At High School Debates, Debate Is No Longer Allowed | Hacker News Reader

At High School Debates, Debate Is No Longer Allowed

thefp.com

22 pointsandrenth13 comments

The author runs a debate league in Florida where judges are recruited from "faith-based leaders." I'd like to see their paradigms. Funny how he doesn't share them for us to compare.

> Debate Judge Kriti Sharma concurs: under her list of “Things That Will Cause You To Automatically Lose,” number three is “Referring to immigrants as ‘illegal.’ ”

> Should a high school student automatically lose and be publicly humiliated for using a term that’s not only ubiquitous in media and politics, but accurate?

How is calling someone an 'illegal' accurate? Grammatical issues aside, a lot of people violate laws by speeding, jaywalking etc. on a constant basis. Are they 'illegals' by the same metric? Crossing the border without authorization is only a misdemeanor.

Plus, a lot of terms can be 'accurate' in the literal sense but because of the context in which they were used, they're no longer acceptable, like the N word and R word. I guess the author wants people using those words pejoratively to denigrate people to win debates.

Because this person is conservative and cherry-picking those who are impartial and far-left. Notice how they do not point out any paradigms where the person is clearly conservative; I have a feeling they exist, just like the examples they chose to highlight.

I guarantee they purposefully picked the West Point grad paradigm as a way to say, "oh this is someone who is very likely to be very conservative who isn't behaving like the ideologies I've shared."

Uh ... what is wrong with the obvious reality: there are legal and illegal immigrants?

According to an immigration lawyer I'm friends with, the better and more accurate term would be undocumented immigrants. Since, you know, their legal status isn't necessarily illegal/breaking the law, just that there is no paperwork for their presence.

Like an undocumented lawyer, then?

What I find strange about this reasoning is that anyone who goes through the legal immigration process will absolutely have documentation. Even if they lose their own copy of the documents, several government agencies will have records of their own and there is a process to obtain replacements.

In other words, the odds of someone being in the US legally with no government issued paperwork or documentation to justify their presence is slim to none. It’s far more likely that someone lacks documentation because they didn’t follow the process set forth by the law to begin with.

The other side of this is that by calling undocumented non-citizens "illegal immigrants" you are calling the human "illegal" which is demeaning and also raises the question of how a human being would be illegal in the first place. Furthermore, if someone overstays their visa but entered legally, it's a civil but not criminal offense. So it's best to use language appropriately.

Slim to none? Even US citizens get deported by mistake, forget legal immigrants.

https://immigrationimpact.com/2021/07/30/ice-deport-us-citiz...

https://www.google.com/search?q=us+citizen+deported+mistake

>”Crossing the border without authorization is only a misdemeanor.”

It’s not just the act of crossing, it’s staying and taking up residence without authorization. “Illegal” refers to the fact that they broke the laws around immigration, naturalization, and citizenship.

As for your speeding/jaywalking example a more apt comparison would be a driver who never acquired their license in the first place, or one who drives with an expired license.

Or registers their car in another state, or misreports their status on taxes, hoards and continually consumes pirated media. The list goes on, the op makes a good point and needling them isn’t adding to the discussion

Debate club goes woke. If there's controls on what you can say, then, it is not a true debate.

Funny how these sorts of people still haven't forgiven Israel for abandoning communism. Agrarian communism and the Kibbutz system have totally failed, but were mostly abandoned before this turned into a total disaster.

Of course, if the "nature of debate itself" is bourgeoisie ... and you cannot deal with this WHY would you involve yourself with it?

Oh right. She wants money.

"... there would be a even higher chance of me getting struck out of the pool. Which in the practical sense is not a decision I can make, because as a result of US monopoly capitalist exploitation, I rely in-part on judging to eat and survive bourgeois class warfare otherwise."

That's, to put it mildly, disappointing.

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