I’m caught in a bit of a death’s door situation. My head
feels like it’s in a bucket of jello, with one ear not working much at all
aside from a raging waterfall of tinnitus. At Regis last Saturday I was
told that it’s something that’s going around and a lot of people have it, which
provided at least a bit of company for my misery. I even took a day off from
the DJ just to not have to pretend to hear what people are saying. Anyhow, I
seem to be slowly recovering—accent on the slowly—so don’t start sending your
lily orders to the funeral home just yet. But I’m not up to snuff, and won’t be
for a while. I think I bought that PS4 right in the nick of time, to get me
through sick days. I could use a big pile of comics, though. That was what used
to get me through when I was a little kid. Big piles of DC comics, from
(although who knew it at the time?) the Silver Age. It was almost worth it to
get sick to provide my father with an order to bring home from the city. Except
for some reason he always felt that I needed Little Lulu as well as Jimmy
Olsen. This was why we had the notorious Generation Gap in the 60s.
We haggled a bit over the idea of special wording for an
internet rule for tournaments, and didn’t come up with much. The problem is
that the NSDA is not definitive, and/or LD and Policy don’t care and do what
they want anyhow, and everyone is perfectly content with that. It is in PF
where we get all the hoo-ha. I just don’t want to penalize people for
relatively innocent connections, mainly accessing their research in the cloud,
which could cost them a round, if one were a stickler about it. Yes, you can
access your research in an offline vacuum if you really think about it, but
it’s a pointless exercise unless you're educating students against DDoS attacks
(thank you, Russia, for that display of the lurking threat within the IoT last Friday
for the Pfffters among us) or protecting government secrets. When I added
wordage about what isn’t allowed, vs what it, murky waters were riled. But just
saying what is allowed seems like merely scratching the surface. Of course, in
the field, the complaints we get from debaters are more of the “they lied about
their evidence” variety. This, at Regis, was novices at their first debate regurgitating a
tag from a piece of evidence someone handed to them that they never fully read
or understood, where if one were to read the whole article, one would find that
the tag is misleading. By me, this is hardly lying about the evidence, or any
sort of fabrication. It’s just novices starting out and learning that the prize
goes to the more knowledgeable side, when the gap of knowledge is noticeable.
Do your own research, in other words, and try to understand it. It seems that
every time there’s another PF challenge of some sort, it’s different enough from
the last one that we have to think about it all over again, and when we look up
the rules, we find enough contradiction to discourage us from even thinking
that rules exist. We do usually say that we’re following NSDA rules, though, as
some sort of guideline. It’s a conundrum, unfortunately. The students and
judges are confused, and then they come to us and we’re confused. It could be
solved by people doing their own research and representing their evidence in a
straightforward fashion, but for some reason PF folk haven’t gotten to this
point yet. Policy is all about evidence, and there the issue is clipping, which
is indeed an attempt to deceive, as compared to fabrication, which may be an
attempt to deceive but which just really isn’t a thing, as they say. Oh, well.
We’ll keep limping along with all of this.
I guess I should acknowledge that you can now vote on the
next PF topic. The subject area is federal drug policy, and the two choices
couldn’t be any further apart as examples of that subject area. The pharma
incentives seems straightforward enough, harms vs benefits, and I like it as an
area for students to learn about. I had to look up Plan Colombia (and, admit
it, so did you), so it’s either a tad obscure or I just didn’t happen to be in
school that day, but, also, there’s nothing terribly wrong with learning about
that sort of thing, I guess. More than the choices themselves I’m amused by the
idea that they represent different aspects of the same area of study. Drug
enforcement does not equal pharmacy industry regulations aside from policing illegal
selling. In other words, this is one hell of a wide net. But at least neither
of the topics strikes me, on a first, superficial reading, as bad. Just about
as comparable as the proverbial chalk and cheese.
By the way, look down the page at the Big Questions topic: "Science leaves no room for free will." Say what? Am I getting too old, or am I
just missing something completely? Don't tell me "both." Let me keep some dignity, please.
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