Dear Reader:
This was a historic event. The Cobb v Fisher Debate, a weekend-long, moderated, one-on-one blog debate, might have been the first of its kind in the Black Blogosphere. I thank everyone who read and commented on the Cobb v Fisher Debate. I thank my co-moderator, Craig Nulan. And, I especially thank Michael Cobb Bowen and Michael Fisher for debating their positions so skillfully. Both debaters did an excellent job. I plan to reread their debate thread next weekend so I’ll be able to take it all in in one sitting. I believe that will deepen my grasp of their ideas and arguments.
This debate dealt with issues of great importance to African Americans and Black people around the world. These are issues that aren’t treated by our major media outlets. But they were investigated and discussed deeply and publicly this weekend. Our debaters showed us that blogs have untapped potential.
We’d like to get your feedback. What could have been done better? What rules should have been added or subtracted? Should we have used a different debate format? Did the moderators step in too much or not enough? What could the debaters have done differently to make the debate better? Any and all feedback is welcome.
Let’s work together to figure out ways to use moderated blog debates in order to dig deeper into the issues that matter most to those of us who make up the Black Blogosphere. I believe this weekend’s debate offered us some insight into one way we might begin to benefit even more from our collective intelligence and knowledge.
Sincerely,
E.C. Hopkins
46 Comments
FYI:
Over 34,000 words fill the Cobb v Fisher Debate Thread. They were added to the thread in only 49 hours. Wow!
In case he didn’t catch it, I’d like to repeat here what I told Bowen on the Audience thread:
I do want to thank Michael David Cobb Bowen for this exchange. I also apologize for having called you a Nigger Michael. Though I do reserve the right to apply somewhat less incendiary appellations in the future ;).
Good night, Michael Bowen.
Also, thanks much Ed and Craig for the excellent job you did.
Excellent job for all concerned. Really.
I want to suggest that until told otherwise E.C. you call this the first one-on-one blog debate PERIOD. I don’t read that many blogs so it is possible I’ve missed something. But if you didn’t get this idea from another non-black blog, then I’d suggest you don’t sell this short.
In so far as Cobb never abided by the ‘resolution’ and Fish never outlined a course of action for Black elites to successfully counter and/or manage the paradigm of global White supremacy to the benefit of Blacks writ large, what was originally intended as a debate never got beyond two, ideologically opposed Negro egghead-pundits talking past each other. But I’ll admit the idea of using the blogosphere for staging debates among an Af-Am intellectual class holds quite a bit of potential. For that reason, I’ll give the moderators a ‘B+’ for concept and a ‘gentleman’s C’ for execution. Cobb and Fish both earned a grade of
‘incomplete’.
Hope springs eternal, though.
Well, MIB, I don’t fully agree. My task was to defend the resolution. The resolution stated that the black elite should disempower white supremacy, not how. The how would be the topic for another debate.
The debate was agonizing for me. I tried to say too much in the space alotted because I knew that I had 48 hours to write. So I was convinced I could knock off a lot of stuff *within a historical context*.
What I did not do was think in terms of a lawyer and deal only with facts and terms brought into evidence in the context of the debate. So I basically had to start over at midnight on Saturday.
So from that point I had to deal with the central question of black identity, because the point that I wanted to stress is the extraordinary difficulty of arranging and aligning the activities of a black elite. That’s over 8 million people vis a vis the definition. My point being, how can 36 million people progress based upon the actions of 8 million when nobody can agree on a definition of blackness?
My second bone of contention was the scope of the operation of white supremacy as well as its effective power. Quite frankly, I do believe that if 8 million elite blackfolks were well organized in the US, that they could do damned near anything. White supremacy wouldn’t stand a chance. And I really got hung up on ‘global system’ because I honestly don’t believe white supremacy is that well organized. Hell, Morris Dees singlehandedly bankrupted the KKK.
Thirdly I wanted to show the operation of ordinary human morality in the equation in the context that white supremacy is just another of the worlds many evils and that moral people naturally combat evil.
Where the whole thing went wrong was at the beginning. I didn’t want to be a part of setting up the question. I felt it would prejudice the entire debate by setting it up to be Cobb vs Fisher rather than a debate on some resolution which is of actual concern to real people. So the actual resolution was not so much a primary bone of contention between us as a matter of degree and nuance. However the idea that a global system of white supremacy controls banks, hospitals, armies, universities, churches, farms and ships at sea, seemed to me straight whack. If we could have narrowed the focus of the debate to questions about the nature of white supremacy itself, I think it would have been more interesting.
So in future debates I would have a very terse resolution. I would determine burdens of proof real-time with moderators who might additionally state what terms are stipulated. I would limit debate to one day. This damned thing ruined my weekend and stressed me out.
I have learned a lot in terms of recognizing that I really don’t have a debating style. I have, I think, a strong analytical style, and I am always trying to create frameworks for concensus. So debating small points of fact seems petty to me.
More later
“My task was to defend the resolution. The resolution stated that the black elite should disempower white supremacy…”.
Hence, part of my reason for assigning you an ‘I’. In a genuine debate (and with all respect to E.C.), resolutions are neither to be defended nor attacked by the debate’s participants. The resolution, as written here, presumed a conclusion, e.g.; “Black elite should…”, that qualified it as a fallacy (of sorts). The decision whether Black elites ’should’ is left up for Black elites to decide. Cobb, to his credit, never agreed to that resolution — his concordance was needed to make for a valid debate.
Even had Cobb concurred with the resolution as submitted, your task would have been to persuade the audience (presumably Black elitists) as to the soundness of your antidote to the global system of White supremacy, aka ‘how to’. AAMOF, you could have presented your case, regardless of Cobb’s (non-)response. You didn’t, IMO.
Also, thinking back to sophomore year in high school. I was accustomed to a simple statement that allowed individual debaters to bring out reasons for and against. All of the pre-supplied subordinate premises helped, but I think took the flavor of the debate out of our hands. So our opening statements seemed almost irrelevant to the course of the debate, at least mine seemed so.
Well. MIB, the rules were the rules. I tried to follow them to the letter.
MIB:
Which authority would you cite for your use of the term ‘resolution’ within the context of argumentation theory? The way the term was used in the Cobb v Fisher Debate is the way I’ve seen it used in the argumentation books I’ve read and the way it is used by communications and rhetoric scholars I know personally. Where might I go to read more about how you assert it should be used in the context of a debate?
“What I did not do was think in terms of a lawyer and deal only with facts and terms brought into evidence in the context of the debate.”
Hmmmm. I don’t know about that. I purposely had not initially introduced any data, but focused on the words, the concepts. The evidential examples outside of those concepts you brought in: Jim Crow, Apartheid, the census figures.
Which examples annoyed me because they forced me to take a detour from my main line of argument.
But what annoyed me even more was the in the case of Jim Crow and Apartheid you didn’t back stuff up with historical facts.
Now I do happen to be an attorney by training (never actually practiced) so I know what the Jim Crow laws were about in pretty good detail, and I happen to have been an activist in the Southern Africa liberation support movement so I know quite a bit of the history of Apartheid so I figured I”d give you some facts so that you could frame your argument based on historical facts.
The results were not satisfactory, though.
Where you started to shine was Sunday when you came up with the virus scenario. You started to deal with the language, the concepts. You even threw me for a loop there for a minute.
But you didn’t follow through. Actually you couldn’t becasue the language, I mean the English language itself, was not set up for you to be able to. So I rode the train all the way home.
Thanks. I basically had to start from scratch. After everybody said goodnight on Saturday, I sat scratching my head literally for about 90 minutes straight, trying to figure out a way out of the hole I dug. So the debate in context to the rules that everybody kept hammering me on didn’t really start until #99. That’s when I determined to stick to the words and concepts keep it short.
I figured you would fight me on every interpretation of history. Way back up at (36) I should have just made the assertions instead of assuming you would stipulate. By (56) it was clear that you would stonewall me and I would fail to make any use of Apartheid and Jim Crow as examples. But your (59) rather sealed that coffin. So I had to take the other tack and poke holes in your version of WS instead of work through the real-world examples. I was still thrashing around a bit, until (70), while still evading all the possible implications of (69) trying to focus more on the resolution. But I was clearly frustrated as I indicated in (81) that I had to deal with Fisher’s version of WS, which was at that point so large and monstrous that nobody could deny the necessity of ‘any means necessary’ of which the resolution’s conclusion was but a small part.
Not possible. Once again, when pressed for specific details about his System, Fisher is either completely incapable or totally unwilling to provide any clear, detailed examples.
I basically stopped reading after Fisher refused to acknowledge that Jim Crow and Apartheid were two historically well-known (if not the best well known) examples of white supremacy.
By what empirical measure do we gauge the existence of white supremacy? What are the best known examples of the way in which it operates and in what historical periods has it operated? These were very straight-forward questions. Cobb cited the two best-known examples of the manifestations of said system and asserted that they were local, rather then global in nature:
Fisher’s response is to say that the language of the laws of those systems do not provide us with any forensic evidence to determine that any racial discrimination had ever taken place. It would be like if all the humans vanished from planet Earth on Monday leaving every legal document behind, and then on Tuesday the High Council of Zandor 5 (or some alien planet) sent an alien investigator (Mog-Org the 4th) to Earth to determine if there was ever a system of white supremacy that operated on planet Earth. Let’s say that Mog-Org travelled to the now-uninhabited Earth and conducted an investigation. Let’s also assume that Mog-Org has access to every legal document and court proceeding that ever took place during Jim Crow. According to Fisher, Mog-Org wouldn’t be able to deduce the existence of a system of white supremacy by examining the language of the laws that the humans had written:
“It is thus not possible to identify the existence of a system of white supremacy from looking at these laws.”
Simply amazing. So, according to Fisher, I guess if Mog-Org examined all the court documents and numerous court cases in which a jury set a white man free for the crime of lynching in the Jim Crow South that Mog-Org wouldn’t be able to deduce that a system of white supremacy was in place at the time. This is what happens when you fail to operate out of any discernible historical context: your perspective becomes that of an alien who is conducting an investigation to determine how an uninhabited Earth operated; completely free of human witnesses or anecdotal account. That was the tactic of a sycophant that the moderators simply decided to let slip.
Fisher wants us to believe in his top-down, isometric, SimCity view of the world in which everything below is governed by the rules of White Supremacy, but he fails to provide any examples or details of the System to help orient someone in the First Person. Thus Fisher’s description of the Global System of White Supremacy suffers from the limits of isometric projection:
A system without depth; without degree; without altitude; without limit - that is what Fisher wants us to believe is controlling the lives of 40 some-odd million black people!!!!
Read that last sentence again: South Africa’s Apartheid laws …can not be identified as “racist”. Ummmmmm, what?
Gentlemen, I ask you, can any of you honestly read that sentence and make sense of what the hell Fisher is talking about? In what reality, what nexus of history, are the systems of Jim Crow and Apartheid not considered objective, and classic examples of white supremacist ideology and functioning? Since when did individuals have to be trained lawyers to understand that these two systems were indeed racist, white supremacist institutions? I love what Fisher does during the debate though. He asserts that because there is no language in the written laws of those two systems which explicitly delineates “black” individuals from “white” individuals that there can be no proof of the inherent racism of those systems. Mog-Org cannot deduce that there ever was a system of white supremacy on Earth. In other words, Fisher would have us believe that because no evidence of a racist system can be deduced from the written language (words) of those oppressive laws that no racist discrimination has ever taken place. But yet, if you plug the words “racist laws” into Google, you’ll find something on the order of 2 Million returns. Again, the moderators should have stopped this nonsense and enforced common sense, but they failed.
Once again, the issues that I pointed out with regard to the wording of the resolution were completely ignored. Fisher (once again) failed to show the ways in which this all-powerful, all-pervasive, world-threatening System maintains absolute primacy and control over the lives of all so-called black people:
Wow, such an erudite exchange there: “Over what period of time…,” …”Now.”
You all make me sick.
Why did the moderators allow Fisher to disrespect the intelligence of the audience with these exceedingly vague clarifications when pressed for some basic details of this all-pervasive, all-powerful System?!
If I am living in the Global System of White Supremacy - WHY DOES FISHER REFUSE TO TELL ME WHO MY ENEMIES ARE?!
Yes well that’s why I too was gobsmacked by (59). The moderators, by their default forced me to focus on the psychological operation because as far as I could see the examples in law were open to question. Thus the virus argument which I proposed worked the same way in individuals and institutions. There is a world of difference between individual racist bigotry and institutional racism, but we never had to go there.
Cobb failed to construct an wholistic, deductive counter argument. His initial step of setting up and attacking a projective strawman totally unrelated to the resolution as his first “substantive” counter argument was an open invitation to gobsmacking.
He was promptly notified concerning this procedural non-compliance at 8 and 11. By moderator comment 20. Cobb was handed the crux of the expected counterargument;
and pointed directly toward the formal weaknesses in Fisher’s argument, i.e., Fisher’s stipulation of empirical examples of supremacy as “givens”.
At moderator comment 29. Fisher was admonished to flesh out his empirical givens;
The debate should have proceeded from wholistic argument and counter argument with respect to the resolution, its premises and conclusions and proceeded from there to empirical particulars drawn from the cultural, political, or economic sectors in the U.S. - or the global anglosphere.
Instead, each debater - to a very great extent - focused early on on his respective idiosyncratic projection of the other instead of on the clearly stated debate resolution. Whether Fisher’s projective The presentation of empirical evidence, however, will not be enough in the face of my opponent’s denial of empirical evidence. or Cobb’s projective New Black Nationalists both were excessively preoccupied with having at one another instead of having at the subject resolution.
Gray…
“I basically stopped reading after Fisher refused to acknowledge that Jim Crow and Apartheid were two historically well-known (if not the best well known) examples of white supremacy.”
Gray, I never said that. In fact, I acknowledged that they were indeed examples of white supremacy. Moreover in the case of Apartheid I provide a case study going all the way from the Bambaata rebellion to 1913 to the present South Africa and its post-apartheid constitution.
Cobb based his assertion of white supremacist nature of each system, Jim Crow and apartheid laws codified in these two variations of white supremacy.
But the white supremacist nature of the systems was revealed in the functional interpretation of these laws. And that was only possible becasue of the extra-legal power of white supremacy. That is, all-white juries that flaunted the laws, judges who interpreted the laws in an unequal manner, etc. And that power is ultimately based on the ability of white folks to commit violent terroristic acts against black folk without much worry of retribution.
Bowen, however, could not admit to that becasuse it did not fit into his political concept. And neither does it fit in yours.
To wit:
That is, that white supremacy and the white supremacists in the last analysis do not give a f*ck about the law, however it is codified, when it comes to black people.
Repeat: That single fact is what doesn’t fit into either one of your political agendas.
Bowen had to provide an example that white supremacy, which everybody agrees certainly existed (and which, I contend continues to exist in a refined form) had come to an end at some point in time. The only way he saw that he could effectively argue that was by citing the end of the codifications that existed during the specific time periods that he cited. But that was impossible. The codifications in and off themselves were not indicative of one “race” dominating the other.
Jim Crow represents a refinement of the system. 1865 saw the end of a more primitive form based almost exclusively on violence. Jim Crow was a more sophisticated form which was less violent (incredible as it sounds) and which relied more on deception. Thus the Jim Crow laws were normatively “unbiased” while the pre-1865 laws were normatively bias.
Bowen’s intended argument that the dismantling of white supremacy can be traced to the dismantling of a particular legal apparatus would have been much more cogent if he would have asserted that the disassembly of the normatively biased legal pre-1865 legal apparatus in the territories he referenced had been the “end of white supremacy”. But that would have forced him to argue that the time period he cited was indeed not marked by white supremacy. Which would have made him a laughing stock. So he just asserted that the Jim Crow laws were normatively biased and pushed the end of white supremacy up to 1965.
I guess he thought I’d fall for the okedoke that since “everybody knows” that that period was a white supremacist period. the laws existent during that period were normatively white supremacist, too.
Ok. Now that he couldn’t hang the end of white supremacy up on the civil rights act of 1965 and the end of “seperate but equal”, how does he prove that white supremacy, which he acknowledged existed, came to an end?
So he went with the census figures. “There’s more Negroes in these here parts”. Which of course was very weak. But there is no real evidence for his contention otherwise. Why? Well, because the system hasn’t ended, it just has been refined. More deception and (relatively) less violence.
lLook, if you want to maintain a system of dominance, deception is much more cost effective than constantly having to engage violent apparatus. As long as that apparatus can be employed when deception fails, why employ that violent apparatus?
Especially when the constant deployment of violence reveals the truth of the system. Unless, of course, you can get the victims to employ violence against each other. Bu that can only be done via deception and manipulation. Which deception can always be revealed, an, that’s the law of nature will inevitably revealed. So the violence option must always be readily employable.
It is a very uncomplicated and straightforward concept. Works real well, too. As we can see.
I think the event was well structured, and perhaps unique. I agree with Dr. Spence, you shouldn’t sell it short. However, I don’t think a debate format, where the objective is for one participant or the other to win an argument, is very fruitful. I would prefer a panel format with two or three bloggers, where the participants are given a problem to discuss, and are allowed to present their insights and proposed solutions, and given audience questions to respond to.
We never got to the point at which what might have been stipulated could yeild a more uniform back and forth debate. My point was never to really establish that white supremacy itself had ended abruptly upon its legal dismemberment, but that this change accellerated black progress. I was fully prepared to argue that black progress was indeed quite possible under any sort of white supremacy with the underground railroad and the establishment of HBCUs being prime examples. We never got there.
Some of the audience folks said that I was mischaracterizing Black Nationalism. I was prepared to go there all in service of the argument that never has white supremacy been so attenuated as it is today and never has a black elite of 8 million been coordinated. Therefore the entire history of black progress in America (which I was prepared to say, is quite substantial) has never required such organization and vigor. Basically all of the power of all of the black nationalists in all of American history never required the resources available today. Thus the very idea that we need one is ass-backwards and the result of an overlarge estimation of how powerful white supremacy is in the first place. To give this new Black Elite carte blanche (heh) in determining the proper fate of ‘black’ people would be to subject them to a far worse fate than it would be to leave them be. Case in point, the high tech lynching Sharpton could do to Imus.
–
At any rate the idea of the debate was brilliant. The debate itself was excellent. The concepts and points it brought up are pregnant with possibilities, but like a Spike Lee movie, it ended without a prescriptive resolution (no pun intended). And so I percieve that many folks may find it unsatisfactory. Not so for me. It was very demanding and tiresome, and it demanded me to work from a completely different orientation from how I’ve been writing (as Cobb) for four years, but it was more than worth it, if only to restore a respectful and cordial relationship between myself and Fish.
..which reminds me. Fish has been unbanned.
merci bien
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote “The great strength of democracy lies in its capacity for self-correction. Self-correction calls for compelling leadership.” Michael Fisher, by offering an apology, and Cobb, by graciously accepting it, demonstrated such leadership. This was a great example of blacks taking ourselves seriously, and I was thrilled to witness it. I would have had an easier time following the discussion if the threads were posted facing each other side by side rather than alternating top to bottom. As exemplified by the moderators, debaters, and commentators there is a political, intellectual, and spiritual recrudescence currently taking place in the black community which is obscured in popular media outlets. You folks have justified my decision to greatly reduce my reliance on MSM to bring relevant topics to light. Even the traditional lines of demarcation such as left-right, liberal-conservative are seriously inadequate.
Gray:
“Once again, the issues that I pointed out with regard to the wording of the resolution were completely ignored.”
I did not ignore your comments. I believe the explicit statement of the premises, subsidiary conclusion, and conclusion that I provided in the original post for the debate thread addressed your issues.
My Feedback
Before the debate began, I imagined myself debating each side. I imagined how I would address each premise, the subsidiary conclusion, and the conclusion. I also imagined how I would have anticipated and unveiled the weaknesses in the opponent’s arguments. I believe I could have argued in favor of either side persuasively; and I believe I could have argued for Fisher’s side convincingly. I have my personal opinions about which types of arguments would have been most convincing or persuasive for either side. And, I would have used different strategies than our debaters used.
The platform we used would have enabled me to do much more than I could have during a timed, live, oral debate. It would have given me ample time consider and reconsider my arguments and counterarguments. I would have had enough time to write and edit precise and concise comments, making sure that I used the same terms and referred back to earlier definitions, premises, and subsidiary conclusions I had introduced earlier in the debate. And, the reader would have had little trouble following my chain of reasoning. So, for this complex normative resolution that Cobb and Fisher took on, I believe the platform we used was not the debate’s key weakness. In fact, the only better form of debate for a resolution as complex as the one Cobb and Fisher tackled might be the exchange of scholarly essays, something that could not be done in 48 hours. Moreover the exchange of scholarly essays platform might not have been as easily accessible to the average charitable and patient Black Blogosphere reader who would try his or her best to understand each debater rather than try his or her best to figure out how each debater failed or fell short.
Even so, I believe Ed and P6 make some worthwhile points about choosing debate platforms over at the Dream and Hustle thread for “OK, Now What Good Did That Do?” In the future, I believe pre-debate considerations about which debate platform would work best for a particular resolution, a set of debaters, a set of moderators, and a target audience should take the following eight factors into account at a minimum
1) the complexity of the resolution (for instance, resolutions that would help us make up our minds about what certain social science data or statistics indicate might be less complex than resolutions that would help us determine what would be the most economical policy decision or the best moral choice);
2) the logical reasoning skill levels of the debaters (how much argumentation theory, informal logic, or formal logic do they know well enough to apply accurately and extemporaneously);
3) the knowledge levels of the debaters;
4) the logical reasoning skill levels of the moderators (moderators need to know formal and informal logic/argumentation theory; however, they also need to know when to hold up the debate and when to let it flow, which can be a tricky balancing test depending on the debaters and the resolution);
5) the knowledge levels of the moderators;
6) the logical reasoning skill levels of the audience/readers;
7) the reading skill levels of the readers (can they extract and distil arguments from ambiguous prose fast enough to read the debaters charitably); and
8) the knowledge levels of the audience members (this will determine the level of common knowledge and erudition the debaters can assume the average audience member has, which would influence how much detail and precision the debater would need to use in his writings in order to communicate effectively).
For some resolutions, sets of debaters, sets of moderators, and audiences, the moderated weekend blog debate format we used might not be the best platform. More restrictive platforms–platforms that would use a list of questions; that would limit the time the debaters could take to prepare or present their answers; that would limit the formats of the debaters’ responses/comments; that would limit the types of evidence they could use; etc.–might keep the debaters on track or make their arguments easier for some audiences to follow. The benefits gained by using some restrictive platforms, however, might come with a price. For instance, a very complex resolution when coupled with a very restrictive or inflexible debate platform might make it difficult, even for two very skilled and knowledgeable debaters, to present very convincing or persuasive arguments that could convince or persuade a very learned audience to change their minds or that could help the debaters and the audience discover something novel they didn’t know before the debate began.
I followed the whole debate and I thougt it was great. As a layman, I found the whole argument about whether Aparthied or Jim Crow was actually, technichalli, racist or not, sort of tedious. I think it kept the debaters from moving on to what I wanted to hear their positions on, which is, even if White Supremacy does exist, does it really affect us? However, to have two such intellectual, well read and passionate Black men debate without political platforms or insults was truly inspiring and I hope a giant step for us to find a way to have discourse with each other while striving for the improvement of our race and position in society. Great job to all.
Co-sign this - but there seemed to be a disagreement between the moderators. Was it Fisher’s job to build it up first, or was Cobb supposed to build it up and then tear it down? Fisher never cited his mountain of empirical evidence - how can you tear it down without building it up? And, once it’s built up, can it ever be said to be torn down?
It all goes back to 59.
Okay, according to you, Cobb was supposed to provide a wholistic, deductive counter argument to what Fisher maintained were “givens”:
You also instructed him to “elaborate his claim” in those three spheres you mentioned, which was a rather vague recommendation; you said “elaborate”, but what does that mean? Does that mean that Fisher is required to comment on the nature and degree of his empirical “givens”, such that he has to name specific “things” and specific numbers about “things”?:
(59.)
He Never speaks to the the specific nature or the empirical degree of the System as recommended in (moderator) 29: he just names those empirical areas of modern society which he assumes the System has total control over which in turn establishes it’s rhetorical ubiquity over the lives of black folks (i.e. it’s “givenness”) in the same way that the average person assumes that all human beings breathe air when they tell someone not to hold their breath for something they don’t intend to do: he never has to say “how much” air they breathe or “how often”, just that they breathe air empirically - again, Fisher, from his position above SimCity, never specifies to which degree the System hinders the progress of all so-called black individuals. He never tells us the ways and the How in which it operates in 59 - he just tells us the What it has control over - none of which speaks to the nature or degree of the System! When Fisher is asked to clarify the size and scope of ‘institutions, organizations’ hindering black progress, his response is to say that the System is ubiquitous across every empirical category and measure of society, which is no different than replying to the inquiry with the statement that humans breathe oxygen; he does not say how oxygen gets into the blood stream, but merely that oxygen is in control of- and influences the operation of- various empirical organs. For Fisher, the presence of the GSWS is to the existence of lungs as the ubiquity and primacy of the GSWS is to breathing air. How is Cobb supposed to provide a holistic, deductive counter argument to the “givenness” of the existence of lungs?
In 27, E.C. seemed to hint at the unreasonableness of this requirement:
If Fisher’s empirical “givens” are indeed considered to be objective “givens”, then the following question is valid for Fisher in helping to establish and elaborate upon the nature and degree and size and scope of his System: In your estimation, if the Global System of White Supremacy were to be dismantled tomorrow, which specific white supremacist obstacles to black progress would have been subsequently removed in the dismantling process?; such as we could say, “Thank goodness A, B, and C person or institution is no longer around to enact or inflict X Y or Z upon us.” Name for us those things which are A, B, C, X, Y, and Z: That would allow us to at least begin to gauge the degree to which the GSWS exercises it’s influence on the lives and progress of so-called black people via X,Y, and Z.
I did not read that much of the debate, but it’s good that Michael Fisher has publically apologized to Cobb for calling him the n-word.
Makheru
Gray.
Institutions are not objects. They are made up in their entirely by people. The agreed-upon definition if White supremacy was as follows: “all thoughts and behaviors that work to establish, promote, or sustain the global dominance of people who define themselves as “white” and to suppress the advancement of people whom they define as “non-white” or “black” on the basis of color”
Institutions don’t “think” and “behave”. People do. So the focus was on the people who practice white supremacy.
That mans the first step was not to establish empirical evidence evidence that “all of the institutions of power, of decisive and overwhelming armed force and destruction, of economics, science, learning, propaganda (a/k/a “the media”) , entertainment, and even the pornographic industry are dominated and controlled by people who classify themselves as ‘white’.”
The first step was to understand what “white” means.
I used logic to establish that “white” means “white supremacy”.
Now we do know the empirical fact that hundreds of millions of people who classify themselves as “white”.
Since White means “supreme” according to the logic laid out, and since supreme means exactly that, namely supreme, we can deduct from solely from the existence of these hundreds of millions of people who classify themselves as white
that white supremacy indeed exists and, being as “supremacy” is indeed supreme. Since all institutions are made up of people and since all white people are, as was shown, in a supreme position vis-a-vis all non-white people, all institutions, which all contain people, are subject to that supreme/not-supreme (white/non-white) division of humanity.
Thus the only empirical fact to prove the existence of white supremacy across all human institutions was the empirical fact that the “white” group or race, that is the group of people who classify themselves as white, actually exists.
To then point out that the US armed forces are controlled by people who classify themselves as white, the Russian armed forces are controlled by people who classify themselves as white, The EU countries armed forces are controlled by people who classify themselves as white, that the Chinese armed forces are subject to the control/destruction controlled by people who classify themselves as white, that the monetary institutions of the globe are controlled by people who classify themselves as white, etc, etc. is actually secondary and, above all, unnecessary, in light of the initial argument.
Now we do know the empirical fact that hundreds of millions of people who classify themselves as “white” exist.
I agree. Helping two intelligent Black men to cease publicly demeaning one another made it completely worthwhile.
E.C., I owe you an apology.
I’ve been insisting the wording of the resolution made your debate problematic. Again, I applied the strict rules of logic to ‘resolution’, forgetting that in conventional debate framing policy issues in moral terms is perfectly legitimate. Allow me to amend your grades to ‘A’ for conceptualization, and ‘B+’ for executiion.
Gray wrote;
No.
Cobb was supposed to furnish his own original wholistic, deductive counter argument to the core resolution, premises, and conclusions. The debate was to center on a specific subject resolution and Fisher or the New Black Nationalist effigy of Fisher was not that subject resolution.
Gray also wrote; (regarding Fisher)
The resolution addresses cultural, political, and economic spheres. Fisher asserted GSWS in those spheres as given. It was incumbent upon him to provide representative particular examples supportive of his claim below.
Is it true or not that the U.S. and the global anglosphere (in which Blacks are embedded) is comprised of racial monopolies of control in every single institution of dominant power without exception?
“Is it true or not that the U.S. and the global anglosphere (in which Blacks are embedded) is comprised of racial monopolies of control in every single institution of dominant power without exception?”
Perhaps, but it is more true that no institution of power changes character in black hands. The overwhelming desire behind comparing black to white (in all the dreadful and depressing statistics) is that blacks be included, that blacks can do exactly those things whites do. And when it happens, guess what. It happens. Once upon a time, blacks couldn’t fly first class. When they did, the planes didn’t get there any faster or slower. The same thing happened when there were black stewardesses, then black pilots, then black air traffic controllers, and the same thing will happen when blacks own airlines. The planes will still fly the same way they do now.
The function of the institutions don’t change so much as black access, understanding and control of them do.
Why am I up this late?
@ the gray conservative,
Comment #26, the gray conservative wrote: 59 - he just tells us the what it has control over - none of which speaks to the nature or degree of the System! When Fisher is asked to clarify the size and scope of ‘institutions, organizations’ hindering black progress, his response is to say that the System is ubiquitous across every empirical category and measure of society, which is no different than replying to the inquiry with the statement that humans breathe oxygen; he does not say how oxygen gets into the blood stream, but merely that oxygen is in control of- and influences the operation of- various empirical organs. For Fisher, the presence of the GSWS is to the existence of lungs as the ubiquity and primacy of the GSWS is to breathing air. How is Cobb supposed to provide a holistic, deductive counter argument to the “givenness” of the existence of lungs?
I said: This is a straw man argument gray conservative, on this planet called earth we humans go by what we see, and at the same time once something has manifested in society as a system, behaviors, characteristics, etc and these things become a consistent pattern in any country, society, or culture then these things pass over to a level called the knowing field, and ubiquitous exist in the knowing field. Once something has reached the level of the knowing field it no longer needs words to explain its existence, why it is the way that it is, and how it operates, etc but the effects of the ubiquitous system is seen. Just like the average person can’t scientifically explain how the wind works but the effects of the wind is seen in blowing as the trees leaves fall, as the bushes move back and forth, as the hair on the head moves, as your clothes stick to your body, as pieces of paper are blown up and down the street, etc are all the effects of the wind. So should you say the wind does not exist because we can’t see it, but only feel its effects?
Gray conservative your statement is a straw man and weak. Also, gray conservative you know that when something reaches the level of the knowing field it can not be put into words nor explained by word any more. You knowing this is the reason why you said in comment #14: Once again, when pressed for specific details about his System, Fisher is either completely incapable or totally unwilling to provide any clear, detailed examples. Often when a group of people find it beneficial for them they deny the reality of the knowing field and the ubiquitous gain an advantage in some situation. Regardless of what people say there is a knowing field, and it does not matter how many people deny it because all people and those denying it live by it everyday.
Cobb simply did not want to jeopardize his political position because it could not hold up to some of the pressure of Michel Fisher’s intellectual arguments. Remember Cobb got stuck at comment 5.
Cobb…
“Perhaps, but it is more true that no institution of power…”
Michael, what does the question of what would happen that if “black” people were in power have to do with the fact that that they are not in power presently?
One has to take things one step at a time in your analysis.
Besides, I had stated during the debate that the moral imperative is that no person is mistreated period and particularly not on the basis of color.
That means that the elimination of Racism/White Supremacy can not and should notbe replaced by a system of Racism/Black Supremacy (even if this were possible) because in eliminating Racism/White Supremacy we are eliminating “race” as a social construct of power and domination.
more true?
You really, really need them 40 winks magne….,
If Cobb and Michael Fisher ever debated again in the future with what they know now about each other. It would be even more fascinating, and impressive. Both would present their arguments even more uniquely.
(more true).
I originally said, “Yes but it is also true”, but changed it to “Perhaps, but it is more true”. Debate tricks.
LSC, I think you’re dead wrong. It is absolutely critical that the operation of white supremacy on people and institutions be explicitly understood, not merely proven. Otherwise you cannot defeat the infection without killing the patient.
We were talking about *should* rather than *how*. The only gripe I’ve ever had is one of scope, priority and the ‘how’ question. Never with the why. My politics are not jeopardized or compromised in any way by the debate. I may have expressed things in the debate that I don’t necessarily believe but that had everything to do with sticking to the rules of the debate. The fact that it was difficult for me is evidence that I wanted to explain things as I see them.
I’m not in favour of a live (in-person) debate in place of what was done here. This format affords the debaters time to compose more thoughtful responses and that is a big advantage.
I’m about to ask a huuge favour of Ed The Host and/or Craig: could you attempt to summarize this event, a kind of study notes version? I’m thinking of something perhaps grid-ish, with question/resolution/angle/issue on the far left and the respective responses in columns to the right, point-form notes only. Some bits may have to be cut, but as long as the most important ideas are captured it would go a long way to making this massive thread more digestible and (therefore) accessible. Hey, sometimes don’t ask, don’t get, right?
In thinking about next time (and there will be one, surely), I do think it would be helpful to have some more controls in place, perhaps more direct control by the moderators (extreme idea is, again, review of the responses before letting them go live, to make sure they address the point/issue/resolution raised). The one downside to letting things freewheel to a great extent is the potential for loss of control and greater difficulty following the thread. Then again, as Mr. H. has pointed out, depends on who’s readin.
Anyway, fwiw, great idea, well done all, this was an important first.
@ Cobb,
Comment #38 cobb wrote: (more true).
I originally said, “Yes but it is also true”, but changed it to “Perhaps, but it is more true”. Debate tricks.
LSC, I think you’re dead wrong. It is absolutely critical that the operation of white supremacy on people and institutions be explicitly understood, not merely proven. Otherwise you cannot defeat the infection without killing the patient.
We were talking about *should* rather than *how*. The only gripe I’ve ever had is one of scope, priority and the ‘how’ question. Never with the why. My politics are not jeopardized or compromised in any way by the debate. I may have expressed things in the debate that I don’t necessarily believe but that had everything to do with sticking to the rules of the debate. The fact that it was difficult for me is evidence that I wanted to explain things as I see them.
LSC: I hear you loud and clear Cobb, and thank you for explaining your reasons. I am sorry for being wrong.
“Otherwise you cannot defeat the infection without killing the patient.”
And you all know what Bobby Wright would say - so perhaps the next debate topic can be the incendiary Wrightian view that the Psychopathic Racial Personality is beyond cure. In other words, is a reduction of violence (as defined by Fish - and operating with “deception”) evidence of a cure - and if not, what constitutes evidence.
The Arch Deceiver vs. The Liberal: A Defense in Two Acts.
Obviously, that last title in no way refers to either of the two debaters (or the moderators) whom I hold in high regard.
Bobby who?
Bobby E. Wright.
http://www.geocities.com/spirit_of_blackness/bobby_e_wright.htm
Deception and Violence:
“According to Dr. Wright, the experience of Black people all over the world presents an analogous situation. For hundreds of years, our European (white) matadors have been holding up the capes of democracy, capitalism, Marxism, religion and education and for hundreds of years we have been charging at the movement of these “capes.” Like the bull, we too are suffering from near fatal wounds and “indeed have arrived at our “moment of truth.” Sisters and brothers, it is time for us to look at the matador and Dr. Wright tries to sharpen our vision.”
Summarizing the Debate
I thought it was going to be easier than it will be when I began to summarize the debate Friday night. It will take me much, much longer than two hours to write a good summary. Indeed, it might take two hours to write up good summaries for the arguments the debaters made for or against each premise, the subsidiary conclusion, and the conclusion of the debate’s resolution. I’ll probably need to write a 3,000- to 5,000-word essay in order to summarize the debate well. I will not attempt a project like this while preparing for my law school exams. I do believe completing the project would be worthwhile, as it would better show what the debate and the debaters really accomplished and it might persuade many more folks that moderated weekend blog debates could be used to help members of the blogosphere form much better opinions about social phenomena that we believe are most important. So, I might invest twenty to thirty hours during the forthcoming holiday break in order to make the attempt.
Standardizing the Debater’s Comments Format
I believe the debate would have been easier to read and, therefore better, had we standardized the format for the debaters’ responses to one another prior to the debate. While I was rereading the debaters’ arguments, I thought that during a 48-hour weekend debate, especially one during which many thousands of words would be typed into comments threads, the format for referencing previous comments and responding to arguments or counterarguments should be the same for both debaters. During a conversation Lester Spence and I had yesterday, I used a format similar to the one I think might improve the audience’s, the debaters’, and the moderators’ abilities to follow the debaters’ arguments in future weekend debates. See comments 17, 18, and 19 in the thread for Defining Afrocentricity.