It occurred to me that the ephemeral nature of blogging means that I can write stuff that would change the world, and a couple of weeks later it’s gone into the ether. I know I have to set up the blogspot tag function, such as it is, but I needed more than that. Multiple-parters like the one on geopolitics will be good material again some day, and I hate to lose it. I have a similar set I recently did on tournament management (now on the Bump site), plus a series on feminism from a while ago. Of course, there’s also the classic, nay, epically classic series of Caveman, which also has podcasts, and is posted on that page. So I decided henceforth to corral series that should be archived, and put them over into greatest hits on the right for accessibility. And so I did. I have a couple of old ones I might pull out, like the feminism if I ever assemble it, plus it gives me space for new stuff. While I am unlikely to provide you with straightforward positions for resolutions (write your own cases, you spalpeen!), I do hope to clarify issues to some extent. My goals are not definitiveness, as I write these things pretty much off the top of my head, but to provide a starter kit for your own head. Also, this allows me to save the Chump for the ages, which is reason enough, eh?
Meanwhile, writing the geopolitical series has put me behind, so let’s play catch-up.
Yeah, Dana Perino didn’t know about October 1962. Ah, youth! Curiously enough, the same confusion of the missile crisis with the Bay of Pigs occurred on the ship of Hud. Which leads to an interesting situation. When two people share a zeitgeist, they can communicate quickly with the easiest of shorthands about all sorts of things. Teenagers today know all about teenage things today. They know all about music and television shows and movies and whatnot from a position on the ground where this stuff actually matters. This has been a part of adolescence since the early twentieth century and the advent of mass media. Adults take different views of such things. But nevertheless, if you are 17-years-old, don’t even dream of challenging me on Beatles questions. Not because I’m any particular expert on the Beatles, because I’m not, but because I lived the Beatles at the time. I breathed the air. All you’ve done is listen to the records, and maybe even read the books, but you vassn’t dere, Charlie. (Wow, now there’s an obscure reference.) You can no more challenge my knowledge of this than I can challenge your knowledge of [pick something generational you know that I don’t]. It’s not a question of knowledge, it’s a question of having lived through it. And my point here is that, when you present in front of a judge, that judge’s life experiences inform his or her intelligence, and if there’s a difference in generation, that judge will know stuff at the core that you, if you’re lucky, may have vaguely heard about. If you get what the judge considers obvious stuff wrong, you’ll look like an idiot. I do have advice on this, and it’s easy enough. Given that most debaters will need to pick up parent ballots, and given that most debaters have a parent or two, and given that the parents of debaters are probably from the same generation as your parents, discussing the context of resolutions with your own parents, and maybe learning what that generation as a whole has confronted about a particular issue from them, can only help you in developing your cases. (It also makes for good kid-parent relationships, and brings your poor parents into your universe in a useful way, and if the poor parent has to actually judge at some point, gives some perspective to them of a rez from your younger, debating perspective.) The debater who does not work out contexts with an older generation (which includes a lot of coaches, obviously), is making a big mistake. It would be nice if all your judges were two years older than you are and subscribers to your own personal paradigm, but the idea that the world is made up of people predisposed to give a rat’s poop about you is a bad starting point for most journeys. Anyhow, I’m giving good advice here. Ignore it at your own risk.
A while ago O’C asked me to do something at his “I’ve Got Nothing Better to do with my Winter Holiday than Debate Institute,” but I had something better to do, but I did get a surprise day open, so I figured what the hey? I’ll do something that Sunday, and he’s now trying to figure out what. Give me, oh, three hours (including break) and I could do Caveman! With visuals! But that is soooo deep background. I’ll do whatever he suggests, if I can scrape together a real lecture on it. Should be interesting. I’ve always wonder what they do at institutes. Now, it turns, out, I discover that they’re listening to people like me. They’d be better off learning to bake pies.
My opinion of the Jan-Feb topic is gleanable from the geopolitics essay, as in, there seems to be a lot of open ground for discussion (and that isn’t even beginning to look at preemption and just war). On the other hand, I can’t say I’m enamored of Jan Pffft. We may have a strategy for the con, but it took a lot of torture to get there. A good resolution is balanced. The subject of Civil Disobedience is not balanced on a policy level, because it has proven effective numerous times. One can argue the theory of CD, but is that what Pfffft wants to be? LD with two people and less prep time? I don’t think so. I continue my stalking of this activity, and did a tad of judging at Ridge, only to be rewarded with underlining of what I already believed, which is that the smartest team with the best knowledge wins. Duh. But it’s hard to get really knowledgeable about a new subject month after month, or even marginally knowledgeable. Which makes this activity a tough one for people who aren’t willing to do a lot of work, despite initial disparaging from many corners when it first appeared on the scene that it was Debate Lite. Far from it. Picking up the ballots of that ineffable pool of people ousted from the other judging pools by tossing around data on the history of Irani nuclear intentions (and non-nuclear intentions) is not exactly a mug’s game. Way more than LD in general it has to be research, research, research. Then a month later, all new research, research, research. Quite a churn, there. Anyhow, with the Jan rez, the only person I’d be willing to debate on this is Oprah. She can go first. On the con.
No comments:
Post a Comment