[eDebate] oops omar -- unfinished post

[Old Strega]

oops that was unfinished.    my bad.

i left in mid sentence with "i think that policy debate students in general 
have some idea..."

i will now finish and then repost with everything patched together: i think 
that policy debate students in general have some idea that giving a speech 
somehow is a form of disobedience because it challenges assumptions.  
speeches @ tournaments are NOT disobedient in any way.   speeches in the 
president's office during a sit in are disobedient and not well liked by the 
authorities who freak out.  debate students have no qualms about the 
regulation of their behavior by university authorities and their inability 
to challenge the terms and conditions of their speeches.   unfortunately, 
the main obstacle to debate sit ins is not a proper intellectual 
justification for the sit ins but the overcoming of FEAR of career 
repurcussions of disobedient behavior effectively inculcated since the 
vietnam war.   fear motivates defensive responses largely intellectually 
dictated.   gandhi, MLK and foucault have many critiques of intellectual 
cowardice in the face of injustice and oppression unheeded by debate 
students in the ivory tower of academic security and safety.   ultimately, 
they keep circling around to popular consent of state actions and 
micro-complicity.    debaters prefer to demonize the state because it is 
easy and it gets them out of their micro-responsibility.   you know that 
mass murder is happening and you know from history what works but you do not 
know how to overcome your fears of police/authority backlash!!!   that's 
what we are talking about.

there are many problems with the idea that the lack of a draft derails the 
vietnam resistance model.

1) greater military industrial complex grafting onto universities.  chomsky 
and the MIT students were protesting complicity with the MIC.   given the 
greater level of invasion of student life and greater production of military 
knowledge by universities, this argument should be more compelling this time 
around.   this is a huge part of the complicity argument.  i don't think you 
need me to document all of the lockheed martin/university contracts.   
debate knowledge in particular is problematic because it is a testing ground 
for propaganda campaigns that informs think tanks of the most effective 
strategies ferretted out by participants and judges.   university knowledges 
directly contribute to mass murder.  university students actually opposed to 
mass murder should sabotage the normal functioning of that institution until 
their tuition no longer pay for murder.

2) the draft link to anti-war sit ins is weak.   UT debaters and other 
students occupied the main tower in 1996 over the hopwood decision to 
rollback affirmative action.   no military draft was necessary.   harvard 
students and faculty occupied buildings for fair pay for all university 
workers in 2000, i believe.   no draft was necessary.   the main factor in 
both of these cases is the overcoming of fear to take a stand.   students 
and others took over the seattle downtown in 1999 and shut down the city 
over WTO meetings.    for less than mass murder connected to tuition much 
less a draft, students have conducted sit ins all over the place.   why they 
have not over the war, i am baffled.   the draft argument is based on 
self-interest which is not the basis of most community activism.  actually, 
i think your argument is a projection of the normalized fear that pervades 
your community.  the unfortunate framing of foucault critiques in the form 
of "power bad" misses the boat.  foucault was well aware of the necessity of 
social movements taking power into their own hands and WIELDING and FORCING 
authorities to behave themselves appropriately.   y'all debate @ tournaments 
because you are afraid of wielding power and forcing your authorities to 
stop the killings.   your power scares you into submissive discussions.  i 
say make your arguments on an unfamiliar stage in the president's office and 
don't stop debating this administration until the killings have stopped.   
you may learn something you will never learn in the classroom about social 
movements.   you have no reflexive understanding of social movements on the 
sidelines and they are purely a subject matter of inquiry.

3) historically sit ins worked against the vietnam war for the same reason 
that civil disobedience has worked for centuries because sit ins up the ante 
for the powers that be and require them to murder under less conducive terms 
and eventually stop them from indiscriminately murdering.   you have no 
alternative.   competitive debate has been critiqued as a form of obedience 
that poses no threat to the war mongers.  you have no new model or 
historical ground of resistance.  complacency is not helping to the stop the 
killings.   what are you going to do if you don't sit in and how could it 
possibly do more to sabotage the system that is doing the killings and do 
more to force a real public debate about the war where the anti-war team 
could actually win the debate?

4) the mass murder of innocent civilians fighting unwinnable guerilla 
warfare is a better link and it's the same now as it was during vietnam, 
hence the model.   unlike y'all in the hypothetical game mode on the flow of 
debate rounds, the anti-vietnam war students could not stomach the bombings 
of cambodia and the little kids getting blasted with machine guns and so 
they decided to that disobedience was necessary to stop the killings.   
y'all are the product of video game culture, desensitization and numbing.   
intellectually removed from the subject matter on an abstract plane of 
discussion, y'all would rather say "and a vote for us will save lives" and 
vote for the team that "saves the most lives" than actually DO SOMETHING TO 
SAVE LIVES.  at this point, a hypothetical policy recommendation to save 
lives and its discussion is irrelevant when mass murder is going on in the 
ADJACENT CLASSROOM NAMED IRAQ.   debate has become the lifeboat ethics of 
the old malthus DA.

i don't think it's going to even be a close debate here, omar.   sit ins 
were a key factor in the cessation of the southeast asian murder campaigns.  
  the iraq war resistance is weak and the war is going strong with a 
possible iran/syria add on.   you have to find a way to wield power and 
force the authorities to do what you want.   that is AGENCY.  tournament 
debate depoliticizes only when it strips students and faculty of their 
agency and misleads them about the nature of power.   that's the 
korcok/shamaham kritik of activist agency as a religious calling to the only 
true way and i am afraid it represents the contest round norm.   that kritik 
is sham because it reduces debate into an obedience game where disobedience 
is ruled out supposedly not because students are AFRAID but because their 
"intellectual disobedience" is superior.   foucault was all over it and i 
have documented this legacy in the archives.   don't sit in against mass 
murder in iraq because if you do you are a follower of a religion who is 
forcing his/her views onto the conductors of mass murder.   instead give a 
riotous speech at a college debate tournament against mass murder which is 
OK because you are not forcing your view like a religioso and you allow the 
proponents of mass murder to have their fair say while actually their policy 
wins and mass murder continues.   y'all is a ridiculous fucking joke...y'all 
"anarchists" who fight traffic tickets like they da plague and 
shit,...scared little chickens...cops might hit you with a stick if you sit 
in...shit that might hurt...you might not get an A in debate this semester 
and damage your GPA...you might get stigmatized in your department...that's 
what all the intellectual searching for a reason against sit ins is really 
all about.   take a risk.   get real.  fuck this war.  you can stop it.






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