Friday, August 29, 2008

And so we bid a fond farewell to right and wrong. Again.

I didn’t lard up the morality discussion with a lot of examples, or aim it specifically at Sept-Oct, because I’m more interested in the topic as a whole than as specifically applied to any one particular resolution. (The whole thing is now a pdf over in the greatest hits, if you’re interested, by the way.) I wish I had put in one thing that I found in the Rawls article I posted on the Feed last week, however, the utilitarian analysis of rape, measuring the pleasure of the rapist against the pain of the victim, to which the response is, you’ve got to be kidding. The problem with academic/absolute approaches to any line of thinking is that sooner or later you’re defending something patently idiotic. But in a debate round, I must admit, I recommend that debaters prepare to argue the extremes of their position, if necessary, because this means that the major ground of their arguments must be solid to even get to those extremes.

Anyhow, starting next week we'll get back to the usual nonsense. Everyone will be back in school. O'C will have his gnomes busily churning out trophies to meet his voracious appetite for tin while he traipses through high school basement after high school basement searching for the results of the 1973 round between God Knows Who and Whatshisname. WTF will stop telling us what the campers had for breakfast, although that seemed to be the high point of their summer, to hear the Montwegians talk about it. The $ircuit folks will wonder how they're going to pay for all those extra flight surcharges in the final stretch of the enlightened Bush economy. Hillary people will not get over it, but at least they'll pretend to. And we here at Coachean HQ will continue in our dedicated program of telling you all the things that you didn't need to know, want to know, or care about after you knew it. It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.

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