From: Charles Olney <olney@oakharbor.net>
To: Multiple recipients of list <cx-l@debate.net>
Subject: Re: Kritik Theory
I will refer you to the Nazi Doctors. "It's all for the best." People
who don't take the time to question their assumptions do some pretty
tragic stuff. Robert Lifton did an amazing study on the Nazi Doctors, and
he pointed out all kinds of examples where the doctors saw someone they
recognized in that mass of bodies, or any one of a hundred other things
that were like a slap to the face, a shock to the system, something that
woke them up from the lethargy. THAT'S what a kritik is.
I may be unsophisticated and utopian, but nothing horrifies me more about
debate than to watch a round where two teams utter racist, sexist,
homophobic, hate-mongering, or nuclearist words, and advocate positions
that uphold those values. Even worse is that people seem to feel that
this doesn't matter... "the ballot says 'the better debating was done
by...' " Well, maybe the ballot should be changed. No matter how much
one trys to justify it, or downplay it, to see 4 supposedly knowledgeable
people, many of whom run kritiks and understand the power of words,
engaging in such a despicable activity is a failure of morality, and
rationality.
On one hand, we have no power to make the federal government DO anything
by force (i.e.-fiat), but we've still got our own lives. Even if
everything that I ever do accounts for nothing to anyone else, who the
hell cares? You've got to do your own thing, and hope that it transfers to
others, but never get discouraged if it doesn't. As long as we debate
from this "smoke-filled illusion of card wars," we can't do that. We're
busy whining about what the federal government should do, while meanwhile,
our own world is going to hell. Read some Thoreau. The affirmative
shouldn't be able to ignore the realities of the the concepts they are
creating through their discourse by extending impacts to their case.
Fiat is illusory as an argument merely makes it possible for us to step
back. It's impossible to examine *how* we speak, how we debate, and the
"big picture" of advocacy from within the smoke-filled illusion of
card-wars. Here, we seperate the game and the contestants. In the debate
world, one is not listened to unless they "solve" some apocolyptic event,
or a nuclear holocaust. The kritik is the only way to examine what is
real, and to remember the agony behind our casually spoken words The whole
point here is the 'shock to the system' argument. That when a team loses
on this position, they are forced to reconsider their arguments, and their
advocacy. After all, since we're all after the ballot, if a team
continually loses because they're anthropocentric, maybe they'll stop
advocating a plan that is. And, since language does shape the way we
think, the only way that people can really escape from the web of
illusions is to stop using the bad rhetoric.
> Also, if I run a kritik, can I still argue case and plan,
> ie disadvantages and topicality and solvency(like anyone argues that any
> more!)?
You can if you want. However, it tends to detract from the point one is
trying to make with the kritik. If you're telling the judge that nothing
matters except for the discursive implications, and the WAY we think, then
you tend to lose some credibility when you attack all the other random
parts of the affirmative plan. Your attitude should be "Wow, you solve,
what do you want, a cookie?"
> Next, can someone explain in detail, or not, what the
> nuclearism kritik is. I heard someone ran one which said that nuclear
> war is good? Maybe not, but explain.
Yes, there is a kritik of nuclear holocaust, and it runs a little
something like this...(straight out of the shell)
The debate forum is inherently discursive. The power of nuclear scenarios
to negatively change mindsets has prompted the kritik of nuclearism. An
effect of this numbing discourse is to lower both the audience's and the
speakers mental threshold to the perception of nuclear holocaust. This
dangerous mindset allows for, and even justifies continued reliance on
these destructive, uncontrollable force in the mistaken perception that
they can be controlled. It also desensitizes us to mass murder, and turns
policy debate into comparing body counts at the end of the round. This
paradigm of thought perversion must fall. Reject the advocacy of the
(affirmative/negative), make your voice be heard. Use your ballot to
crush these dominatory, totalizing voices, break the barriers which encage
us all, and let the true values of life ring true...
The point being that a team by either running a position supporting
proliferation, nuclear power of any sort, trying to justify the possible
benefits of these technologies, downplaying the risk of nuclear holocaust,
or even by just saying the words "nuke war" (I hate these two words more
than anything else), are falling victim to the perversion of nuclearist
thought.
Nothing horrifies me more about debate than to watch a round where one
team runs Mead, the other runs Khalilzad and the rebuttals just come down
to "Our nuke war is bigger than yours." The old cliche that "everything
leads to nuke war in debate" is particularly applicable.
I've always believed that the debate forum is the kind of place that one
can get rid of lots of the preconceived notions that one might have from
government propagandists, or whatever, and it really bothers me when I
hear nuclear weapons referred to as nuke weapons, nuclear power as nuke
power, and nuclear holocaust or nuclear annihilation as nuke war.
I had a very distressing round last weekend where we ran the ban nuclear
power affirmative with nuclearism, and the negative spent most of the
round saying "nuke" and then trying to justify it. Now, I'm good friends
with these people, but I just can't condone that kind of behavior. I was
so upset after giving the 2AR that I had to leave and only returned in
time to hear the end of the judges's decisions.
I realize it isn't intentional on anyone's part, and that people aren't
doing it out of spite or anything, but I think that as long as we in the
debate forum, (the people most likely to affect a change) constantly
downgrade the seriousness of the millions of horrible deaths that might
occur as a result of nuclear armageddon, by body-counting, and running the
Mead card as an impact to casually linked disads, it's only going to get
worse.
This kritik mainly comes from Carol Cohn, who wrote an ariticle about it
in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and supposedly wrote a book, too.
(Anyone who knows anything about the book PLEASE let me know. I've been
searching everywhere and can't find it.) A couple other relevant authors
are Robert Lifton and Jonathan Schell.
> Finally, is a kritik of
> normativity at all legitimate? I kinda like it, but it argues against
> itself, it seems, because how can you not be normative. The way it is
> normally worded, anything humans do is normative.
The kritik of normativity applies to the way we make should/ought claims
about something we have no control over (i.e.-arguing that the federal
government should establish a tradeable permit system). The argument
being that when we fall victim to such fallacies of thought, we lose the
context of the real world, and have no chance of ever escaping this
framework, and thus never becoming autonomous. (that's very basic, and
probably a bit wrong, but it'll do)
Yes, it may be a bit contradictory to argue against the debate forum from
within the debate forum, but the whole point of running normativity is for
the judge to use the ballot to slap the other team in the face. It's a
shock to the system, and just might be something which can break the
entrenched ideas that normativity is necessary. And nothing is more
shocking than losing because you said 'should.'
> I definitely prefer
> anthropocentrism...IT RULES!!
I hope by this you mean that you prefer the kritik of anthropocentrism,
that being deep ecology, as opposed to prefering anthropocentrism as a way
of life. That would really bother me.
Oh, and one last thing. This is a little off the subject, but...
MY REACTION TO A WORLD OF KRITIKS
Everybody out there who just runs kritiks because they're fun, and it's a
nice equalizer when you're debating a really good team who you otherwise
would have no chance against, and who, despite consistently running
kritiks, hasn't ever really considered what it means to be running them
should listen up. When kritiks were invented, it was because there were
some serious issues about the WAY people were debating. Some people felt
that the words that people were using and the way they were thinking was
seriously flawed, and that something ought to be done in order to stop
that kind of misbehavior. Now, kritiks have kind of ceased to be such an
important thing.
I don't know if it's something to do with debate itself, the people
involved, or something else, but these once highly emotional arguments
have almost completely succumbed to the system which spurred them.
Kritiks are no longer about what's right and what's wrong. They're just
about winning rounds. I think that's an even worse tragedy than them not
existing in the first place.
As a person who is very personally affected by these kritiks, and by the
points they try to make, as a person who stopped eating meat because of
the deep ecology kritik, who gets very emotional about nuclear
proliferation, who almost gets physically sick from hearing mocking jokes
about the Holocaust and the concentration camps, I mourn for a debate
world that's so highly competitive, that even those calls for reason and
righteousness that I respect so greatly, are turned into just another
off-case position to be spewed out with 6 disads, and 20 on-case.
I don't know if there is a solution, but I can only hope that those of you
out there kritik for the sake of kritiking will at least give some
consideration to these issues.
Thank you, and sorry for the length of this message. Being a 1AR, you'd
think I'd have learned better word economy.
Charles Olney
Oak Harbor Debate
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"Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so"
--Shakespeare
"Words, words, words"
--Shakespeare
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