My buddy Jeff just emailed me a link to a wikipedia article about the REM song "It's the end of the world as we know it". It says:
The lyrics chronicle a scenario for the end of the world as well as listing various pop icons and politicians at a rapid pace. The chorus ends with the famous reassuring statement, "and I feel fine." While there are many plausible explanations for what the combination of lyrics mean, it is widely believed that the inspiration for this song came after Michael Stipe attended a Policy Debate competition at a high school in north Texas or from watching a college friend compete in NDT debate while attending the University of Georgia. This homage to the esoteric activity would explain both the rapid delivery and apocalyptic content of the lyrics.
That's interesting, and it does make sense. Debaters speak so fast that they make that song sound slow by comparison and policy debates do tend to be rather apocalyptic. My last year coaching we ran a case on drug legalization that had 5 separate scenarios for how legalizing drugs would avoid nuclear war. My favorite involved a North Korean invasion of South Korea leading to nuclear war with a 24 hour timeframe. Policy debates frequently come down to weighing advantages and disadvantages, as in "Okay, so the plan causes 4 nuclear wars but prevents 5 nuclear wars. Affirmative wins."
- Log in to post comments
More like this
I judged debate for a few years back in the midwest (not a big thing here in the SW). It was just novice and JV, but it was amusing sometimes how healthcare reform, international aquatic resources, and the death penalty always seemed to have at least one team that would insist that their opponent's proposal would lead to ...
GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR!!!!! [insert chilling music here]
The other humorous element, at least at the entry level, was the inevitable ... "how are you going to fund this?"
dogmeat wrote:
LOL. The iron law of policy debate: there is nothing that can't be linked to nuclear war. My favorite was always the beef disad, which I was introduced to my freshman year in high school when the subject was education reform. The argument went like this:
Education leads to higher incomes
Higher incomes lead to eating more beef
Eating more beef leads to more rain forest cut down for grazing land
Less rain forest leads to environmental collapse
Environmental collapse leads to nuclear war, global extinction, the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)
Heh heh heh, I saw similar trains of thought with Health care reform:
Improved health care ---> More people living longer ---> More food needed ---> Forests cleared ---> etc. etc.
Basically the gist of their argument was "let 'em die or we all die!"
One sign your debate isn't going well:
Your partner during the cross ex answers a question with "Why yes that makes se... oh wait, NO!"
I did CX in high school, but wasn't talented enough to do it in college. I still miss it....
On the other hand I hate those apocalyptic arguments because they diminish the concern when a real apocalyptic scenerio presents itself. It is the same problem as the overuse of the words genocide and holocaust. Save those for when it really matters so that the pschological value is appropriate. (See Weapons of Mass destruction vs. Nuclear Weapons)
Will wrote:
Interestingly enough, there are arguments in debate now that work on that level. A team might use what is now called a "kritik" (pronounced like critique) to argue pretty much exactly what you mention, that presenting things in such apocalyptic language only diminishes our ability to respond to actual problems. There are a lot of language-level kritiks out there, some of which are interesting and some of which are absurd. There are also topic-level kritiks and even activity-level kritiks (roughly, kritiks that say that debate is the wrong way to determine the truth, we should all be singing songs or reading poetry instead - to which my response is, "Then get out of the room. If you actually mean that, you shouldn't be at a debate tournament.")
Ed, did you just predict season 6 of 24?
(It would have to take place in Los Angeles though).
All this raises an interesting question...
Has William Dembski reported Michael Stipe to the Dep't of Homeland Security?
"(roughly, kritiks that say that debate is the wrong way to determine the truth, we should all be singing songs or reading poetry instead - to which my response is, "Then get out of the room. If you actually mean that, you shouldn't be at a debate tournament."
Unless they're on the opposing team.
What do you do if the topic of debate is GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR?
This kind of thing is why I discovered pretty rapidly that I wasn't debate team material.
Fascinating. I didn't do debate in high school and didn't have anything to do with it, but this makes me wish I did.
/theatre geek
So, I expect one of you geniuses to create a game where given a contemporary topic one could get to Global Thermonuclear War in 6 steps or less, much like the Kevin Bacon Game / 6 degrees of separation.
Hey wait, didn't I just do that? Dibs!
Oh, and we'll call it "The I Feel Fine Game"
Actually, that game has already been invented and it's called debate. That's pretty much what debaters do in high school and college, come up with ways to link anything and everything to nuclear war.