Ha. I should have known. I always do extremely well under academic pressure.

Someone else went first. He, and for the purpose of this entry let us call him Bob since that's his real name, gave his talk in which he called for denying health care and education to any illegal immigrants, deporting them, and closing the borders of the U.S. permanently. Well, the professor did ask us to choose as controversial a topic as we could think of. He picked a doozy.

The problem I had with it was while his premises were properly researched and technically his argument was valid, he threw in some completely unsupported and bogus comments to shore up his points, such as "They come here because they don't like their own country." My arm shot up like a rocket as soon as the professor opened up the discussion for questions.

"I'd like to address your comment that they're here because they don't like their country," I said calmly. "Most immigrants are here because this country offers them opportunities they don't have at home."

"See?" Bob said triumphantly. "They don't like their country, they like ours better."

"No," I replied, "that statement doesn't follow. Many people leave their own country, which they love very much, because of political or religious persecution. A lot of people leave because they have no economic options left."

"Well, then they don't love their country or they'd stay and try to change it," he said, a note of belligerence entering his voice. The class watched us closely. The professor was smiling.

"Bob, I don't think you can conclude that based on the premise. You're not presenting evidence, just your opinion. And I assure you, for many people it's leave or die. They don't have a choice!" I was starting to talk fast, a sure sign that I'm getting agitated.

"Let me ask you something," he said, a phrase I particularly dislike in a debate. "You're one of those people who believes in respecting all cultures equally no matter what, aren't you?" He nodded his head as if to say uh huh, I got yer number, liberal kook.

"Fallacy of the loaded question," I shot back. "When did you stop beating your wife?"

The class cheered.

Anyway, it was a fairly lively discussion from then on. When the professor asked for another volunteer I demanded to go next. And to my surprise I spoke passionately for the entire alloted seven minutes on why racial profiling was unreliable, harmful, and a violation of civil liberties without looking at my paper. I was eloquent, and I hit every point. I made eye contact with everyone. I rocked the planet.

Not everyone agreed with me, and one person correctly pointed out that I had conflated two types of profiling, one blindly discriminatory and one useful for protection, but I was happy. I think the professor was happy. And I'm done, done, done with my paper and my speech!

Bob was a real pain in the ass for the rest of the class, though. He kept swinging the topic back to how tough white males had it in American society no matter what the topic was. Bernadette, an articulate and bright African-American police dispatcher, finally let him have it when he claimed the SAT 9 tests were totally fair to all races and cultures. She let him know how much tougher it is to do well on a test when you don't get to take your books home at night to study, you may or may not get breakfast every day, and you don't understand questions written with middle class students in mind. The examples don't make sense to a black kid from Hunter's Point, she said. The tests are not fair to all socio-economic situations.

Bob didn't have much to say to that. He clearly enjoyed being a gadfly, though. He didn't make too many friends that night, but I think he did just what the professor asked of us.

Two weeks left in the semester. I think we'll be getting a take-home final because there's no way we'll get through the rest of the student papers next week. We only got through four out of seven planned papers thanks to Bob, me, and five or six other loudly participating students. This is fine with me. I have to write a one page argument demonstrating deductive and inductive logic, which I'm going to do tomorrow as it's due on Monday and I'm about to go out of town. Good thing I'm taking tomorrow off. My flight is at 8:30pm so I can rewrite the paper, do laundry, pack, wrap presents, cook dinner, and still play with the Sims.

As a bit of lagniappe I leave you with a link to my favorite online dictionary, The Skeptic's Dictionary, which includes a definition of begging the question, my favorite fallacy of all. I particularly recommend visiting the definition of Angel Therapy. Have fun looking things up, and see you next Monday.

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