Thursday, February 02, 2017

In which we call a spadoodle a spadoodle

In the divvying up of my social media life, there is Twitter for Trump, since that’s where he likes to make his messes. There’s Facebook for mostly debate friends, because that’s where they gripe about debate. Unfortunately a lot of them also like to gripe about what is shaping up into the Second Civil War, but I’m already saturated with that from Twitter, so I’m just mostly posting entertainments, amusing myself more than anything, and tiptoeing through the carnage. There’s Slack for work, because media people think it’s the coming thing and who am I to question it? I do work for a media company, after all, even if I am in the old-fogey corner of it. Then there’s blogging (here) for long form (-ish) discussions of, during the season, the tournament business, and out of the season, whatever. And that is enough social media for any one person. I have to admit that it is Twitter that absorbs me the most lately. I’ve become obsessed with watching our country be degraded by an ignorant clown and his self-serving cronies, treading within the first few weeks into remarkably dangerous territory that could literally bankrupt us and/or bring us into a shooting war. The damage already done to the meaning and the values of the US is inestimable, and the clown has only been in office a couple of weeks. But, as I say, I’m not going into that here. I apologize for bothering the VCA with these thoughts. I figure it is highly unlikely that you don’t already have them yourself.

I’ve just sent out a cri de coeur over policy judges at Penn. The bottom line is, we ain’t got any, and nobody wants to bring any. In a nutshell, this means that, unless things change, there won’t be any policy division. It is small to begin with, and I think represents more of a desire by the Penners to be a full-service tournament than any real dedication to the art. But when the waitlist for JVPF is twice as large as the whole Policy division, I think the situation explains itself. I would point out that, for those who run tournaments, PF is twice as profitable as Policy because you can squeeze in twice the teams into the same rooms for the same amount of time, and, well, the entries are there wanting to get it. I made that point in my presentation to the NDCA last year. It stands today. I don’t make the facts, I just report them. Who would have thought, back when Ted Turner Debate pulled out onto the runway, that it would end up like this? At the time, LD was the thing, the up-and-comer, the growing concern. Now? Not so much.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes…

Meanwhile, as the tide turns to qualifiers for CatNats and NatNats, Mar-Apr LD is guaranteed housing. In the US, this certainly stretches our rights vision, but internationally it is often considered a basic human right. Something tells me that if this were being argued in 1997, it would be rather interesting. In 2017, maybe occasionally interesting, maybe a mess. I do like the subject area, in any case. Students should be thinking about what does and does not constitute the responsibilities of government. If we presume that government exists to protect rights, then what are those rights. Of course, I believe that government has a responsibility to do what only a government has the capability of doing, so I approach the question from the position, do we live in a society where individuals may no longer be capable of securing their own housing, making that a government responsibility? Health care would fall under this line of thinking, i.e., is health care such today that it goes beyond the abilities of individuals to maintain it? Of course, this line of thinking is not what the rights-oriented resolution asks, so it’s just bloviation on my part. Still, what should the government do? What should the US government do? Is it doing it? Or is the US government just all a bunch of dogmatic idiots incapable of doing much of anything?

Am I giving myself away here?


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