We bid farewell, probably, to WTF; a new hope (?); alarming episodes; next year, Miley!

All right, that was fun, but it’s time to get back to the real world. Even ten-a-day updates from O’C get old after a while. There’s a regular existence that needs tending to.

CP and I have been in discussions over a certain school that shall, for the moment, remain nameless. I’m relatively willing, but I have some issues that need to be resolved first. At times I feel as if we’re the tournament SWAT team, and when we come in, we don’t take any prisoners, and the forensic universe is a better place for our having been there. But I also get the feeling sometimes that we’re seen as merely an advertising tool to make any tournament look better because, hey, how bad can it be if the Usual Suspects are running it? But in the actual event, all we can do is insure professional tabbing. It takes more than that to make a good tournament (although you really can’t have a good tournament without it). CP’s great contribution has been getting schools to do all those other things, and the continued growing strength of the Bullpups is one manifest result of that. And speaking of which, I have to admit that I am very much looking forward to the Pups again this year. If we get that building we had last year, and if they get decent hospitality for the judges, this is going to be a high point of the season. But I’m also looking forward to a bunch of others. Big Jake, for instance, because I love watching O’C run around going crazy because there’s not enough chrome on the 23rd place traveling trophy. Anyhow, as information breaks I’ll pass it along. For the moment suffice it to say that negotiations are taking place, and if they work out, the forensic universe will be a better place for our having been there.

I have added an alarm to my calendar to remind me to keep posting Nostrum pdfs. I should get one or two a week up henceforth.

And—ta-da!!!—I have finished updating the Hillary Duff, which is now posted and ready to go. There’s good new information on justice and morality, and some Frenchies ported over from Caveman. I was going to toss Rand and Maslow as old-hat, but I decided to leave them in. These two old chestnuts have definitely been replaced in the cycle of materials run in LD, to which most of us say, “Thank God,” but they still have their relative points of interest. Anyhow, with this behind me and checked off on my to-do list, I can move on to a few other projects. I do need to get a bunch of stuff done before summer is over. So far, I feel that I’m on track. But registration for the Pups is in a couple of weeks, the resolutions come out in less than a month, and who knows what-all will be needed after that.

The injustice of justice; -273.15 degrees Celsius; the Summer of Love

I spent a little time with Justice last night. The problem is complex. People have been thinking about justice since what seems the beginning of time. At best, we can come up with a general sense of what it is, but the minute you start pinning it down, it looks up at you as if you’ve got a hole in your head and points to something you just said and shows you how that is entirely wrong, which is soooo frustrating. Normally the fact that a concept is slippery would not bother me all that much. Plenty of philosophical concepts are slippery, so what’s new this time? Well, the thing about justice is that it seems to inform practically every LD resolution. We are constantly saying that we are attempting to achieve justice, which forces us to explain what it is that we are achieving. While we all, perhaps instinctively, have a sense of what justice is, that’s not always good enough for a debate round. Certainly the fly-by phrase doesn’t capture it, i.e., “giving everyone their due” or “defined as fairness.” And at the point where we’re trying to achieve something that we can’t categorically define, even though we clearly know and agree that the thing exists roughly a certain way, there are people who will take advantage of your lack of a categorical definition, easily going so far as to say that your concept of justice must therefore be false, and often going to the extreme and saying that justice itself is a false construct. Show of hands, ladies and germs: how many people noticed that the new list of LD resolutions only uses the word “just” once? (All right. Actually, it’s the word “unjust”.) Maybe the committee is tired of nailing this particular jelly to the wall? Could be, folks, could be. It’s been explicit so often in resolutions lately, maybe they’re hoping that someone will finally come up with a new value or two in the rounds themselves. Now for a while, I don’t think. We’ll have to shake off a lot of old justice dust first.

In any case, I will end up with a working definition, plus some historical analysis and some applications. At the point at which a debater can argue successfully that there is no such thing as justice, we have performatively proven the existence of justice by performing an act of injustice (picking up that argument), thus confirming the positive by confirming the negative. Can’t have cold without hot, in other words. For that matter, all you need is colder; even if you can’t prove the existence of absolute zero, you can demonstrate one thing is colder than another, and the colder one is the closer of the two to the absolute. If cold is the goal, the colder one wins. Same thing applies to selling your soul to the devil, which never happens with an atheist. I mean, if the devil came up to an atheist and said, sell me your soul, the atheist would immediately see that the existence of the devil, the negative, proves the existence of God, the positive, and therefore, would keep his (un-)damned soul to himself. (What? Selling your soul to the devil is a metaphor? Now they tell me!)

I see that institutes have started up, along no doubt with the annual drive by instituters to get passed the resolutions they trained on during the summer. There may be a cart/horse situation here in terms of why they chose to train on those rezzes in the first place, but this practice does afford undue theoretical advantage to institute students above and beyond the sheer act of having gone to the institute. The good news is that almost every case written on a rez at an institute sorta sucks. A self-correcting machine of sorts, then. In the past one of my hardest coaching jobs has been demonstrating to campers the errors of their institutional ways. Occasionally they haven’t believed me and debated their summer loves, and the resulting heartbreak, while predictable, has still brought a tear to the eye. Summer loves are chimerical. Trust me on that. Not that I’m not in favor of institutes: I rather like the idea, actually. It’s just the cases themselves that are problematic. Wait till Yale. You’ll see.

The joy of techs; the joy of Vegas; farewell to the summer of 08; Feed thoughts

I managed to send Little Elvis into an uproar yesterday by downloading a bunch of TV shows from iTunes. When you have little or no hard disk space, the last thing you need is too much new data. Fortunately at some point I remembered the raw podcast files, and cleaned up five—count ‘em, 5—gigs of space, and the problem was solved. A new Airport base station arrived yesterday, adding another joy to the electronic life of the chez, but I didn’t install it yet. I need to extend the network to the upper forty; it seems a simple enough deal according to the Mac support docs, add to which the ease of doing, well, almost anything on the Mac versus doing that same thing on the PC. Of course, maybe everything is peaches and cream on the PC side now that Vista is out there. (That’s meant to be a humorous statement, if you were wondering.)

Things are pretty quiet on the forensics front, of course. NatNats is over, although I gather a few coaches stayed behind to actually enjoy Las Vegas without the handicap of minors transported across state lines distracting them from the city’s main attractions. I admit I enjoy Las Vegas for the gestalt of the place, which can pretty much fill your brain for three or four days before you even realize it. I like to gamble, but I don’t, much, because aside from statistical deviation, you are guaranteed to lose your money, which is not all that much fun. And on a more level playing field, so to speak, I’m not a good enough poker player to attempt it against strangers (although I’m intrigued by the idea of a backroom game some day against JV and maybe a few other sly dogs). I do like shows, however, where the spectacle outweighs the content (i.e., 17 different iterations of Cirque de Soleil). And who doesn’t want to get beamed aboard the Enterprise? And there’s plenty of good restaurants, unlike the olden days where it was all $1.99 buffets featuring all the filet mignon you could eat (most of which tasted as if you had gotten it from a $1.99 buffet, if you could get to it after pushing all the senior citizens out of the way, which isn’t easy because those walkers give them an extra purchase on their chosen turf). The first time I went to Las Vegas was in the 50s, so I’ve seen it change many, many times. And vice versa. Anyhow, as soon as they announce a debate tournament there for coaches only, I’ll be the first one to sign up.

I have been chiseling away at the Hillary Duff. Some of it was in better shape than other parts of it. I’ve also got some other projects I’m working on of a non-debate nature, so the evenings are filling up pretty quickly. Summer is always so short. I mean, it’s already practically over. The 4th of July is next week. That’s about half of it. And then, well, it’s September. Whew. That was fast. Damn. I didn’t get half of the things done that I needed to do. On the plus side, all that time elapsing so quickly means that there’s that much less time remaining in the Bush presidency. So, there’s a positive side to everything.

This whole Zimbabwe story, while sad, is fascinating. It’s got everything: freedom, tyranny, racism, globalism, violence. The Policians have studied Africa at great length, which is something we haven’t done in LD (or in Pffft, at least on topics I recall, but my experience there is more limited). I fed (feeded?) a story yesterday demonstrating growth of nations, and I was listening last night to an interview with Fareed Zakaria, author of The Post-American World. We see growth on the globe everywhere but Africa. Why is this? Why has this one continent missed out on so much? It is, as I say, fascinating, but also sad. And I don’t see any big change coming in the short term. Or, for that matter, the long term. Maybe the growth of China, and their need for resources, will ultimately make the difference. I have no idea.

Meanwhile, who are the Jonas Brothers; there's something out there; calendar gel

As soon as you start looking at something to edit it, you end up rewriting it. Or at least I do. By the time I’m done with the Hillary Duff, it will be the Miley Cyrus. Oh, well. It’ll be better. That’s what matters. (Not that I’m saying Miley Cyrus is better than Hillary Duff, mind you. This is not a theological discussion. Then again, I wouldn’t know either of them if I saw them in a police lineup. I mean, be realistic here.)

I’ve been Feeding a lot of metaphysics pieces, it seems, and I am struck by the number of leading lights (going back to Plato) who have suggested that, since our senses are limited, there is probably some whole ’nuther thing out there underlying reality, which they maintain exists because they can’t know through sensory data that it exists. What??? Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this the same thing as paranoia? Then again, paranoia would be, I can’t see them, but I know they’re out there, while in this case it’s because I can’t see them, I know they’re out there. I was obviously not cut out to be a metaphysician. I just hope my Ethicist License doesn’t expire any time soon.

Next year’s calendar remains in flux. It’s looking as if Newark will hold two-day novice divisions as part of their invitational, which is something we discussed back at Northeast Chumps. We were all very much behind this; it would eliminate the MHL that weekend, but everyone would benefit from more rounds. O’C and I would tab the event, probably at a separate school for both LD divisions. However this works out, I like it. From my perspective it makes Newark so much easier than trying to shuttle down two separate groups on different days. Another weekend starting to take shape is the one before Bigle X, with an expanded ALJ event and possibly a conjunction of NY and NJ UDLs somewhere else. We’ll see how that works out, but it, too, might end up MHL-less, but with all the MHLers debating elsewhere. More to come on that, but probably not soon, as school years are coming to a crashing thud all around us.

And I see that we are now going into round 382 of the NatNats hostage situation in Las Vegas. WTF reports that the event is predicted to end by Labor Day. With any luck.