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Comment by LeroyRaz | Hacker News Reader

To the people posting how the author is just whining re the meta, and to those saying young people should challenge society, etc...

The author is arguing that the rise of K-s is killing true debate (where anything can be advocated for and one wins based on the quality of arguments) with something else (clever appeal to authority and personal attacks).

The aim of debate is to foster people who form their own opinions, but the current structure instead fosters people who blithely subscribe to the current social norms. Critical theory is not revolutionary. Socially, it is dominant (particularly among that demographic). It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.

I also think a white elephant in the room, is that a) a lot of critical theory is incredibly badly reasoned / detached from reality and b) a significant amount of the use of it is done in bad faith (e.g., for virtue signalling, and to shoot others down, invalidate others rather than engage with their arguments and views)

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Two things here that seem unconvincing:

> It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with [Critical theory], e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.

There is not a lot of abolishment of capitalism going on in the west these days in practice. Dominant in certain demographics, sure, but claiming it's "actually revolutionary" to disagree seems to be a sidestep of actually engaging with the claims of why changing things would be important to anyone involved or affected in the first place. "It's revolutionary to say things should stay the same"? So instead of debating the premise, you then try to pull a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-to of saying "you're just following the crowd" as a justification for... following the crowd among those really calling the shots instead of the crowd of high school debaters.

> I also think a white elephant in the room, is that a) a lot of critical theory is incredibly badly reasoned / detached from reality and b) a significant amount of the use of it is done in bad faith (e.g., for virtue signalling, and to shoot others down, invalidate others rather than engage with their arguments and views)

This, similarly, shifts from "here's why I don't support the formats/tactics" to slipping in "just take it for granted that the contents of the arguments are actually wrong, regardless of format."

> not a lot of abolishment of capitalism going on in the west these days in practice

It’s a fair question to debate. What’s nonsense is turning every economic question into this one.

Wouldn't that be a very different complaint, focusing on what judges reward vs what the actual arguments are? The original article touches on that more than the comment here.

Instead of talking about if the tactic is valid or if the judges are doing a good job with it the comment here took a major tangent towards "actually the whole line of thought used is obviously flawed and wrong" with a dose of "nobody here is thinking about it they're just following the crowd." Which is suddenly not about tactics or scoring at all.

That premise is open to debate, there are Western countries with different systems. E.g., most Western European countries have a system called "social market economy" (which is not [exactly] capitalism).

> premise is open to debate

Again, nobody disagrees. But if you ask me if I want red or white wine, and I, instead, launch into a diatribe in Marxist-Leninism, that’s not a valid argument and it’s very annoying. Outside these debate circuits, it could come across as debilitating.

Well as a classic example, you could debate "the unemployment rate is going down – is it good or bad?" (well, the Phillips curve…) and ask with Horkheimer/Adorno, if the entire notion of discussing this in terms of a relative change to a statistical rate isn't normalizing a dysfunctional aspect of economy, regardless, where it's at. This is still a debate, but it shifts the core argument to a conceptually more fundamental level.

All countries in the world have mixed economies. (Except maybe Somalia or North Korea.)

The US has a fair amount more publically owned sectors than Europe, which eg has privatized postal services.

Yes. This is correct.

Though the extent of it really matters, I always hear "Norway is a capitalist country" when their economy is primarily in the hands of the state, more than for example Venezuela.

But people tend to point to Venezuela, and not Norway, as an example of a failed state owned economy.

It's not really about "sectors" of the economy that are publicly owned but actual economic output. The money in the US is produced and it is in the hands of private individuals most of it. In Norway near 70% of it is produced and in the hands of the state. Obviously Norway is a particular example because they're a country that relies on natural resources extraction. But you can look at other similar countries in terms of their exports (Australia, Chile) and see how the Norwegian model differs.

The USPS, for example, is a service. It's not really a business, it doesn't have to be profitable it ideally has to be sustainable but I wouldn't say it's a necessity. Not only that, it subsidised private businesses like Amazon.

> The USPS, for example, is a service. It's not really a business, it doesn't have to be profitable it ideally has to be sustainable but I wouldn't say it's a necessity. Not only that, it subsidised private businesses like Amazon.

USPS is profitable, though. (even if Congress messes with their retirement accounting to make it look worse)

If they subsidize anyone it's China, because we forced them to do that by signing the UPU treaty. After that it's people who buy forever stamps.

Sorry, my bad. Point still stands though, services don't necessarily need to be profitable because they're there for a different reason.

> I always hear "Norway is a capitalist country" when their economy is primarily in the hands of the state, more than for example Venezuela.

Can you please provide some sources backing up your claim? What metric did you use?

The metrics that I would use, like the Index of Economic Freedom by The Heritage Foundation, seem to contradict your claim.

The fact that the state owns some companies in key industrial sectors and has stakes in others does not mean that the country's economy is primarily in the hands of the state.

The Index of Economic Freedom is based on ideological arguments, not material analysis. Norway's government revenue makes up about 60% of its GDP [1], in part due to its share in oil, gas and fishing - this is in the top ten in the world. Venezuela actually has the lowest share of government revenue in the world, at about 5% of GDP [1], the black markets caused by hyperinflation probably playing a part here.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governm...

A better measure than revenue would be public ownership of property, but this produces some surprising results. I am not sure whether the fact that Singapore is the second most socialist country on the planet would likely be more distressing to the left or the right.

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2018/03/09/how-capitali...

Someone else has already posted a good source for it. But I just wanted to add here that the Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank particularly known for pushing "free-market economics" (read as: neoliberal policies of hyper-privatisation) so obviously it's on their best interest to label countries such as the nordic ones more capitalist than socialist.

And I mean, yeah, nordic countries for sure participate in the free-market... but Capitalism is defined by private ownership; so when you have such important portions of your economy be collectively, socially or communally owned (state, coops, labour unions) it's misleading to use such labels so lightly. These are mixed-economies, and I would even go as far as to say they're more socialist than capitalist.

Socialism does have a bad reputation though. So I don't blame for these countries to label themselves as "capitalist"; i mean, it's better for business.

It wouldn't be a contradiction to live in a country where most productive enterprises were owned by the state, but where individuals still had great economic freedom.

There is a big difference between governments owning things vs. exclusions to citizens owning things.

Socialism is when workers own and control the means of production. Capitalism is the opposite. There is no such thing as a "mixed economy." Social programs are not exclusive to socialism.

> Socialism is when workers own and control the means of production.

In most cases, workers can own the means to production as many corporations are public. They just have to risk their capital to buy a share of the company - like every other owner.

You missed the second part of that definition. Both parts must be satisfied. Workers do not control any public companies that I am familiar with.

If the workers control a company it's not a public company. That's what "public" means.

There are worker coops, customer coops, and state owned companies in the US.

This is true, but workers do not broadly own or control the MoP in the US. Thus, the US is not socialist. It is not a "mixed" economy, because there is no such thing.

I know "all numbers are either 0 or 100%" is a common belief, but people on here are supposed to be smarter than that.

Also you're still trying to argue against Keynes and your statement would make China and Vietnam capitalist, which would be a surprise to them. Not to mention Lenin's NEP mixed economy.

nb the people who "control" the means of production in the US are the voters, who can get the government to pass laws regulating it. It doesn't matter if you "own" it ie are equityholders. Although we have that too, in the form of our worker-owned index fund company Vanguard.

> and your statement would make China and Vietnam capitalist

Well they are. Just because they wave red flags and call themselves "socialist" doesn't make it true, for the same reason North Korea is precisely none of "democratic", "people's", or a "republic" despite its assertions otherwise.

If they are owners, they control it as much as the other owners - following the same rules; which I believe in most companies is the majority get the final say.

> In most cases, workers can own the means to production as many corporations are public

A thing being true throughout an economy and it being permitted by the formal rules are not the same thing.

Socialism is not merely where some workers do control some of the means of production, but where the entirety of the means of production are cobtrolled by the workers by virtue of their being workers.

If some people who happen to work also happen to have a private property relationship to some capital sufficient to be on par with their labor in terms of importance in their personal relation to the economy, then they are just petit bourgeois in a capitalist economy.

This classical Marxist definition of socialism is one I agree and identify with, but it's not what 99% of people mean by it, socialist or not.

I am not sure the word & associated baggage can be rescued from the 20th century at this point.

Who said anything about social programs?

Also, people just get on here and disagree with Keynes?

I always hear that European economies fall under the socialist rubric, but they seem pretty capitalist—at least a lot more so than the economies of any Marxist-Leninist government throughout history. I imagine scholars have a reason for their taxonomy, but I wish it made more sense to me.

To illustrate the difference, the Ahlener Programm, the first political program of Germany's conservative party (CDU) after the war in 1947, originally stated:

> The capitalist economic system has not done justice to the national and social vital interests of the German people. After the terrible political, economic and social collapse as a result of criminal power politics, only a fundamental reorganization can take place.

> Content and goal of this social and economic reorganization can no longer be the capitalist striving for profit and power, but only the well-being of our people. Through a public economic order, the German people should receive an economic and social constitution that corresponds to the rights and dignity of human beings, serves the spiritual and material development of our people and ensures internal and external peace.

This was dubbed "Christian Socialism", and, under the influence of Adenauer, the program soon inched somewhat to the center towards a concept now known as "social market economy", a term, which had also been in use by (some) social-democrats. Conceptionally, it's deemed different from ordoliberalism as it is more process-oriented and pragmatic. (We may also see how someone who is leaning marginally towards anarcho-capitalism like, say, Elon Musk, must be perceived as entirely misaligned.)

Neither critical theory nor capitalism are revolutionary. They each have large bastions where you will be at best low status, at worst cast out, for criticizing them.

Also, the idea that revolution is inherently good has been a dead cliché since the IT industry got hold of it.

Under this interpretation nothing can ever be revolutionary. There is absolutely and ideology that is dominant in society at large and trying to say that the ideology that runs 95% of world powers and one that opposes it are equally "revolutionary" is counterfactual.

You can be revolutionary by seeking big change at personal risk because you're not socially dominant (or militarily in other contexts). There have been times this happened. Who is doing that today?

Indigenous people resisting copper mines, gas pipelines, lithium mines, etc that are being proposed on territories they've been pushed back onto.

I doubt critical theorists do them any good.

Oddly enough the OG Critical Race Theory that originated in law schools about the globe decades ago addresses systemic inequality issues fairly directly.

This seems to have been forgotten since Tucker Calson et al started redefining woke | CRT to mean whatever they currently hated to avoid addressing policy.

"Countering disinformation about Critical Race Theory" (2022)

[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/08/countering-disinfor...

Your material:

    As readers of my book *All One in Christ* will find, the content of CRT is even more disturbing than this brief summary indicates – and it is also riddled with blatant logical fallacies, crude social scientific errors, and assumptions and policy recommendations that are utterly contrary to the natural moral law and the Catholic faith.

appears to be a lengthy pro catholic | anti CRT self promoting strawman.

Based on what? If it's your dislike of critical theory, that's merely circular.

Is running a casino more moral than a copper mine?

There's a clear distinction between

* people choosing to build a casino on a specific portion of their land that they choose to build upon, and

* people having no say over third parties excavating a giant hole beneath a large area of their land at a particular location they believe has deep religous meaning | spititual connection.

Stealing people's land to build a casino is no more or less moral than doing the same to build a copper mine.

However, only one of these is actually going on.

> Who is doing that today?

So many people. Look no further than the activists who are continuing to protest against Cop City in Atlanta despite the fact that the cops have already murdered one person [1] and arrested many more on trumped up charges [2].

[1] https://theintercept.com/2023/04/20/atlanta-cop-city-protest... [2] https://theintercept.com/2023/06/21/cop-city-georgia-attorne...

Animal Rescuers, e.g. https://bemagazine.org/direct-action-everywhere-trial-finall...

Where is this bastion of critical theory which I would like to visit?

I've spent years in academia, admittedly in STEM but I saw little actual explicit critical theory. I was all alone discovering and reading post-Marxist texts, with no group to discuss it with.

You had no cultural studies departments? No people who do cultural analysis in the literature department? No one in the sociology department who works in the tradition of the conflict theory? No one in the geography department who does critical geography? No one in the anthropological departments who does critical anthropology? In the US? In the 21st century? Weird. Which university is that?

Yeah, I think a lot of us looking at this must be wondering how we can be part of this university.

Even famously conservative universities like U. Chicago have plenty of this stuff going on.

Gee, I wonder why.

Could it be that the CRT is not inherently anti- (or even non-) conservative? Perhaps the term has been hijacked by conservative culture-warriors as a wedge issue for identity politics in a way that conservative academics disagree wirh? I'm just asking questions here.

I'm sure we did but basically you're showing there is no critical theory bastion, they are a diffuse minority compared to most actual departments.

And that tracks with my personal campus experiences, as well as the historical account of critical theory itself.

Critical theorists and academics in general are smart enough to be able to hold multiple contradictory ideas in their heads at the same time. For example, they are at the same time against capitalism and against starving to death in a gulag.

Today from the "drank the kool-aid" study book on the history of capitalism: before Adam Smith invented and advocated laissez-faire capitalism in 1776, all the people in the world were starving to death in gulags.

The only 20th century alternative to capitalism was socialism whose only fruits were a massive pile of skulls. So are you talking about going back to feudalism? Monarchy?

Unfortunately "critical theory" (as stereotyped in public discourse, but also as practiced in American academia) is generally like Marxian theory completely stripped of the materialist method and an actual attention to economic fundamentals. It's name-checked radicalism. Any "anti-capitalism" is purely skin-deep, a kind of moral grandstanding but on the whole without any program they could give as an alternative, or even the ability to fully explicate what capitalism really is.

And the milieux that circulates this is really primarily liberal, centrist in practice, overwhelmingly supporting and electing quite mainstream fully "capitalist" political parties... but with the aesthetic or appeal to a past radical, anti-capitalist, socialist "scene"... without an actual meaningful program or alternative for the working class. A working class which has as a result almost completely divorced itself from this "left."

Which is all the end product of the demolition of the organized socialist left & trade union movement in the west through the 70s and 80s and early 90s and the retreat of associated intellectuals into academia and cultural politics.

If, as I keep hearing from right-wing commentators, "the left" is somehow dominant, it's only because "the left" has wholesale dropped its historical anti-capitalist mission, and has retreated almost exclusively into culture wars; and generally taken positions which enrage the right on that basis, but doesn't actually challenge any real power. A very general "anti-oppression" politic which is primarily concerned with individual concerns, not collective ones. This "left" that I keep hearing about from the Shapiro etc types foaming at the mouth, it's a caricature not only made by its opponents... but by itself.

Just Liberalism, and a very 21st century American product.

I largely agree (and consequently upvoted) that it’s not meaningfully socialist and only superficially anti-capitalist, but I don’t see how it is some kind of liberalism when it is criticized precisely for being illiberal. I get the feeling that “liberal” here (and perhaps to leftists in general) means “supporting/tolerating capitalism” and has little to do with, say, opposing racially discriminatory (i.e., “race conscious”) policies. I’m also not sure what you mean when you say it is concerned with individual concerns—it seems very concerned with collectives—identity groups specifically. In my experience, these people will argue that because the average whites person is wealthier, more privileged, etc than the average minority, any given white person in any interracial conflict (even if race isn’t germane to the conflict) should yield to the minority party irrespective of the wealth/privileges of either individual. Phrases like “we don’t need to hear what another white male says” as though all white men share a collective opinion.

There are multiple definitions of "liberal", but in the American context it's really stopped meaning anything about classical liberal concepts of personal liberty (in speech in particular) and more about perspectives on moral and identity issues, it seems. It's really, from my mind: not-conservative, defined almost entirely in opposition to the aggressive reaction from the religious moral right in US politics. Anything beyond that is just a huge mix.

Liberal across the Atlantic means something closer to its classic definition.

One of the first challenges I have when discussing politics with Americans (and increasingly other Canadians) is precisely trying to define how I, as maybe a more "traditional" socialist radical, do not fit on the spectrum they've defined there. I share a disgust with the conservative right, am secular, and broadly call myself a feminist or anti-racist but when it moves to bread and butter issues, gun control, or some identity politics stuff... there's basically no correspondence...

(Here in Canada, it's muddled in different ways, where "Liberal" is a political party, defined mainly by "whatever will win an election" than any constant ideological focus. Right now it's vaguely "left" (in so far as it takes "left" positions on cultural issues, combined with some kind of neo-Keynesian budgetary spending model, but combined with low corporate taxes) but in my mind it's really just a kind of croneyism... but that's a rant. We have a separate, sometimes-successful, social democratic party which sorta muddies any kind of comparisons to the US, but comparisons to the UK also don't work because our NDP isn't really like their Labour party, either... though it might want to be)

Agreed there are multiple definitions in the US, and the term is very murky. As far as I can tell, the people who fixate on identity stuff usually identify as 'progressives', although some who identify as 'liberals' might go along with it because that's increasingly the new moral orthodoxy on the US left. Of course, many conservatives often refer to the entire US left as "liberal" (in the same way that many progressives call everyone to their right "far right").

Incidentally, if you talk about liberalism people are more likely to understand that you mean the philosophy rather that some basket of policies and jargon that are popular with the liberal tribe at the current moment.

> broadly call myself a feminist or anti-racist

Even these labels are fraught, at least in the US. They are pretty much doublespeak insofar as the folks who identify as 'anti-racist' in the US tend to endorse policies that are explicitly racially discriminatory (they would say 'race conscious', but they mean exactly the same thing), and the folks who identify as 'feminist' in the US have no discernible interest in gender equality.

You should check out the recent Glenn Loury Show episode where he brings on Norman Finklestein. I think you'll highly enjoy it.

> Which is all the end product of the demolition of the organized socialist left & trade union movement in the west through the 70s and 80s and early 90s and the retreat of associated intellectuals into academia and cultural politics.

This was not some grand conspiracy, the Socialists just realized that workers in the West were generally happy and well off (iirc Marcuse said "Capitalism delivers the goods") and not at all friendly to Socialists' plans of revolution.

As a result there was a push to shift the propagandizing ("educating") to the next best oppressed groups they could find, with these being the familiar categories of LGBTQ, racial minorities (only certain ones), women etc.).

Just like the socialist revolutionaries of old, the majority of the "New Left" are not parts of those groups. They are merely using them as a "revolutionary mass" whose misery and grievances are single-use tools for the revolutionaries to gain power. Lenin was fuming at Bolshevik party members who actually tried to negotiate better working conditions or pay pre-1917 because happy workers don't have "revolutionary potential" (a euphemism for not being desperate enough to want to put him in power).

> If, as I keep hearing from right-wing commentators, "the left" is somehow dominant, it's only because "the left" has wholesale dropped its historical anti-capitalist mission, and has retreated almost exclusively into culture wars; and generally taken positions which enrage the right on that basis, but doesn't actually challenge any real power.

I explored some of the reasons for that above, but everybody with some sense could see that capitalist societies were happier, almost never genocided their own population, were vastly more prosperous and even produced enough surplus to have better social welfare than Socialist countries. On the other hand Socialism always ended badly, sometimes catastrophically. People are not blind, and associating your political movement with 60 million corpses is not a smart move.

The reason they don't challenge "real power" is because the objective is to gain the power vested in those institutions, not to challenge them.

> There is not a lot of abolishment of capitalism going on in the west these days in practice

Anti-capitalism is very pregnant where I live (France) with one mainstream political party embracing it and the Green supporting it covertly. It's a position which is popular amongst parts of most Green parties in Europe.

> Critical theory is not revolutionary.

True. It may overlap with revolutionary views, but is not, inherently, itself revolutionary. It is a view of what is, not a view of what should be done about it.

> Socially, it is dominant

No, its not.

> (particularly among that demographic).

There is essentially no demographic, other than one defined specifically by adherence to critical theory, for which this is true.

> It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.

This has been the dominant view, across society (at least, as weighted by social power, maybe not in pure number of adherents terms), in the developed West for longer than capitalism has had a name (which it got from people disagreeing with that dominant viewpoint in the mid-19th Century.)

It is not truly revolutionary to hold what is both the dominant elite viewpoint and the viewpoint supporting the dominance of the elites.

> There is essentially no demographic, other than one defined specifically by adherence to critical theory, for which this is true.

I think the parent comment means for the audience to substitute whatever minority group the reader finds the most loud and obnoxious. In other words, it's nonsense when read literally because it's not meant to be read literally; it's a dogwhistle.

There was a radiolab episode about the other side, interviewing the people advocating for critical theory in debate: https://radiolab.org/podcast/debatable

It's true that it goes against the debate in the moment, but if you zoom out and look at the role of debate within greater society, I think it makes sense to challenge the topics brought up for debate and the whole system that we live in.

The trouble is that it ignores the very thing that debate is trying to teach: the ability to sympathize with, understand, and argue for a position even if you don’t agree with it. It is meant to encourage a greater understanding of the world through different perspectives.

People do exactly this with Ks in policy debate - the same person presenting a K in one round will be defending against it in another round. Nationally competitive debaters don't (in my experience) choose Ks because they believe in them, but because they're tactically effective.

Nothing is solved by high school debate. Nothing. Ever. The only point it has is teaching kids how to debate, which is negated by giving the kids instant-win buttons in the form of Correct Opinions they can spout to adoring judges.

Good thing nobody gets an instant-win button! (That would actually kill the activity which is why even this rather poorly-argued article doesn't claim it's happening.)

It doesn't? It says judges openly advertise things like "I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist" along with many other positions. It also says they routinely award wins simply because they happen to like a particular "K", all this sounds a lot like a collection of instant win buttons.

The article says a lot of things, some of which are even true. Debate judges are volunteers and there are tens or hundreds of thousands of people who've done it. I don't doubt there are judges who make bad decisions, but that ideological quote, if it's real, is definitely not representative of how debate is actually judged in most or prestigious tournaments.

(Also, even that isn't an instant-win button! Any decent debater can spin an actually-you're-the-imperialist argument in almost any circumstances, and sadly paying attention to judge biases is also routine. And FWIW at something like a state championship tournament there are a lot more normie judges who won't vote for a K, no matter how well argued, than there are Maoists.)

it makes sense to challenge the topics brought up for debate

Sure. But not in the debate itself.

That's classic bad faith participation and means the argument you are representing is being ill-served to the point of dishonesty.

That's absolutely untrue, at least in policy debate, which I participated in during high school.

There are 5 of what are called "stock issues" that are the basis for judging a round, and the affirmative side must win all of them to take the round. The negative side need only win one.

One of those stock issues is "topicality." The affirmative wins topicality as an issue by affirming the resolution. The negative is not so bound. This leads to an absolutely classical negative strategy called the "counter-plan." Essentially, what this is is a strategy where, rather than the negative simply saying "nuh uh" to the affirmative's points, they put forth their own plan and argue that it is better than the affirmative's plan.

There is some thought that the negative counterplan must explicitly be non-topical, i.e. not advocate for the resolution. So, for instance, the the resolution might be something like "Resolved: That the United States government should reduce worldwide pollution through its trade and/or aid policies," which was actually the 1992-1993 high school policy debate resolution. The negative could argue that the US should reduce worldwide pollution by means other than trade and/or aid policy, or that the US should do something completely unrelated to pollution reduction, because that action would create bigger benefits than the affirmative plan.

For this strategy to work, it's best if the counterplan and the affirmative plan are mutually exclusive, so it's a common strategy to simply hijack the affirmative plan's funding plank to make it all work.

Absolutely none of this is any sort of bad faith tactic. An affirmative team must always be prepared to argue a comparative advantage case. As I said, this is completely bog-standard, classical policy debate strategy, and in no way constitutes bad faith. But, yet, because the negative has no duty to be topical (and, indeed, could possibly be more convincing if they are explicitly non-topical), they might spend half their time talking about something not mentioned at all in the resolution.

In the context of the article here, the tactics are used to derail the agreed proposition - not to contribute to understanding the values or otherwise of it, which is the purpose of any good faith approach.

If the resolution is about reducing worldwide pollution, and I put forth a counterplan that essentially says "No way. We should take all that funding you want to use for your plan and use it to support animal welfare instead," is that not "derail[ing] the agreed proposition" in your terms? Yet, again, this is a classical and accepted tactic.

I haven't participated in this kind of program, but it seems extremely bad faith to basically expect the opponent to argue that their position is necessary condition to something nothing short of absolute utopia.

As a college admissions officer or employer, if this is what the endeavor had degenerated to, I would place no stock in it as a skill builder or source of any reputable credential.

> I haven't participated in this kind of program

So you have no idea what you're talking about.

So, you can't counterargue a lay perception? That speaks for itself.

Better yet: "this is atypical in-group power play: the misuse of authority in the absence of substance is de facto perpetuation of the institutional dysfunction laid clear by outsiders."

Which "k" is that?

A "lay" perception is not actually an argument.

Your arguments is basically a mediocre elitism K,

In what way? Like it or not, we exist in a world of finite resources. It's wholly appropriate to argue that "No, we should not use our limited resources on X when there is the problem Y out there that we could apply them to instead, and derive a much larger comparative advantage from." These are the types of questions faced in the real world by decision makers every day. If anything, your position is the utopian one.

The distinction between derailing and "understanding the values and otherwise" is contestable and in fact routinely contested by debaters - and there is of course no de jure or de facto rule that the person who goes further in trying to critique assumptions and structures wins.

The style of "critique is inherently bad" argument made by this article is also perfectly possible to make within debate. But it's not common, less because of biased judges (who certainly exist, in all directions) than because it doesn't stand up to scrutiny very well in context. Policy debate isn't a great truth-finding endeavor, but it is ruthlessly competitive and as a result pretty effective at weeding out arguments that, like the article's, rely on a low-context audience who have heard a lot about out of control woke college students but haven't just watched a bunch of rounds of vigorous dispute over everything from hypothetical policy details to the boundaries of the year's topic to, yes, critical theory, with practiced advocates on every side.

> It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.

how on earth is it "revolutionary" to express "the current economic system that dominates 95% of all countries on earth with little to no challenge is actually just fine"

that is the opposite of "revolutionary"

Different spaces have different cultural values and taboos.

It's revolutionary for an Anglo-Saxon educational setting, I'd imagine, because I'd infer Marxism is enforced as a moral standard by a significant number of teachers in some schools.

It's a leftist moral pocket inside the US.

Muslims would be a conservative moral pocket.

Saying gays should die is taboo in most of the country but not inside most islamic religious gatherings.

Etc.

You imagine and infer but do you have direct evidence? The only place I've heard that argument is right-wing propaganda (i.e., not direct evidence), though I don't have enough experience or direct evidence myself to rule it out.

> Saying gays should die is taboo in most of the country but not inside most islamic religious gatherings.

Again, any direct evidence? I'm pretty sure that is false. Note the Christian scripture and some leaders say similar things, but the vast majority of Christians do not.

“Revolutionary” is relative to the context it’s in. It doesn’t matter if the rest of the world is capitalist if academia is Marxist.

Also - the world isn’t capitalist for ideological reasons. You have to work hard against nature to destroy the notion of personal property.

K's are not new. People have runs K's since at least the 2000's. I myself ran a Zizek K that was quite a lot of fun to run with back then.

I'm wondering if the author simply thinks the current K's are simply just worse.

Genuine question--if one isn't willing to debate the question at hand, then why debate at all? Why not, as a point of pride or honor or authentic rejection of the topic, withdraw from debate and take the L? It seems the side bringing up the K either is an activist for a different topic no one else wants to hear or is just someone(s) wanting to get one over (even embarrass) their opponent(s) by blind-siding them.

Because its all part of learning how to think critically. Policy Debate is not about actually expecting policy outcomes. It's about learning how to think and argue.

These kinds of questions are not interesting, because EVERYONE ASKS IT. Every single HN question on this topic of "why would you do this" would have reams of evidence/theory to refute it and explain why you're a crazy person for questioning this strategy.

Even back in my day, we definitely had debates where the argument effectively was "This debate is racist, and if we don't win you are all racists" And so you would have to figure out strategies to fight back.

You can see it all the time in the rhetroic online with activists and whatever, people who don't know how to argue, arguing with others that are making either bad faith arguments or trying to figure out how to deal with Kritique style arguments. It waste's their time and everyone elses time.

By being able to argue for/against Kritiques, you gain the ability to quickly call out the fucking bullshit and go straight to the meat.

> By being able to argue for/against Kritiques, you gain the ability to quickly call out the fucking bullshit and go straight to the meat.

I'm not so sure about that. Because, if what Bodnick says is true, the judges never go for the meat but always vote for the sizzle. As she herself wrote, 'For example, many leftist judges will not accept a response to a Marxism kritik that argues that capitalism is good.' Sounds more like the K advocate (with the aid of the judge) is more interested in diffusing aromas than putting ribeye on the table.

I didn’t do debate in high school, but I remember a class in the late 80s we had a class “world crisis” which covered the past/current states of Chile, Cuba, Ireland, Israel and South Africa.

We were supposed to debate a South African about apartheid. He couldn’t make it so we debated our teacher (who made his opinions known he was not a fan). He destroyed our arguments one by one. We knew for the rest of the class we would have to up our game.

> By being able to argue for/against Kritiques, you gain the ability to quickly call out the fucking bullshit and go straight to the meat.

This! I actually laughed out loud at the following line from tfa:

> A Public Forum debater who reached Semifinals at the Tournament of Champions told me: “I had to know critical theory to win... you have to be prepared in case you have to run it or go against it.”

Literally what? That's the entire fucking point. This is like people complaining about squirrels in debate or cheese in an RTS: if it worked, you suck, so maybe try not to suck instead of whining about it? I mean, I, personally, find arguments and worldviews rooted in appeals to authority to be quite gross, but I don't pretend that I can bury my head in the sand and cry unfair if someone deploys an argument like that against me and I can't deal with it due to lack of familiarity. Not really seeing how this scenario is any different.

Even in the extreme case of an outright biased judge, that's still in the game: inverting the K to demonstrate that, actually, the side that raised it are arguing for structural racism or whatever is both a ton of fun and really good experience.

Bias disclaimer: ran/defended against Ks in PF to great success long ago

> Genuine question--if one isn't willing to debate the question at hand, then why debate at all?

Why do people cheat at anything? Because they want to win.

Because competive debates are dumb and a dumb way to make up your mind about anything. The objective of the competitive debate is not to find some kind of truth or meaning or understanding but to win the debate. No honor or pride or authenticity needed. It's meaningless. And Ks are just the inevitable endpoint of this pointless exercise. They don't even have to pretend to debate the topic now, just win becaue that's what the judges like. It's actually always been like this, even without the Ks. If it was a right leaning jury you could win using what abouts and saying "woke" as many times as possible. The Ks just make the uselessness of debate as a format more obvious.

This kind of argument is starting to really bother me. Do you really think that the only part of the debate that matters is the actual debate itself? Are you ignorant of the massive amounts of shit that we learned when researching a topic?

I'm bringing up some old memories now, but lets go with some random topics that I recall

a) We should increase USAID funding to Africa to fight HIV/AIDS

b) We should increase alternative energy incentives in the US.

With the USAID topic, we had to learn in high school:

- What is USAID, how does it work

- How does foreign aid to Africa work

- How does the Govt actually allocate funds

- What is HIV/AIDS, how does it spread, and what work is done to prevent/cure it

With the alternative energy topic, we learned:

- How does national alternative energy policy work

- How do states deal with their own energy security vs others

- Does nuclear count as alternative energy

What high schooler is being tought these topics in class. I definitely see debates on HN that are FAR worse than a High School debate since so much research and planning is done by debaters on these topics, and probably know far more than most people.

This is a long battle, "Sophists did, however, have one important thing in common: whatever else they did or did not claim to know, they characteristically had a great understanding of what words would entertain or impress or persuade an audience."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophist

To many an audience, that's all that matters. I have a persuasive essay due tomorrow night. Part of that is transferable rhetorical strategies removed from the actual specifics. On the flip side of your argument, just presenting a list of facts is not persuasive.

But a) and b) aren't really topics of learning.

Which I want to point out as the root of the problem. Debate is not really about learning, not in the arts and sciences sense.

I remember once an MIT lecture made the point that medicine is not really science. I'll extend that and say, debate is not really about the truth. There's nothing to learn, all it is is learning the rationalizations to serve one side.

So the purpose of debate is to teach high schoolers things? If only there was some other institution they were a part of that could do that. Do HS students no longer take AP history and economics?

You could just as easily have a research club where awards are given for the best research on any given topic. That's essentially what the science fair is.

But it's important to you to have a winner declared between a and b? A fun game, sure, but don't delude yourself into thinking it had more value than entertainment. You could have learned about or been taught energy policy through any number of means. But you are failing to consider why the framing of HIV vs energy funding as a winner take all debate is, as I said above, incredibly dumb.

Here is the nihilism

Except it's not nihilism at all? There are all kinds of ways to increase your and the public's understanding and knowledge. Competitive debate is not it any more than a trial by combat is.

The way policy debate works (traditionally) is that the affirmative side gets to choose a particular policy to advocate within a broad space. A negative side that sticks to refuting the particular details of that policy is putting themselves at a severe disadvantage - they're always going to be behind in research and debate experience on that topic relative the affirmative (unless maybe they happen to use that same policy proposal themselves when assigned the affirmative). So debaters have used generic negative strategies for many decades, not just meta-critiques of their opponents discursive approach or assumptions ("Ks") but also "disadvantages" based on generalities like "your proposal will use up political capital and prevent Y from happening", and topicality arguments, where e.g. there might be two (or more) facially plausible interpretations of what's in scope for the topic, and they'll argue that whichever the affirmative has used to justify their proposal is incorrect.

Debate is competitive. Yes, each side wants to "get one over" or "blindside" their opponent, but that's not different with the K than with any other creative argument or novel bit of research, and at higher competitive levels everyone is going to be quite comfortable debating the K (at least since the 1990s).

> The way policy debate works (traditionally) is that the affirmative side gets to choose a particular policy to advocate within a broad space.

This seems like an advantage to the affirmative side. in that light, Ks are a strategy to negate the affirmative advantage.

It is. The main advantage that the negative has is that they only need to win 1 of what are called the 5 "stock issues" in order to win a policy debate round. Furthermore, the negative can also run something called a "counter-plan," which I talked about in another comment. That's basically something structured a bit like the affirmative plan, but which (typically) does not affirm the resolution. That's frequently enough to put the affirmative off balance, because the negative has essentially free reign to argue for anything outside of the resolution.

> wondering if the author simply thinks the current K's are simply just worse

People are taking it more seriously. In the past, one had the capacity to debate opposition. That appears less true today. Debate experience doesn’t seem to correlate, in my experience, with ability in negotiation or public speaking anymore.

The information that K's are not new is in https://www.slowboring.com/p/how-critical-theory-is-radicali... which points to them getting started in the 1990s.

My impression is that the author thinks that K's are bad in principle. And that the level of popularity is a problem. Certainly that's how I think about it. What you call "quite a lot of fun to run with," I call, "intellectually dishonest groupthink." Ideas should be debated on the merits of the ideas, and information on the merits of the facts. Winning on the popularity of the ideology you espouse is an easy way to ignore holes in your ideology.

Lawyers have a saying. "If the law is on your side, pound on the law. If the facts are on the side, pound on the facts. If neither is on your side, pound on the table." K's are pounding on the table. And pounding on the table is sufficient reason to declare that you have lost the debate.

Seems like the ultimate "move the goal post" art of debate to me.

High school debate is not a good event for this kind of argumentation. It's a very technical event with stupid rules and ridiculous "speeches" which consiset of someone screaming facts at you at 300wpm in between gasps of air

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0

This feels like a fire fighter showing up to your burning house and saying “well I can’t save your house until we debate the merits of private property ownership”. There is a time and place for policy debates, turning every social interaction into an opportunity to thrown in a red herring is immature and ultimately ineffective. None of these debates are going to move the needle and the aggregate effect won’t move the needle either.

To be fair, we're talking about a very specific, competition, high school debate format. Not the more pure phiilisophical kinds of debate. The former is more like a sport and the "athletes" are simply minmaxing the game. The goal and how you gain point do not necessarily reflect real world values.

We can certainly discuss if they should and how we can encourage/discourage certain tactics, and it feels the article focuses on that. Not so much the comments here.

This. American high school debate format makes no sense. This is just the latest contradiction to be heightened.

Debate is just not a thing that subjects itself to being gamed in this way.

I disagree, I think the skills taught are portable to lay persuasion, and this can be seen by the fact that debaters from the 'weirder' events will often enter a slow, lay debate format, win the tournament, and then return back to the 'weird' format.

The "lay" debate formats have the same technical rules as policy debate, theyre just shorter and dont lend themselves to spreading. Policy debaters clean up because theyre playing debate in hard mode, but the rules are still similar: present contentions, rebuttals, and anything that isn't addressed carries across the flow and is tallied up in the end as a mathematical formulation of who addressed which points when, and were those rebuttals convincing? Theres no room for the soft skills required to legitimately influence people in real life, the most important of which is listening.

Just because you suck at it, doesn't means its not a good/useful event.

Did you watch the video

Yes I followed it just fine. You need to skill up.

Spreading is not a useful skill outside of debate. "Winning" by out talking your opponent is only useful in the context of competitive debate. If you do that when arguing with someone in real life, you come off as an asshole or autistic. Its an utterly useless skill after the age of 22

>Critical theory is not revolutionary. Socially, it is dominant (particularly among that demographic). It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.

There is simply nothing revolutionary about advocating for things the way they are, even if that doesn't reflect the majority opinions of those making and judging the debates. I agree that personal attacks and virtue signaling is detrimental to a reasoned discussion, but these are highschool kids that live in a country with the highest incarcerated population in the world (the majority being black), extreme wealth inequality, a political system that offers geriatric candidates who have no interest in introducing radical social policies that might give them a future to be hopeful for. What, you think they're just going to sit back and listen to a bunch of old people tell them that everything is cool and the system works? The system clearly doesn't work! They don't even have a baseline for a reasonable discussion, to them the whole world is fighting against their futures and the "truth" doesn't matter if it will crush them.

Agreed. Another factor here is how the audience for debate is changing. The author of the article themselves is mass reviewing debate arguments on YouTube. Not so long ago this would have been far more difficult (and thus be seen by far less people). Making these debate arguments widely available to the wider Internet implicates that a simple intellectual exercise where you argue a policy position you see as problematic could help to make that policy position more likely to pass in the future if you are very effective in your arguments...

> It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.

Ah, the status quo, truly the highest form of revolution.

Your premise is faulty. The aim of debate isn't to foster people who form their own opinions any more than baseball is designed to foster people who can reliably strike fast-moving objects out of the air to a stick. It's a sport, it has rules, and it rewards tactics and strategies devised within those rules. Read Patrick McKenzie about this; he's written a bunch about how competitive debate was unintelligible to outsiders as far back as the 1990s.

with something else (clever appeal to authority and personal attacks)

One thing about personal attacks. Some people take sides on an issue based on their political alliance. That means many times their arguments are contradictory. Pointing this or hypocrisy out is a personal attack but it also shows their arguments are disingenuous.

>It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.

Is this supposed to be satire? According to neoclassical economics, "capitalism" (to be precise, neoclassical economics actually denies the existence of capitalism) is a mathematically unimprovable system that is already as perfect as it gets and any alternative will make things worse. Economists are literally blind to the things that cause recessions and they will deny any potential solution because those are already assumed to be implemented implicitly.

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