea — let’s mitigate the risks of nuke war by pursuing nuclear disarmament and taking the money we were spending on maintaining ludicrous stockpiles of WMDs as shrines to the demons of our worst nature and spend it on ensuring that we can prevent the Rocks of Callous Indifference from coming and ruining our day, eh?

Big Problem #3: Playing on fear prevents calling disadvantages as fearful and backward-thinking as they are. Really, the one thing I get from the negative as off-case is consistently “Spending money will kill us and we’ll all die.” And that should be easy to turn, except that the affirmative is banking on “Rocks hitting us will kill us and we’ll all die, but even just seeing rocks will kill us and we’ll all die.” But here’s the the thing: if you fix the first two big problems and stop telling me about how we’re all going to die and instead tell me about how we’re all going to live, then you can break that spending disadvantage by calling it “ridiculously cynical claim against the human spirit and playing into the hands of the people who would try to hold humanity’s future hostage with their fake fiat money.” Bonus points if you’re able to sound properly enraged that anybody would try to hold humanity’s future hostage, especially with something as flimsy as fake fiat money. And then you pull out your Politics of Fear critique and beat your opponents into submission with it.

This will work because many of your judges — the parents, grandparents, teachers, and occasional volunteer (o hai!) — would rather hear you talking about how you’ve got interesting plans backing your hope for the future than how you’ve managed to embody twice their cynicism at half their age.

Note the risk on the Politics of Fear critique is that if your opponent can sever their terminal impacts and instead play up Advantages! (which is what I’m trying to get you to do here) and leave you continuing to ramble on about fear, well… you’ll be the one stuck talking about fear and biting your own Politics of Fear critique. Other than that, it’s the only critique I’ve seen that does a good job of telling me why I shouldn’t want to vote for That Other Position.

Special Bonus Heidigger Counter: There’s a negative critique that says that technology doesn’t make us better people (true), so we shouldn’t vote for the affirmative (false). The stronger variation of this references Heidigger, but frankly it all sounds like Rousseau’s simpering whining to me.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus observed — as our opponents have keenly demonstrated — that we get in the habit of breathing before we get in the habit of thinking. The 2500 or so, according to UN estimates, people who were born while my opponent was decrying the evils of technology increase the population of over 7 billion people in the world today. None of them want to starve because there aren’t enough all-natural, hand-picked crops to feed everybody. Or die of some wholly preventable microbial infection. Or freeze to death in the cold of winter. Solving for these things, allowing ourselves to breathe easier, is the purpose of technology. It’s only when think-tankers and ivory-tower intellectuals like (the Nazi) Heidigger and Rousseau get better at thinking than they do at breathing do they think that what humanity really needs to do is work on breathing harder. You want to know the first thing that would happen if we, as a species, accepted our opponents’ anti-technological screed? About 90% of the world’s population would die early, painful, and stupid deaths. And you know what else? We’re intellectuals here which means what we’re actively practicing getting better at is thinking, not breathing. Which means we’d almost certainly be in the 90% who die early, painful and stupid deaths.

I suspect that the actual problem the intellectuals face is that they stop knowing how to advance up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs. They don’t have the opportunity to understand, as Daniel Pink documented in his book Drive, that having a purpose, pursued autonomously, while working towards mastery, is the path to self-actualization. It’s a fair point that Pink wrote that after they died, but Goethe wrote similar in Faust: “Then may delight and distress, And worry and success, Alternately follow, as best they can: Restless activity proves the man!” And Goethe nails this: technology is what allows humans to trade in their problems of today for fresher and more interesting problems of tomorrow. Saying “Oh, we don’t want tomorrow’s problems” may be an interesting mental exercise, but the rejection of technology would mean that we’re trading in today’s problems for yesterday’s problems, even though our civilization as it is today only exists because we solved yesterday’s problems and moved on.

So I say let’s reject the early, stupid and painful deaths our opponents want us to have and instead embrace reality as it is today — 7 billion people and all — and at least try to make it better.

It is worth noting that Goethe’s Faust ends with Faust doing some terraforming so that people have more land to live on, not so much for the benefit of the people as because he’s irked by the ocean’s come-uppance. He dies before he is satisfied that his work is done, but by having been occupied at working towards his vision of the future, angels come and steal his soul from Mephistopheles. If you want to understand Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, I think Faust is a pretty stunningly good read.

But if you TLDR’d Faust or this whole post, please at least check these clips of Dr. Who to get clued in to what’s totally missing from policy debate today:

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On Income Disparities

I’ve previously said that I wouldn’t write about economics anymore. And I didn’t intend to, but this is about debate; specifically the neg case for the December Public Forum topic.

My partner and I agree with G.K. Chesterton’s assessment that “The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all,” and thus don’t believe that “In the United States, current income disparities threaten democratic ideals.” Overall, we’re going to claim that the resolution (and the affirmative) misidentify the causes of macrosocioeconomic woes in the United States today, and that the resolution is necessarily false because of this.

First of all, let’s check the mathematics. All other economic factors being equal, could we mitigate the current income disparities without resolving any alleged threats to democratic ideals or social justice issues the United States faces today? If we could magically double the income of the working poor to increase their disposable income so that they can better solve their own socioeconomic problems, that would mathematically be the same as if we cut the income of the working rich in half — multiply by two versus divide by two — and yet cutting the income of the rich in half doesn’t help the poor who have jack-all one bit. So seen in this light, the problem isn’t that there’s a huge gap between the rich and the poor, it’s that the poor are suffering from being too poor: if the poor weren’t suffering, then there wouldn’t be dire complaints about the rich. So yes, we totally grant that there are problems — but income disparity is not their root. We could solve for income disparity without fixing democracy.

Second, these problems are not a threat to democratic ideals because a successful democracy, a functional democracy, is based on practical compromises, not strongly held ideals. Alexis de Tocqueville said that the peculiar genius of American democracy was “self-interest, properly understood,” which Joseph Stiglitz breaks down like this:

Tocqueville was not suggesting that there was anything noble or idealistic about this outlook — in fact, he was suggesting the opposite. It was a mark of American pragmatism. Those canny Americans understood a basic fact: looking out for the other guy isn’t just good for the soul — it’s good for business.

So our second claim is that the income disparity is actually proof of capitalist ideals of meritocracy and some people being “worth” a whole lot more than others, while being bad for democratic compromise — not some ideal — that smooths over those inequalities by requiring people be willing to cede some of their personal ideals to the collective jurisprudence of civil society. Point is that even if American meritocracy is threatening the functionality of our government, we know — and our perpetually dismal views of congressional and presidential performance show — that there are no democratic ideals for us to have, much less threaten. We compromise, rather than cling rabidly to our ideals, to make a society despite our differences: that’s democracy.

Third, and this will chain on a bit, the problem isn’t income, the problem is wealth. The difference between the two (on face) is like the difference between deficit and debt: a lot of money moving fast is one thing whether it’s income or deficit, but having money that sticks around, either as debt or as wealth, is what gives you lasting problems or power. Just compare bankrupt Nick Cage to billionaire investor Warren Buffett who can’t seem to give his money away fast enough (though he is trying). When it comes right down to it, the income disparities are shocking… but the accumulated wealth disparities are even more so. Economists are estimating that the top 1% of the nation holds 37.1% of society’s total wealth, the next 19% of the nation has 50.6% of the wealth, leaving for the remaining 80% of the people a scant 12.3% of societal wealth. So our claim here is that underlying wealth is the actual lingering problem, even if it’s easier on-face to get fired up about paychecks.

Fourth, and cross-referencing Buffett’s lament that his secretary ends up paying a higher percentage in taxes than he does, the resolution gives a shallow glossing of the complexities of wealth with the word “income.” This word means something to the IRS: it means what you pay Income Taxes on. But guess what? The wealthy people with big investments — and Stiglitz backs us on this — don’t make their money from conventional income as the IRS recognizes, but rather from Capital Gains on stocks and such. And the taxes on Capital Gains are generally rather lower than they are on normal income, resulting in Warren Buffett paying proportionally less in taxes to keep America great than his secretary which even he thinks is dumb.  Point is that even if the problems were being caused by income in the loosest sense of the word, they’re not being caused by income in what your or I would conventionally think of as income, or by what the IRS identifies as conventional income, so the resolution continues to be off-target.

Fifth, and this goes big, while we love what Buffett and Gates and some other enlightened wealthy people are doing for our world and trying to do for our nation, the fundamental problem is that our meritocracy isn’t producing an general aristocracy with a sense of noblesse oblige (that is, roughly translated, “Noble is as noble does”). For example, the Wall Street Journal brazenly asked “Do the Rich Need the Rest of America,” and roughly concluded “Ha ha, no you silly peasant.” But Jiang Xuequin counters in “What’s Wrong with Meritocracy” that

There’s a major difference between the US aristocracy and the meritocracy… Aristocrats like Henry Chauncey, bred at Saint Grottlesex boarding schools and the Ivy League, were conscious of their privilege and social responsibility, and focused on developing the character and leadership skills necessary for public service. Many of today’s meritocrats, in contrast, don’t believe it’s a rigged game in their favour, and commit themselves to winning it at all costs, which means stepping on everyone else.

So the problems we’re really seeing are the exceptionally wealthy focusing on their capitalistic and meritocratic ideals of being The Greatest and refusing to compromise with the rest of society which is, necessarily, not as great as they are. But the key phrase I want to point out there is that “it’s a rigged game in their favor,” which is super relevant because that shows how we can’t even do meritocracy right. Buffett refers to the rigging of the game as their winning of the “ovarian lottery” when he defines wealth in The Snowball:

Wealth is just a bunch of claim checks on the activities of others in the future. You can use that wealth in any way that you want to. You can cash it in or give away. But the idea of passing wealth from generation to generation so that hundreds of your descendants can command the resources of other people simply because they came from the right womb flies in the face of a meritocratic society.

When you put those two things together, when you think about how much property that stuck-up Paris F—ing Hilton and her ilk will tragically but eventually inherit, you see that the disparity of wealth is a threat to our pragmatic and functional democracy — which isn’t the same thing as income disparity being a threat to alleged democratic ideals at all.

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On Not Being Obligated

The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason. –T.S. Eliot

If you’re looking for a negative case for the LD topic and have a spare dollar, I’d recommend this song.  The lyrics are a retelling of Aesop’s fable of the snake and the farmer in stunningly beautiful, as I recall, 13th century Spanish.  The story itself has many variations.  I rather like the more modern ending of the snake telling its savior/victim “You knew what I was when you picked me up,” but the original moral of not taking pity on the scoundrel or giving charity to the ungrateful is a rather taut counterpoint to the breadth of Resolved: Individuals have a moral obligation to assist people in need.  The affirmative might well claim that people aren’t vipers.  The negative might well then counter that the affirmative apparently hasn’t met very many people.

It seems to me that this resolution skews towards the negative in the confusion of people involved in the resolution.  The phrase “in need” is amazingly dodgy, and the individuals can negate any moral obligation by simply denying that anybody is in need.  Awkward side-note: Maslow listed sex as basic physiological need, which I fully suspect will result in some smart-ass teenager on the negative claiming that the affirmative is morally obligated to assist them in having sex.  (The affirmative should offer to look up an escort service in a phone book should this situation occur.)  But the part that really tilts the scale in my opinion is the word “obligation,” particularly without suggestion of where the generally unbounded obligation originated.

The problem with the unknown source of obligation is that the charge stops being an individual charge to the self to assist somebody in need, but rather a charge against some other individual for not assisting somebody in need — especially if you’re that somebody.  Rather than seeing the individual as an individual, they’re seen as a means of assisting the person in need.  This was Judas’ reaction when Mary washed Jesus’ feet.  And this is also a violation of deontological ethics a la Kant, and no properly moral obligation ever arose from being unethical.

But looking beyond that, the overview of my larger concern is that when we take on an obligation or a duty to assist people in need, the temptation rises to treat people in need not so much as people, but rather as a means of discharging our obligation of assisting.  This undercuts Kant’s structure of deontological ethics, and precludes the creation of a moral obligation from an unethical tendency.

Detailing this out a bit, in God in the Dock C. S. Lewis looked at the authoritarian subtleties of people who felt it was their moral obligation to help people they considered to be “in need”:

Of all the tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.  It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.  The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

In modern times, however, canny capitalists have managed to combine the cupidity of the robber baron with the moral busybody.  Consider the financial industry as iconified by Goldman Sachs, as reported in Daily Finance, November 9, 2009:

Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs (GS), has put an unusual spin on the bank’s activities. He says his firm is doing “God’s work.” This may seem like an audacious statement coming from a man whose company has been harshly criticized for planning to give many of its employees multi-million pay packages just a bit more than a year after the collapse of the credit markets… Blankfein told The Times of London, “We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. We have a social purpose.”

Put another way, Lloyd seems to think that he is assisting those in need.  The howls of protest he hears merely indicates the depth of the need to a man with a conscience as chlorine-cleaned as Lloyd’s.  But the protesters would probably contend that Lloyd’s ignorance of them as people, as human beings, demonstrates a clear violation of deontological ethics and a negation of the resolution because what constituted “assist” is a point of conflict even if need is successfully recognized.

But Lloyd does suggest something else.  He suggests that the moral obligation has been condensed from a social norm (of conspicuously giving to charities, social institutions and beggars) into a personal, internalized duty (made all the easier with payroll deductions, autopay credit cards, and web sites set up to receive your money).  But there’s a pernicious underside to this as Erich Fromm points out in Escape From Freedom.  Fromm writes:

However, the sense of “duty” as we find it pervading the life of modern man… is intensely colored by hostility against the self. “Conscience” is a slave driver, put into man by himself.  It drives him to act according to wishes and aims which he believes to be his own, while they are actually the internalization of external and social demands.  It drives him with harshness and cruelty, forbidding him pleasure and happiness, making his whole life the atonement for some mysterious sin…

So here Fromm theorizes that even an internalized obligation is still based in social norms of the variety that unethically place such obligations on people, treating them as a means of fulfilling those obligations — but that the internalization of the obligation is even worse because it causes individuals to dehumanize themselves while trying to discharge this duty.  Fromm continues:

[S]uch humility goes together with a contempt for others, and that self-righteousness has actually replaced love and mercy. Genuine humility and a genuine sense of duty towards one’s fellow men could not do this; but self-humiliation and self-negating “conscience” are only one side of an hostility, the other side of which is contempt for and hatred against others.

So what Fromm is concluding here is, as I’d stated in the overview, that when we’re conditioned to be obligated to help people in need, we’re not motivated by the fact that they’re people, but rather by our desire to discharge our obligation with not only no particular care for the actual people involved, but rather a loathing for the way they become connected to our sense of duty to assist them.  Not only is the individual’s ability to assist people in need a corruptive mark of the individual’s power over them, but fostering an obligation makes the individual feel shackled to and hateful towards people in need.  But this should be totally unsurprising: the individual started by self-dehumanization via their sense of duty, how can we expect them to refrain from dehumanizing anybody else?

The net result is that any prescribed obligation that people are feeling at this point is not a moral obligation, given that Lloyd Blankfein seems to think that he’s a pretty good guy, and the negative wants you to stop and think about what you’re doing before you arbitrarily do what you’ve been conditioned to think is the right thing.

I’ve gotten to this point without talking about where else obligations come from.  Richard Niebhur looks at three perspectives in The Responsible Self which may help with understanding this.  He (basically) says that people can look at things deontologically (“Who are you?”) or teleologically (“Where are you going?”) or responsibly (“What’s going on?”).  People who take on duties with a deontological perspective hope that having those obligations will alter who they are, generally in a good way.  People who take on obligations with a teleological perspective — and I think Lloyd is in this category — believe that carrying out their duties will result in a better future.  For example, a person might assist somebody in need because they want to be the sort of person who assists people in need.  Or a person might assist somebody in need because they think they can get that person out of need, back on their feet, and back to being a productive member of society who will discover Cold Fusion or something.  But the responsible person suspends the sense of obligation, save their obligation to reality, which requires asking “What’s going on?” before determining a plan of action.  And that’s why I’m generally opposed to de facto obligations, such as the one suggested by the resolution.  Because when you stop to ask “What’s going on?” you can realize that Hey, that’s a snake! and then not pick it up and live long enough to maybe do some good elsewhere in the future.

To round out the debate case, I’d recommend valuing Responsibility — citing Niebhur, with the root of the word being “response” and not being based on a prescribed duty but rather on an obligation to respond to the world as it is — and a criterion of Realism (the real reason I keep bringing up Lloyd), and focus the responses on denying the affirmative to cast moral judgments on other people and thus using them as a means to forward a blinding and enslaving obligation.  Be flexible, of course — all you really have to do is carve away at the affirmative’s ability to uphold their value to show that they really don’t know what they’re talking about, and this case is well-suited to that purpose.

And that is why, while I believe individuals should assist people in need, it is wrong to claim that individuals have a moral obligation to assist people in need.

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A Heavy Cross (Ex) to Bear

I heard a bit of whining last year about how cross-examination debate skews heavily towards the affirmative winning rounds. In my experience, this is because negative teams do a miserable job of dismantling the policy proposals that the affirmative teams provide. It starts when the 1NC throws out five generic and non-unique disadvantages and then fails to ever go on case, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make. The point I’m trying to make is that it doesn’t have to be this way. So here’s some more (and/or repeated) things that the negative can do better to improve their chances of winning.

Let’s start off with something simple: Topicality. I heard a procured topicality card a couple of times the other day and it sounded like source code, not speech. Cross examination debate is still a speaking event and it should, at least to some extent, sound like it. If you want to run topicality, here’s how you do it:

“On topicality: our opponents have failed to affirm the resolution. The resolution calls for them to propose a policy that [does something]. Instead, the policy they have proposed [does something wildly different]. This may or may not be a good idea, but for the purposes of this debate the affirmative side cannot win because our opponents have not affirmed the resolution.”

Don’t read generic topicality blocks that make you sound less human and less engaged than you are. Or, to put it another way, if you’re only engaged enough to read a badly written generic block, you shouldn’t win. Also important is not turning around and clobbering your topicality argument while hedging your bet, if you’ve got a back-up argument good enough to be worth hedging with. Verbally positioning points seems to be lost in CX, but it does make a world of difference. Consider the two following statements:

1. First, they’re not topical because they didn’t chain the honeybadger. Second, when they chained the honeybadger, it didn’t care.
2. We maintain that they’re not topical because they didn’t actually chain the honeybadger. But here’s the thing: even if they do chain the honeybadger? It don’t care.

The second version runs longer, but it also makes it clear that even if the judge rejects voting on topicality, the honeybadger don’t care. The first version suggests that the speaker has, in the space of two seconds, lost track of what they’re claiming is going on.

Transitions are also important when spinning narrative-based generic critiques of some ilk or another. This is because, as it relates to the affirmative case and usually the cross-examination period that followed, a generic critique is also a non sequitur which disrupts the flow of thinking in the brain and — especially if it’s a new and interesting critique — will surprise the judge into not having the foggiest clue what you’re going on about for a moment or two until they can associate it in some magical way, by which time your foundational points have been totally lost. So, going back to our bit about honeybadgers…

1. There are 26000 victims of land mines per year, which is horrid and stuff.
2. I know we’re generally here to argue against their honeybadger-chaining policy, but you know who doesn’t care about honeybadgers? The 26000 people who fell victim to land mines last year. And I think it would be better use of our time to raise awareness about those land mine victims than to have an inane discussion about honeybadgers. So with that in mind…

While it might not get more judges voting for your critique, adding some transitional verbiage like in the second version does mean that judges aren’t going to be wondering if you’ve wandered into the wrong round on accident.

But I (and most judges I know) aren’t fans of critiques. This is because most critiques don’t help us put a policy decision on the ballot. And that is because most critiques are narratives based on mythology and a rampaging ignorance of history. I remember one round in particular where the negative team went off on a Marxist critique and claimed that the affirmative couldn’t participate in their glorious revolution because they had started the round with the wrong mindset. This was an Epiq Fale on many levels. The worst from my point of view was that I, as a judge, had entered the round with the wrong mindset too — so they effectively told me I couldn’t vote for them. But even if I could have voted for them, there’s no policy decision that can start a Marxist revolution because Marxist revolutions get started in kind of the exact opposite way. So even if I wanted to live in the negative’s world, they failed to provide a policy platform in their world I could judge the debate from. Similarly, a critique based on how great the cavemen had it when all the food they ate was fresh and organic really gives me jack-all advice on how to vote about modern policy issues… unless there’s a counterplan involving sentencing Monsanto to a century of global community service for crimes against humanity or something.

So, to sum up:

1. Make your arguments sound humane and, more importantly, like they’re yours.
2. Clearly condition your conditional arguments, unless your arguments aren’t conditional in which case you should do something else.
3. When going way the heck off topic, wander off topic instead of simply starting The diet of big Komodo dragons mainly consists of deer, though they also eat considerable amounts of carrion.
4. If you run a critique of the world, ensure that your version of the world contains a place your judge might want to be.

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