Because state sanctioned sources with an incentive for American discord have used it to subvert the educational system. If you don't believe me, take a look at what a competitive high school or college policy debate looks like today. It's literally 4 kids speed reading (as fast as they can!!! Seriously auctioneers would be proud!) Obscure French post-modernist philosophy. They avoid any discussion that might be about a policy implementation of the topic being debated (it's not strategic to use regular language or arguments anymore due to the judges) As a result, I routinely speak with wealthy 15 year olds who insist on calling themselves "maoists".
Don't believe me? Look up "TOC semi final policy round" or "Harvard vs Berkely finals policy debate" on YouTube. anything even kind of like that. There's no way that this happened without the intervention of either spooks or worse, foreign spooks
Books like this, or the works of other terrible French scholars, are the bread and butter of this fashionable nonsense
"take a look at what a competitive high school or college policy debate looks like today. It's literally 4 kids speed reading..."
There was a great radiolab episode about this.[1]
"There's no way that this happened without the intervention of either spooks or worse, foreign spooks"
Apparently, the trend towards that sort of debate is student initiated. Students want this. Though at the same time, students aren't unanimous in wanting this style of debate. The radiolab episode goes in to detail about the controversy.
It's very easy for an intelligence agency to make it look like this was a Grass Roots movement. I am a member of this community (debate community) and I believe that it was anything but grassroots.
Also, the students have to adapt to the judges, not the other way around. I'm sure that judges are more to blame for this than anything else.
If this post becomes greyed out than it's obvious that I've hit a nerve
"If this post becomes greyed out than it's obvious that I've hit a nerve"
Or it could be just a reasonable reaction to a conspiracy theory presented with absolutely zero evidence.
Rather than intelligence agency involvement, who are unlikely to care about debating formats, I find it far more credible that some students are just lazy, and would therefore prefer to rattle off nonsense or memorized text too fast to follow than actually do the hard work of persuading the judges with arguments they can understand.
I do wonder why the judges let them get away with it, though. I'd personally just fail whoever tried anything remotely like that.
My guess is that the judges led the way here, with a well-intentioned but ultimately destructve desire for a scoring system that is ostensibly objective, repeatable and free of any cultural bias, but at the cost of depending on gameable proxies as a substitute for meaningful values. Once such a system is put in place, the incentives will drive behavior towards extreme gamesmanship, while at the same time driving away anyone preferring real debate.
I further suspect that, at least within high-school debate, pressure from parents, in the form of a minority incessantly and agressively arguing against the judges, played a part in the desire for 'objective' measures.
Update: here's a relevant quote - note the emphasis on the number of arguments, in light of the fact that it is easier to increase your count by adding another argument than it is to increase your count by adding another argument that specifically refutes one made by the other side:
We developed a situation where one team decided, "I'm going to present eight arguments," and the other team talked slower and only answered six of them, and the judge says, "Well, you didn't answer two of these arguments so you lost the debate because you didn't answer those arguments." So the other team said, "We need to answer all eight of those arguments," and they started to talk faster. And the other team said, "Well, we'll present 10 arguments," and then they answered 12. It escalated to a point that, in some instances, has gone way too far.
>Books like this, or the works of other terrible French scholars, are the bread and butter of this fashionable nonsense
I must admit, at someone familiar with the works, I couldn't disagree more. Althusser never seemed like nonsense to me, nor did Foucault, Badiou, Deleuze etc. - but the fact that it can be used as fashionable nonsense by a university debate team does not make it so. If you want real arguments and discussions on the topic, put it into Google Scholar and read some papers around whatever work you think is "fashionable nonsense". It's not as though the authors want to keep it as "nonsense" either - Debord famously published the Comments too.
How do you read Lacan or Deleuze and think those thoughts?
"it's about the "mirror stage", except my body without organs didn't reterritorialize enough for me. Such a Westphalian cartography of thought is telelogical and causes Freud's solar anuses to explode from my nose."
Is this a Deleuze or Lacan quote? No, but you'd be hard pressed to prove it isn't because you can ctrl-F through any word or phrase I used above and find the exact line where they begin their charade. The worst part about them is that now people think that Freud's bullshit was right. No the Oedipus complex doesn't exist.
The additional context of knowing why DnG or Lacan are critiquing Freud doesn't help when you realize that every intellectual link in that chain is bankrupt. Worse yet, they abjectly failed to treat any psychiatric patients and themselves literally went crazy. Deleuze killed himself. Althusser killed his wife. All of them hurt future psychiatry with their nonsense.
And don't get me started on lacans bullshit math symbols.
>The worst part about them is that now people think that Freud's bullshit was right.
Freud used to get a lot of attention, and now he doesn't - mostly because of his treatment by Popper, a treatment that has been refuted several times over. I'm not saying Freud is unassailable, but to say he's so useless as to not be used is ridiculous. There's much more to Freud than the Oedipus complex.
>Deleuze killed himself. Althusser killed his wife. All of them hurt future psychiatry with their nonsense.
This is a very uncharitable treatment of the authors (it's unclear why their personal problems have anything to do with their work; name me an author less saintly than Tolstoy or Spinoza and I'll find words to hang them), and the fact that nobody really practices psychoanalysis based on Deleuze, and Althusser wasn't even in the same camp. My point was that it's wrong to paint every French scholar of the 60s, 70s and 80s with the same brush. The actual legacy of Deleuze in psychiatry is nil. His legacy in psychoanalysis is slightly more than nil.
I did look this up. How this can be construed as a coherent argument in a timed debate is... it's nearly unbelievable to me.
Yes, they fit in far more information and logical constructs than I could in that kind of time but it throws all oratory practice out the window. It's not just incoherent, indistinguishable babbling, it's also terrible to listen to with those deep, throaty breaths he has to take in order to accomplish his speed read...
The thing is, so-called "debate" is a competitive sport with its own weird rules. You are incented to babble a lot because then the opponent has to waste time on countering what you said - since that's what the rules require. It doesn't have to make sense, it still confers an advantage.
IMO most games—especially ones that are more intellectual than physical—get worse over time as the rules get more and more "gamed" and "correct play" gets nailed down & optimized. Kills all the fun.
What good are the arguments if they can't be understood. And I don't mean for their philosophical obscurity, but practically. Even slowing down that audio doesn't render discernible words.
> Don't believe me? Look up "TOC semi final policy round" or "Harvard vs Berkely finals policy debate" on YouTube
Actually this kind of reconciled me with this "debate club" thingie that I thought was nonsensical. Now I get it, that's just a game. It is a gamification of the rules of debate but that's as close to real debate as starcraft is to real strategy.
Don't believe me? Look up "TOC semi final policy round" or "Harvard vs Berkely finals policy debate" on YouTube. anything even kind of like that. There's no way that this happened without the intervention of either spooks or worse, foreign spooks
Books like this, or the works of other terrible French scholars, are the bread and butter of this fashionable nonsense