Harvard university debate team loses to New York prison inmates (2015)
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
and this: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/10/07/harvar...
Smells like bullshit to me.
https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2017/09/26/corr...
What I do not understand is how you could be completely ignorant of the idea of "debates". There are thousands of videos on YouTube of debates. How can you understand the definition of the word debate and not realize that people have debates?
To me, that's like saying "I didn't know science fairs were a thing". Sure, I can understand how many (most?) people have probably not participated in a science fair themselves, although I made my initial comment aware that this is Hacker News and it's a slightly different group of people than the population at large. I do not understand the level of myopia that would be required to not even realize they exist.
As to debates, I've come across several debating clubs and public speaking clubs, however when I think of "debate" I think of American elections with politicians on a stage with podiums - we don't really have that here, especially between parties.
Also, I'm not American.
I know what penguins, stoning, and The Great Wall are, even though I live in the US and those things aren’t common here.
I wasn't really aware of then until I went to university.
It's definitely not a common concept. I've heard of chess boxing before this.
All I was looking for was a clarification from the person who made the very general statement. All I got was a lot of people putting words in someone else's mouth.
In this context, I guess that "be a thing" means, "be something people do in their spare time, even when not strictly required to because its forced upon them in their role as politician/whatever."
But it does because people assume that every one of the the 2.3 million Americans in prison today are uneducated thugs. It's not a comforting prospect to think of them as our peers, or worse yet, having been in a better position than us before their incarceration.
You can be of exemplary moral character and still end up in prison if you decide to take on a cause that threatens the wrong people or the status quo.
Let's take for example Chelsea Manning and also consider what would have happened to Edward Snowden if he'd been caught. So you can be a genius, you can stand for what's right and even if you're not on the wrong side of the law, something will be found or twisted to stop you being a threat. In the case of my example, in the name of national security.
>The inmates impressed the judges by suggesting that if public schools turned the students away, non-governmental organisations or wealthier schools could step in and provide better education to the children in any case.
That's a weak argument, in my view.
The illegal immigrants wouldn't be able to afford private education as it is too expensive even for Americans. Non-gov orgs wouldn't be able to reach to illegal immigrants. Home- and Internet-schooling would be better arguments, but still bad.
Integrating the children of illegal immigrants into public schooling would bring greater benefits not only to them and their parents but to society as a whole.
One can argue that, in the US, European cultural values predominate ("white" is not a synonym for the Caucasian ethnicity but simply an identity that means "holds European cultural values"), and that African-Americans don't have significantly different cultural values from European culture, (ie, they are "white" save for superficial differences like music, food and places of worship, and so on), and that a Syrian Caucasian is not "white" (because they don't hold European cultural values) but an African-American descendant of the people from the Sahara region is a dark-skinned "white".
And therefore African-Americans being dark-skinned "whites" (even if they try to superficially distinguish themselves with the US "black" cultural identity) is an example of the power of assimilation of our public schooling. It would convert, say, a child of Syrian parents with Middle-Eastern values into someone who holds European cultural values and who would work, or rebel, within the cultural rules of the European system.
The children of illegal immigrants should be allowed into public schools not just to neutralize the threat of cultural invaders, but to give us more soft power over a wider portion of the world.
Discuss? ;)
Definitely, but from all I've seen of debate competition, the strength of argument is largely irrelevant. How many points did you make, how many were responded to, how many of the opponent's did you respond to...you might not get credit for a completely off-the-wall response, but if you pass a basic sanity check, I think you're good.
I could be wrong, but this seems to match, what I've been told, what I've seen, and what seems measurable (and balanced when you're assigned your position).
> ;)
But you know that.
Nobody uses "white" the way you did and even if that matches your observations in the US that term was only very recently inclusive of so many origin countries on the European continent. The UK version of "white" still isn't nearly as inclusive as the American construct. It is fine to merely say American culture has predominantly European roots.
The underlying argument around re-education camps may have more merit. The primary argument is about who pays for it. You need to convince Congress and education secretaries and I don't think you're soft power argument would sway anyone.
I also mean to say that this is universally true, as it is a fundamental definition of what "white" is -- a cultural identity, and not a skin-color, "race" or ethnicity.
Modern biology doesn't divide humans into races; there is no Caucasian "race", for example.
"White", furthermore, isn't an ethnicity like Caucasian is (because Caucasian simply refers to the ethnic people originally from the Caucus region), but instead is a cultural identity as I described above.
As "white" is a cultural identity, skin-color and ethnicity aren't a determining factor on whether someone is "white". Again, the term "white", when properly defined and understood without confusion with Caucasian or "of European birth or descent", is almost perfectly interchangeable with "Westerner".
What I mean by "black" are the unsuccessful attempts of African-American people of Sahara-region descent to avoid "white" assimilation and distinguish themselves from "white" culture. I say unsuccessful because African-American fundamental values are essentially the same as "white" values -- unlike, say, an African person from Nigeria -- and even as they rebel against institutionalized oppression they do so within the confines of "white" values (ie, they wish to be included in those institutions as equally as Caucasians, but don't wish to fundamentally destroy or alter them like other cultures do).
One can even go further and say that "black" is as much a proper name for ethnic people from the Sahara-region as would be to call people of Middle-Eastern descent "brown people". "Black", in my view, is simply a name adopted specifically by African-American culture, and doesn't refer to dark-skinned people as a whole; the term "black" is only PC in the US; in other languages, it is offensive; the technical name for people of Sahara-region descent is now taboo in the US, and, in my view, this is to help erase the memory of Africa-American cultural history and to further assimilation.
In general, poor people don't pay private schools the full amount, and private schools even set their budgets such that they expect to be subsidizing X% of the students at the bottom from Y% at the top, adjusting their tuition up and then discounting it for some or even most students.
You can't directly charge rich people more, but it turns out they'll look the other way if you charge everyone else less because they're poor.
I think you are going out of your way to intentionally start a flame-war barely related to the original article.
These people find ingenious short-term "quick-fix" arguments, a lot of that advantage can go away in the long term.