Debate Culture

From my outbox (to a team listserv earlier today): 

I bring this up [debate culture] because where I put my focus is on debates, versus gunplay or smear attack propaganda. For some time, the policy in the State Department, during Nuland's tenure, was to cut off all communication with the Russian diplomatic community and to ban their television in the USA. This was consistent with the Ukraine policy of demonizing Russia and outlawing Russian as a means of official or even informal communication.

However, nowadays the prospect of televised debates between US and Russian journalists is far more likely, or even high school debate teams.

A US team, if debating something about current affairs, say whether Portland should indeed become a sister city with Mariupol, would want to train on a lot of materials, as is standard. The team will have to master and argue both sides at different events.

Does anyone else watch Rick Sanchez ever? He was in a booth on Red Square with Scott Ritter during the Alaska Accords summit (what some of us Ruscadians call it); I watched him co-star with Manila Chan on RT America for years.

I was always an RT America fan, which I came to, as I explain in my journals, via Air America, the FM radio network that I'd tune in on the car radio while waiting for that same daughter to get out of middle school. When Air America broke up, a lot of the talent moved to either MSNBC or RT America. The latter had Abby Martin, Chris Hedges... folks I follow to this day.

Now that NATO has lost its proxy war (the way I see it), I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot more US high schoolers, debaters especially, put on the spot to bone up on what's been happening, and that's not going to mean mindlessly reciting gospel / dogma emanating from Washington, DC and it's Great Decisions program (or maybe the Methodists still get programmed that way?), it's going to mean finding the right YouTubes and starting from scratch in a lotta ways.