Don't go into the house

It's like a horror movie. Don't go in there! Only bad things will happen.

I really don't read VD all that much. Life is too short to follow the meanderings of the handful of college dropouts with nothing better to do with their time than respond to every post EVAR. But, on the other hand, one ignores VD at one's peril. So I do check it to make sure that O'C hasn't posted some imaginary thing like, Should Menick be Thrown Over Niagara Falls in a Barrel? Today they were talking about the LDEP. So I posted, and I'll print the post below (since I know you never read VD yourself). My guess is that the usual suspects of LDEP won't post, and the more people complain about what LDEP is doing, the less likely LDEP affect any change. And if we are indeed going to hell in a handbasket, sitting on our hands isn't the way to solve the problem.

Yeah, once again, I get the be the crackpot. Jeesh.

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[The post]

I was not aware that anyone was barred from participating in the LDEP. This comes as a surprise to me, that so many younger, active people had been turned away. This should be corrected by that august body...

To give some background, I am not on the board of LDEP. It was formed before I heard of it, and I was given literature about it last year at TOC (presumably during one of those outrounds I never see the inside of). Sounded fine to me, so I signed up. I mean, say what you will about LD, it is changing, and right before last year's TOC there was a lot of vituperation leveled against some people who had dedicated their lives to the activity, by some people who weren't old enough to vote but whose participation in this activity was directly attributable to those they were vilifying. A lot of bad feeling, little of which seems to have disappeared, if the people writing here are any indication.

There's some things missing in the equation, which I ask you to think about from my point of view, i.e., the POV of someone running tournaments at least once a month, including one TOC qualifier plus a number of intro events for younger students. Whenever I have had disciplinary issues, it has been caused by students without proper chaperoning. This does not mean that having a proper chaperone over 21 precludes high school students behaving improperly, but at least it gives me someone to bear responsibility (although, honestly, I do believe that there is a link, but I can't argue it beyond the intuitive). This is more likely at my little tournaments than at Bump, but to be honest, when I'm running any tournament I can't be bothered with disciplinary issues, so I do whatever I can to buck them up to some other adult, i.e., the ones that brung you. Few of you would do otherwise in my position -- at least not more than once.

Still, there is at the heart of the discussion something very important, and that is the content of the rounds. Issues about speed have existed since the invention of the tongue, so they don't bother me much (that is, I don't think speed is killing LD today anymore than it was killing LD ten years ago). What bothers me is a sense of irrelevance, that arguments don't really address the issues, and worse, that irrelevant arguments are becoming acceptable. You will grumble and say, who am I to say that something is relevant or irrelevant to a discussion. Well, I'm a pretty clever character who knows a lot of stuff, with about 20 or 30 debaters on my team that I bear responsibility for training. Every time there's a new topic, I get to work with them toward understanding what that topic's about, not in a debate sense but in a real world sense. What is important for them to know about, say, the issue of religion in government (SOCAS)? This is a phenomenally important issue in our time, and discourse on it could be at the cutting edge of why the US is at the end of its run as a world leader. It asks incredible questions of how theocratic nations will coexist with secular nations. It cuts to the very core of our private lives, in that if one is religious, one intrinsically must prioritize religion over all else. Yet in the two months plus TOC time last year that we had this as a topic, it was routinely trivialized, usually for competitive reasons, and the number of rounds that seriously confronted any of the possible issues was minimal. You know this as well as I do if not better, because you judged a lot more of those rounds than I did. I mean, did you really take seriously the idea that the phrase "the church" (never used in the rez) or the word "church" being construed as Christiancentric meant that you couldn't really debate the issue? If you buy these diversionary tactics as good strategy, you and I need to sit down and play chess together. For money.

But the big issue here is not what I'm calling irrelevant positions, but the effect of those positions on that little gray army of 20-30 debaters I was talking about, those faces looking up at me from the back of the room. Ranging in age from, say, 13 to 17. What would you want to talk to them about when SOCAS was released as the topic? Jefferson's letter? The 10 Commandments v. the 9 Supreme Court justices? Dubya and the religious right? Iran's and Pakistan's governments? That stuff sounded great to me. What a mind opener! What fertile ground for discussion and elucidation! What an opportunity for, dare I say it, education.

You could say that there are other ways of thinking about the resolution. You could say, for instance, as Baudrillard asserts, that the deterrance effect relegates the discourse to nonmeaning in the geopolitical arena. You could take a CT stand that the patriarchal nature of most religions precludes discourse, rendering further discussion pointless. You could do a lot of things that would be extremely clever, and do nothing to educate my little gray army.

Enter the LDEP, stage right.

As far as I know, no one on LDEP is officially arguing against use of any material, or any arguments. None of these people are dimwitted enough (I don't think) to not know that different theorists come and go in popularity and relevance, and that the discovery of new thinkers is one of the great joys of learning. What the LDEP is trying to do is figure out a way to keep the little gray armies of the world engaged and educated. If they could do this without disturbing the rather small group of vocal constituents of the national circuit, they probably would. I mean, it is curious that the people responding to this entry here are all of the national circuit and not of the little gray armies. Nor, unfortunately (at least so far) have any respondents been of the LDEP. One of the reasons for that is, if they're like me, they hate posting here because about three responses later they're attacked into oblivion, and they have neither the time nor the inclination to respond to every post, line-by-line. (Maybe it's their big-picture :-) paradigms.) But I'll throw myself to the wolves, so to speak; after all, there's only about half a dozen of you, and since I have little intention, as I say, of going round-for-round, line-by-line, I think I'll survive the opprobrium. (I enjoy making fun of this website, by the way, which I can usually only do by avoiding it, a stance you may wish to take on yourselves some day.)

Anyhow, I ask you to think of that core issue. You have a debate team, of varying ages, varying skills. What do you, as a teacher, believe you should be doing to educate them?

And if you think education is important, regardless of how you define education, and you disagree with the specifics of the LDEP, why don't you go to the LDEP and tell them how they should improve themselves, instead of hanging around in the back of the room muttering among yourselves.