In which we are right, yet again

About 75% of the voters chose not to support the PF topic on schools going to your house and standing over your shoulder as you troll all your ex-friends on Twitter and Facebook. I'm glad to see it, although I admittedly did not necessarily predict it. The voters have chosen the less debatable topic in the past, so their preferences are no guarantee of much of anything. Of course, the topic that was chosen does have its problems, at least to me, but maybe that's because my default mindset is old LD, and we would have framed this as a basic rights issue, where the conflict is between the individual and some sort of society. Plus the added issue of this being the school vs the presumed child: what rights, if any, do children have? This becomes especially interesting when the presumed child is also the debater. 

At the old Hud, when this was an LD topic, we started thinking about the rez by trawling through court cases. There's plenty, and the discourse therein on both sides came up with numerous arguing points. Needless to say, we didn't argue that because the courts said something, it was right. We just used what the courts had said, pro and con, as fodder for our own arguments. But yet again, that's an LD approach. If PFers are going to launch evidence battles, as is their wont, one wonders what exactly counts as evidence. Will they be going extreme, because that's where the action (unfortunately) is? Beats me. In any case, I still think they're better off than they would have been with the other topic. Only time (all two months of it for Sept-Oct) will tell.

The reason I didn't post the last couple of days was that I was up lounging at Mohonk Mountain House, in the Shawangunk Mountains about an hour and a half from my house. Lots of hiking to earn the right to big hiker's meals, reading a book of my own choice (and then, to balance things, one for the DJ), watching Russian and non-Russian dancers and listening to a couple of flautists have at it, and generally letting my brain have a holiday. But now it's back for a while, until the next week off. I can't wait. I do love a good vacation.