frame

Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!

DebateIsland.com is the largest online debate website globally where anyone can anonymously and easily debate online, casually or formally, while connecting with their friends and others. Users, regardless of debating skill level, can civilly debate just about anything online in a text-based online debate website that supports five easy-to-use and fun debating formats ranging from Casual, to Formalish, to Lincoln-Douglas Formal. In addition, people can improve their debating skills with the help of revolutionary artificial intelligence-powered technology on our debate website. DebateIsland is totally free and provides the best online debate experience of any debate website.





Resolved: Universities in the United States ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech

Debate Information

Position: Against
Lets debate whether universities ought to restrict their students constitutionally protected speech! A former NSDA ld topic, there are so many different ways both sides can go with this.Ill take the Neg. Only experienced debaters accept PLZ. LETS HAVE A GOOD DEBATE!!



Debra AI Prediction

Tie
Predicted
50%
Likely
50%
Unlikely

Details +




Debate Type: Lincoln-Douglas Debate



Voting Format: Formal Voting

Opponent: sear

Time Per Round: 24 Hours Per Round


Voting Period: 48 Hours


Forfeited



Post Argument Now Debate Details +



    Arguments


  • Affirmative Constructive | Position: For
    searsear 109 Pts   -  
    Harvard President Larry Summers (served as Tres. Sec. @ Clinton 2nd Term) raised deliberately provocative but un-PC questions about biological ( intellectual) differences between men & women. A minor fluff-up resulted. Summers has apologized 3 times so far. ABC-TV's George Will responds:

    "Summers simply forgot where he was. He thought he was at a place where there was free intellectual inquiry. He wasn't. He was at Harvard. He was on an American campus, where certain ideas simply can't be thought. The idea that there might be innate, which is to say genetically based cognitive differences between the sexes is not a radical thought. There's a huge body of science investigating it. By mentioning it, he induced in that poor woman [MIT Professor Nancy Hopkins] something like a clinical description of Freudian hysteria. She was going to fall down on the carpet and swoon with vapors and muss up her crinolines. This is what feminism has produced? This frail flower who can't stand to be in the presence of an idea like that."

    "This major grovel's ridiculous. All he's done is dramatize that Harvard like most American campuses believes in diversity in everything but thought." Will




  • Cross Examination - Affirmative | Position: Against
    GorbinGorbin 51 Pts   -  
    1. You are very unclear about what your argument actually is. Please clarify.
    2. As the affirmative, you are supposed to be arguing that universities should not restrict any constitutionally protected speech, but, as you state
    "He thought he was at a place where there was free intellectual inquiry. He wasn't. He was at Harvard. He was on an American campus, where certain ideas simply can't be thought."-What this is saying is that some things cant be said on american university campuses. So, 1)according to that 1 piece of evidence, your not arguing the affirmative side 2) the question of the debate is if universities have a moral obligation to restrict speech protected by the constitution(hence the word "ought")and you,as the affirmative,should be arguing that they do not have that obligation. Plz revise your case.
  • Negative Constructive | Position: Against
    GorbinGorbin 51 Pts   -  

    What I post are direct pieces of evidence from scholarly articles that support my position-only read the bold taglines, and the bold, underlined sentences. These are the most important pieces of evidence, and they are what you should be reading, along with the author name in the citation above the piece of evidence.

    This argument that I present is called a "Kritik". It is Latin for "critique". What the argument consists of is a link to the affirmative, an impact of the affirmative, and an alternative methodology that solves better than the affirmative does. This also contains what is called a "role of the ballot". This means that as you are judging and deciding you wins the debate, use the role of the ballot to as a weighing mechanism, a tool that you use and weigh against my opponents case. Since I am not really sure what my opponent is arguing, this may be kind of difficult. You can think of the role of the ballot as what your role as a judge is.
    Thank you.

    Speech is an expression of will, but the voice of the oppressed is lost as it becomes docile. Violence becomes the corrective tool to reorient non-conforming bodies into obedience with oppressive rule systems "for their own good"

    Ahmed 1 (Sara Ahmed is formerly the director of a new Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at Goldsmiths, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, and a scholar that writes on the intersection of queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and post-colonialism, Willful Subjects, Duke University Press, pp 63-67.//Accessed 2/2/17 KE)

    The story gives us a portrait of obedience as virtue. We could thus consider how the project of eliminating willfulness relates to obedience. Aquinas in his reflection on the virtue of obedience refers to the work of Gregory who argues that obedience has “more merit” the “less it has of its own will” (Summa Theologiae, 2a.2ae.104.60). For Gregory obedience becomes a virtue when persons obey commands that do not go in the direction of their own will. There is no virtue in obeying a command that is agreeable to one’s own will: “obedience requires little or no effort when it has as its own will in agreeable things.” Rather “the effort is greater in disagreeable or difficult things.” Obedience occurs when one’s “own will tends to nothing apart from the command (63). This is how Gregory can conclude that “by obedience we slay our own will” (64). To obey is to go where your will would not take you. Willfulness might refer to willing in agreement with one’s own will. Another way of putting this would be to say that a willful will is one that wills what it wants, and that has yet to eliminate want from will.6 As I noted in my introduction to this book, the Grimm story can be considered as part of the educational tradition described by Alice Miller (1987) as “poisonous pedagogy.” Miller draws on the earlier work of Katharina Rutschky who describes this tradition (problematically) as “Black pedagogy,” which has as its primary aim “the domination and control of the child for the child’s own good” (Zornado 2001, 79).7 As Joseph L. Zornado points out, following both Rutschky and Miller, this pedagogy rests on willfulness: “Because the child is willful, stained by original sin and destructive, the adult must enact decisive and punitive measures so that the child will not grow up ‘full of weeds’ (2001, 79). The violence toward the child is thus presented as being for the child. One of the examples of poisonous pedagogy quoted at length by Alice Miller is J. Sulzer’s An Essay on the Education and Instruction of Children (1784).8 I will follow Miller in quoting this essay at length as it gives us a fuller and affective picture of what is at stake in the history of willfulness. In Sulzer’s essay willfulness is described as that which must be “driven out” before children can receive a good education. Willfulness is an obstacle to the educable will: As far as willfulness is concerned, this expresses itself as a natural recourse in tenderest childhood as soon as children are able to make their desire for something known by means of gestures. They see something they want but cannot have; they become angry, cry, and flail about. Or they are given something that does not please them; they fling it aside and begin to cry. Th ese are dangerous faults that hinder their entire education and encourage undesirable qualities in children. If willfulness and wickedness are not driven out, it is impossible to give a child a good education. Th e moment these flaws appear in a child, it is high time to resist this evil so that it does not become ingrained through habit and the children do not become thoroughly depraved. (cited in Miller 1987, 10– 11) Indeed driving out willfulness, Sulzer suggests, should be the “main occupation” of those concerned with the education of children. He argues that driving out willfulness must be done “in a methodical manner”; other wise children “will finally become the masters of their parents and of their nursemaids and will have a bad, willful, and unbearable disposition with which they will trouble and torment their parents ever after as the well- earned reward for the ‘good’ upbringing they were given” (11). The rod makes an appearance as the proper instrument for moral correction: “If parents are fortunate enough to drive out willfulness from the very beginning by means of scolding and the rod, they will have obedient, docile, and good children whom they can later provide with a good education” (11). The rod and scolding are techniques of parental will that aim to create a docile child. Note here that docility appears an end of will, as what will, transformed into a disciplinary technique, is intended to actualize. As such the will seeks to eliminate the child’s will, understood as willful insofar as it is his own: “A child who is used to obeying his parents will also willingly submit to the laws and rules of reason once he is on his own and his own master, since he is already accustomed not to act in accordance with his own will. Obedience is so important that all education is actually nothing other than learning how to obey” (12, emphasis added). Becoming obedient is learning to act without accordance to one’s own will. If children are to act without self- accordance, their own will must be broken: It is not very easy, however, to implant obedience in children. It is quite natural for the child’s soul to want to have a will of its own, and things that are not done correctly in the first two years will be diffi cult to rectify thereafter. One of the advantages of these early years is that then force and compulsion can be used. Over the years, children forget everything that happened to them in early childhood. If their wills can be broken at this time, they will never remember afterwards that they had a will, and for this very reason the severity that is required will not have any serious consequences. Just as soon as children develop awareness, it is essential to demonstrate to them by word and deed that they must submit to the will of their parents. Obedience requires children to (1) willingly do as they are told, (2) willingly refrain from doing what is forbidden, and (3) accept the rules made for their sake. (13) To eliminate willfulness is thus to eliminate not only the will defined as independence from what is willed by others, but to eliminate the very memory of this will or at least to aim for this elimination. The child’s identification with parental will would become so complete that identification is experienced as willingness, as not only willingly doing what they are commanded to do, but as being this doing, as having always been this doing. Once the child is willing, any memory of having a will that was willing other wise is eradicated. Or at least that is the idea. A subject that is willing to obey is a subject without will: a willing subject becomes a will- less subject. What is this subject required to do? Katharina Rutschky explores how the genre of poisonous pedagogy provided the psychic conditions for the emergence of Fascism within Germany in the twentieth century (creating subjects whose obedience rested on the acceptance and perpetration of cruelty and punishment). As Alice Miller shows in For Your Own Good, we can track the emergence of poisonous pedagogy across Europe and America during the eighteenth century. Take, for example, the work of John Wesley who was influenced by Arminian doctrines. Wesley writes of children: “Break their wills betimes. Begin this work before they can run alone, before they can speak plain, before they can speak at all. Whatever pains it costs, break the will, if you would not damn the child. Let the child from a year old be taught to fear the rod; and to cry softly; from that age, make him do as he is bid, if you whip him ten times running to effect it. If you do spare the rod, you spoil the child; if you do not conquer you ruin him” (1811, 71). If breaking the will is painful it is understood as necessary pain. This pain must be prior even to speech. The child must be conquered to avoid damnation. Reading these literatures is difficult given how violence against children is rationalized and enacted in the works themselves. The works are implicated in the histories they enact; they are conduits of violence. In the brutish maxim “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” history is summarized as instruction. When reading about Wesley, I came across another text by the twentieth- century Baptist evangelical John Rice. He asks how John Wesley and his brother Christopher as leaders of the Evangelical movement and founders of Methodism were themselves taught. Rice notes: “Their mother Susannah Wesley taught them to fear the rod when they were a year old” (1946, 213). Rice himself then follows Wesley in arguing that “when the will of a child is totally subdued, and it is brought to revere and stand in awe of the parents, then a great many childhood follies and inadvertencies may be passed by. . . . No willful transgression should ever be forgiven children. . . . as self- will is the root of all sin and misery, so what ever cherishes this in children insures their after- wretchedness and irreligion” (213). After- wretchedness: this history is indeed a wretched history. To follow the figure of the willful child is to stay proximate to scenes of violence. And we learn too how those beaten by the rod become rods that beat. This becoming is not inevitable, but it is part of a history we cannot afford to forget. It is a history still with us.9 Assembling a willfulness archive is a way of attending to histories that are kept alive by forgetting.

    Hate speech - Only when we are free from our masculine restrictions can we then solve for hate speech and its violence against bodies deemed as Other

    Hatfield et al. 5 [Hatfield, Katherine L., Schafer, Kellie, Stroup, Christopher A., 2005, Atlantic Journal of Communication, “A Dialogic Approach to Combating Hate Speech on College Campuses”, acc. 7/11/16, School of Communication Studies Ohio University, Speech Communication and Dramatic Arts Central Michigan University, School of Communication Studies Ohio University, pp. 43]

    Owen (1998) wrote that words can turn into bullets, hate speech can kill and maim, just as censorship can ... we are forced to ask: is there a moment where the quantitative consequences of hate speech change qualitatively the arguments about how we must deal with it?” (p. 37). This study was conducted to determine whether engaging students in discourse about hate speech would affect their perceptions of the appropriateness of hate speech. Tests indicated that when engaged in the discourse, participants are more likely to decrease their perception of appropriateness and have a more overt reaction to the hate messages.

    The aff is complacent in joy and The Killjoy exposes a genealogy between rebellion and punishment in the law. Our strive towards being unhappy and sacrificing happiness is what liberates us from the complacency of oppression inside the institutions walls.

    Ahmed 2 (Sara Ahmed is formerly the director of a new Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at Goldsmiths, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, and a scholar that writes on the intersection of queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and post-colonialism. Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke U Press, 2010. Pg. 59-63 //DOA 1/29/17 GKKE)

    Going along with this duty can mean simply approximating the signs of being happy — passing as happy — in order to keep things in the right place. Feminist genealogies can be described as genealogies of women who not only do not place their hopes for happiness in the right things but who speak out about their unhappiness with the very obligation to be made happy by such things. The history of feminism is thus a history of making trouble,^ a history of women who refuse to become Sophy, by refusing to follow other people’s goods, or by refusing to make others happy. The female troublemaker might be trouble because she gets in the way of the happiness of others. Judith Butler shows how the figure of the troublemaker exposes the intimacy of rebellion and punishment within the law. As she argues in her preface to Gender Trouble. “To make trouble was, within the reigning discourse of my childhood, something one should never do precisely because that would get one in trouble. The rebellion and its reprimand seemed to be caught up in the same terms, a phenomenon that gave rise to my first critical insight into the subtle ruse of power: The prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble” (1950: vii). Happiness might be what keeps you out of trouble only by evoking the unhappiness of getting into trouble. We can consider how nineteenth century bildungsroman novels by women writers offered a rebellion against Emile in the narrativization of the limitations of moral education for girls and its narrow precepts of happiness. Such novels are all about the intimacy of trouble and happiness. Take, for example, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, which is told from the point of view of Maggie Tulliver.'^° The early stages of the novel depict Maggie’s childhood, the difficulty of her relationship with her brother Torn, and her perpetual fear of disappointing her parents. The novel contrasts Tom and Maggie in terms of how they are judged by their parents: “Tom never did the same sort of foolish things as Maggie, having a wonderful instinctive discernment of what would turn to his advantage or disadvantage; and so it happened that though he was much more willful and inflexible than Maggie, his mother hardly ever called him naughty” ([i860] 1965: 73). Various incidents occur that contribute to Maggie’s reputation as a troublemaker: when she lets Tom’s dogs die (37); when she cuts her dark hair (73); when she knocks over Tom’s building blocks (96); and when she pushes their cousin Lucy into the water (111-12). The novel shows us how trouble does not simply reside within individuals but involves ways of reading situations of conflict and struggle. Reading such situations involves locating the cause of trouble, which is another way of talking about conversion points: the troublemaker is the one who violates the fragile conditions of peace. If in all these instances Maggie is attributed as the cause of trouble, then what does not get noticed is the violence that makes her act in the way that she does, as the violence of provocation that hovers in the background. Even when Tom is told off, it is Maggie who is the reference point in situations of trouble. Mrs. Tulliver says to Tom: “'Then go and fetch her in this minute, you naughty boy. And how could you think o’ going to pond and taking your sister where there was dirt. You know she’ll do mischief if there’s mischief to be done.’ It was Mrs. Tulliver’s way, if she blamed Tom, to refer his misdemeanor, somehow or other, to Maggie” (114), Maggie gets into trouble because she is already read as being trouble before anything happens. Maggie gets into trouble for speaking; to speak is already a form of defiance if you are supposed to recede into the background. She speaks out when something happens that she perceives to be wrong. The crisis of the novel is when her father loses the mill, threatening his ability to look after his family. Maggie is shocked by the lack off sympathy and care they receive from their extended family, Maggie speaks back out of a sense of care for her parents: “Maggie, having hurled her defiance at aunts and uncles in this way, stood still, with her large dark eyes glaring at them as if she was ready to await all consequences. . . . ‘You haven’t seen the end o’ your trouble wi’ that child, Bessy,’ said Mrs Pullet; ‘she’s beyond everything for boldness and unthankfulness. Its dreadful. I might ha’ let alone paying for her schooling, for she’s worse nor ever’” (229). Girls who speak out are bold and thankless. It is important that Maggie is compelled to speak from a sense of injustice. Already we can witness the relationship between consciousness of injustice and being attributed as the cause of unhappiness. The novel relates Maggie’s tendency to get into trouble with her desire, will, and imagination, with her love of new words that bring with them the promise of unfamiliar worlds. For instance, she loves Latin because “she delighted in new words” (159). For Maggie “these mysterious sentences, snatched from an unknown context — like strange horns of beasts and leaves of unknown plants, brought from some far-off region—gave boundless scope to her imagination and were all the more fascinating because they were in a peculiar tongue of their own, which she could learn to interpret” (159-60), The association between imagination and trouble is powerful. It teaches us how the happiness duty for women is about the narrowing of horizons, about giving up an interest in what lies beyond the familiar. Returning to Emile, it is interesting that the danger of unhappiness is associated precisely with women having too much curiosity. At one point in the narrative, Sophy gets misdirected. Her imagination and desires are activated by reading too many books, leading to her becoming an “unhappy girl, overwhelmed with her secret grief” (4.39-40). If Sophy were to become too imaginative, we would not get our happy ending, premised on Sophy being given to Emile. The narrator says in response to the threat of such an unhappy ending, “Let us give Emile his Sophy; let us restore this sweet girl to life and provide her with a less vivid imagination and a happier fate” (441).*^ Being restored to life is here being returned to the straight and narrow. Imagination is what makes women look beyond the script of happiness to a different fate. Having made Sophy sweet and unimaginative, the book can end happily. Feminist readers might want to challenge this association between unhappiness and female imagination, which in the moral economy of happiness, makes female imagination a bad thing. But if we do not operate in this economy— that is, if we do not assume that happiness is what is good — then we can read the link between female imagination and unhappiness differently. We might explore how imagination is what allows women to be liberated from happiness and the narrowness of its horizons. We might want the girls to read the books that enable them to be overwhelmed with grief.

    The alt is a personal killjoy manifesto against the oppressive structures of happiness in academic spaces. We stand up against the complacency of happiness inside of the institution allows us to rupture the patriarchal and racialized history of the university's placating commitments. Our genealogy repeats the unhappy history of students and debaters alike, where every round forces the academic institution to continually take on the weight of its past. A manifesto allows us to use our personal experiences against the institution to reassert our wills and to collapse systems of violence. To be a killjoy is to be a political activist, a nonconforming queer, or the angry black woman. There can be joy in the killing of joy – our manifesto just determines a purpose of feminist flight.

    Ahmed 3 (Sara Ahmed is formerly the director of a new Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at Goldsmiths, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, and a scholar that writes on the intersection of queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and post-colonialism, Living a Feminist Life, “Conclusion II”, 2017, Duke University Press, pp 254-257 //Accessed 2/9/2017 GKKE)

    We must stay unhappy with this world. The figure of the feminist killjoy makes sense if we place her in the context of feminist critiques of happiness, some of which 1 discusses in chapter I (see also Ahmed 2010). Happiness is used to justify social norms as social goods. As Simone de Beauvoir described so astutely, "It is always easy to describe a, happy a situation in which one wishes to place [others] (1949] 1997, 28). Not to agree to stay in the place of this wish might be to refuse the happiness that is wished for. To be involved in political activism is thus to be involved in a struggle against happiness. The struggle over happiness provides the horizon in which political claims are made. We inherit this horizon. A killjoy becomes a manifesto when we are willing to take up this figure, to assemble a life not as her (I discussed the risks of assuming we are her in chapter 7) but around her, in her company. We are willing to killjoy because the world that assigns this or that person or group of people as the killjoys is not to world a want to be part of. To be willing to killjoy is to transform a judgement into a project. A manifesto: how a judgment becomes a project. To think of killjoys as manifestos is to say that a politics of transformation, a politics that intends to cause the end of a system, is not a program of action that can be separates from how we are in the worlds we are in. Feminism is praxis. We enact the world we are aiming for; nothing Iess will do. Lesbian feminism, as I noted in chapter 9, is how we organize our lives in such a way that our relations to each other as women are not mediated through our relations to men. A life becomes an archive of rebellion, this is why a killjoy manifesto will be personal. Each of us killjoys will have our own. My manifesto does not suspend my personal story it is how that story unfolds into action. It is from difficult experiences, or being bruised by structures that are not even revealed to others, that we gain the energy to rebel It is from what we conic up against that we gain new angles on what we are against. Our bodies become our tools; our rage becomes sickness. We vomit; we vomit out what we have been asked to take in. Our guts become our feminist friends the more we are sickened. We begin to feel the weight of histories more and more; the more we expose the weight of history, the heavier it becomes. We snap. We snap under the weight; things break. A manifesto is written out of feminist snap. A manifesto is feminist snap. And: we witness as feminists the trouble feminism causes. I would hazard a guess; feminist trouble is an extension of gender trouble (Butler 1990). To be more specific: feminist trouble is the trouble with women. When we refuse to be women, in the heteropatriarchal sense as beings for men, we become trouble, we get into trouble. A killjoy is willing to get into trouble. And this I think is what is specific about a killjoy manifesto: that we bring into our statements of intent or purpose the experience of what we come up against. It is this experience that allows us to articulate a for, a for that carries with it an experience of what we come up against. A for can be how we turn Something about a manifesto is about what it aims to bring about. There is no doubt in my mind that a feminist killjoy is for something; although as killjoys we are not necessarily for the same things. But you would only be willing to live with the consequences of being against what you come up against if you are for something, A life can be a manifesto. When I read some of the books in my survival kit, I hear them as manifestos, as calls to action; as calls to arms. They are books that tremble with life because they show how a life can be rewritten; how we can rewrite a life, letter by letter. A manifesto has a life, a life of its own; a manifesto is an outstretched hand. And if a manifesto is a political action, it depends on how it is received by others. And perhaps a hand can do more when it is not simply received by another hand, when a gesture exceeds the firmness of a handshake. Perhaps more than a hand needs to shake, If a killjoy manifesto is a handle, it flies out of hand. A manifesto thus repeats something that has already happened' as we know the killjoy has flown off. Perhaps a killjoy manifesto is unhandy; a feminist flight. When we refuse to be the master’s tool, we expose the violence of rods, the violences that built the master's dwelling, brick by brick. When we make violence manifest, a violence that is reproduced by not being made a manifesto, we will be assigned as killjoys. It is because of what she reveals that a killjoy he - comes a killjoy in the first place. A manifesto is in some sense behind her. This is not to say that writing a killjoy manifesto is not also a commitment; that it is not also an idea if how to move forward. A killjoy has her principles. A killjoy manifesto shows how we create principles from an experience of what we come up against, from how we live a feminist life. When I say principles here, I do not mean rules of conduct that we must agree to in order to proceed in a common direction. I might say that a feminist life is principled but feminism often becomes an announcement at the very moment of the refusal to be bound by principle. When I think of feminist principles, I think of principles in the original sense: principle as a first step, as a commencement, a start of something. A principle can also be what is elemental to a craft. Feminist killjoys and other willful subjects are crafty; we are becoming crafty. There are principles in what we craft. How we begin does not determine where we end up„ but principles do give shape or direction. Feminist principles are articulated in unfeminist worlds. Living a life with feminist principles is thus not living smoothly; we bump into the world that does not live in accordance with the principles we try to live. For some reason, the principles I articulate here ended up being expressed as statements of will; of what a killjoy is willing (to do or to be) or not willing (to do or to be). I think we can understand the some of this reason. A killjoy manifesto is a willful subject; she wills wrongly by what she is willing or is not willing to do. No wonder a willful subject has principles; she can be principled. She can share them if you can bear them. 

    The role of the ballot is vote for the debater that best mobilizes unhappiness as a way to fight oppression. Our manifesto is an archive of happiness that extends beyond the resolution; the ballot becomes a form of affect – every reading of the alt elicits an rfd, decision, and refutation which create new impressions to shape identity to reclaim the liberatory potential of academic settings.

    Ahmed 7 (Sara Ahmed is formerly the director of a new Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at Goldsmiths, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, and a scholar that writes on the intersection of queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and post-colonialism. Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke U Press, 2010. Pg. 19-20//DOA 1/29/17 KE)

    Every writer is first a reader, and what we read matters. I think of myself primarily as a reader of feminist, queer, and antiracist books — these books form the intellectual and political horizon of this book. I would describe these books as my philosophy books in the sense that they are the books that have helped me to think about how happiness participates in the creation of social form. But my archive does not just include books or films. If you follow the word happiness you end up everywhere! So my archive is also my world, my life-world, my past as well as present, where the word happiness has echoed so powerfully. One of the speech acts that always fascinated me is “I just want you to be happy,” which I remember being said to me an awful lot when I was growing up. Writing this book has given me a chance to wonder more about what it means to express “just want” for the happiness of another. But this is just one kind of happiness speech act. There are many! Others you will encounter in this book include “I’m happy if you are happy,” “I cannot bear you to be un­ happy,” “I want to make you happy,” “I want to see you being happy,” and “I want to be the cause of the happiness that is inside you.” How often we speak of happiness! If my task is to follow the words, then I aim to describe what kind of world takes shape when it is given that the happiness of which we speak is good. The question “what does happiness do?” is inseparable from the question of how happiness and unhappiness are distributed over time and in space. To track the history of happiness is to track the history of its distribution. Happiness gets distributed in all sorts of complicated ways. Certainly to be a good subject is to be perceived as a happiness-cause, as making others happy. To be bad is thus to be a killjoy. This book is an attempt to give the killjoy back her voice and to speak from recognition of how it feels to inhabit that place. I thus draw on my own experiences of being called a killjoy in describing the sociability of happiness. So many of the discussions I have had about this research have involved “swapping killjoy stories.” I remember one time at a conference table when we were discussing being killjoys at the family table. The conference was organized by the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association in 2007, and it was the first time I had been to a conference in Australia as a person of color from Australia where I felt at home. I now think of spaces created by such conferences as providing new kinds of tables, perhaps tables that give support to those who are unseated by the tables of happiness. I know that I risk overemphasizing the problems with happiness by presenting happiness as a problem. It is a risk I am willing to take. If this book kills joy, then it does what it says we should do. To kill joy, as many of the texts I cite in the following pages teach us, is to open a life, to make room for life, to make room for possibility, for chance. My aim in this book is to make room. 

  • Cross Examination - Negative | Position: For
    searsear 109 Pts   -  

     Have I been conscripted into a debate? Without notification?

     I see:
    "Debate Type: Lincoln-Douglas Debate
    Voting Format: Formal Voting
    Opponent: sear
    Time Per Round: 24 Hours Per Round
    Voting Period: 48 Hours"

    There are several problems with this, but among them:
      - It may be mere coincidence that I even opened this thread / topic.

     - The site's main page, and each forum's main page is badly congested and conter-productively cluttered with graphics that merely waste screen area.

     For all I know, this is not the first debate at this domain where an effort has been made to entrain me (bafflingly, without notification or agreement).

     Regarding the resolve:

    Resolved: Universities in the United States ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech

    I infer this refers to their on-campus policy & conduct.
    In that case I support the resolve.

     BUT !!

    I see I'm listed as "Opponent".

    Does that mean I am the "Opponent" of Gorbin ?
    Or that I take the negative in the debate?

    So Gorbin if you want some help setting up such a debate, there are a few simple but essential steps you must not neglect.

    8888888888888888888888888888888888888

    My opinion on this topic:
     Would it even be legal for universities in the United States to restrict Constitutionally protected speech?
Sign In or Register to comment.

Back To Top

DebateIsland.com

| The Best Online Debate Experience!
© 2023 DebateIsland.com, all rights reserved. DebateIsland.com | The Best Online Debate Experience! Debate topics you care about in a friendly and fun way. Come try us out now. We are totally free!

Contact us

customerservice@debateisland.com
Terms of Service

Get In Touch