The Way of the Sailor

Typical statement from a Sailor: “You have a blog?” I told them that I write about them all the time, and eyes widened, but then I admitted that I didn’t invade their privacy and wasn’t nasty about them (or any more nasty than I am to anyone else), and they seemed to lose interest. Why do I do this again? I couldn’t even get insatiable reader Meh interested in reading Summer Street once I told her she’d have to cough up three whole bucks.

It’s going to be a long year.

Anyhow, we met last night, and talked about The Eternal Mug’s Game (i.e., recruiting), Model UN (yeah, right, considering how many people we get to debate, including the team members), and, eventually, the topics. Started with LD, and talked a lot about how activist blocs in the US direct the political dialogue, and how different it would be if the only people who voted weren’t the nutjobs on either side of an issue. For that matter, look at the 2012 presidential election, which was only really run in a handful of states that were in play. Of course, I still think referenda are a better cynosure for getting a sense of what the rez means, even if it’s not necessarily relevant to actual cases. It helps you get your mind around it when you focus on issue-related voting rather than election of officials.

As for PF, we talked the Con.

• Assume a subconscious judge distaste for preemptive warfare and unilateral action.
  
• Start with the object of the proposed action—prevent nuclear proliferation—the disadvantages of which are so severe as to warrant action in the first place.
  
• Cover the list of just war imperatives, but focus on the two important ones, competent authority and last resort, as the others are relatively easy to accept.
  
• Don’t propose attacking Iran; just use the Iranian situation as one that could possibly evolve into one warranting the action.
  

Of course, that was all what I said, and I don’t even know I would do it if I were to start writing a case, but it sounds reasonable to me. Next week we’ll look at the Pro, and presumably I’ll come up with something similarly pleasing to me and no one else there, and they’ll go on to do whatever they were already planning on doing, but that is, of course, the Way of the Sailor.

The Way of the Sailor...

Meanwhile, more than just thinking about rezzes and catching up with the Hendronauts, the new season means starting to pay attention to tabroom.com as people put up more tournaments, as well as monitoring the tournaments I’m attending and/or running. Until I started working on beating up the software (which, btw, Kaz and JV are happy to relegate to me), I hadn’t thought about it at all. Gotta get back into the old habits, in other words.