Trade this, you yabbo; nail me to the nearest VW; My Dinner with Non-F

So now Palmer wants to trade with me. He wants the CatNat LD topic, and in return, I get the CatNat Pfffft topic. Nope, not good enough. He needs to throw in one Original Orator, two Duo teams and six Declaimers to be named at a later date before we can even begin to deal.

The nerve of that guy!

Curiously enough, I just posted on the feed a list of artists and their projects that is, well, germane (?) to the issue of what is art. Take a look at it, or if you’re not an Eater (i.e., a follower of the feed, which is akin to being a member of the VCA but sort of like the mother’s auxiliary), go Google the name Chris Burden. But you’ve been warned. We’ll start evaluating art according to our new prescriptive definition in the near future. Whether this will help with CatNats I highly doubt, but then again, if you have a native understanding of what art is, it won’t hurt when it comes time to argue about it.

Speaking of arguing, sometimes you just have to recognize that you shouldn’t because you’re just not going to get anywhere. One of my houseguests last night, during a discussion of the CatNat LD topic (I recommend that my students discuss these things at the dinner table, because God knows I certainly do it myself), equated athletics with stupidity. More specifically, she claimed that all college athletes (and she’s a professor, so she knows a bunch of them) are stupid, or at least the vast majority. The problem with this statement though, even if it were true, is that it requires one to provide a link between athletics and stupidity. Now if you made that statement, and I asked you to provide the link, i.e., the inherent aspect of athletics that made people stupid, or the inherent aspect of stupidity that made people into athletes, you would either provide it or admit that there wasn’t one. But that’s because you’re a forensician. Non-Fs don’t get it. They see ample examples of the truth of a conclusion, and therefore do not feel a need to challenge the logic of the conclusion: they do not recognize that the conclusion requires a direct causal link, without which one has subscribed to a logical fallacy, the truth of the matter or lack thereof notwithstanding. Cum Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc, if I’m not mistaken. But then again, I’m no logician. And I’m not a person to argue with, unless you’re actually willing to argue absent a commitment to a position. If you actually believe what you are saying, then discussing something controversial with you won’t be much fun because you’ve already committed to your conclusion. True debaters are like true gamblers. As a true gambler will wager on which bird will be the first to take off from the branch merely for the sake of having a bet on the table, the true debater will argue anything for the sake of arguing it. Content is beside the point. But to be honest, I do disagree with the athletes=stupid claim. Everyone knows it’s the fine arts people who are stupid.