Not ironic

Bari Weiss’s big substack is featuring a series of articles on woke judges in high school debate, written by a debate coach who is trying to set up an alternate non-woke board of judges.

I took debate in junior high, around 1963. It wasn’t a huge influence but it did give me practice in serious fact-digging. The official topic that year was Socialized Medicine, and we had to take both sides. Socialized medicine was definitely a hot topic then. D presidents were trying to get there, R was fighting it, and LBJ achieved “socialized medicine” for oldies in ’65. Medicare works.

Looking it up: The official list gives the topic for 1963-64 as Resolved: That Social Security benefits should be extended to include complete medical care. So it was specifically about Medicare, not just socialized medicine.

Nobody knocked the students for taking one side or the other, BECAUSE THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT IS TO LEARN HOW TO ADVOCATE FOR BOTH SIDES. (I vaguely “remember” that studying the foreign systems gave me a more positive attitude toward socialism, but all such “memories” are dubious.)

Some of the article’s commenters are woke the other way around, calling the wokers Communists and declaring that there’s no possible argument for “socialism” as they see it. Nonsense.

One commenter hits the HARDASS reality:

Ironically, this current NSDA, not Mr Fishback’s alternative, is teaching kids EXACTLY the skills they need to get ahead fast in today’s world: 1. Start by digging up dirt on social media, 2. Never address your opponents argument directly (or at all), instead make sure the focus remains ad hominem, 3. Always argue from the left, 4. The more you say ‘phobia’ the more you win.

Not ironic at all, just factual. If the purpose of school is to train for life and success, the woke judges are doing the right thing. Learning to handle both sides is a quick route to poverty in a witch-burning culture.

= = = = =

Skimming through the official list from 1927 to present, I see that socialized medicine was repeated a half dozen times in various forms. It’s still being debated (out of class) right now, because we still haven’t achieved it.

In terms of form and intention: Before 1970 most resolutions were binary. We should start X or we should stop Y. After 1970, nearly all were analog. We should significantly increase X or we should significantly reduce Y. I don’t see any wokeness in recent years; the resolutions are still dealing with important issues, not symbolic crap.

It would be fun to run through the resolutions as a ToDo List. How many of them were checked off? Among the DONEs, which were good ideas in hindsight, which were atrocious, and which were too vague to determine?