Coachean feed: Special climate change edition

More links of interest to the debate community.

• Mitt Romney: Climate change is real, but addressing it would be wrong Not as lame as it sounds.
  
• How about some ideas for coping with the change? Blocking the Sun: Study Looks at Costs of 6 Geoengineering Schemes
  
• I think it unlikely that there will be denials, but one never knows. The Distribution of Summer Temperatures,1950-2011
  
• Climate change challenges power plant operations Or, everything is connected to everything else.
  
• Oh, great. Impacts. How Climate Change Could Make Summer Crime Waves Worse.
  
  

It's all the fault of the Village People

What's their fault? Dissuading people from joining the Navy. There was an ocean of new Speecho-Americans last night, but only a drop of a single freshman debater, a senior no one had ever seen before, plus a pair of middle schoolers. (Naval ROTC? NOTC? Years from now they're going to wonder why I refer to them as the Nazis.)

I'll betcha things aren't much better at the YMCA.

Anyhow, I'll push for a little more recruitment this week. The fact that Speech is thriving is good, but debate needs its souls as well. I don't hold out a lot of hope, but we'll see what happens.

In any case, after going through my usual rigmarole about the team to the assembled multitude, we broke off and I talked to the debaters, mostly about the October PF topic. Yesterday was the first time I more than glanced at it. It is, as is often the case, a tad problematic: Developed countries have a moral obligation to mitigate the effects of climate change. Originally I was thinking about what I thought it said, but look at that phrase "mitigate the results of climate change." Let me quote from NASA, which is the first result on Google for "results of climate change":

Global climate change has already had observable effects on the environment. Glaciers have shrunk, ice on rivers and lakes is breaking up earlier, plant and animal ranges have shifted and trees are flowering sooner. Effects that scientists had predicted in the past would result from global climate change are now occuring: loss of sea ice, accelerated sea level rise and longer, more intense heat waves.

In other words, Developed nations have a moral obligation to mitigate the effects of shrunken glaciers, shifting fauna/flora ranges, accelerated sea level, more intense heat waves... You can't change the weather, but you can deal with the results of the the changed weather?

Look up the word elide in the dictionary. Then again, you might not have to. It's one of the things debaters do instinctively. Sometimes because they don't want to really run the resolution for purposes of weaselness. Other times because they sort of can't. Sigh.

The resolution very specifically asks if the nations that historically caused climate change (you don't otherwise achieve development) ought to now deal with the harms. Well, yeah, except for instance that a recent harm is increased tornadoes in the northeast of the US. Maybe the government should go out there and stop them? Na'ah. Go out and sweep up afterward? I guess so.

Climate change looks like a great topic, and there are great topics in the ideas of development versus environmental protection, which this sort of glances off of. But I do wonder if anyone on the proposal side of this business ever bothers to write the proposed resolution on the board and then parse it, like we do at meetings. They would have seen pretty quickly that, first, the last phrase is a mess, and second, that there's virtually no good argument to say that developed nations aren't obligated. One could (and maybe will have no choice but to) argue that governments don't have any moral obligations beyond social contract (which isn't very PFish), but then again, since there's nothing in the res that says nation to other nation, it would be protecting one's own citizens—

So far the Menickean navy has not signed up for any October debates. Looking at this resolution, they may never do so. Oh, well. I will gird my loin chops and head blindly forward. Mine not to reason why, and all that.

I eagerly(?) await the November topic.

Abundant PF resources? Na'ah.

I expect that eventually I will eschew Pffft resources and draw on my own materials, but let’s face it, this is my first full year as a PF coach, and I’ll take what I can get. There isn’t much.

There was a nice introductory piece at NDCA: September Public Forum Topic Analysis: Renew the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. Made me glad I sent them my thirty bucks or whatever it was. We worked through it at the chez last night, and it provided good food for thought. I thought that the NFL was doing resolution analyses (I remember the top of Kevin Tidd’s head in a couple of videos last year), but I couldn’t find anything there reagrding the Sept topic. Maybe I just missed it. In any case, if they haven’t done it by now (the topic’s been out since 8/15), there’s not much point in it going forward. I recall when they were doing LD papers they always came out about halfway into the topic, at which point everyone was always into the next topic. Plus ca changerooni…

For the Sailors, with exactly one tournament on a topic, the return on prep investment in September is fairly slight. I’m looking forward to October, where they could debate literally every weekend, if they were so inclined, or at least one version or another of the 1.5 of them. Meh says she now has a job but isn’t sure when, and Zip hasn’t come down from the summer mountain yet to tell us his plans, so with exactly one stalwart, the seas are choppy at best. Tonight, as I think I already pointed out, I’ll visit with the Speecho-Americans to talk about, among other things, recruitment. We need warm bodies. Makes me wish we had a bigger school.

I feel curiously out of the loop vis-à-vis the Pups this year. I’m not involved in the waitlist or the judge sales, so mostly I just look at it once in a while and ruminate. The waitlists in LD are coming down slowly but surely, but I still think we’re going to play it close to capacity. Oh, well. I’ll feel in it once it gets started…

And on the blogging front, I seem to be settling into a pattern of putting things in pot pourri entries more often than not, and saving individual entries for those moments—rare—when not only do I have something to say, but it is something worth saying. We’ll see how long that keeps up. Being busy with the new season, and busier than usual at the DJ, means fewer empty hours to fill writing my usual nonsense high-level cultural analysis.

Sept PF and Sept-Oct LD

I found a position piece from the NRA in a quick lookup for the September PF topic. I loved this: they used the phrase “assault weapons,” i.e., they enclosed the words in quotes, a sort of typographical sneer if you will, and certainly the kind of usage I love to see in political debate. It’s the same as calling an estate tax a death tax. If we want to ban assault weapons, no quotes, we want to ban dangerous weapons that have no reasonable purpose but to kill innocent people, preferably in great quantities. If we want to ban so-called “assault weapons,” on the other hand, we are abridging our constitutional right to protect ourselves and our families.

What a crock.

Anyhow, I love the idea of arguing gun rights. It is probably the most complex constitutional issue that people generally ever get their heads around these days, aside from the belief that somehow the Founders thought we should all be good Christians and that this is somehow written into the document, except that the latter is patently untrue while the former, i.e., the right to bear arms, is, if you’ll pardon the expression, debatable.

There are specifics that one needs to study. The Federal Assault Weapons Ban is specifically referenced, so first of all, what exactly is it and why was it enacted? Of course, from my LD background, I’m always first and foremost interested in the why should we or why shouldn’t we, the inherent moral and ethical issues. But of course there are also the real world analyses: what happens if we do, what happens if we don’t. Good stuff. I’m not sure how it will play out in rounds, but for most folks around here, it’s a one-shot at the Pups and then we move on.

On the LD side of things, I like the study of due process, but I’m not terribly convinced that there’s a good argument to follow due process in some crimes and not others, depending on either the crime or the accused. I mean, if the US stands for anything, it stands for justice, and there is no justice without due process, but what do I know? So for me, LD is an easy vote for the aff, but then again, I won’t judge a single round, so no one has to worry that I’m prejudiced. At the point where we can pick up any scary looking non-citizens off the street and toss them in the pokey and throw away the key without a warrant (literally and LDy), we might as well be some totalitarian hellhole like, oh, Canada for instance. But as I say, the study of this topic will be good for the brains of the assembled multitudes, especially novices. I like seeing an educational topic in that Sept-Oct slot. There’s nothing about this that would shake my faith in the Modest Novice, of course, but we’ve all seen worse. Plenty worse.

Why PF?

From the comments: “What made you move from ld to pf as opposed to ld to extemp and congress?”

The short answer is that I don’t know much about Extemp and Congress, and I’m very tied into the debate circuit. But there’s also a long answer.

LD and Policy, and now PF, are a way of life, at least around here. After one gets one’s feet wet as a novice (and, for that matter, occasionally even then), tournaments are multiple-day affairs. They require travel, planning and commitment. They are not an extracurricular activity so much as a student’s total non-class life. You can’t do it by popping in now and then, because your competition is way too dedicated and they’ll eat you for breakfast. You’ve got to dig in as much as they do. And you’ve got to do it weekend after weekend, all over the map. This kind of debate will subsume your life. And I consider that a good thing.

Around here, speech is maybe twice a month, one-day affairs within relatively easy driving distance, punctuated by the occasional college event. Debate is every weekend, somewhere, at some level of intensity. Not that everyone does every weekend, but a lot of people come close. They sort of have to.

I’ve always maintained that while the forensics activities themselves certainly have value, all the other things required for getting into those activities also have value. You can’t be a regular participant at debate tournaments without the ability to organize your life to do so. You have to get all your other work done to make it happen. You have to show up when and where you’re supposed to show up, week after week, tournament after tournament, meeting after meeting. This generates life skills that you will have to learn, if you haven’t already acquired them. The intensity of debate, and the frequency, solidifies those skills. Speech, because it is less ubiquitous and simply doesn’t take the time aside from the activity itself (I would imagine the strong extemper spends every bit as much time on prep as the strong LDer), doesn’t have that intensity aside from within the rounds themselves. It’s the travel, the planning, and the resulting competency that I value from committed debate. They’re just not part of speech, at least around here. And Extemp and Congress are lumped in with the speech tournaments, not the debate tournaments; I understand that it’s different elsewhere.

So it’s not the activities themselves, it’s the attending hoo-ha. In fact, I’m rather fond of Extemp and enjoy judging it at the occasional District tournament, but it’s just not where the action is for the debate life in the northeast.

PF's road to perdition

Look at the comments on yesterday's post.

I wonder if PF really will go the path of previous debate activities. A couple of things need to happen.

First of all, we need to eliminate all the lay/parent judges. As long as virtually all the judges in a given pool are practically straight out of the cabbage patch, there is little likelihood that competitive debaters will be tempted to get too inside baseball. There’s no future (and no ballot) in it. Can this happen? Can we transform the judging pool? I look back to LD in, say, 1995. There were graduates, but no real breed of assistant/private coaches. There were coaches. And there were parents. Today, it’s primarily graduates and assistant/private coaches (at least in the most preferred category). I remember strolling over to LD land last year from PF land, and all my friends, coaches of star debaters, were sitting around doing nothing…

Keeping the pool lay will require some unconscious commitment on the part of the community in general, but the inertia of using parents—they’re cheap, they’re easy to train at the present level of the activity, they’re inherently interested in what their kids are doing extracurricularly, they provide built-in chaperones—will be hard to unseat. It could happen though. Tab rooms will have to commit to the same inertia: put all the judges who can’t do anything else into PF. All those judges are, pretty much by definition, intelligent adults. PF was built to influence intelligent adults. So far, that is all good.

Secondly, we need to build up a solid structure of institutes, staffed by former debaters. One of the big reasons that Policy and LD are so inside baseball is that they have enough time on their hands to go inside baseball (i.e., summer vacations), and a willing crop of college graduates to help them along with it. Will we have a system of PF camps across the continent before long? As sure as the girl scouts sell cookies… But these camps aren’t particularly dangerous without the following point.

Thirdly—and this one is something we haven’t talked much about yet, but eventually we’ll get to it—before PF can go inside baseball, there has to be an inside baseball. LD didn’t really know what it was until the value/criterion paradigm was invented (which happened after LD was invented: LD was values debate, whatever that was; the V/C answered the question). When we talk in the back room about the problems of PF, one that always comes up is that no one has really figured what it’s about yet, in the meta sense. If no one ever does, we’ll be okay. If someone pins it down, it gives the folks at the institutes something to feed on, and the path to perdition will begin being paved.

There may be a tendency for any activity to eventually start gazing at its navel, and start confusing its navel for the rest of itself, but there are also brakes that can prevent it. I’m willing to bet that the parent-judge nut won’t be cracked for quite a while. That’s our best hope. Because there will be institutes, and those at those institutes will do their best to earn their keep by creating some sort of mystical lore worth paying for. That’s certainly what the Policy and LD institutes do now. They teach you all the stuff you coach doesn’t even understand, and thus you’ll win like it’s going out of style, because you’ll know all the latest techniques, and you’ll know what debate is really all about.

We have to check back in in about ten years, and see where we are.

The numbers talk

We chezzed it up last night, and talked a little bit about recruitment, the time for which is now, vis-à-vis the Middle School (which sounds like the school the Hobbits go to). And we looked around and saw that there were exactly three debating Sailors. In my office at the DJ, I have a bunch of pictures of fleets past, and each one has maybe three or four kids from each year. We never set sail for a season with less than a dozen, and often there were more. Now there’s two freshmen and a junior.

Dire straits, indeed. We could, potentially, go out of the debate business. Thank goodness the Speecho-American Sailors remain strong.

A lot of the reason for this is the simple pendulum swing, the ebb and flow of interest in the school community as a whole. But when I look at all the people who have started on the team lately and then dropped out, I realize that, for all practical purposes, it is LD itself that has shooed them away. Contemporary LD, that is, LD as it is practiced hereabouts, LD rounds that they watched when the novices were encouraged to audit a varsity round, or LD rounds that they get trounced in, when sophomores hit seniors in random rounds and couldn’t even flow what was said, much less figure it out.

Let’s make an argument that LD, as it is practiced at the so-called highest levels, is the best possible version of LD vis-à-vis pure debate. That is, if you were going to design the activity and what should go on in a round, this is what you would design. I’m willing to grant that (although I don’t personally believe it). Today’s LD is as good as it gets. Okay, fine. The problem with this version of LD, unfortunately, is that it is extremely high maintenance, absolutely necessitating participation in intensive summer camps and requiring a dedicated staff of private or assistant coaches during the tournament season. And it is conducted in such a fashion that only those who are a part of this high-maintenance process of dedicated coaching can understand what is happening in the round. It is not that the participants are being secretive; far from it. They’re all proselytizers at heart, which is why they got into debate in the first place, and they’re as likely as not to want to bend your ear with their theories and paradigms. They publish their thoughts regularly, they critique ad nauseum explaining their thought processes following a round. This is not a closed cabal, in other words, insofar as admission truly is available to anyone, provided they are willing to participate at the necessary level of intensity.

But that’s the thing. That necessary level of intensity, even if it has arguably made LD as good as it gets, is inherently a turn-off to most people. Most students, when faced with something they feel that they should understand but that they can’t, find other ways to exercise their intelligence. Smart young novices see what is going on and a lot of them decide that it’s just not worth the effort. And it is absolutely true that the effort needed to succeed in LD in 2012 bears no relationship to the effort needed to succeed a decade or more ago. Back then, you could go to institute one summer, but if you didn’t, you’d catch up. Lone wolves could succeed at tournaments by scoping out the activity for themselves, not by hiring a battery of private coaches. People might talk fast, but you could pick up the style after a tournament or two, and the speed bore no relationship to the speed today. And the content of the rounds themselves was predictable based on the nature of the resolution: the odd debater who didn’t argue somehow what the resolution was about was, indeed, an odd debater. People actually affirmed or negated the resolution, in front of an audience that was not limited to former debaters. No one wanted to try to persuade an untrained parent judge back then any more than now, but a trained parent was a reasonable audience that a debater could handle if the debater were any good, and there were plenty of trained parents that started out when their kids were novices and learned what to do and learned it pretty well. Like me.

I blame LD for the size of my team. I’m moving over to PF, which certainly has its flaws, because at least those flaws are flaws that are not detrimental to attracting and retaining membership in a debate team. The flaws of LD, on the other hand, are detrimental to attracting and retaining membership in a debate team. Even granting LD its excellence, it is like policy with its particular excellence: virtue had better be its own reward, because when all is said and done, that’s all you’ve got.

I offer no solutions for this, if one perceives it as a problem. The numbers will speak for themselves. The more I go to tournaments where they’re breaking down the doors to do PF and we’re able to make room for them because of the ever dwindling size of the LD fields, the less I’ll care. We have, fortunately, a general debate activity. Maybe it’s not as pure and good as LD and Policy, and maybe it too will go down the road to perdition, but for the moment, it’s doing the job of grabbing the attention of a large contingent of high school students who are interested in adding forensics to their intellectual bag of tricks.

Thank goodness.

Grumble grumble grumble

I read these LD essays on WTF, and I have no idea what they’re talking about. Of itself, this wouldn’t normally bother me, because there’s plenty of things in the world I have no idea about, but in this case, you’d think at least I’d be interested enough to want to understand them. But I’m not. I’m not putting down the writers here, because they seem to know their stuff. It’s the content. They’re writing about things that have nothing to do even remotely with what is supposedly the content of the rounds. Why even bother to have resolutions, if the core of your argument is that you ought to win because you’re aff or neg, on the basis of some rhetorical observation/analysis unrelated to content? Has LD really gone this far off the track? If this stuff is what’s really happening in rounds, I have to admit that I just don’t care.

All right. You’ll accuse me of being a dinosaur, and there is certainly some reason why the image at the top of this page is what it is. And I’m sure you can provide all kinds of analysis why this is good material for the activity. But the way I see it, the ultimate extension of your case is that LD is now no different from automobile mechanics. It’s entirely about the workings of a machine qua machine workings, and not at all about driving around from place to place. Me, I’m more of a traveler. Then again, I would posit that being knowledgeable about the various topics—targeted killing, domestic violence, etc.—is more educational than being knowledgeable about argumentation per se. These days it seems that a minimal amount of effort goes into studying the topic area specifics, and a lot of effort goes into studying how to argue the topic area generalities. The result? Meh.

Meanwhile, there is a problem on the PF side, where all we’re supposed to have is the resolution, and no overarching/underlying value proposition. April’s topic is mandatory vaccinations. The problem here is that the science has pretty much sorted itself out, and the nutters, if they haven’t gone to ground, don’t have any science to support them anymore (because, well, they never did). Which means that one has the numbers of this and that on either side, to be weighed out on a CBA, but nothing meaningful to tie it into. When this was an LD topic, you could argue the justice or morality of forcing populations to do something, and tie it into an ethical framework of some sort (and I’m using the word framework here in the normal sense of the word, not the LD sense, which is, I gather, itself no longer clearly defined). In other words, I would want to argue what is right and wrong about vaccinations deontologically, but I am prohibited from that by the nature of PF itself. I can only weigh consequences, even when those consequences are virtually identical, or non-comparable, because first, no framework, and second, the language of basic ethics is not inherent in the language of PF, as it once was in LD. Sigh.

So what does one do in all of this? Well, if all I’m able to do is weigh which side has the most flaws, modern-day LD is the clear winner/loser. It’s arcane and progressively limits itself to a smaller audience at its perceived highest levels. It may break out of this—it has changed dramatically a number of times in its history—or it may just solidify. PF, on the other hand, remains generally accessible, which as its sole virtue (if it is its sole virtue) is a damned good one. It might not be as classically sophisticated rhetorically as LD, but I’ll go back to the metaphor above: when it comes to car races, the auto mechanics are absolutely essential, but it’s the drivers who get the fans and the glory.

(Okay, it’s not the best metaphor, but members of the VCA are used to that by now.)

The end of the eleven top ten

I look at the new iPad and have no interest; my good Republican cloth coat original iPad still does the job perfectly well. No wonder my LD list seems so out-of-date.

4. Fast thinking
You have to be able to think fast, both in CX and when prepping rebuttals. Preparation in advance of a round, and remembering the responses you've already developed -- rather than creating them on the spot -- is the best approach because it requires that you save your fast thinking for the unexpected, while using your memory for the predictable.

This one is interesting. For lots of debaters once upon a time, responding to arguments meant, for all practical purposes, making something up on the spot. Over the years we’ve evolved into finding the response on your computer (not true when this was written). Fast thinking is still required, but the skill is totally different. Before it was fast creative thinking, now it’s fast recalling. You know you’ve got the response there somewhere; you’ve just got to find it. This is actually a good skill, learning to organize in such a way that when you need something, you can find it. The way this is worded wouldn’t require much if any rewriting for PF.

3. Time management
Use your all time in a round correctly. Your constructives should be timed perfectly. 1ARs should be half and half Aff and Neg (although some varsity think 1:30/1:30 + 1 for V/C analysis, overviews, underviews, middleviews, views of the lake from the cabin, the view from tab, a dim view of the proceedings as a whole). NRs should end with a minute or two of crystallization, while 2ARs should be all crystallization. Use all your prep time, even if it's only to take a deep breath.

Well, when was the last time you heard a 2AR that was all crystallization? Nowadays they just replay all the arguments and give you 27 sufficient and independent reasons to affirm as if they really believe there could be such a number. Judges buy into the pretense, presumably because they get caught up in the magic. Dream on. Still, voting issues are required…

Anyhow, using time efficiently is always important; this can be easily revised for PF rounds, although the emphasis on using prep won’t be so important because there isn’t much of it and it’s mostly spent finding files.

2. Judge adaptation
Since ballots come from judges, working with your judges is, at least according to the HH coach, who will always rank this as #1, the greatest key to success. With former debaters and coaches, you can confidently use a certain measure of speed and LD lingo (almost always -- you'll know the exceptions). With parents, assume that they are rational adults who would like you to be clear and simple in your analysis (see Simplicity, above). They'll also respond to knowledge and confidence, not to mention speaking well. They will be less accepting of speed. If you actually know the individual, that is, if you know the judge, you are best off, because you can -- and must -- adapt to what you know that judge likes.

Here’s the deal about public speaking, aside from high school forensics. Rule number one is to know your audience, and adjust your speech accordingly. Let’s say you are giving a talk about the future of personal computing. If you are giving this talk at Apple HQ, you would do it differently than if you were giving it at my mother’s nursing home, even though the content would be roughly identical. You have to know what it is that your audience knows, and doesn’t know, so that when you’re addressing them, you don’t lose them. If you tell them what they already know, or talk in terms they don’t know, they’re lost.

In LD, back in the day when at any given tournament you could be judged by a wide range of adjudicators, this was absolutely the number one rule of debate. Nowadays, where you can engineer your way through MJP to a reasonably narrow band of judges at least in your most important rounds, it is still required—you will get the odd inexperienced judge, or a coach like me wheeled out from tab because no one else will fit, etc.—and you have no choice but to slow down and simplify, or lose (provided your opponent is smart enough to slow down and simplify; if neither of you do, you both deserve to lose the ballot coin-flip that will transpire, at least metaphorically). Adaptation is still required, but not from round to round, and hence, it is not a top priority.

There isn’t a lot of need for judge adaptation in PF at the moment, given that most PF judges do tend to be lay, even though some of them might be mightily experienced. All of them want what PF proclaims to offer, which ultimately is good speaking and clear points and big picture. So, for entirely different reasons than with LD, this doesn’t loom all that large.

1. Knowledge
There is no such thing as too much research. At the highest levels of debate, all debaters are created roughly equal skillwise; it's the work they do in advance that can make the difference. Contrariwise, if you don't know it, don't use it. Know what you know and avoid what you don't know. Of course, the more you know, the less you'll have to avoid!

It was revolutionary when the Sailors voted this number one over judge adaptation. A sign of the future, you might say. I’d reword this a tad, perhaps, but knowing your topic inside and out is the best thing you can do in aid of winning a round. So, probably, number one again.

Continuing with the eleven top ten...

Somebody called me yesterday from Rippin’ wondering why I hadn’t re-upped for the year. I think I showed remarkable restraint, which is similarly demonstrated here on a daily basis. ‘Nuff said.

When last we looked at the eleven items on the top ten list, we were up to here:

8. Speaking well
If you sound like your mouth is filled with month-old molasses, yet everything you say is intelligent, you will win some rounds. If you sound like a polished Shakespearean actor, with resonant tones that soothe the judgic ear, yet everything you say is idiotic, you will win even more rounds. If you sound good AND talk smart, you will dominate. Practice speaking exercises. Listen to the advice at meetings. Never underestimate oratorical skill.

I would say that this has become way less important in LD (it was on its dying legs even when we last espoused it) and absolutely crucial in PF, where the audience is almost entirely parents. Plus, the paradigm for PF in the first place was presentation, when it was called Crossfire and based on the TV news commentator idea. I can’t say I’m upset that this will feature higher up on the final PF list. Speaking well is a good thing, and while I have nothing against the other skills being taught/learned in Policy and LD that have replaced classic public speaking, I nonetheless like that it is still alive and well somewhere in the debate forum.

7. Opponent adaptation
Adjust your style appropriately. Treat lesser opponents with respect. Treat stronger opponents with the understanding that anyone can be beat. Don't speed-talk against a slow talker. Getting good speaker points often depends on your keeping your cool in tough, unbalanced pairings, regardless of where you yourself are in the balance.

This one probably still holds true in LD, and will be true in PF, although most people don’t practice it as much as they should. Not the treating opponents with respect part; I think that most debaters know enough to be polite in their LD rounds when they know they’re capable of eating their opponents alive. But adjusting to the opponent, absent competitiveness? That’s something else. For the judge, when it’s not so match a matter of talent balance but a question of approach, if the two debaters are coming from totally different directions, the judge must immediately intervene by deciding which approach is preferable. If both debaters are coming from the same place, life is much easier for everyone in the room. In the new rules, this one will probably be rewritten, but one way or the other will continue in the running.

6. Fast flowing
Practice flowing from day one, and never attend a round without flowing it. Even practice rounds. You will simply continue to get better at it. Fast, accurate flowing will mean the difference in your toughest rounds. Learn all the different flow styles and use (or create) one that works best for you, not the one that works best for someone else.

Why would I change a word of this?

5. Confidence
If you act like you know what you're doing, you might actually convince your opponents and judges that you do, in fact, know what you're doing. It is easiest to act as if you know what you're doing, by the way, if, in reality, you do know what you're doing.

Also hard to improve. How many rounds have been lost the very second that debaters look at the schematics and see that they’re hitting someone they think is better than they are? You don’t have to even walk into the room to lose the round, in other words, because it’s already lost in your head. Do the best debaters always debate the best? Is every round completely predictable? But I think more to the point on this one is that people (judges) respond in a certain way to confidence (as compared to visible abject dismay) that is favorable. Not arrogance, just a belief that you belong there, and have something to say worth listening to. It’s usually true, so why not act as if it’s true?

The Eleven Top Ten Items, deconstructed

This is like the ultimate trip down memory lane:

Top Ten List for Successful Debating

I think this was originally written during the early years of the reign of George III, but I may have the date wrong. It evolved over time, but was still relevant five years ago, when it was published. I bring it up because I'm going to start something comparable for PF, but it might be instructive to look at the list in its own right, as it might relate to LD today.

11. Physiological management
Control of your body leads to control of your mind. Get the right amount of sleep & food at tournaments. Drink plenty of water all day long.

This one's a no-brainer, and it's true for all branches of forensics, and plenty of other things as well. If you're going to a tournament, you're away from home, maybe in a hotel, there's adrenaline around every corner. Yes, you can stay up all night prepping for the round you're pretty sure you'll have tomorrow morning, but unless you have a team of assistant coaches to work with you on it (and some of you do, which was unheard of when this was written), you won't get all that much better. It's like cramming for exams. It might work, a little. Then again, it might not. What is true, though, is that debate competitions tend to be marathons, and the more you think about the endurance aspects of the race, the better you'll be. I would suggest that half of the late rounds are not won but lost, and the debater with the most legs has an advantage. This one stays in.

10. Having fun
You should be enjoying yourself. Everyone who has a winning record in this activity enjoys batting around ideas with like-minded individuals. A sense of your enjoyment will infuse everyone in your round, including your judges. Of course, you don't want to take it too far -- many judges have the same sense of humor as cheese pumpkins. So play it straight, but enjoy yourself. If you don't like debating, why aren't you on the chess team instead?

Fun is a lot different nowadays. How many big yucks have you heard in LD rounds lately? Seriously? There used to be plenty of strong debaters who infused their work with humor; there's not much room for that anymore, certainly not stylistically. I would even question if the activity has anything to do anymore with batting around ideas with like-minded individuals. The fun, alas, seems to be gone. Not terribly bad advice in PF, though, where often everything is terribly mean-spirited. Lighten up, people!

9. Simplicity of cases
The more simple your case is, the easier it is to understand. The easier it is to understand, the better it will sound to the judge. The best rule of thumb is, try your case on the youngest person in your household, down to about age 6. If they look at you like you've got beans in your brain, simplify it. Keep in mind too that the better you understand a resolution, the easier it is to explain it, and vice versa.

Read this one as if it was proposed by Martians. There's nothing here that holds true today in LD. I would suggest that this will almost inevitably go into the PF list, however.

More tomorrow...

The Seven Debating Santini Brothers continue the move

The old LD curriculum, after the initial meetings where everyone tried on the sorting hat and headed off either to Debateland or Speecho-Americana, began with rights, the social contract and morality. Occasionally, just for a change of pace, I’d kick off with morality. One could, I guess, tie right and wrong into the protection of rights, but traditionally we look at deontological and consequential analyses, which are a different business altogether than weighing conflicting rights claims. So we would mostly talk about these concepts, rights and morality, independently. I tended to talk about justice a little later in the game, primarily because the mind has so much vacant space available at any given time, and it seemed to make sense to let a few other basics sink in first. But before long we would have covered those three key ethical concepts in some depth, i.e., rights, justice and morality.

Next up we would talk about the structure of an LD round. Then the nature of arguments. Then the writing of cases. And of course the topic at hand (in our case, Modest Novice). Figure that now we’re at about the middle of October.

I can live with that. The elders on the team can contribute, and we can switch over to them regularly enough to discuss their PF topics of the month.

When November 1 rolls around, we’ll have a new topic (for December). We can all start talking about that together, which finally puts us on the same track resolution-wise, although I would expect participation from all on any topic discussion. What also needs to come up at this point, after the newbies have debated those 3 opportunities from the first-timers to the first MHL, is the beginning of training for PF.

What seems to me that is most different about PF and LD, and what I’m putting as my number one in the top ten rules for PFers, is that facts/evidence dominate. The rule, to my recollection, is that you should never open your mouth in a PF round unless there’s a piece of evidence in it. There’s other rules as well in the top ten, but I haven’t sorted them out yet completely. When I do, I’ll share them. Meanwhile, this indicates to me that the first PFish thing that we train on is research.

Having no debate over the weekend (and watching the calendar count down until the end of the season on—yikes!—April Fools), I did more work on the cur, but so far I’ve only tackled the easy stuff, moving things around and putting in “debate” where it says “LD.” When it came to research in LD, I never pushed much, on the assumption that research was the idea that cut out the ribbon clerks. I demanded little or nothing; if they didn’t do it, they would eventually drop by the wayside. But in PF, research is the heart and soul, and some other means of cutting out the ribbon clerks needs to be determined.

A paradigm shift if there ever was one.

Another way to switch from LD to PF is to throw a fat guy in front of the trolley

I’m going in deep and revamping everything.

Once upon a time I had a pretty decent curriculum for weekly LD meetings. I started with some key concepts like rights and morality, then went on to the structure of rounds, and the parts of an argument, etc., etc. Which was all swell and good when we were an LD team, but if we’re going to mostly be a PF team in the future, something’s got to give.

So, I’m rethinking everything, and planning everything out in my great book of debate life, AKA the Cur. Everything has to be looked at. Even my remarks on parents’ night are no longer entirely accurate. But the first big issue that arises, to which I have no particular answer, is when to switch the average novice from LD to PF. I still like the idea of starting people in LD. There’s no partner issues to worry about, for one thing, and an argument is an argument. Plus, early rounds have little to do with debate per se and much more to do with things like showing up and thinking on your feet and writing cases and public speaking. (Yes, novices in LD do engage in public speaking, although nowadays we quickly move them away from anything so unrewarding as speaking well.)

Because we run the Modest Novice topic from September through November, I can get three solid months taken care of without thinking about it. But what happens in December? I’ve been thinking that, since the team as a whole will hear the December PF topic on Nov 1, and we’ll quickly start brainstorming on it (provided I actually have repeat offenders next year), starting the noobs in PF in December makes some sense for that reason alone. Unfortunately, there are more novice LD opportunities after the turn of the year than there are novice PF ops. There’s no question that the debate community has yet to embrace Novice PF in this region, despite the popularity of PF overall. Old habits die hard, I guess.

Of course, the switch time will never be set as hard and fast. Some folks may never want to switch, and I’m certainly not going to force them. And maybe I’m deluding myself that I’ll have enough novices to create even a single PF team, considering how tiny the Huddian Navy is at the moment.

Oh, well. Thoughts to ponder as a plough the waters of the Cur.

The Tiggers

Princeton has come and gone. Some thoughts.

First of all, we made a conscious decision upfront that we would feature the PF division. It had the biggest TOC bid, and at colleges these days, it’s a big draw. This was absolutely the right decision, I think. We opened 160 slots, and never really had much of a falloff. The field was well-balanced, and geographically diverse, with a lot of Florida folk adding a little sunlight to the proceedings. Dario was handed the data and sent forth, and managed to run everything on time in the expected transparent fashion, and we realized once again that Florida’s gain was our loss, but he loves it down there so what can you do? One thing about transplanted northerners: they know better than to show up in New Jersey in December in short pants. This may be how you can separate the nuts from the coconuts, so to speak.

The second big decision was, rather than trimming the fields, running the LD divisions back to back. I think this went well too. We had to move into PF rooms on Saturday night and got slightly hung up, but not for more than 10 minutes in one or two cases, so that wasn’t a problem, and the word on the street was that having a couple of hours off between rounds makes the day a joy. I remember when Pton used to do that, and I was judging, and that’s exactly how I felt. Throwing in some nice weather (albeit not enough for short pants) didn’t hurt. Even if we can get the HS back next year for PF, I think I’d still stagger the LDs. It just makes for a nice weekend.

Inside LD tab, there were a few things I would change. I thought there would be more interplay between the divisions, so I put everything on one machine, but that proved to be unnecessary, and a bit of a burden in the crunch times. Also, watching O’C balance the tournament on two computers because one is at death’s door and the other must be kept clear from the evil influence of Windows, was like watching a drunk tightrope walker crossing Niagara in a hurricane. Also also, I forgot my new little speaker system, meaning there was a noticeable lack of hula music during the weekend, although Abdul did manfully try to fill in the gap with some of his more obscure material; problem is, computer speakers just don’t do the job, even when you turn them up to 11.

MJP went well, although we discovered that you have to doublecheck that all the prefs do travel from tabroom to trpc. Most do, some don’t. Go figure. We also offered strikes in PF, as it turns out to resounding disinterest. A couple of schools took advantage, but not many. One school that I know about objected. Dario’s conclusion was that they’re okay because those who wanted them, had them, and those who didn’t have them weren’t harmed. We had thought long and hard about this before the tournament, and I’d say that the results are that the jury is still out. I’m not going to do it again for a while, although I did strongly recommend that they do it at the PF snake pit TOC. We’ll see.

Anyhow, overall Princeton has, I think, kicked itself into the top ranks of college tournaments. The students running it are committed, and they’ve got a good system that keeps them in it over the years to oversee that it’s working well. They did a great job, and rule number one of any college tournament is that the host must be totally committed. They were, and the results were clear.

This is how the world ends, not with a bang but with a CFL tournament

The Regiscopalypse was last Saturday. Normally this is a cheerful little event around Halloween, with four joyful rounds and every now and then I pop out for a latte, and Grandma Julia—Regis’s resident bubbe, so to speak—lays out a judge spread that demonstrates clearly that all the money amassed by the Vatican has not been going to waste. This year they had meatloaf, mac and cheese and sliced Virginia ham in addition to the usual sandwiches and salads.

If I had known what was coming, I would have taken a doggy bag. A couple of them.

I was, as the saying goes, busier than a one-armed paperhanger. First we got round one out, then I did PF judge training, then I got round two out, then I did LD judge training, then I got round 3 out and read the texts from my wife telling me that the world was ending and did I want to be at Regis when Gabriel blew his trumpet, to which I guess I would have to answer that if I had to be anywhere, this was a fairly good choice. Fortunately Catholic Charlie was around to help me with the ballots. Since all the divisions were about as balanced as some really imbalanced thing [fill in your own metaphor here; I’m too cold and exhausted], we had to use cards every time, the only fun in that being that I can show off being able to use cards. Yeah, I know. Big deal.

At one point in the day I got a text from JV down at Whitman telling me that O’C had wandered off from their tab room, asking if I had seen him. Then I started getting texts from O’C about some stuff or other about the Tiggers or something, all of which was interesting enough but, honestly, I was doing that one-armed p.h. thing. The funny thing is, after training the PF parents, having to train the LD parents was like sending off your troops into a suicide mission. You know that their efforts will be futile and that they will never survive, but you need them as a momentary distraction as the enemy mounts an offensive on the Marne or something. The best I could do is promise the survivors that we will look out for them in the future and keep them away from the beast of VLD.

Oy.

Anyhow, after shutting down, we headed north. I had two plebes in my car, both of whom fell asleep as I played music from WDW to distract me from the fact that it looked like a scene from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe as directed by Jean-Luc Godard, in 3-D and Smellovision. One drove at a handful of miles per hour through pure white, on ice, surrounded by fallen and falling trees, the sky ever darkening, occasionally going nowhere in a line of traffic extending forever, watching roads expand and contract from three lanes to half a lane and back again. After finally reaching home, the power was out, the house was cold, and the silence was maddening. Fortunately there was juice in my portable speakers so we listened to Hawaiian music.

Never underestimate the healing power of the ukulele!

It's in their pipes and now they're smoking it

So I walk into the meeting last night, and the room is packed with newbies. Instead of the three I was sort of getting used to, there were maybe a dozen fresh-faced little freshman staring up at me. Apparently there was a general recruitment for all the teams/clubs, and we got some people answering the call. Very nice. Of course, this meant that I had to start at the beginning again, which I really can’t do, but I managed to cover Debate Philosophy 101 in about 20 minutes, and then we went on from there. Whether any of these people will return is questionable, but I talked nonstop for 90 minutes and occasionally someone got one of the jokes and either they will come back or leave the district immediately for gentler shores. I’ll find out next week.


Okay and the Cannibal weren’t there for the PF announcement, but my entire slate of Juniors (two, count ‘em, two) were, and at least one of them was quite happy with this, he being of the persuasion of former LDers who weren’t all that excited about VLD. The plebes probably couldn’t make heads nor tails of any of it; the first-timers probably even less so. Whatever. I’m thinking that the best thing to do is get on the train for December rather than just the one time at most in November. This will allow me to continue concentrating on the Modest Novice and then Nov-Dec through October, which is only two more meetings, while setting up the infrastructure for PF (viz team research).


In private conversations I have had, no one is surprised by the switch. It’s not absolute, which helps. People can LD their little hearts out for four years if they are so inclined, as I’ve said. That’s a good thing, but only for some people. For other people, and I think a majority, PF will be a good thing. As I seek to spread the benefits of debate as I see them to the greatest number, it is, as they say on Vulcan, the logical thing to do.

A Big Change

No, I am not quitting LD.

I am simply adding PF.

It’s like this:

Historically, there has always been a drop-off between sophomore and junior years, or wherever the line is drawn between varsity and whatever leads up to it. We have a fairly healthy JV experience regionally, although I have to plead guilty to removing most of the JV divisions from the colleges and replacing them with novice divisions. This was done to provide more experiences for novices, with the assumption that the other kids going to college tournaments ought to kick themselves up a notch and go varsity. Also, the JV divisions were confused amalgams of debaters with anywhere from one week to three years of experience, which made them a little less than competitive, or a little too competitive, depending on your point of view.

In any case, the drop-off in LD is not new. I’ve seen it since the beginning of my tenure at Sailorville. Whatever the nature of LD over the years, the jump to varsity has meant a much bigger commitment than some debaters were already making. The kid who wanted to derive benefits from debate without giving it the commitment of one’s total soul was left out. That kid could continue with the activity, but only to face a career of relentless losing and confusion. Today’s LD is probably more confusing than ever. At least in the past, while the material might be over one’s head, at least one could follow what was going on. Now speed makes that difficult, unless one has already sold one’s soul to do that speed oneself (no easy trick). As I have said many times, I have nothing against speed intrinsically, but I personally can’t follow it (although I used to, when I judged every week, although now it’s even faster so I’m not so sure I could do it if I tried). Those who believe that speed leads to only judges who can do speed who are, by definition, college students, could be right, but I don’t think that this is exclusively the case at any tournament except, maybe, TOC. Still, speed is almost everywhere, at every tournament, if not in every round.

Another aspect of today’s debate that requires that soul-selling is theory. Again, I have nothing against theory and see it as a useful tool against abusive positions, but given the prevalence of theory in rounds, one has to assume that virtually all debaters are being abusive in the first place, requiring these tools in almost every round to combat them. Also, of course, there are the sort of positions that I’m sure will be used in Nov-Dec, where the argument whether one is morally obligated to help those in need (which, I would suggest, is emphatically negative) will never touch on the moral obligations of helping others in need, but will simply argue the wording of the topic or the intrinsic unfairness of the topic. Again, there’s nothing wrong with arguing at that level, but to be honest, I don’t really care about it. It’s game-playing, and while I love playing games, I also love the content of resolutions, and I’m a little saddened to see the content relegated to a minor position in the discourse, if it holds any position at all. The content of LD is rich, but lately, it’s all but forgotten.

Mostly my concern is not with LD, but with student drop-off. My core belief—the reason I do this in the first place—is that forensics is good for students. All students. Anyone doing literally any forensics activity will be better off as a result. The benefits of debate are learning to write and research and think a certain way, and to speak on one’s feet. All good stuff. I don’t want to limit that good stuff to freshmen and sophomores, who then go off to become mall rats.

So, the program at Hen Hud will henceforth work thus. All novices will do LD all year. Starting second year, everyone will switch to PF, unless they wish to stay in LD. That is, PF will be the default position, and LD with be an option. Practically speaking, it’s the other way around now.

What will the results of this be? Well, I hope it will keep students longer. LD in the first year will train them on basic debate strategy: after all, debate is debate and an argument is an argument (and those members of the VCA who have followed my thoughts on PF know that I believe that a virtual LD structure underlying a PF case is a good idea). I will be able to work with students more thoroughly throughout their career because, honestly, lots of the specifics of LD are lost on me these days, and that is not true of PF. Also, I will be able to rope in more parents to help out. And I think that the average Sailor will have a better debate experience overall. They still can do LD if, for instance, they’re of the Panivorous persuasion—I’m not stopping anyone from doing it, and I will encourage those who want to. But most kids, facing the circuit mentality, tend to fade away, and I want to put a stop to that.

Again, this is nothing against LD. Nor have I ever had anything against PF that I’m suddenly changing my tune about. I love all forensics. I’m just changing focus a little bit.

And I don’t think I’m alone in this.

Thousands (all right, seventy-two) cheer!

I am, of course, going to TOC with the Panivore. While she has traveled with others often during the year as she has bounced around on the $ircuit, I have stayed at home running my normal local course of events, thankful that we have such good friends in the region who are willing to add Sailors to their travel list (and, in the P’s case, suffer through watching her eat bagel after bagel after bagel, interrupted only occasionally by toast, baguettes and the odd Parker House roll). Nowadays the TOC has more judges than the Panivore has gluten, but one still gets put into the pool, and in my case, no doubt ranked about as low as the numbers will allow, not because I’m inherently terrible (although I may be) but because I am startlingly out of practice, and while some debaters will cagily rank me high knowing that they can pick up my ballot without batting the proverbial eye, most will prefer someone who is, shall we say, a little more au courant. I don’t blame them for that. But it would mean a pretty boring couple of days for me (as it is most judges who are not at the top of the preference scale). I’d judge a round or two at most, and one of them would only be because the first choice got run over by a bus on the way to the room. There’s nothing worse than walking into a round with a ballot in your hand and having the contestants fall to the ground to beat their breasts in despair. Then of course I’d be in an octos round, the ballot no one bothers to pick up as they speed along merrily and I do my best to keep up without toppling off the bed as I do so. There is no worse RFD in the world than, “I was able to flow more of you than the other one so you win.”

But here’s the good news. I’ll be tabbing PF. I will be much happier (and busier) as a result, but I’ll still have plenty of time to schmooze and enjoy the event. I do always like TOC, which I haven’t been to in a while. It’s civilized, with rounds ending for dinner, and Kentucky is pretty that time of year. I have always resented not being able to watch the Derby, but this year the tournament is the week before the race, which is nice for an old railbird like myself. And since I’ll be tabbing, I’ll feel productive for a change. Needless to say, my exit from the LD judging pool improves that pool quite a bit, which I guess makes this a win-win situation.

And that will be the end of the year. Looking forward, there’s this weekend off, NDCA, Easter, TOC, golf. Ahhh.

(By the way, I am happy to report that the Aged P situation has improved quite a bit. She is thriving as a result of the monitoring of meals and medications and regular physical therapy. We are looking for a nice assisted living place in the area, where she can maintain both independence and security. All’s well that ends well, in other words. There is still work to be done, but the stress is much less. Once again, Ahhh.)

Are we there yet?

New York got a little banged up by yesterday’s snow, but I gather that Massachusetts got completely blown off the map. Storms are like that, often. We imagine that it’s the end of the world, but the Masswegians know it for a fact. I figure that all will be clear for the weekend for a pleasant Bigle X, however. They’re good at digging themselves out.

The one-day MHL the third weekend of December was the last tournament I went to, and while that one had its issues, it was nonetheless one day, and it was only me and Kaz while everyone else was off soaking up the balmy rays of Blake. Last weekend was cancelled up here, although some folks were down in Alabama or Florida freezing their buttoffskis, so this weekend will be something of a homecoming, a gang’s all here kind of session for the Traveling Tabroom. Some tournaments are like that, which is nice. What amazes me about Bigle X is the size of the PF field, which at the moment is at 67. Mes etoiles! They don’t have a novice PF, which may explain it a little bit, but still. Pffft in New England is on a roll, whereas Pffft in New York is lucky to get a schmear on a bagel. Go figure. CP explains it as N.E. Pffft stemming from speech rather than debate, and that may indeed pin it down. It’s hard to start a new debate wing on an already busy debate team, whereas with speech, it’s just one more event at a one-day tournament, at least starting out. In other words, it’s just one of those things, but one can see why. The VCA knows that I’ve wanted to do more Pffft, but where your incoming freshmen can be counted on the fingers of one hand and that one hand is Jerry Garcia’s, it’s not bloody likely. The other thing I want to do is extemp, but ditto yet again, as Yogi Berra might say.

Poor, poor, pitiful me.

Anyhow, tonight we pack up the long johns and the trivia questions, we charge up everything that plugs in, and then tomorrow bright and early we head for Lexington. I’ll honk as I drive by.

The "controversy" that would not die

One benefit to being alone for a few hours in the chez, after one tends to the feline invalids (or, I guess, the felinvalids), is being able to find the time to record a Nostrum, which I did last night. I pointed out to Jules that he was getting a lot of the information wrong, changing the names of things all over the place, and he finally admitted that maybe he and the Mite weren’t exactly concentrating as much on Series 2 as they had on Series 1. Not that anybody actually pays all that much attention, but it would help me, at least, as the one person who has no choice but to pay attention. But what can I do? They’ll both be at Bump, so maybe then I can sit them down and drill some sense into them. Although back in the day when they were on the team that never worked, so why I think it would work now is a mystery. Then again, what isn’t?

I noticed that somebody in one of my debate feeds was launching a series of debates on the November PF topic, in aid of the belief that issues like these are exactly what students ought to be discussing. It’s interesting how this one won’t die, and how people either think it’s an actual issue with two sides or an absolute travesty of an issue that is beyond sides. The VCA knows my opinion on this by now. Just because people in the world are arguing something stupid doesn’t raise the level of their argument beyond its native stupidity. Granted that turning the volume up on crap makes it noisier, but it doesn’t make it any less crappy. It was George W. Bush who thought that there ought to be public debates over whether evolution was a scientific fact in order to air “the controversy.” But it’s not a controversy. Scientists do not argue the fact of evolution. If they did, that would mean that it is controversial and, presumably, unproven, otherwise they wouldn’t bother arguing about it, the nature of science being what it is. The so-called Bushian controversy would pit people who don’t believe in science against people who don’t hold whatever religious belief is guiding those people who don’t believe in science. Where’s the debate in that? Similarly, where’s the debate in people who believe in the free practice of religion in this country against those who don’t? (If you call visiting a cultural center practicing your religion, but I’ll grant you this one.) I guess you could argue that for whatever reason we shouldn’t allow certain religions to exist or to practice their faiths, but I vaguely recollect that this country was built on the ideal, among others, of the free practice of religion. At the point where it’s the free practice of some religions, the ideal becomes a little tarnished. Not to cheapen the so-called debate over the November topic, but as I think I’ve asked before, how far away is the nearest sushi joint from the Pearl Harbor memorial? Shouldn’t we ban Germans from visiting Normandy Beach? And then, hell, the Jews killed Jesus, so we ought to be doing something about limiting them… As I say, the VCA knows my opinion on this by now. If adults want to waste their breath arguing this, let them. I can turn it off, and it’s not as if my entire life there haven’t been people in this country whose beliefs deeply disturbed me. (Notice, by the way, that I haven’t tried to shut them up, I’ve just turned them off personally.) Students we’re trying to educate? With them, I think we should be making the points I’m making here, explaining to them why this is not a good debate, rather than making them debate it.

Aaarrrghhhh!