Thursday, November 19, 2009

WSM, JSM, MJP, LBJ, JFK, CIA, A/T, TWA (the abbreviated version)

I’m off tomorrow to Wee Sma Lex. It is indeed wee sma on the LD side, but it’s positively gargantuan on the PF side. What’s going on up there in Massachusettsland? At least I’ll get to powwow with CP while I’m churning cards (this one’s going to be manual). We can MJP up tabroom.com to our hearts’ content, for one thing, although I think he’s mostly got it knocked already. Plus we can plan our Tigger dining options, always an important aspect of coachean conferencing.

I’ve been reading the Sandel book, by the way, and while it’s probably fine for general audiences that have never heard of justice, I’m not all that thrilled with it for our purposes. John Stuart Mill came out more in favor of personal liberty than pure utility calculus? Well, yeah, duh. I’m glad to see that the book is a hit and all, but my guess is that beyond introducing the subject to novices, there’s not much here. Then again, there’s nothing wrong with a readable book that introduces the subject to novices, so I just might make this suggested—not required—reading, once it hits paperback. The bottom line is, it’s not original thinking but synthesis. Nothing wrong with that, but not terribly necessary in the LD universe.

We podcasted up last night, so to speak. Tabbing, posting brackets and results, breaking all 5-2s (and, heaven forbid, 6-2s). Some interesting stuff. The tech tip was about Google in general, as in, you want it, they got it. While I’m reluctant to concede some of the maligning done by my partners in podification against poor Yahoo (which is your humble servant’s email of choice, admittedly with half a dozen Google accounts feeding into it, and which is also my team’s listserver of choice, which I think runs neck and neck in functionality with Google’s groups app, with maybe a slight edge to Yahoo because of the calendar), one thing that is true about “the Google” is that there’s always something new going on. I have my Wave invitation around here somewhere, and need to check it out, for instance. And I live on Google’s Reader. (We plan to talk about RSS on a future show, or maybe news in general which, as the VCA knows, is a big concern of mine.) And I blog on Blogspot/Blogger. What can I say about Google, then, except that I just love the Kool-Aid?

So with all of that, I wonder, what’s happened to my world? MJP. Endless tournaments. T shells. That’s just not me. Or is it? We’ll go into all these things in depth here sooner or later. What’s important to keep in mind is that an activity like ours is anchored on certain principles but nonetheless needs to be flexible in its achieving of those principles. I’m very Hegelian on all of this. Very dialectic. From my perspective, one of the biggest problems in LD is not the changes proposed by the wackos, but the unwillingness of powerful people in the activity to listen to what the wackos are proposing. Some of it isn’t wacky at all, if your concern is those core principles. And some of it is so wacky that it evaporates entirely on its own. But at the point where you are unyielding because you refuse to even consider change, then I don’t think you belong in forensics. A few years ago a lot of people were in a snit over the impending implosion of LD. It hasn’t happened. The trends then that were seen as damaging were mostly the use of “philosophers” who were far from meaningful as ethicists, which was a real trend that has mostly passed, and speed, which has been a real trend since my Day One and it’s about time people got over it (a good debater turns the speed up and down depending on the judge, end of story), and theory, which is turning out to be nothing more than people applying names to things that were ever thus, but going overboard with the idea that naming something somehow makes it more important—a dog will still bite you, or not, whether it’s a dog, un chien, or a great googly-moogly. The bottom line is that everything we think we know must always be subject to challenge (which brings us back to J S Mill). The truth will out because it is challenged. That’s just the way it works, like it or not.

It has ever been thus.

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