Change without continuity can be anarchy. Change with continuity can mean progress. And continuity without change can mean no progress.
President Richard M. Nixon, remarks at the Supreme Court upon the swearing in of Supreme Court Justice Warren E. Burger (June 23, 1969).
On May 31, 455 A.D., Emperor Petronius Maximus was stoned to death by an angry mob while fleeing Rome.
On that date in 1578, King Henry III laid the first stone of the Pont Neuf (New Bridge), the oldest bridge of Paris, France.
In other rock history, May 31, 2013, marked the closest approach to Earth that the asteroid 1998 QE2 and its moon will get until two centuries hence.
Her name is Lila Lavender, and she won the 2019 national high school debate championship. But now she has Authority.
“I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging.”
Start of a resignation letter?
Not on your life. Ms. Red — excuse me, Ms. Lavender added, “I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments.”
She exalts totalitarianism, instead, and the deaths of over one hundred million people and counting. And feels quite comfortable doing so . . . in this terrible, evil country . . . in which somehow she judges debate.
She’s not exactly an aberration. High school debate has regressed “from a competition that rewards evidence and reasoning,” champion debater and coach James Fishbeck writes in The Free Press,“to one that punishes students for what they say and how they say it.”
He points to a listing of judges run by the National Speech & Debate Association (NSDA), where many judges on their individual but public webpages acknowledge deciding winners and losers according to their own personal politics.
“A black student I coached,” he recalls, “was told by the debate judge that he would have won his round, if he hadn’t condemned Black Lives Matter.”
One judge posted instructions that “if you are white, don’t run arguments with impacts that primarily affect POC [people of color]. These arguments should belong to the communities they affect.”
Another judge said “Referring to immigrants as ‘illegals’” would automatically lose one the debate.
While the NSDA insists that “Judges should decide the round as it is debated, not based on their personal beliefs,” Fishbeck complains they do nothing about judges who publicize their punishment of students on a political basis.
But James Fishbeck did something. He formed a new debate league, Incubate Debate, which this year has already hosted 18 debate tournaments.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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One never knows whether people have principles on principle or whether for their own personal satisfaction.
Karel Čapek, Letters from England (1925).
On May 30, 1989, student demonstrators unveiled a 33-foot high “Goddess of Democracy and Freedom” statue in Tiananmen Square.
A day of reflection — and from a few years ago — “Honor and Horror.”
Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” Essays: First Series, quoted from the 1847 edition.
On May 29, 1790, Rhode Island became the last of North America’s original Thirteen Colonies-turned-states to ratify the Constitution.
On the same in 1913, Igor Stravinsky’s ballet score The Rite of Spring received its premiere performance in Paris, France, provoking a riot.
Paul Jacob quotes Nixon and Kennedy and remains up-to-date:
Seize all the joy you can that robs no other.
Arsène Houssaye, as quoted by James O’Donnell Bennett in When Good Fellows Get Together (1908), p. 109.