Comment to blog post from yesterday that was too long, according to Blogger:
I honestly can't remember the last time I heard you talk broadly about
a debate topic and agreeing with EVERYTHING you said; I must be
slipping in my old age. Jeff Hannon, who was the kid in finals my
senior year at Harvard who, when a cell phone rang a minute into his
1AC interrupted himself and said, "telephone?" (he was one of my Nova
boys.) In every round, he used to basically fall asleep during the
negative's speaking time and get up cross ex and ask, "so what don't
they understand?" And he was like a big fourth grader and it was
clearly the most intelligent question anyone was forcing. He'd just
ask the same thing over and over again, kind of like asking one of
these semi-pubescents arguing statism critiques "do you really believe
a single word of this you little 16 year old blessed soul?" No kid in
debate can say that they're meaningfully different from adults.
If you want to know, the most effective argument I found was
predicated on this evidence from an author I can't remember who wrote
a very good quote explaining why VIOLENT people, regardless of age,
are not amenable to rehabilitation. Frankly, the neg (if that's the
"treat them like adults" side) can't argue about retribution because
that criterion for punishment gives a pretty clear mandate. I
remember reading that just punishment has four attendant criteria that
can be deemed more or less important that one another in debate and
also ranked, lexically, as it were (this was always the best part of
punishment topics.) The thought experiment where you consider whether
to harshly punish a man in his mid-90s who's two years away from death
and is, for the sake of the thought experiment, both repentant and
assured never to commit a crime again, is hard to answer in harsh
terms, specifically given that the punishment proposed in the original
incarnation of the thought experiment is between jail time and
consignment to a deserted island (which is obviously meant as a trick
because the point is that he's basically denied of pleasure but he's
not a threat to anyone, just like the presumptively reformed criminal
(who may have been a very bad kid when he shot that pregnant lady)).
The evidence in support of the state's ability to rehabilitate people,
even those who are said to be climinically amenable to treatment, is
fairly weak but there's good reason to critique it in light of the
quality of the attempts tried. And all of that said, there was an
argument that you alluded to in your overview that I thought was very
important for the negative but it was hard to make convincingly
because it was so simple that it seemed almost wasteful to devote a
lot of time to it. Since I think trying and punishing kids like
adults means housing them in the facilities (the argument for the
right to affirm while housing kids in separate facilities was that
they could still receive adult-like punishment but there were at least
two responses: first, that's ridiculous. No matter how savage they
were on the whole, it would be impossible where adults relate to
soulless teennagers the way they might to an adult on death row
(people who'd committed the same crime.) Basically, to separate kids
would be separating them on the basis of their juvenility, meaning
that, a priori (there's no other way to put it...), kids were not
being treated like adults if incarcerated separately. You couldn't
affirm the resolution that women should be treated like men in the
criminal justice system by observing that they should still be house
in separate facilities on the basis that men and women can't live
together, at least in prison.)) I mention all of this because the
evidence on what happens to kids in hard core detention who are housed
amongst adults is really disgusting. I thought I had this really good
part of my case where I read the universally accepted statistics on
the relative likelihood of rape, abuse, dropping the soap, and then
"analytically" explained in mathematical terms what that meant on an
hourly basis for kids versus adults. Given that, as a criterion, its
pretty easy to argue that no matter how bad the bad guy, it's always
worse to convict one innocent than to let ten to go free; accordingly,
subjecting equally guilty people to egregiously different punishments
isn't worth it because of the injustice done to the relatively less
innocent (yes, the cases are not perfectly analogous but I'm sure you
can see a relevant parallel.) So this point could've been really
effective in "turning" the aff case, since violent adults are no worse
than kids who kill Crips , then consigning the kid to an equally long
period behind bars wherein, and I'm not just pulling this out of my
ass, 9 times more likely to raped and absurdly likely to deal with
more than mundane work in the laundry room or even hammering out
license plates, seems pretty cruel. It would be like putting, at
minimum, androgynous people, let alone women, in the same facilities
as most sexual predators, let alone generally bad people. I thought
the point was good, too, because it did what good negatives on the
capital punishment topic did: point out some inherent problem, not
even gross Oz episode, with the affirmative and then just ask, "so
what's the point?" Capital punishment, to me, is ultimately stupid
because it's pretty useless and, at least as a policy, there are some
pretty big downsides and my feelings about this topic are the same,
though.
I always flipped aff, though, and, with the exception of the very
beginning (Newark being the biggie), I lost on this topic but I always
thought I got screwed and not just like I always got screwed (everyone
knows that if I lost I got screwed but the degree of legitimate
bitterness was slightly different from case.) If you can get one
point across, tell those NFL people that it's retarded that the two
most popular topics are debate by an overwhelming minority of
debaters, since they're in March-April (#2) and Nationals (#1). Who
thinks of this shit?
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We return now to our regularly scheduled blogger...
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