Monthly Archives: March 2010

Next Malgorcast

In an attempt to generate some user driven content, Malcolm and I would like to get some questions going for the next podcast. So if you have a burning debate question you should post it here. The more specific you can be the better, or at least the more specific the topic will be before we go wildly off on tangents as we see fit. While the last podcasts have been about the K, Malcolm assures me he does also know about “disadvantages” although I am skeptical since the two times I debated him he talked about the movie A History of Violence and told me that the Dalai Lama should give land back.

Recommended Links Section ——->

You can now see on the side of the page a “recommended links” section. From now on we will post interesting articles that we think people would want to cut cards from in that section instead of dedicating posts to them/clogging people’s emails with updates.

The Enemy System

There has been some new research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology about the way enemy creation serves to eliminate anxiety people feel toward their chaotic environments. This would be a good example of a “social science” article you could cut to support your more theory based security K’s, and is also a really  good answer to friend/enemy good aff turns. The article is entitled “An existential function of enemyship: Evidence that people attribute influence to personal and political enemies to compensate for threats to control.” I also really like the way they have turned enemy into a verb, as in “Roy enemizes manners and polite social conduct”.

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Selling Topics

There is a bit of a scandal going on right now about the NFL “selling” the rights to pick the public forum topic. You can wade into it here, and see a response from the NFL here.

At least for me trying to take a position on this is hard because after reading all of this I still don’t really know what is going on (mainly because there is no agreement as to what exactly happened). But I will say a few things.

1. In theory, selling the topic seems like an ok idea to me. 150k? That is a lot of cash that could probably do some good. The obvious questions are who decides where the money goes etc. It should be fairly obvious that I should get to decide where any topic sale revenues are spent, but odds are likely that due to “politics” the NFL would get to decide. I have long thought the NFL spent a bit too much money on promotional elements and not enough reinvesting into debate, and I worry a similar thing would occur with their new cash cow.

2. The topic process as it works now in both HS and college debate is I think pretty dumb. They say a camel is a horse made by committee, and these topics clearly reflect that. I think there should be some sort of like Enders game system where we just pick a really smart debate person and have them craft the topic for a year all by themselves so there doesn’t have to be any compromising or dumbing down. Then next year pick a new person. So the idea that letting outsiders “buy” the topic somehow destroys our awesome topic process doesn’t really hold a lot of weight with me. Democracy doesn’t work people.

3. I don’t want to get into a whole policy vs public forum thing here, but it does seem to me that the very purpose of public forum is to engage the public at large in a way that policy can’t (and shouldn’t). And getting the NFL corporate sponsorship seems like a big part of why pofo came about, giving debate a more marketable face.