One thing is that this makes it sound like "force" is the primary measure of scoring for kendo, but it's not. Judges (there are three, majority is required for a point) have significant leeway in judging hits and one of the primary, if not THE primary criteria is whether the striker displayed proper "spirit," which can be explained in various ways.
A forceful strike that simply does not show intention would never be given a point; in fact, at lower levels where such things happen, it wouldn't be uncommon for a clearly reckless, forceful strike to a target area to be given a foul.
Valid scoring areas are also incredibly limited and unrealistic.
The point I'm trying to make in a roundabout fashion is that kendo is just as much a victim of sportification via rules as fencing. :)
Is there a way to change the rules of public debate to align the game with the interest of the people?
To the author's point, it seems like the problem is fixed for a short time after new rules are introduced. Then, after the Machiavellian players figure out the weak points, the competition becomes a grotesque of what it was intended to be.
This makes me think Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he said we should rewrite parts of the constitution[0] once a generation.
It's much more difficult to game the system when the game's rules keep changing.
[0]https://newrepublic.com/article/63773/what-jefferson-said
Is the problem that politicians are too good at debate or is the problem that voters lack the critical thinking skills to recognize that they're being played? I'd lean much more towards the latter. In watching public policy debates during election cycles, I always notice how little it resembles the debates I did in high school. Politicians, debating the way they do for voters, would lose in high school debate competitions. If anything, debate taught me to recognize nonsensical arguments that were, none the less, somewhat convincing. I wonder what would happen if more voters were acquainted with the experience of having won an argument based solely how you argued rather than the substance of your position.
> Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he said we should rewrite parts of the constitution[0] once a generation
Ah...but now you've just created a meta game that controls the actual game. The Machiavellian players, as you put it, would just figure out how to control the rule rewriting process to achieve their necessary victories once the game starts being played. The only thing that makes the rule changes in debate work for a while is that the rules are written by impartial people who are trying to fix a broken situation and, crucially, are ineligible to play by the rules they create.
Gerrymandering: states are precisely "cracked and packed" to maximize the number of expected majority-red districts in a state and minimize the number of majority-blue.
Partisaned primaries: optimization of campaigning and stumping is done thru visiting specific states that vote early in the primary. Most people don't vote for the best possible candidate, they vote for the candidate they dislike the most that they think can win. The biggest states (CA, TX, NY) are traditionally vote only a few weeks before the end of the primary while NH and IO vote extremely early, and thus, have outsized influence on who most people get to vote for.
Electoral college: Republican candidates don't spend any real effort in deep blue states and Democratic candidates don't spend any real effort in red states.
These are the extreme optimization of quirks in our "democracy" in the same way modern fencing is an extreme optimization of modern fencing rules rather than training for real-world sword fighting battles.
This definition of gerrymandering makes it sound like only Republicans do it, but in fact both major parties do it. For example https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/how-dee...
Btw, the way to counter a flick is to not get hit by it. I know that sounds stupid, but whipping the blade substantially decreases it's length. So just space around it.
I was a sabreist but my friends did foil and spent a lot of time bitching about the change. (Some people looooove their flicks)
Something similar seems to have happened in sport fencing. The style of fencing in the 19th and early 20th century is now known as "classical fencing". It was practiced as a sport but also as a preparation for duels, so the techniques had to be useful in a fight with sharp weapons. Wikipedia[1] says
> Scoring was done by means of four judges who determined if a hit was made. Two side judges stood behind and to the side of each fencer, and watched for hits made by that fencer on the opponent's target. ... There also were problems with bias: well-known fencers were often given the benefit of mistakes (so-called "reputation touches"), and in some cases there was outright cheating.
Then in the 1930s, electrical scoring was introduced. This is objective, but it led a big change in style, because now you could score by just touching your opponent, even if such a light attack would be ineffective in a real fight.
By contrast, kendo never introduced electrical scoring, and still uses human judges. A judge can refuse to award a point if an attack connected but didn't have enough force behind it---this avoids rewarding techniques that would not work in combat. So kendo is maybe closer to actual sword fighting, but on the other hand e.g. Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash makes fun of the subjectivity:
> As in fencing, you're not allowed to kick your opponent in the kneecaps or break a chair over his head. And the judging is totally subjective. In kendo, you can get a good solid hit on your opponent and still not get credit for it, because the judges feel you didn't possess the right amount of zanshin.
I guess the corresponding thing in debate club would be to give more discretion to the judges, so they wouldn't award a point if there was insufficient follow-through...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_fencing