
Harvard university debate team loses to New York prison inmates (2015) - miraj
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11916035/Harvard-university-debate-team-loses-to-New-York-prison-inmates.html
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hackits
Does anyone actually have the source to the actual debate? All i've found is
clickbat articles.

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hkmurakami
Yes, would love to watch some actual footage.

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pmoriarty
Anyone interested in this should check out Radiolab's episode on the state of
collegiate debate:

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/debatable/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/debatable/)

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jacobolus
Your link is about an entirely different format of debate (“policy debate”)
from the one under discussion in this thread (“parliamentary debate”). The two
are unrecognizably different. See e.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_debate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_debate)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_debate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_debate)

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mannykannot
Competition seems to have turned the so-called "policy debate" into a highly
stylized ritual that bears little resemblance to true debate, and having
little relevance outside of its own domain. To my mind, rewarding arguments
regardless of validity or relevance, and favoring the number of arguments over
their cogency, has destroyed its value.

[https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-
culture/2017/09/26/corr...](https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-
culture/2017/09/26/corrosion-high-school-debate-and-how-it-mirrors-american-
politics)

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tmp777889
Why should this surprise anyone. There are Harvard graduates in prison. There
are geniuses in prison.

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superflit
Genius does not equal honesty or good character.

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spraak
Being honest and of good character also doesn't mean you can't end up in
prison.

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Viliam1234
And dishonesty or bad character don't mean that you can't win a debate.

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sigi45
Ivy League people are people, prision inmates are people.

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Aenyn
Therefore, Socrates is a cat. But I see your point ;)

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jhiska
>The three inmates, Carl Snyder, Dyjuan Tatro and Carlos Polanco, were tasked
with arguing that public schools should be allowed to turn away students whose
parents entered the US illegally.

>The inmates impressed the judges by suggesting that if public schools turned
the students away, non-governmental organisations or wealthier schools could
step in and provide better education to the children in any case.

That's a weak argument, in my view.

The illegal immigrants wouldn't be able to afford private education as it is
too expensive even for Americans. Non-gov orgs wouldn't be able to reach to
illegal immigrants. Home- and Internet-schooling would be better arguments,
but still bad.

Integrating the children of illegal immigrants into public schooling would
bring greater benefits not only to them and their parents but to society as a
whole.

 _One can argue that, in the US, European cultural values predominate (
"white" is not a synonym for the Caucasian ethnicity but simply an identity
that means "holds European cultural values"), and that African-Americans don't
have significantly different cultural values from European culture, (ie, they
are "white" save for superficial differences like music, food and places of
worship, and so on), and that a Syrian Caucasian is not "white" (because they
don't hold European cultural values) but an African-American descendant of the
people from the Sahara region is a dark-skinned "white"._

And therefore African-Americans being dark-skinned "whites" (even if they try
to superficially distinguish themselves with the US "black" cultural identity)
is an example of the power of assimilation of our public schooling. It would
convert, say, a child of Syrian parents with Middle-Eastern values into
someone who holds European cultural values and who would work, or rebel,
within the cultural rules of the European system.

The children of illegal immigrants should be allowed into public schools not
just to neutralize the threat of cultural invaders, but to give us more soft
power over a wider portion of the world.

Discuss? ;)

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ringaroundthetx
I would say it is counterproductive to base your re-education camp argument
around loaded terms like white/black-american culture.

> ;)

But you know that.

Nobody uses "white" the way you did and even if that matches your observations
in the US that term was only very recently inclusive of so many origin
countries on the European continent. The UK version of "white" still isn't
nearly as inclusive as the American construct. It is fine to merely say
American culture has predominantly European roots.

The underlying argument around re-education camps may have more merit. The
primary argument is about who pays for it. You need to convince Congress and
education secretaries and I don't think you're soft power argument would sway
anyone.

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jhiska
More specifically, I mean to say that "white" is the cultural identity that
originated with the European Enlightenment and its values. It is almost
perfectly interchangeable with "Westerner".

I also mean to say that this is universally true, as it is a fundamental
definition of what "white" is -- a cultural identity, and not a skin-color,
"race" or ethnicity.

Modern biology doesn't divide humans into races; there is no Caucasian "race",
for example.

"White", furthermore, isn't an ethnicity like Caucasian is (because Caucasian
simply refers to the ethnic people originally from the Caucus region), but
instead is a cultural identity as I described above.

As "white" is a cultural identity, skin-color and ethnicity aren't a
determining factor on whether someone is "white". Again, the term "white",
when properly defined and understood without confusion with Caucasian or "of
European birth or descent", is almost perfectly interchangeable with
"Westerner".

What I mean by "black" are the unsuccessful attempts of African-American
people of Sahara-region descent to avoid "white" assimilation and distinguish
themselves from "white" culture. I say unsuccessful because African-American
fundamental values are essentially the same as "white" values -- unlike, say,
an African person from Nigeria -- and even as they rebel against
institutionalized oppression they do so within the confines of "white" values
(ie, they wish to be included in those institutions as equally as Caucasians,
but don't wish to fundamentally destroy or alter them like other cultures do).

One can even go further and say that "black" is as much a proper name for
ethnic people from the Sahara-region as would be to call people of Middle-
Eastern descent "brown people". "Black", in my view, is simply a name adopted
specifically by African-American culture, and doesn't refer to dark-skinned
people as a whole; the term "black" is only PC in the US; in other languages,
it is offensive; the technical name for people of Sahara-region descent is now
taboo in the US, and, in my view, this is to help erase the memory of Africa-
American cultural history and to further assimilation.

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ringaroundthetx
yes everyone could tell from outer orbit that this is the argument you
actually wanted to have, and it has nothing to do with the discussion at hand
and only undermines it and weakens your argument.

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mrcactu5
I think you underestimate the type of "spin" (for lack of better term) that
goes on in the street? At least here in the Bronx, some of these people find
ingenious arguments to get out of situations. Who is going to be better than
understanding argument and the law, than someone who personally went through
the process?

These people find ingenious short-term "quick-fix" arguments, a lot of that
advantage can go away in the long term.

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trisimix
Yes I love this shit fuck ivy leagues

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ratsimihah
maybe the lost but they made it into Hype League!

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rweba
Should say 2015

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aj7
Why am I reading about this in an Oct 15 UK publication?

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esaym
Amazing what happens when you step out of the "group think" environment and
into the real world. They should have expected the unexpected.

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drawnwren
This comment is so bad that it has to be satire. You can't really string that
many cliches together while simultaneously claiming to have an outside view of
"group think" and be sincere ... can you?

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sudojudo
And this comment is so rude that your point is lost entirely.

