Beans, brics and nets

Inclement weather (or at least the forecast of same) will postpone tonight’s end-of-year bean trivia extravaganza. I’ve asked my hardware engineer to find us a room for tomorrow night, which will make it an extra-extra vaganza. So it goes. If not tomorrow, next Monday? Time is running out for the Sailors to earn their beans in calendar ’08.

For those who follow such things, the new Pffft is out. It’s not exactly another bric [sic] in the wall, but has anybody looked at the financial pages recently? The state of the oil market for Russia and Brazil, the downswing of Chinese manufacturing vis-à-vis the world recession, India about to nuke its neighbor to the west… One can argue about something relevant, given the situation, I guess, but I wonder if the world is moving faster than Rippin’ happens to be aware of. As for me, I’d probably advise people to combine the Jan and Feb rezzes and run that the US ought to outsource jetpack manufacture to the BRIC by 2040. By the way, the exclusion of any language referring to economics in the resolution is, to say the least, rather baffling, considering that’s what BRIC is all about. They’ve got to get away from buzz phrases. On the bright side, at least the rez isn’t about the economies in France, Australia, Romania and Turkey. Maybe they’re saving that for NatNats.

Meanwhile, I’ve been meditating a bit on burdens recently, perhaps as a result of having a realllllllyyyyy long Grateful Dead jam on my MegaPod that’s been carrying me back and forth to the DJ lately. (Normally I listen to podcasts, but I’m winding down a bit in preparation for volume 2 of the Butcher S&S series and a general reevaluation of how I’m spending my listening time, all of which is beside the point, but when have I ever demurred from parenthetical comments?) Burdens in a round, it would seem, are often not inherently valid. It might be dodderingly old-fashioned of me to suggest that the aff only has a burden to affirm and the neg only has a burden to negate, not to mention that this, of course, begs the question of the meanings of affirming and negating (although those ideas used to be marvelously intuitive). But those aren’t really the burdens being thrown around in rounds, I think. What’s being contended is burdens that one side or another announces as essential, either proactively or reactively, either theoretically or practically, in-case or off-case or pre-standard or whatever, and then everyone in the round proceeds to concentrate entirely on the fulfilling of those burdens.

Hmmmm.

I bring to the round a net full of jello. I claim in the round that my opponent’s burden is to juggle a net full of jello. If my opponent proceeds to concentrate on juggling a net full of jello, I have managed to get the round neatly into my pocket. And my opponent is stuck juggling a net full of jello.

Question one: is the burden inherent in the resolution, or merely in the opponent’s case? If the former, fine, if the latter, Question two: can you fulfill the burden? If not, then doesn’t it make sense to demonstrate that, simply put, the opponent is proposing burdens that are not intrinsic to the resolution, and that a decision in winning the round should not revolve around extra-resolutional issues (unless both debaters agree otherwise)? If you can fulfill the burden, question three: can you demonstrate how the opponent is somehow also tied to either the burden or some quantifiable result of the burden, and how the opponent in fact does not fulfill the implied result of his or her own burden? If so, win. If not, maybe your fulfilling the burden regardless of your opponent is enough to win. Worst case is a mooted point.

What I’m saying here is that, just because your opponent claims such-and-such is required to win the round doesn’t make it true. Evaluate the claim. If you like the claim and feel you can win on it, go for it. There’s nothing wrong with ad hoc agreements that this is what the round is about. But if it’s some damned-fool thing that has nothing to do with the resolution, or there’s nothing in your opponent’s actual case that relates it to the resolution (as compared to all the pre-standard rigamarole that’s all the rage these days, i.e., LD’s latest hula hoop), then you’re in a situation where, in a word, your opponent is making it up. How does it not succeed to demonstrate that the imposed burdens are bogus? Does every debater feel in every round that he or she is obligated to juggle every net full of jello tossed over by the opponent?

If I talk nonsense, and you reply as if it isn’t nonsense, we are both talking nonsense. If I talk nonsense, and you can prove that I am talking nonsense and that you are not talking nonsense, all I have left is a net full of jello.

(And I apologize to the creators of the Muppet attraction in WDW, who I guess were the first to use that particular pun, which is a groaner only to people who watched “The Mickey Mouse Club” in the 50s.)