A Theory of Justice, the Musical

No, I'm not making this up. Go to Open Culture, sports fans.

Teaching Nietzsche to novices. Sort of.

Stephen Fry on a lot of things

Some great life advice from one of my favorite people.



Via

Capitalism is safe! Ayn Rand on the Johnny Carson show.

If we're going to debate capitalism, we're going to have to avoid quoting Ayn Rand. Memorize the following, then subtract all the words from your mind.



Via Dangerous Minds.

Michael Sandel

There's plenty of other Sandel on video, for interested parties.

This seems so...2009

Chomsky & Foucault

Remember when LD used to be about philosophy?

Download Free Courses from Famous Philosophers: From Bertrand Russell to Michel Foucault

Stick with me, kid, and I'll show you the world.

This is pretty good

It's quite serious, and a nice way to learn about Plato's key idea about philosophy/reality.

Plato's Cave in Claymation

Government obligations

We talk a lot about rights, needless to say. If we begin our training as debaters with basic philosophy, we learn pretty quickly what we mean by that. My favored validation of individual rights is that it is advantageous for humans to accept that there are fundamental rights inherent in humanity, and to act accordingly, and disadvantageous not to accept their existence and act accordingly. That is, I don’t have to base my possession of inherent human rights on some complex philosophical or theological premise, but simply on the idea that having these rights is more beneficial than not having them, so whether or not they are inherent, they are nonetheless a good thing. So, let’s presume their existence, because we’re better off with them than without them, at which point, it doesn’t really matter where they came from.

We are nothing as philosophers if we are not practical. After all, mostly what we are interested in is ethics, the practical application of morality, i.e., doing the best we can. Balancing angels on the head of a pin is for other scholars altogether.

Basic human rights are fairly few. We have the right to be alive, which means that our existence is self-warranted and therefore cannot be abridged by others. We have the right to do what we want to do, provided that we do not harm others or somehow interfere with their right to do what they want to do while they are not harming us. And we have the right to our stuff, the legitimate ownership of possessions and the benefit of the fruits of our labors.

As far as basic human rights are concerned, I wouldn’t want to go much further than these fundamentals of life, liberty and property because, already, they raise questions of the protection of these rights. Ownership of property and the fruits of our labors is hardly as simple as it sounds, for instance. There are varying cultural definitions of property that undermine to some extent the apparent universality of property rights, for instance. As for conflicting claims of liberty, when what I want to do comes in conflict with what you want to do, we can imagine problems here almost from the point when any two people happen to come in contact, ever. And one can always ask the simple question, does a murderer cede his or her claim to life by abridging someone else’s claim of life?

You can see that as soon as we have populations of people, rather than just one person hanging around in some metaphoric Garden of Eden, we have various rights claims that need to be adjudicated, and rights that need to be protected. To handle this business, we create governments and empower them to do that job. We establish law and order and processes of law and order, and to maintain them and make them viable, we have to give up a little something. If nothing else, we have to give up a little property, because governments cost money to run. We could go a lot further in explaining how rights are abridged for their own protection, but my point here is something else altogether.

Here’s what bothers me, and it bothers me a lot. We have a lot of systematic philosophical thinking on rights and their protection and the establishment of governments, and we can draw on that thinking pretty easily. That is certainly what Thomas Jefferson did in the Declaration of Independence, when he paraphrased John Locke. (If you’re reading this in Texas, Jefferson was a President of the United States and the chief author of the Declaration, but unfortunately for you, he is in your no-fly or, I guess, no-think zone. Sorry about that.) (If you’re not in Texas, I’m not referring to any characters in “Lost” when I mention John Locke. Sorry about that, too.) We can argue handily about natural rights at a lofty, philosophical level, if we are so inclined. But government, especially government in the year 2010, is way more complicated than merely rights protection. We’ve got people literally marching in the streets complaining that government is going to hell in a tea bag, and that somehow it needs to be minimized because it just does too damned much. I’m hardly a deep commentator on the whole Tea Party movement, but it is clearly composed of a lot of complaints about the way things are in the present day, positing much of the blame on the government. Absent any political aspects of this—that in reality this is often one party trying to undermine another party, or in many cases racially motivated—it does play on fears and frustrations that real people really have. These real people aren’t at your local debate tournament, so for just one weekend, instead of hanging out in a high school cafeteria on a Saturday afternoon, hang out at the mall. Take a peep out of the cocoon for a moment. See what’s out there.

What we don’t have, unfortunately, is a handy, readily available theory of government that goes beyond basic rights protection. And this is a problem, because in reality, government does go beyond basic rights protection—way beyond—and we don’t have an acceptable, accepted ethical shorthand for discussing it. We have no ethical road map for how far governments can justifiably go beyond rights protection. We tend to have mostly opinions rather than metrics.

Let’s look at one example of government obligation beyond the protection of rights: roads. Literal roads. Individuals do not build roads, but roads are a requirement of our society. If all the roads in the US were immediately shut down and removed, we could not function. Goods could not travel very far, and if we did not have access to our own family farm, we’d be in serious trouble. (One could look at the history of roads in the US, and find that, with the invention of the car, roads became very much within the purview of government, because at the point where you need paving, a horse galloping across the fields or on a trodden path doesn’t work anymore. Additionally, in the 1950s, Eisenhower embarked on a system of interstate highways, transcending even local governments’ road-building in aid of a national system, reflective of the ubiquitous ownership of automobiles after WWII).

Roads are an example of government doing what individuals cannot do. Because individuals cannot do these things, and because they are required by society, we obligate government to do them. That is my basic premise for understanding extended government obligations. And the things that are necessary but beyond the scope of individuals are not limited to roads. International protection is another obvious job the government does that I cannot do alone. I look to the government to set up the parameters of discourse with other governments, up to and including the conduct of war. I may have opinions on the subject of whom we should fight, just as I have opinions on the subject of where a road should lead, and in a free government I have avenues for expressing those opinions, but ultimately it is the job of the government that I support, and which I am inherently a part of as a citizen, to conduct that business.

The question that is raised is the determination of the limits of what government should do that individuals can’t do. Additionally, one must consider in the mix what can be done neither by lone individuals nor the government but by non-governmental groups of individuals, be they corporate or otherwise. That is, there are jobs that religions do, for instance, that we believe are outside the scope of government (or that most of us believe should be outside the scope of government, but now we’re back in Texas where there is no separation of church and state because Jefferson, by not existing, never raised that pesky issue). There are jobs that corporations should do that we consider to be outside the scope of government. But the question is, which of these jobs are which? How do you argue that providing health care, for instance, is a government job? Or providing broadband? Or welfare? Or anything, even roads?

What you probably need to do is view the issue, first, from the perspective of what only the government can do, and assume that because only government is capable of it, government is obligated to do it, if we agree that it is an important enough benefit to society. Keep in mind that all government works have a cost, so if we consider that the government engage in a particular chore, we have to be willing to pay for it, which means that we need a cost-benefit analysis to decide whether or not to do it. Still, this is the easiest sort of obligation to fulfill, because there are no competing claims on filling it. If only government can realistically take it on, if we decide we need it, the government is obligated to get it. Our roads are a good example of this. Costs of roads are not insignificant, and in some odd vision perhaps some corporation could be created to provide them, but when all is said and done, it is worth it to pay for them and reasonable that the government be the agency to build them. Not a hard call.

Education is an interesting example. Our government has taken on the obligation of educating the young. We tend to make this an obligation of local governments rather than the vaster national government, but that’s an insignificant distinction. We are obligating our governments to do this. Why? I mean, there are plenty of people who believe in home-schooling. There are people who prefer religious-based instruction in at least primary education and often secondary education. Because we believe strongly in government-supported education, we allow for those not availing themselves of this education to get at least a share of it by also supporting home schools and parochial education, at least to some extent. And on top of this, we draw the line at providing college education to all as part of the basic education package, but still we provide state institutions underwritten by the government to compete with private institutions, and we provide government-underwritten loans. The thing seems to be, we value education enough to warrant obligating the government to provide it because, for the most part, if government doesn’t provide it, it will not be fairly accessible to all. If the government stopped providing public education, a lot of people would still be educated, but not all, and we consider this wrong.

From the education example we can begin to draw an idea of what government ought to do beyond the absolute essentials. Or, if you will, to draw an idea of what the absolute essentials are. One big thing seems to be not that only government can do it, but that only government can do it fairly. If it were not done, a lot of individuals would suffer harm as a result.

How about housing? Housing is obviously essential to our lives. Does the government have an obligation to provide us all with some sort of housing?

The difference between housing and education seems to be that, with the latter, the government provides an open door through which citizens can avail themselves of the service of education, whereas with housing, we would actually have to provide some sort of literal, physical object, a house or an apartment. What, exactly, would comprise a fair house for a family of five? Tough one. So while we believe, in a humanitarian sense, that people need a roof over their heads, we don’t literally set a claim that the government will give them one. Instead, we provide general funds through which people who are homeless can find some sort of shelter. We subsidize them, in other words. If you lose your job you get unemployment insurance, at some point you can get food stamps and things like that. We don’t get you an apartment, but we help you to pay your rent. Not much, though. You might end up moving in with family or something. You might lose everything. We grieve for you, but we don’t solve the problem for you in any specific way.

So what is the underlying reason we support education and not housing, the reason we have decided that education is a government obligation and that housing is a personal obligation, aside from the specificity of the property involved? I would suggest that we connect housing to something beyond and aside from the government. Our homes are a reflection of our lives as a whole, our income and spending, our jobs, our position in society. Housing is, to a great extent, tied into the capitalistic system of working for profit and taking a share of that profit to support ourselves. That’s what people do with jobs, and jobs are considered the fabric of the corporate capitalist system. To be a member in good standing in this system, you work. (Those who have lost their jobs in the recent recession talk a lot about the anomie that results from losing their positions in society.) If you don’t work, you are not a member in good standing, unless you are actively job hunting and therefore presumed to be simply on hiatus, a member in good standing in absentia. So if you don’t have housing because you don’t work, your position as a non-member of society in good standing deprives you of any potential entitlement to housing. Why should the government provide you with what you should be providing for yourself? This could also be tied into the idea that providing housing is in conflict with property rights. Government protects the property you have, but it doesn't get you property. Maybe housing cuts too close to the core of individual rights?

Mostly I think the difference between housing and education does, in fact, seem to point to a difference of fairness. While it would be unfair not to provide education to all, we do not perceive it as unfair not to provide housing to all, because while the former would be impossible for many to obtain, the latter, housing, would not be impossible if people just got a job and worked. Maybe, also, the numbers would be smaller. Not providing housing to all affects a small number, whereas not providing education to all would affect a vast number.

Because it is so difficult to establish meaningful parameters, we argue endlessly about what the government should do just about everywhere. Libertarians want the least amount of government possible, leaving life to one’s own devices. Socialists want the most amount of government, creating a system of the most achievable fairness. Most of us are somewhere in between. If we could only devise a mechanism for measuring when the actions of the government are balanced by the fairness of the results of taking those actions, we would have a reasonable blueprint for action, and a reasonable guide to when those actions are obligated.

And that is how I would address a resolution calling for the government to take on the burden of any action above and beyond protecting basic human rights. That is, I would, in my case, set up a mechanism for measuring when the actions of the government are balanced by the fairness of the results of taking those actions, compared of course to the results of not taking those actions, and I would use those results as the tool for mandating or not government actions. Yes, it is absolutely consequential, but one can reasonably argue that virtually all government actions must be weighed consequentially, since they exist in the real world and not merely in philosophical papers. More to the point, the government “must” inherently do only a handful of things that are intuitively obligated, or if you prefer, deontologically obligated, at least by the definitions of government we use in basic political science. But as I say, all government actions are, by definition, real world, and therefore subject to real world analysis. They must satisfactorily meet the criteria of desirability and achievability according to a real world test (there can be no absolutes in politics, only presumptions based on reasonable data).

This is not relevant to CatNats and "soil rights,", but mark my words: these resolutions will come. If not in LD, then every time you turn around in PF. Unfortunately, people in PF rounds often don’t provide the underlying thesis analogous to LD’s V/C, giving judges little to go on. (See my PF notes, elsewhere.) If at the very least you can begin with a political model of some sort, and then measure how action plays out in that model, you’ll give me something I can follow and understand and, as a judge, measure. It’s worth a try. But the bottom line is, when you venture out of protecting basic human rights, you venture alone, without the body of literature to support you, that is, without an accepted ethical framework forged over centuries. You are forced to provide your own ethical framework, your own rationale why this must be done, not because it's good but because it's obligated. Plenty of things are good, but that doesn't make them government obligations. Constructing and deconstructing government obligations is a big job. But as government gets bigger and bigger, somebody's got to do it. Often, that somebody is us.

Have fun.

WSM, JSM, MJP, LBJ, JFK, CIA, A/T, TWA (the abbreviated version)

I’m off tomorrow to Wee Sma Lex. It is indeed wee sma on the LD side, but it’s positively gargantuan on the PF side. What’s going on up there in Massachusettsland? At least I’ll get to powwow with CP while I’m churning cards (this one’s going to be manual). We can MJP up tabroom.com to our hearts’ content, for one thing, although I think he’s mostly got it knocked already. Plus we can plan our Tigger dining options, always an important aspect of coachean conferencing.

I’ve been reading the Sandel book, by the way, and while it’s probably fine for general audiences that have never heard of justice, I’m not all that thrilled with it for our purposes. John Stuart Mill came out more in favor of personal liberty than pure utility calculus? Well, yeah, duh. I’m glad to see that the book is a hit and all, but my guess is that beyond introducing the subject to novices, there’s not much here. Then again, there’s nothing wrong with a readable book that introduces the subject to novices, so I just might make this suggested—not required—reading, once it hits paperback. The bottom line is, it’s not original thinking but synthesis. Nothing wrong with that, but not terribly necessary in the LD universe.

We podcasted up last night, so to speak. Tabbing, posting brackets and results, breaking all 5-2s (and, heaven forbid, 6-2s). Some interesting stuff. The tech tip was about Google in general, as in, you want it, they got it. While I’m reluctant to concede some of the maligning done by my partners in podification against poor Yahoo (which is your humble servant’s email of choice, admittedly with half a dozen Google accounts feeding into it, and which is also my team’s listserver of choice, which I think runs neck and neck in functionality with Google’s groups app, with maybe a slight edge to Yahoo because of the calendar), one thing that is true about “the Google” is that there’s always something new going on. I have my Wave invitation around here somewhere, and need to check it out, for instance. And I live on Google’s Reader. (We plan to talk about RSS on a future show, or maybe news in general which, as the VCA knows, is a big concern of mine.) And I blog on Blogspot/Blogger. What can I say about Google, then, except that I just love the Kool-Aid?

So with all of that, I wonder, what’s happened to my world? MJP. Endless tournaments. T shells. That’s just not me. Or is it? We’ll go into all these things in depth here sooner or later. What’s important to keep in mind is that an activity like ours is anchored on certain principles but nonetheless needs to be flexible in its achieving of those principles. I’m very Hegelian on all of this. Very dialectic. From my perspective, one of the biggest problems in LD is not the changes proposed by the wackos, but the unwillingness of powerful people in the activity to listen to what the wackos are proposing. Some of it isn’t wacky at all, if your concern is those core principles. And some of it is so wacky that it evaporates entirely on its own. But at the point where you are unyielding because you refuse to even consider change, then I don’t think you belong in forensics. A few years ago a lot of people were in a snit over the impending implosion of LD. It hasn’t happened. The trends then that were seen as damaging were mostly the use of “philosophers” who were far from meaningful as ethicists, which was a real trend that has mostly passed, and speed, which has been a real trend since my Day One and it’s about time people got over it (a good debater turns the speed up and down depending on the judge, end of story), and theory, which is turning out to be nothing more than people applying names to things that were ever thus, but going overboard with the idea that naming something somehow makes it more important—a dog will still bite you, or not, whether it’s a dog, un chien, or a great googly-moogly. The bottom line is that everything we think we know must always be subject to challenge (which brings us back to J S Mill). The truth will out because it is challenged. That’s just the way it works, like it or not.

It has ever been thus.

Religion, Part 3 (conclusion)

So far we’ve established that religion is a concept based on non-rational thought that is, by its nature, at the core of believers’ perception of reality. At which point you say, okay, this is all well and good, but what does it have to do with debate?

I’m taking off from a particular reaction to the Nov-Dec topic, but that reaction was not limited to this topic, and has arisen in the past where there have been religious areas in play in a resolution. The issue at hand was a religious objection to immunization; the reaction was, “That’s just stupid.”

The one thing you’ll notice in this series I’ve been writing is that I haven’t addressed the content of religious belief. Nor will I. Because of the nature of religion, one can never address the content of religion as a starting point for discourse. You can’t argue about it, in other words, not only because of the close holding of the belief but also because of faith’s lack of rational structure. You cannot argue against something that does not respond to argumentation. As I said initially, religious beliefs are a-logical, outside the realm of logic. Argument is a tool from the realm of logic. Arguing about religion is like using a power saw to play the piano. It’s the wrong tool for the job.

This is why we don’t use religion as the warrants for our claims in debate. If we are arguing a moral question, most likely our religion provides clear warrants for a particular position. But to make a claim and warrant its truth as its being the word of God would not allow for much subsequent discussion. If I quote Joe Biden and you quote God, then pretty clearly your source outranks my source. So what we do is look for ways of making ethical judgments other than our religions. Good ethical judgments grounded in secular thinking ought to be roughly what our religions tell us. Good ethical judgments, for instance, tell us not to kill and steal and so forth, with no appeal to religious doctrine. We can make ethical determinations, in other words, without appeal to religion that are nonetheless congruent with religion.

Still, we do come up against issues where we are arguing about religion. In these cases we cannot argue religion’s content (in the case in point, the reason a religion might object to immunization), because that is irrelevant to the discussion, and impossible to change (because, being religious, it’s non-rational and core). What can be argued in any situation I’ve ever seen where its come up, is the role of religious versus secular concerns. That is totally debatable, and we see examples around the world of almost every possible combination of religion and secular in different cultures ranging from the totally separate to the totally intertwined. To evaluate what they mean, we need to step back from the content to the structure, to look not at what is being said but how its being said. We must look at the religious and the secular as societal structures, and evaluate their interplay abstractly, with an understanding of what religion is and what society is, absent a concern with the nature of a particular religion or a particular society.

Are you feeling structuralist yet? Are you doing the Caveman dance? The pulling away from the study of content to the study of structures was one of the milestones of 20th Century scholarship. And as far as I can tell, it’s the only way for debaters to meaningfully address issues of religion in society.

Back to the example. The X people won’t be immunized because it is against their religion. Responses?
1. “This is scientifically wrong because immunization yadda yadda yadda whatever.” Not a good response. Why? You’re arguing the content. The X people don’t give a crap what science says, and all the science in the world won’t change their minds. So even if you’re right, you’re not solving the problem.
2. “Society must prioritize public health concerns over private religious concerns.” A much better response (although I’m not necessarily saying it’s the correct one). Here you’re allowing for the X people to believe whatever they want to believe, but addressing the issue in a “what do we do when secular and religious conflict” mode, regardless of the content of the conflict.

I hope you understand what I’ve been trying to say. In a nutshell, I’m suggesting that you, first, understand what religion is, and, second, begin to think about ways of addressing it that take that understanding into consideration. Your beliefs or my beliefs or anyone’s beliefs are beside the point, but the role those beliefs play in arenas outside of the purely religious are very much the point. You can’t argue religion, but you can argue about religion, in other words. That’s the bottom line. And considering the religious nature of the society we live in, it’s probably good advice. People can believe whatever they want to believe, and they do, in vast numbers. That’s fine. When their beliefs cause a conflict beyond the boundaries of religion, that’s not fine. And that’s the ground on which we can stand as debaters.

Religion, Part 2

As we said, religion is both primary and transcendent. What you believe about your religion probably takes precedence over all else, and it probably provides meaning or context for all else. Religious belief is mental ground zero. And as we also said, because religious belief relies on faith rather than logic and experience, it is different from most of our empirical approach to life in general.

This might be a good analogy. Imagine that you have a headache, a pounding in the back of your brain that won’t go away. You visit the doctor, who performs all the possible tests and discovers that, beyond any doubt, there is nothing wrong with you. What happens when the doctor tells you this? Does your head stop hurting? Of course not. Whatever you feel, you feel, and someone telling you that you don’t feel it is patently absurd. That you feel the pain is incontrovertible, even if, objectively, there is no reason for you to feel the pain. Just because you’re not sick doesn’t mean your head still doesn’t hurt.

Philosophers have juggled around the complexities of what is objective reality and what is subjective perception since the first powwow in the cave lo those many years ago. We intuit that there probably is an objective reality, but we realize that each individual brain may perceive that reality differently. Each individual brain has no ability to know anything beyond its own perceptions. Thus we piece together what we think might be objective reality by pooling our subjective perceptions. (And this can, at times, not be a good thing: study your Foucault, for instance, if you want to understand the nature of relativism in the 20th Century.) We are each a relativistic brain possessing its own share of objective reality.

The nature of knowledge, meanwhile, is variable. For instance, I know that Nightingale McQueen played Prissy in “Gone with the Wind.” You come along and tell me, no, it was Butterfly McQueen. I realize that you are right and I was wrong. Henceforth, I will store Butterfly in my brain instead of Nightingale. The thing is, this is just some random piece of information in my brain. I have no investment in it’s being correct or incorrect. I don’t really care. It can be this fact, or that fact. Whichever. It is just an item on the shelf, replaceable by another item, if the need arises. I do not define myself by what is one these shelves; they’re just storage areas for data.

Another form of knowledge is derivational. That is, I have worked it out on the basis of various premises. It is the result of my own active mental processes. For instance, I have studied anthropology, and know all the various branches of early hominid. I can name every fossil line from the missing link to Sarah Palin. The problem is, all of a sudden they discover a new skeleton in the Olduvai Gorge, and the whole schema of human evolution needs to be rewritten. Now, this may be harder for me to accept than the Nightingale Butterfly problem, because while that was just some random fact, the process of evolution is one that I have studied in depth and one on which I have reached various conclusions. Still, when the new skeleton comes along, I can rethink everything I’ve thought before and work that new piece of information into what I already know. After all, the accumulation of knowledge about this subject before I know about that skeleton was also a process of adding new information and evaluating it, and I’m just continuing the process. Even when it requires a total paradigm shift, I can handle it. It is the rational part of my brain doing its job, which is reasoning: new information, new thinking or perhaps rethinking. Whatever. It may be harder for me to make the shift for the new skeleton and a total new picture of evolution than it was with Nightingale Butterfly, which was simply a substitution of one fact (erroneous) for another (correct), but I can do it eventually. My investment in my prior knowledge was deeper than N/B, in that I had worked for it, but it was not self-definitional. Even if my job were anthropologist, I could make the shift, because that’s part of an anthropologist’s job, to update the paradigms when a new skeleton is found. In fact, it’s the so-called scientific method, to test ideas against the evidence at hand. The scientific method pretty much explains how the brain does its rational thinking on a philosophical level, whether or not we’re talking about science.

So, we see two types of knowledge, simple and complex. But both are flexible. Unlike the pain in my head, which I felt, these were simply pieces of information in my head, mere thoughts that I knew. Tell me that they’re not there, so to speak, and I have no problem with it. But tell me that the pain in my head is not there? Sorry, my head still hurts. Even though it is only what I think rather than what I have had demonstrated to me as true, my brain still accepts it as true, and more to the point, true beyond analysis or refutation. If I feel the pain, the pain is there.

Religious belief, based as it is on faith rather than rational process, is like the pain in the head, not because it’s real or unreal (that’s not my point) but that we feel it rather than rationally deduce it. At the point where we move from reason to faith, we leave reason behind. We believe what we believe because we believe it. Religion is not random facts like N/B, or knowledge we’ve worked out like science. It is things that we believe because we believe them, and because we choose to believe them. And, because they are prime, transcendent beliefs, they are probably even more unshakeable than that pain in our head. What it boils down to is, not only is religion the most important thing to many people, it is also a thing that is not subject to rational evaluation. This is why you can’t argue with someone about their religion. People believe their beliefs because they believe them, and they are of primary importance to them. You come along with some mere rational objection, and the religious person doesn’t care. Their beliefs, formed by faith rather than rationality, are not subject to rational evaluation. It’s pointless to attempt such an evaluation. You’re the doctor telling me my head doesn’t hurt. Sorry, but it does hurt. You can’t tell me otherwise.

Remarkably enough, despite the fact that religious belief is non-rational (it is not irrational, which is something else altogether, which I’m not going to go into because I’m not arguing about the content of religion but the nature of belief, which are two different things entirely), most people on the planet are religious, and do hold religious beliefs. This is rather curious, in a way, and points to a few possibilities. Maybe there’s something about being human that requires spirituality, or maybe spirituality is an objective reality and our religions are our ways of approaching that inherently unknowable concept. It doesn’t matter. The point is, most people do believe, whatever it is they believe in, and whether or not what they believe in is true.

With one tiny exception. There are no atheists in foxholes, as the saying goes. But, damn, there are an awful lot of atheists in debate rounds. Ask these people to evaluate something with a religious aspects, and they’re at a total loss. They simply cannot get past the rational/objective: “You believe in what? That’s preposterous.”

Well, yeah. It’s faith. It is non-rational, by definition. But, young padowan, you’d better get it into your head that this doesn’t make it any less real to the people who believe in it (who, by the way, might be right). And so often non-believing debaters want to attack the belief rather than the structures that contain it.

In this path lies madness.

[To be continued.]

Religion, Part 1

There’s a lot of interesting material for discussion in a subject area we normally tend to shy away from. As a general rule, that area is not only divisive but, I would imagine for many teachers, potentially dangerous. They could lose their jobs over it, in other words. As the saying goes, you can’t argue religion or politics. In our world, we just can’t argue religion. I can’t say that I’ve talked about it all that much myself, at least here. My goal is to inform and/or entertain, not to piss people off. So I’ve avoided the subject because of all its landmines.

So much for that.

The debate world, by default, does not make arguments that appeal to religious beliefs. Our task is to employ a combination of evidence and logic in aid of reasoned discussion of issues. Religion, on the other hand, employs neither. Therefore, an appeal to religion would not result in a reasoned discussion of issues because that is not what religion is about. Religion is about faith. Faith, by its very nature, is a suspension of logic and empiricism as the mind accepts as true ideas that are not logical and for which there is no evidence. Faith, therefore, appears to be a very special aspect of human thought, because unlike most human thought, it runs on a track that accepts things unquestioningly versus a track that questions everything. Abraham’s willingness to kill his son at the command of God is one of the great examples of faith over all else. There is no way Abraham can do this without a most powerful faith (and trust) in the Almighty. This faith and trust is notably rewarded when God relieves Abraham of this burden after he has proved himself worthy.

So faith does not rely on logic. But the point is not that faith is illogical. It’s a-logical. It’s in another realm altogether. It is not measured by the tools that measure logic or facts. It is not thought of in those terms. There is much writing by religious people on this subject; there are plenty of teachings in, for example, the Roman Catholic religion on faith that are very much along these lines. Having faith asks you to accept things because you accept them. You accept them not because you can prove them but despite the fact that you cannot prove them. That’s what faith is all about.

The need to maintain faith without resorting to logic seems to apply to all religions. The study of the role of religion in human society (absent the truth of religion in human society) demonstrates a number of things, chief among them being that the vast majority of people in the world do maintain a belief in religion. We can extrapolate from this a number of possibilities. One is that people have some sort of need for religion in their lives, and therefore invent religion to fulfill that need. Another is that there is indeed a spiritual world, and the variety of religions extant in the world are our attempt to understand that spiritual world. That spiritual world is, by definition, beyond our limited human understanding, so we do the best we can trying to figure it out. Often we have what we consider divine revelations to help us along, i.e., books or signs that we interpret as the emanation of the divine. Some religions like to think that their revelations are somehow the true ones, and everyone else’s revelations are untrue. Other religions take a more ecumenical view, trusting that most revelations are indeed divine, and simply different from culture to culture because, as I said, the spiritual world, while it does exist according to their thinking, is beyond our limited human understanding. This sort of thinking leads one religion to respect another religion. Thinking that your religion is better than someone else’s religion, on the other hand, leads to things like holy wars (the ultimate oxymoron).

Faith is not only logic-defying, but deeply held. One is not a proponent of their religion at the same level that one is a proponent of, say, their local baseball team. The latter is an arbitrary commitment that can take on an appearance of depth, but is never more than just fandom, even when engaged in rabidly. There are a lot of the trappings of religion, though. One is a fan of a team for reasons that defy logic, and one supports one’s team over other teams through thick and thin. But, ultimately, it’s just being a sports fan. It is subscribing to belief in an alternate universe (sports) for the purpose of recreation or, perhaps at its deepest level, self-identification because that sport is, for the self-identifier, the key pastime. It can even be an obsession, but it is never comparable to religion even when it is metaphorically a religion. Religion holds the power of eternal life and death, of explaining the mysteries of the universe, of connecting the human to the divine. For even the biggest sports nut, none of these are possible returns on fan investment. Comparing sports fandom to religious fervor merely allows us to begin to understand the sports fan; it does not make sports and religion identical.

As I say, religion is the realm of eternal life and death, of explaining the mysteries of the universe, and of connecting the human to the divine. There can be nothing of greater importance than these ideas to the human mind. From a structuralist perspective on secular society, the hierarchy of concern is self then immediate family then extended family then friends then community, etc., in the long line of formative moral binds (although, at times, they can be juggled, for instance when a soldier gives his or her life for country). Religion is the transcendent idea preceding even the self, taking the structuralist to a level beyond secular: the divine, then self, etc., etc. By definition, therefore, nothing can be more important to the individual than religion. And religion not only tops the hierarchy, but it transcends all the other levels.

Religion, in other words—i.e., belief and faith—is, among those who possess it, an absolute primary. Is it any wonder, therefore, that we don’t want to argue about it?

[Continued next time.]

The Pie of Justice

I’ve never been pleased with my materials on justice. It’s not the easiest concept in the world to explain to bleary-eyed novices, or for that matter, to be explained by bleary-eyed political scientists. At its core it’s simple enough, but the further you stretch it from the core, the more goofy you start to sound. The fact that there are different kinds of justice that we often deal with (to wit, distributive and retributive) doesn’t help. If we have a justice-system resolution early on in basic training, it can throw a noob’s understanding of justice per se out the window for a couple of years, if not an entire debate career.

Distributive justice alone, however, ought to be simple enough. Easy as pie actually, if you think about it.

Imagine a pie. Imagine one person. Now, that one person gets to keep the whole pie. There’s no issues there. The world would be so simple if there were only one person in it (unless that person was Jon Cruz, but that’s another story altogether).

Now imagine a pie and two people. Now we start to think about cutting up the pie in a satisfactory way between the two people, and that’s where justice comes in. Justice is the business of settling claims among a number of people, not just one person. So now we have two people with a claim on one pie. In the simplest of worlds, we just cut the pie in half and each takes an equal portion. That sounds eminently fair. Justice is fairness after all, the settling of claims in such a way that the settlement seems to be correct. If the settlement did not seem to be correct, we would say it is unfair, or unjust. To some extent, fair and just are synonyms, so when a debater (or John Rawls) defines justice as fairness, or giving each fair due, it’s a bit of a tautology. But if you dig into the definitions, you’ll see perhaps minor differences. For our purposes, however, they’re much of a muchness.

In order to insure the fair deal between the two pie eaters, by the way, we might install a precedent established in nursery school: one person cuts, the other person chooses. This approach to justice might be innate: if we have a moral instinct, this is one of the ways it inevitably expresses itself. Or, perhaps, it’s just so damned logical that we reinvent it again and again. Whatever. In any case, we have two issues, determining what is fair, and determining how to achieve that fairness. Halves are fair. Switching cutting and choosing achieves the fairness.

Pies being rather filling, we can cut them into satisfactory pieces for quite a few people. But, eventually, there’s really not enough for everyone. There is a limited amount of pie in the room. We have pie for, say, twelve people, but there are twenty people in the room. For argument’s sake, we will declare that the pie cannot be cut into few than twelve pieces. What to do?

If there’s twenty people and twelve pieces of pie, everyone cannot have an equal amount of pie. One solution to this problem that would perhaps be fair is to have a lottery for the pie. Every one of the twenty people has one chance at winning a piece of the pie. There will be twelve lucky winners. In this case, everyone has an equal opportunity at getting a piece of pie, even though everyone will not have a literally equal piece of pie. This, too, seems fair, and it much resembles some of the lotteries of life. In a just situation, we all have an equal opportunity for something, although all of us might not get that thing. If a university offers an entrance exam to everyone, and selects the top hundred people, everyone seems to have an equal opportunity of getting in, although only the top one hundred actually will. (This raises issues about what determines who is at the top, and whether its fair that Joe is smarter than Jack, but they are issues buried deep in the example. Let’s assume that the test is absolutely unbiased, whatever that means, and leave it at that.)

So we have equality, and we have equal opportunity, which are two different things, but which both seem fair. But let’s take it one step further. Our pie is not blueberry or apple. It is a metaphor for the amount of money available for financial aid for college. Like any pie, it is finite: it can only be cut into so many pieces. There’s also a meaningfulness aspect to it: give everyone just a dollar, and it doesn’t count. Financial aid needs to really aid people.

So, we have a finite amount of financial aid pie to divvy up among a large number of applicants for that aid. There are more applicants than can be aided. What do we do? This is, of course, representative of justice in the real world.

Before we can distribute the financial aid pie, we need to establish the criteria on which we will base of distribution decision. In the broadest either/or analysis, we could favor the people who are the smartest and have earned merit-based scholarships, or we could favor the people who are the poorest and need the money most. Neither of these is particularly right or wrong, but they would conflict. How do we decide the criteria?

John Rawls addresses this issue with his concept of a veil of ignorance. For Rawls, when we’re talking about distributing goods, we have to remove ourselves from the equation. That is, in this particular example, we cannot know if we ourselves happen to be smart or poor. Knowing this would prejudice our decision. The veil of ignorance is like a black box with us in it. We don’t know what we are, so when we make our decision, we will have no predetermined personal stake in it. This is a pretty good idea, otherwise those in the position of making the decision would presumably always choose in favor of themselves. Another term for this is the original position.

But of course, this doesn’t help us actually make the decision, it simply removes our biases from the decision-making. We are still faced with the challenge of determining how to spend the money (with no presumptions of how spending the money might affect us personally).

One can get pretty academic at this point, but one thing is pretty clear. However we decide, we need to give everyone an equal opportunity to share in the distribution. We can’t say that we’ll limit the distribution to only one racial group, for instance, to have it be equal on face. But then again, if one subscribes to a need to adjudicate cultural/societal inequalities in one’s distribution, then maybe one ascribes a system of weighting a la Affirmative Action. Meanwhile, it seems unfair to the smartest person in the world not to be rewarded with a scholarship because that person is, say, Bill Gates’s kid. On the other hand, if someone can afford the education without aid, why give them any, when that would take it away from someone else? Do we give it entirely based on need, where if you need the most, you get the most? In that case, how do we determine what need really is?

These questions can be answered a number of ways. Depending on what kind of pie exactly you’re talking about, some of what Rawls says might apply, to wit, that any decision must favor the least advantaged members of society (this favoritism is called the difference principle). But then, define “advantaged.” There will never be any easy, definitive answers.

So that’s what distributive justice is all about. How do we take goods, and fairly distribute them throughout society? Now, Rawls’s original position and difference principle are hypothetical ways of understanding the nature of society and justice. (Isn’t all philosophy hypothetical? Philosophy that isn’t hypothetical is call science.) To ask if this sort of thinking is at all relevant to the real world, think about taxes. Where does the money go? What should we do about less economically advantaged members of society? What about immigrants, especially poor folk who sneak in? If we’re going to give away some health care, who is going to get it? How are we going to split up Social Security payments? How do we apply any of this across borders with international aid? What are the just answers? They’re debatable. And, I assure you, debate them you will.

Anyhow, that’s distributive justice. Keep it in mind, and you’ll have it in a nutshell.

Slouching toward ModNov training

I can’t wait till next week, when my mind won’t feel so much like leftover broccoli soup. I’ve had to catch up on so many things at the DJ that I’ve barely treaded water anywhere else. This can’t keep up, I would imagine. I’ll get back to the correct speed and back on top of things soon, and life will go on accordingly. At least I hope so.

I’m starting to direct what little thinking I have available to the issues of how to start off novices in the world of ModNov. I’ll probably do some cross-posting over there, but needless to say, it is an issue of timely necessity, given that we will all have novices in about a month or so. Aside from topic-specific stuff, which wouldn’t come until a little later in the process, it’s not so much creating new curriculum as sorting and organizing the old curriculum in light of ModNov. Last year, thanks to the Fat Man on the Trolley resolution, I started with morality, which appeals to me on some levels (absent ModNov), because people generally have given at least some thought to the concepts of right and wrong by the time they’re high school freshmen, but I don’t think that makes sense in a vacuum, much less with civil disobedience. Do we not challenge the rule of law through civil disobedience, and by it place our own relativistic view of the world higher than the world’s view of the world? If you look at it that way, the rule of law is a much more difficult concept than the rule of relativistic self, and requires more explanation. That explanation goes directly to the creation of society, and thus the social contract. That is, why do we create a society? Then, what happens when we disagree with the society we’ve created? This order sounds right to me.

Speaking of which, the CatNats arguers on a right to health care often simply stated that because the classic constructs of rights protected by soc con did not include health care, therefore there was no such right. As I understand it, John Locke had really good coverage from his AARP supplemental plan, which is why he didn’t make it life, liberty, property and health care (at least except for preexisting conditions; this was the olden days after all). Anyhow, this kind of dogmaticism is probably why classic ethical training in LD has gotten a bad rap. We don’t believe things because Locke (or Rousseau or Kant or Rawls or the Old Baudleroo) said them; Locke (et alia) said them because they believed them. Philosophy is like mathematics: abstract constructs for understanding the real world. At the point at which philosophy is taken as reality, it’s not philosophy anymore.

I think I need another vacation…

The Steroid-User's Guide to Pumping Irony

Irony never works. Trust me on this.

The point of the previous entry was to juxtapose two concepts in the hopes that the expectations of the one would help inform the lack of expectations of the other. My commentator takes approach that the analogy was bogus, and that the framers (in this case the NFL) are not to be considered in the equation of what makes good or bad LD; this was my point exactly, that many debate judges disregard the “intent” of the activity. At tournaments we are all, alas, judicial activists.

As for my opinion of postmodernism, I doubt if I have been unclear over the years. I applaud any student studying these texts; this is a triumph of grit over incomprehensibility in many cases, and great entertainment in others. I very much enjoy Baudrillard as a social commentator, for instance, and would recommend him to anyone looking for that sort of reading. But educators (despite their being, in my commentator’s opinion, old and in the way) ought to start students on the canon, and the problem I see is that judges, who fill the educator role in rounds, are often college students whose personal taste overcomes their good sense, and who prefer to see rounds that are relevant to them, with material relevant to them, rather than rounds relevant to the high school students debating those rounds. Of course, it is a commonplace that students should feel that the canon is to be overcome rather than embraced and learned from: it has been ever thus. Teacher’s should be wiser than this. I do not claim that the canon is the end-all, be-all (note the correct usage of this phrase, unlike the usage by our illustrious in-coming Veep), but that its mastery is required before proceeding, much like knowledge of the scales is required before playing Mozart, or perhaps more relevantly, before becoming Thelonius Monk. If you don’t know where you’ve been, it is rather hard to plot a path to where you are going.

As for the use of the phrase pomo crap, I may have been overarching in that comment. Much of it is interesting, but little of it provides applicable ethical structure for debate rounds, and its days in academic circles seem to be coming to an end. Of course, the reason it is interesting, non-applicable and dying out is because most of it, if not nonsense, is incoherent, never a particularly strong value in the exegesis business. And when it is coherent, as with (most of) the Old Baudleroo, it is rather silly. One wants to stand with my favorite Frenchman in Hiroshima in 1945 and have him tell me how the use of nuclear weapons is impossible. Actually, I’ll stand somewhere in Kansas and he can write me a letter from Japan explaining it to me, if you get my drift. Or maybe he can send me a letter from the Mideast, where wars are not happening. That would be just as good. And remember, my favorite Onion headline of all time: Derrida “dead”

Oh well. You can’t please everybody. Onwards to Jake!

O villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain!

I’m rather taken with the fact that last night at our meeting we had a rather extended yet far from exhaustive discussion of nov-dec. We haven’t even gone into possible arguments yet, but we’ve spent a lot of time looking at the subject from various angles. Unlike the jejune sept-oct, where its purity quickly turned into sterility, there’s a lot of ways of looking at the question. First and foremost is why we suggest that felons shouldn’t have the vote in the first place. The history of voting, at least in the US, is a history of exclusions, from the non-propertied to blacks to women at various times. Each of these exclusions seems arbitrarily prejudicial, for obvious reasons. Excluding felons, on the other hand, at least makes intuitive sense at some level. They have done something that warrants their exclusion from the democracy of which they are members, and thus they have warranted their exclusion from the democratic process. On face, that’s reasonable enough, but the more you look at it and think about it, the less convincing it feels. Compare this to the bugaboo of non-citizens voting. I forget which topic led to discussions of this, but by me it was a no-brainer. If you’re not a member of the polity, you don’t have a warrant for acting as if you are, and voting is probably the single act most emblematic of being that member. This was similarly intuitive, but a lot deeper. At the point where non-citizens can vote, then anyone can vote, because you’ve removed the one meaningful qualification from the equation, i.e., membership in the polity. Not being a citizen of one country naturally means that you are a citizen of some other country, and would be voting there, even if you’re not living there. We don’t suggest that tourists ought to vote if they happen to be here in November. Alien residents, compared to tourists, are simply a matter of degree. Apparently some communities do, in fact, allow resident aliens to vote, but that is more an act of niceness on their part, the fulfillment of a negative rather than a positive obligation. Anyhow, thoughts on the felons bring up all kinds of interesting skeins and depths of logic—much more than thoughts of pure morality—and we’ll definitely be keeping at it for a while. Meanwhile, some folks will be debating this up at Manchester-Under-the-Sea, and that’s less than two weeks away. Time to sharpen those virtual pencils!

It’s interesting that the subject of sept-oct, which has caused the Modest Novice to rise from the dead, resulted in an instant nonsense thread over on WTF. At least one person bravely pointed out during the skirmish that the fear of all rounds being about utilitarianism v. deontology was unwarranted, and that there was plenty of other things to talk about. Really? With this resolution? The mind boggles. The problem is that U v. D is sort of inarguable, not that you can ignore the conflict completely in a resolution that, philosophically (and practically) speaking, is about nothing else. Worse, the deontological argument is difficult to make, while the utilitarian argument is (perhaps) empirically proven as an intuition in the cross-cultural morality tests. That is, Hauser suggests that we are hard-wired to vote aff, whereas voting neg means accepting an exegesis on human worth that even Kant had problems with. Not that everyone votes aff in a round, but that the arguments are not created equal, which leads to odd debates. From the educational view, however, the difficulty of grokking the ontology/relativism of the neg is rather stupefying, which is why the Modest N is back. Do you really want to teach deontology to 13 year olds their first week on the team?

I have a pile of strikes and rankings from Jake, plus O’C keeps adding judges, which means more strikes and rankings. It’s time to start subtracting judges! Who needs ‘em? The only thing better than removing judges from debate tournaments would be removing debaters. Anyhow, it’s fun to see who gets pretty even rankings and whose rankings are all over the map. There’s the people you love and the people you hate and everybody loves and hates different people, except for the couple whom everyone loves or everyone hates. How does one get to be so universally loved or universally reviled? Anyhow, that’s why I like community rankings. I do like having stronger judges on the bubbles, and why not let the community at large decide, albeit anonymously, who those stronger judges might be? That way, you get what you paid for, without exactly eliminating the ones you fear. That is, you can strike a handful, but you’re stuck with the rest. Someone you ranked a C could be most people’s A, and then you’ve got them in the round so suck it up. Of course, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, it was thought that a good debater ought to be able to pick up just about any ballot, and should adjust to the judge rather than the other way around. We’ve come a long way since then (mostly in the wrong direction, but, as they say, Viva Pfffft!).

You would have prefered a tornado? / My, aren't we the busy one!

I have spent time in California, and can sympathize with the poor WTFers. The thing about an earthquake, which natives take for granted, is how weird it is. The house is not supposed to shake. Your seat is not supposed to move. Random crockery is not supposed to jump off the mantelpiece. Curiously enough, back in the 80s there was a small quake in NY. I don’t recall where it was located, but in the land of the Sailors it sounded to everyone as if someone had picked up and dropped their basement furnace; the thing took place at about four in the morning, and it was subterranean noise more than movement. As you know, Manhattan is slowly working its way up to Albany; the bad news is that California will be long gone by the time the governor of the Empire State is able to live in Gracie Mansion and not have to commute to work. (FYI: Gracie Mansion is where the NYC mayor lives. Gracey Mansion is where 999 ghosts live. I did have to look up the spelling.)

Anyhow, Earth is a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there. You just can’t count on it to stay put. I do understand, however, that the Old Baudleroo has written a critique of earthquakes, demonstrating that they do not exist. No doubt the WTFers will be running this for Jan-Feb. Again.

I worked on some novice intro material last night, and ended up with a web page that would tell them what to do and link them to what they need to be linked to. The hardest thing was coming up with a tone that wouldn’t scare them away, as in, read this, read that, sign here, print that, watch your brain evaporate, mes etoiles, what have I gotten into? It is difficult for some poor barely pubescent schmegeggie to appear on the team in September fresh from middle school and all of a sudden have to learn everything in about three weeks because your first tournament is coming up so stand up straight and buy a suit and could you get your mother to judge for us? One of the items I’ll be requiring is familiarity with the Feed, which I was poring over last night. I’ve come to realize that it’s rather silly to repost this blog there, so I’ll stop that, although I will keep cross-posting things like CP’s blog, which should get a lot of readership (although for all I know, he’s more popular than I am, in which case, the hell with him, why doesn’t he repost my stuff?). (And I’m sorry, but for the life of me I can’t come up with a good enough juxtaposition of repost and riposte to even marginally get a laugh out of it, so I won’t even bother.) I’ll get to a more detailed discussion of my continuing bout with news and news-reading here shortly. Suffice it to say for now that I’ve given in completely.

In terms of debate, this has been one of my most productive summers, but I have no idea why. It’s been productive in other ways, too. I’ve seen all kinds of art, made all kinds of day trips, learned how to make a perfect caffe con leche, and found a way to keep Tik (pronounced teek) from biting me too often. A year that will go down in history, I’d say. All that’s left is some David Hume, who seems to be way more important than I knew till now, and whom I’ve only dabbled in. Unfortunately I just started The First Word two nights ago, and so far I’m loving it, so it may take a while to get to the Sage of Edinburgh, given that I read books at the rate of about 3 pages a day (except for the Day Job, when I read at about 100 pages an hour). Fortunately I won’t have Scrabulous to distract me anymore, so my productivity should increase threefold.

Codified morality

There would appear to be a school of thought that law is codified morality, a school of thought to which I do not subscribe. Having been writing on morality lately, this came up, and I realized an obvious link that had eluded me in the past.

One of the things that I do early on with novices is, not surprisingly, discuss morality. In debate, when the subject arises, we need a method of measuring right and wrong that is somehow objective, and although we may never light on the perfectly objective measurement, we can reasonably look at consequential and deontological approaches to right and wrong as decent enough working models. There are those who, because of the inherent imprecision of our models, disregard the possibility of any moral action, but this presumes that morality is an absolute, and that we can’t choose among different actions as more moral or less moral, a practical necessity in real life. This is the same as saying, since I can’t be good, there’s no point in getting any better: it is at the very least illogical, because the one does not follow from the other. And, well, maybe there is an ultimate, categorical good. As Fats Waller might put it, one never knows, do one?

In introducing those novices to this subject, the first thing I ask them is how to tell the difference between right and wrong. Since most of us act on moral models received from authority, first parents and then religion, one would expect an answer along these lines, but that is seldom forthcoming. No one ever tells me that the Bible (or the Koran or the Gita) is their source of right and wrong, or their spiritual adviser, and certainly not their parents. The almost inevitable answer is that, somehow or other, the majority of people determining that something is right or wrong is the way that we can tell the difference. That is, we somehow get to vote on it.

If you stare at them long enough with they point this out, they eventually come to realize the inadequacy of such a system. We go on from there to the more satisfying and traditional models.

Still, when you come to think about it, in a democracy law is the will of the people writ in statute. Law is the list of things we can’t do and the things that we must do, and one way or another laws exist because of the will of the majority (even if you follow the torturous path of representative democracy in the US). If you look at that and squint just the right way, it might be hard to differentiate that democratic legislative provenance from the idea of law as morality. My problem with this should be clear: I don’t think we get to vote on what’s right and what’s wrong, and that that is how we tell the difference between the two. That would presume that the majority must always be correct in distinguishing right from wrong, or that right and wrong actually are a numbers game, which seems to me the same as saying that since the Yankees have more fans than the Mets, the Yanks are therefore a better team. A better team might warrant more fans, but more fans don’t warrant a better team. Something being morally correct might warrant its codification into law, but codification of something into law does not warrant its moral correctness. I’m pretty sure that most of your conscientious objectors would agree with this line of thinking.

I only point this out because, hey, it’s summer, and what else is going on? After you scour the daily published lists of which schmegeggies at WTF are studying ill-conceived theory part three and who’s studying stultification in the aff, what else is left to fill the empty hours?

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.