Debates

A week or so ago I was at a debate between Positive Money, and the Socialist Party.  Positive Money were arguing that there are big problems in the monetary system that need to be sorted out.  The Socialist Party money isn’t required and we should instead aim for a resource based economy where everyone gets as much as they need for free. 

However this isn’t a blog post about that.  It’s about the debate itself.  I’ve seen a few debates online and been to a few in real life and it always seems be a futile exercise.  This is especially true where the “facts” are being disputed.  As you just end up with each side asserting facts without making much headway. 

The problem seems to be that by framing a debate as a zero-sum game there has to be a winner and a loser.  To concede a point is to lose ground to the opposing side.  If the two parties happen to agree on anything they have to ignore that area or find some nuance of the point to argue over.  As a way of progressing an idea this can’t be the right way to go. 

I’m therefore trying to come up with something that is a sort of anti-debate, where you win points by agreeing.  I have no idea how this idea will work so I thought I would write this blog post and see where my thoughts take me.

So I think the first step would be to change what the aim of the debate is, the aim of a debate as far as I can tell from everything I have seen is to convince as much of the audience as possible to join “your side”.  The aim in my new kind of debate is to create a list of things that can be agreed on. 

For example, if the debate where about marmite then you would have a crowd made of lovers and haters.  However you would be able to reach common ground on some basic factual stuff like “Marmite is high in vitamin B12” and probably some ethical stuff “Though I don’t like marmite it shouldn’t be made illegal”. 

This means that the entire concept of “debate” has left the room, you would not have something on the sign like “Marmite: Lover VS Hater – Who will win” you would have something like… hmmm.

Well here we see a problem because debates are intellectual sports.  And sports are always VS events (evening ironing!).  So unless we try to advance debates into the realm of contemporary dance we are going to need some kind of competition to draw in the crowds.  “Going to see an amazing demonstration of cooperation” sounds a bit dull.  So perhaps we need to look at team sports. 

This is getting tricky!  I’ll have to put more in the next post.  Thoughts welcome in the meantime.

Regards

Bucky O’Hare 

What happens to surnames when you get married

I’ve just got married, I have changed my last name.  In the interest of remaining anonymous (like Batman) I’m going to simply say my last name is Smith and my wife’s is Chang (false names). 

I of course wanted her to change her name.  I’ve grown up seeing people do that, my parents did that, it’s a normal thing to do that.  But WHY!?!  I decided my main reason was that I wanted to create a single family.  I didn’t want the Chang and the Smith I wanted to be “The Smiths” (the family, not the band)

How much does a name matter?  Probably not much.  But I give me the words navy and turquoise and I’ll be able to pick out two colours.  Give me the word blue and they will seem more unified.  And it only postpones the argument of what you call your children.

So this gives four main choices,

She takes my name,

·         She takes my name “The Smiths”

·         I take her name “The Changs”

·         Mix them up “The Smangs” or make a new one “The Thunderhawks”

·         Hyphenate or double-barrel “The Chang-Smiths”

Now I don’t want to take her name any more than she wants to take mine.  However I have an argument.  She is Chinese I’m not.  If she took my name people would think she got married and changed her name.  They wouldn’t bat an eyelid. 

If I took her name people would know I changed my name and I would be seen as an under the thumb husband and afforded less respect in business deals etc. So basically “it’s tradition” combined with a certain “don’t rock the boat” and “the other kids will pick on me”. 

However what if I still went to church because if I didn’t people would think I was immoral (old fashioned view now but there you go).  Or what if I didn’t let my wife drive because people would think I had no control of her (again, an old fashioned view or Iran)  So perhaps for every change there must be someone who takes the flack, and in my case it’s very weak and not very serious flack. 

Perhaps as women become the leaders of more and more companies I will have an advantage?  But this doesn’t seem fair.  She keeps all of her name and I keep none of mine.  So I shelve this idea.

If you mix our names together you don’t get the Smangs but all the combos we could think of are equally stupid sounding.   (jury is out on Thunderhawk)

That leaves hyphenation.  And that’s what we’ve gone with, saving you the details of the arguments about hyphen or not, who is first etc.  We have settled on “Chang Smith”.  This means in restaurant bookings we are generally Chang and in internet forms we usually come out as Smith.  But there you go. 

Our kids will be little Chang Smiths and we will at some point do the legal stuff with deed polls.  However at the moment we’ve only gone as far as updating Facebook. 

What will our kids do?  As this kind of thing gets more common kids are going to have to deal with 4 then 8 then 16 names!  Thoughts and stuff welcome.  Do you have hyphenated parents? What are you called? Do you have any other ideas. 

Regards

Bucky O’Hare