Curious weekend. I heard from Smilin’ J, who demurred from my discussion about him back in the day. Apparently he’s just come upon my writing, and far from wanting the tee shirt, he demanded that I set the record straight on what I had said about him. And so I will: In 1993, without question, Jason Baldwin almost smiled. There is photographic evidence of this event, available upon request.
There. Done. All inaccuracies in this blog have now been adjudicated.
So I don’t think I’ve gone into detail on the Great Tape to Pod project, although I know I’ve mentioned it. Back when the mists of prehistory hadn’t yet settled on the papaya trees, I remember reel-to-reel tapes, where you could fit three albums on one side of a tape. At that time everything was LPs, which meant you popped up to change the record every twenty minutes or so, unless you had a record changer that dropped one record on top of another in a process guaranteed to turn your vinyl into chopped liver. The process of getting up to turn or change the record was rather sacramental, and regular. But as I say, the tapes meant you got up once every two hours or so, which fit in well with college life. I never owned one of these players myself, but I envied those who did. The players were the size of a small buffalo.
Cassette tapes came into their own in the ‘70s with the arrival of the Walkman. When I first moved to Manhattan I had already begun the process of copying all my LPs (and there were a lot of them) over to cassettes, and acquiring most of my new music on more cassettes. I was never much of a Walkman fan back then, because I enjoyed walking around without distraction, enjoying life on the hoof as it happened. It wasn’t till I moved to the ‘burbs and began running in the mornings that I started going through a series of ever-breaking Walkmen. Meanwhile I continued to acquire cassettes, often dupes from library borrowings. I’ve never had too much music. And I’ve gone through a lot of phases: rock, jazz, cabaret, opera, classical, shows, tropicalia, etc. When I run out of new things to listen to I will no doubt be dead. “He who is tired of music is tired of life,” to once again bring up Dr. Johnson (although, of course, he said London, but no one but a blockhead ever quotes anyone other than Dr. J).
There are, in the chez, enough cassettes to provide musical entertainment for each and every soldier on both sides of the Global War on Terror (or GWOT, as it is known), except I admit that I have very little Islamic stuff except for a few guitarists and Cat Stevens Version 2.0, so Osama is going to have to make do with various versions of the Cajun favorite, “Don’t Mess with my Toot Toot.” In any case, as life has progressed, these cassettes have gravitated to the chez basement. I do my daily constitutionals nowadays not with Walkmen but with the Nano and the latest from my favorite podcasts. The only time I plug cassettes into the regular stereo is Christmas, because whereas I had no compunctions about upgrading, say, the White Album to CD, I’d be damned if I was upgrading “Elvis’s Christmas Album.”
I have followed the idea of copying down cassettes to mp3s for a while but never gotten off the old duff until an article a couple of weeks ago in the Times. They simply said that a copy of Toast on the old Mac would set you on your way, and that was good enough for me. The lesson here is: Don’t always believe the New York Times. All the news that’s fit to print, and half the technical data. Feh! I ended up buying a new amp, plus Toast, plus an iMic. But in the end, the setup works fine, thus:
Play cassette (which is hooked up through the amp and out the headphone jack through the iMic into the Little Elvis USB). This is a real-time process, which means I’ll be doing this forever. Yesterday I moved some chezian furniture to ameliorate the process. There’s a program called CD Doctor which is part of Toast, and you use that to record the cassette. Set the recording time for 45 minutes, and go off and read a book.
When the recording is done, you send the waveforms to CD Doctor. At this point the program attempts to separate the tracks, but its accuracy is not perfect, so you may need to do some readjustment at this point, on a macro scale. If nothing else, you delete the extra time at the end (the empty track, if any). And if a song in a mix is something you already have on disk, you can delete it and take it off the conveyer belt.
Next, you have two choices. First, you can send the material to Toast, for burning as a regular CD, and I’ve been doing that for show music. I haven’t heard Camelot, for instance, since King Arthur was in the White House. And Carousel. And Merrily We Roll Along. Those were among this weekend’s haul, all going straight to regular old CDs. Works like a charm, and those I play through the main house system, which is the usual show tune venue. I mean, I have a few shows on the MegaPod, but that’s not usually the kind of music I listen to when I’m listening to the pod, whereas nothing goes better with the Sunday Times than Broadway. Go figure.
Alternatively, you can send the music to iTunes. Here I save them as mp3s (there are other choices). No biggie. Then I copy the stuff over to the MegaPod and listen to it in the office. These are all unlabeled tracks, and at this point, as I intimated in an earlier entry, I’ve got a lot of unknown music by unknown performers. Yeah, I can recognize the Beatles more often than not (we’re talking about a hundred mix tapes here), but I do trip up on those deep Jo Jo Gunne cuts. But as you listen to the music, you plug guesses about the lyrics into Google, and nine times out of ten you see a hit for the lyrics giving the name of the song and the performer. After that, Wikipedia and iTunes one way or another set you on the path for verification. So as you listen to the music, you carefully list (and if necessary, acquire) all the track info and save it out. (Later on, if you’re so inclined, you can even pick up album art from Amazon or the like.)
Sometimes a track is complete, one song, and that’s that. Sometimes it’s more than one song, or it’s fuzzy and needs processing. In these latter cases, you go back to the computer and open the song in Audacity, process it as necessary, including breaking it up into separate tracks, and export out as mp3s. Replace the old mp3s with these new mp3s both on your hard drive and in iTunes.
Next, attach the iPod back home. First you delete all the tracks from the iPod. You still have all the original tracks you recorded, pointing to the files on your hard disk, in iTunes. Plug in the new track info into these tracks in iTunes, and when you do iTunes also updates the actual file. Then you copy all the music over again onto the iPod, and you’ve got edited—if necessary—tracks with complete info. Finally, you back up the tracks on your hard disk so you’ll never have to do all this nonsense again.
And that is how I plan to spend my summer vacation. You learn a lot in this process. For instance, there are two King Biscuit Boy tribute sites (at least), and Jo Jo Gunne (yeah, they’re real) has reunited. Who knew? As far as I know, by the way, I possess no hiphop tracks. No gangsta music. No Celine Dion (which makes gangsta rap sound like Mozart). But if any turns up, I’ll let you know.
Yo!
Showing posts with label Smilin' J. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Smilin' J. Show all posts
Monday, April 16, 2007
Thursday, March 01, 2007
The Truth Fairy
The Winningest Winner Since the Invention of Winning has an article on truth in LD in last month’s Rostrum, which I was reading this morning. Smilin’ J and I had a bunch of correspondence back in the day when he was pushing truth as the paradigm for resolutionality with the Legion of Doom. I didn’t buy it then and I don’t buy it now, for none of the reasons he suggests as those of the nay-sayers. The thing is, I agree with him pretty much on the whole resolutionality issue, and I understand what he’s saying, but his saying of it just doesn’t do the job.
The issue is not, of course, truth per se, but LDers arguing the resolution. The position, with which SJ and I both agree, is that LD is most valuable when the debaters concentrate on seriously debating the content of a resolution. This would mean, for instance, in March and April of this year that debaters would argue that the UN ought to prioritize solving human rights abuses over maintaining national sovereignty, or that they should not do so. In this instance, it is not hard to deduce that if the affirmative argues that the UN ought to prioritize solving human rights abuses over maintaining national sovereignty, the exact opposite argument that the negative might offer is that the UN ought to prioritize maintaining national sovereignty over solving human rights abuses. Argued this way, there are clear and directly opposed advocacies on both sides, and the nature of the subject (protecting rights across borders) insures that you can’t defend one side without attacking the other.
Putting aside the issue of truth for the moment and sticking to the content of this one very good resolution, it is pretty certain that in March-April the affirmative has little choice but to argue that the UN ought to prioritize solving human rights abuses over maintaining national sovereignty. The literal wording of the resolution offers no reasonable alternative that I can see. The negative, on the other hand, does have alternatives to direct opposition (although I see the direct opposite as the best and most interesting, and debatable, position). That is, not only could the negative simply argue that sovereignty > rights protection, but the negative could choose to argue, for instance, that the two should be protected equally. Personally I consider this a bad argument, but few topic periods elapse without some batch of yabbos arguing on the negative a position that merely puts the word “not” into the resolution and develops logic along those lines, offering very little true advocacy of their own. It’s probably harder to do that with this UN topic than with some others, but people will. I always maintain that this is the absolute weakest strategy a negative can take, as it is not a positive advocacy, but merely the lack of any advocacy. In effect, it is running inertia, which may be very Newtonian but is hardly Lincoln-Douglasian.
There are other possible negative strategies with this resolution. One could argue that the UN has no obligations, or that it does not have either of the obligations supposed by the resolution. I have always maintained that the language of a resolution includes presumptions (in this case that the UN has these two obligations) and that one should accept them; this will naturally lead to arguments that strongly argue interesting content on both sides. Plenty of people I respect disagree with this. For the sake of better debate, I think I’m right, but they think they’re right, for the same reason. I won’t argue it here now, but suffice it to say that non-acceptance of the presumptions of a resolution means that you can attack the presumptions, which certainly means that no longer would you be arguing whether the UN should choose between X or Y, but you would be arguing instead whether the UN has to choose, or is able to choose, or is justified in choosing, between X or Y. If nothing else, non-acceptance of the presumptions of a resolution certainly opens up a lot more ground for debate, if one accepts the concept of non-acceptance.
Along these same lines, but even further out on the continuum of the normative (don’t you love language like that?) is negative positioning that would simply critique the UN as a body absent the content of the resolution. Or a position would critique the concepts of rights and/or sovereignty. At this point we’re probably saying that the UN ought not to exist, or that rights and/or sovereignty should not or do not exist, and I can imagine a variety of arguments that could be used to support these positions. In fact, the variety is so large, since theoretically there is no contextual limit to a critique, that this sort of negative argumentation could be, virtually, anything.
So as we look at that continuum of possible debate ground, we start with a pretty straightforward reading of the resolution, with one side defending rights and the other side defending sovereignty, with the UN as the agent of action. I think that there are a lot of lines of argumentation that one could take with this straightforward reading that would allow for some very interesting debate. It’s not as if the straightforward approach limits creativity; far from it. It simply sets boundaries within which that creativity must take place. In an educational context, two months to discuss and argue the UN in an extracurricular activity, with that sort of boundary, ought to make for reasonable learning in a large group of LDers. Most high school students have never thought about the UN before in their lives; does it make sense that we should examine the most extreme positions one could take on the organization, or should be concentrate on the real issues facing the organization on a daily basis? Which will lead to the most learning? Obviously, I say that it is that latter.
As we move along the continuum from straightforward to critique, one thing that becomes clear is that there is more and more possible ground for debate, if one accepts the premises at that point in the continuum. So at the final point in the continuum, the critique of the resolution, the possible ground for debate is, theoretically, infinite, or at least infinite enough in the concept of a two-month period of NFL applicability. The problem here is, however, that this infinity is one-sided. The affirmative always must run the relatively straightforward rights > sovereignty analysis, while the negative can run • (that’s an infinity symbol as I’m typing this). Competitively speaking, this puts the affirmative at an enormous disadvantage. The negative always knows what the affirmative will run, while the affirmative never knows what the negative will run. This is unlikely to lead to substantive debate (at least in situations where both sides are not lugging 5 or 6 RubberMaid tubs with them from round to round to cover every contingency). Usually the result of such a round is in the mindset of the judge, who accepts or doesn’t accept the validity of critiques, rather than in anything said or done in the round by the debaters. Certainly no one will have learned anything about the UN, or come to any agreement that such and such is the best action the UN should take. The energy in the round will have been spent performatively deciding what a round should be. From an educational viewpoint, however, learning about the UN > learning about what an LD round should be. Few legitimate educators would disagree with that statement.
So where does the truth come into all of this? Well, JB believes that if you limit argumentation to the truth on both sides of the resolution, you will get resolutional debating, and like me, he believes that resolutional debating is better than anything-goes debating. So he wants to legislate some wording to that effect, and has done so with the Legion of Doom, and he argues his reasons in that Rostrum article. The problem I’ve always had with his position is that it doesn’t really clearly solve the resolutionality issue, nor does it clearly apply, at least in the various iterations of it that I’ve seen. He makes it clear in the article what he means by truth, and I accept that and agree with it. But none of what I’ve said here is a measure of truth, as I normally understand it. I don’t argue a position on March-April because it is true and because the opposition is false, except in the most tortured and complex terms of analysis. I do, according to JB’s logic, but I really don’t. I argue that my position is preferable, more desirable, more practical, more a lot of things, but not more true. Of course, JB’s not saying that one side is true and the other isn’t true (read the article), but simply that debate clash requires competing claims of truth. But how do you apply this in practical terms?
Well, you can’t just say that “Both sides will argue that their position is true,” because that hardly ever applies. “More true” is a philosophical construct that would send heads rolling in more ways than one. So what we end up with is, to paraphrase the Legion’s (and JB’s) wording, that the affirmative will argue that an affirmation of the resolution is true, and the negative will argue that a negation of the resolution is true.
Yeah, well… Sort of…
And that’s my problem. The language is absolutely tortured because the concept of truth almost applies to resolutionality. But linguistically, as Mark Twain put it, it is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug. The wrong word may come really, really close, but it is still the wrong word. The concept of truth comes really, really close to setting resolutional boundaries in LD, but it is still the wrong concept.
Of course, I’ve done no better, and come up with no paradigm that is a better fit. I tell my new judges, i.e., parents, to listen to a round and make their decision on which side best convinced them that, if they had to take action on the resolution immediately, they should take that particular side. That’s far from elegant, but it does help them make a decision. Elegance, which is what JB is trying for, is better. But I don’t think that elegance resides in a concept of truth. Or if it’s truth, JB still hasn’t pinned it down with wording that I can point to and say, Do this, and everyone will do it with no questions asked. He doesn’t, in other words, solve the problem. If he were solving it, I don’t think he’d get so much resistance from people like me who agree with him. God knows, I’ve got plenty of people in the debate universe with whom to disagree, so I’m not going out of my way to disagree with the ones I agree with.
So the problem remains, how do you clearly define what resolutionality is in an LD round? I’ve explained here why I want it, and I certainly know it when I see it, but I can’t distill it into one short sentence. Neither can JB. And until we can, we leave open the competitive and unfair (and uneducational) possibility of infinite debate ground vs limited debate ground. I go back to the NFL’s new LD rules as pretty good on this, but they sort of take a Potter Stewart know-it-when-I-see-it approach as well. If we could do better than that, we’d have a great breakthrough. Till then (if ever), we continue to muddle along.
The issue is not, of course, truth per se, but LDers arguing the resolution. The position, with which SJ and I both agree, is that LD is most valuable when the debaters concentrate on seriously debating the content of a resolution. This would mean, for instance, in March and April of this year that debaters would argue that the UN ought to prioritize solving human rights abuses over maintaining national sovereignty, or that they should not do so. In this instance, it is not hard to deduce that if the affirmative argues that the UN ought to prioritize solving human rights abuses over maintaining national sovereignty, the exact opposite argument that the negative might offer is that the UN ought to prioritize maintaining national sovereignty over solving human rights abuses. Argued this way, there are clear and directly opposed advocacies on both sides, and the nature of the subject (protecting rights across borders) insures that you can’t defend one side without attacking the other.
Putting aside the issue of truth for the moment and sticking to the content of this one very good resolution, it is pretty certain that in March-April the affirmative has little choice but to argue that the UN ought to prioritize solving human rights abuses over maintaining national sovereignty. The literal wording of the resolution offers no reasonable alternative that I can see. The negative, on the other hand, does have alternatives to direct opposition (although I see the direct opposite as the best and most interesting, and debatable, position). That is, not only could the negative simply argue that sovereignty > rights protection, but the negative could choose to argue, for instance, that the two should be protected equally. Personally I consider this a bad argument, but few topic periods elapse without some batch of yabbos arguing on the negative a position that merely puts the word “not” into the resolution and develops logic along those lines, offering very little true advocacy of their own. It’s probably harder to do that with this UN topic than with some others, but people will. I always maintain that this is the absolute weakest strategy a negative can take, as it is not a positive advocacy, but merely the lack of any advocacy. In effect, it is running inertia, which may be very Newtonian but is hardly Lincoln-Douglasian.
There are other possible negative strategies with this resolution. One could argue that the UN has no obligations, or that it does not have either of the obligations supposed by the resolution. I have always maintained that the language of a resolution includes presumptions (in this case that the UN has these two obligations) and that one should accept them; this will naturally lead to arguments that strongly argue interesting content on both sides. Plenty of people I respect disagree with this. For the sake of better debate, I think I’m right, but they think they’re right, for the same reason. I won’t argue it here now, but suffice it to say that non-acceptance of the presumptions of a resolution means that you can attack the presumptions, which certainly means that no longer would you be arguing whether the UN should choose between X or Y, but you would be arguing instead whether the UN has to choose, or is able to choose, or is justified in choosing, between X or Y. If nothing else, non-acceptance of the presumptions of a resolution certainly opens up a lot more ground for debate, if one accepts the concept of non-acceptance.
Along these same lines, but even further out on the continuum of the normative (don’t you love language like that?) is negative positioning that would simply critique the UN as a body absent the content of the resolution. Or a position would critique the concepts of rights and/or sovereignty. At this point we’re probably saying that the UN ought not to exist, or that rights and/or sovereignty should not or do not exist, and I can imagine a variety of arguments that could be used to support these positions. In fact, the variety is so large, since theoretically there is no contextual limit to a critique, that this sort of negative argumentation could be, virtually, anything.
So as we look at that continuum of possible debate ground, we start with a pretty straightforward reading of the resolution, with one side defending rights and the other side defending sovereignty, with the UN as the agent of action. I think that there are a lot of lines of argumentation that one could take with this straightforward reading that would allow for some very interesting debate. It’s not as if the straightforward approach limits creativity; far from it. It simply sets boundaries within which that creativity must take place. In an educational context, two months to discuss and argue the UN in an extracurricular activity, with that sort of boundary, ought to make for reasonable learning in a large group of LDers. Most high school students have never thought about the UN before in their lives; does it make sense that we should examine the most extreme positions one could take on the organization, or should be concentrate on the real issues facing the organization on a daily basis? Which will lead to the most learning? Obviously, I say that it is that latter.
As we move along the continuum from straightforward to critique, one thing that becomes clear is that there is more and more possible ground for debate, if one accepts the premises at that point in the continuum. So at the final point in the continuum, the critique of the resolution, the possible ground for debate is, theoretically, infinite, or at least infinite enough in the concept of a two-month period of NFL applicability. The problem here is, however, that this infinity is one-sided. The affirmative always must run the relatively straightforward rights > sovereignty analysis, while the negative can run • (that’s an infinity symbol as I’m typing this). Competitively speaking, this puts the affirmative at an enormous disadvantage. The negative always knows what the affirmative will run, while the affirmative never knows what the negative will run. This is unlikely to lead to substantive debate (at least in situations where both sides are not lugging 5 or 6 RubberMaid tubs with them from round to round to cover every contingency). Usually the result of such a round is in the mindset of the judge, who accepts or doesn’t accept the validity of critiques, rather than in anything said or done in the round by the debaters. Certainly no one will have learned anything about the UN, or come to any agreement that such and such is the best action the UN should take. The energy in the round will have been spent performatively deciding what a round should be. From an educational viewpoint, however, learning about the UN > learning about what an LD round should be. Few legitimate educators would disagree with that statement.
So where does the truth come into all of this? Well, JB believes that if you limit argumentation to the truth on both sides of the resolution, you will get resolutional debating, and like me, he believes that resolutional debating is better than anything-goes debating. So he wants to legislate some wording to that effect, and has done so with the Legion of Doom, and he argues his reasons in that Rostrum article. The problem I’ve always had with his position is that it doesn’t really clearly solve the resolutionality issue, nor does it clearly apply, at least in the various iterations of it that I’ve seen. He makes it clear in the article what he means by truth, and I accept that and agree with it. But none of what I’ve said here is a measure of truth, as I normally understand it. I don’t argue a position on March-April because it is true and because the opposition is false, except in the most tortured and complex terms of analysis. I do, according to JB’s logic, but I really don’t. I argue that my position is preferable, more desirable, more practical, more a lot of things, but not more true. Of course, JB’s not saying that one side is true and the other isn’t true (read the article), but simply that debate clash requires competing claims of truth. But how do you apply this in practical terms?
Well, you can’t just say that “Both sides will argue that their position is true,” because that hardly ever applies. “More true” is a philosophical construct that would send heads rolling in more ways than one. So what we end up with is, to paraphrase the Legion’s (and JB’s) wording, that the affirmative will argue that an affirmation of the resolution is true, and the negative will argue that a negation of the resolution is true.
Yeah, well… Sort of…
And that’s my problem. The language is absolutely tortured because the concept of truth almost applies to resolutionality. But linguistically, as Mark Twain put it, it is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug. The wrong word may come really, really close, but it is still the wrong word. The concept of truth comes really, really close to setting resolutional boundaries in LD, but it is still the wrong concept.
Of course, I’ve done no better, and come up with no paradigm that is a better fit. I tell my new judges, i.e., parents, to listen to a round and make their decision on which side best convinced them that, if they had to take action on the resolution immediately, they should take that particular side. That’s far from elegant, but it does help them make a decision. Elegance, which is what JB is trying for, is better. But I don’t think that elegance resides in a concept of truth. Or if it’s truth, JB still hasn’t pinned it down with wording that I can point to and say, Do this, and everyone will do it with no questions asked. He doesn’t, in other words, solve the problem. If he were solving it, I don’t think he’d get so much resistance from people like me who agree with him. God knows, I’ve got plenty of people in the debate universe with whom to disagree, so I’m not going out of my way to disagree with the ones I agree with.
So the problem remains, how do you clearly define what resolutionality is in an LD round? I’ve explained here why I want it, and I certainly know it when I see it, but I can’t distill it into one short sentence. Neither can JB. And until we can, we leave open the competitive and unfair (and uneducational) possibility of infinite debate ground vs limited debate ground. I go back to the NFL’s new LD rules as pretty good on this, but they sort of take a Potter Stewart know-it-when-I-see-it approach as well. If we could do better than that, we’d have a great breakthrough. Till then (if ever), we continue to muddle along.
Monday, February 26, 2007
OMFG (Gone Wild)
Well, it’s illuminating.
The comments thread following the Smilin’ J follow-up post on VBD has shed much light on some issues surrounding LD, almost all of it inadvertent. I didn’t read the thread that closely, but I didn’t have to. You don’t have to either. And what have we learned from these comments?
First of all, VBD is, theoretically, a website for and about high school students. But high school students are sadly lacking in this thread, with one or two exceptions. Mostly it is the young people, primarily college students, who ought to be doing something else with their free time who are posting. Even if they are dedicated coaches planning to enter secondary school education when they graduate, they simply need to have something better to occupy their brains than monopolizing a thread on a high school website on which they spin endless screeds explaining their understanding of this or that philosophy. Go to a movie. Read a good book. Please. It is bordering on the pathetic to see the level of commitment by these college students to posting in this forum. There aren’t that many of them, but they are omnipresent. These people are not setting a good example of, shall we say, the intellectual college life. Nor are they in fact living what I would term an intellectual college life. There is no rounding to their education. They appear to be locked into a high school existence from which they cannot escape, and an inherently sophomoric approach to that existence that may be cementing the inescapability.
Secondly, the level of demonization of Smilin’ J is remarkable, considering that his influence on the activity is small and, agree with him or not, is entirely motivated by good intentions. What did he ever do to these people to rouse them so much, when most of what he says has been said many times by others? I suspect, and there is some evidence for this, that he dropped these people when they themselves were debating, or he dropped their present-day students, and they still hold a grudge. But even in cases where that is not true, the level of discourse is embarrassing. Debate in an educational context ought to be inherently respectful with differing points of view presented clearly, without calls to personality. Name-calling and sour grapes and broad attacks simply do not, as noted in my first complaint above, set a good example. And these people are presenting themselves as debate coaches? I don’t want to be in the same room with them, and I pity the students who are forced into adjudications from such self-impressed, poorly mannered people, whose only claim to superiority, which they never stop making, seems to be their vast knowledge of the philosophy they have gleaned from their Pomo 202 course last semester.
All of this underlines one of the chief problems many of us have been pointing out with LD today, which is the corrosive nature of the college judges slash assistant coaches on the activity. They have brought to it materials inappropriate to the educational age group, claiming that these materials are progressive when in fact they are simply beyond the understanding of anyone who is not first versed in the basics of elementary philosophy, and—hello?—most 14-year-olds haven’t had that much time in their short intellectual careers yet to reach that point. And they have so much time on their hands that they are ubiquitous, spouting all this material at the drop of a hat in forums that, frankly, are not theirs to control. Let the high school kids have VBD. Guide them occasionally if you feel a need to do so, and certainly explain yourself, but let them learn something from the Smilin’ Js of the world. If you must post, do so respectfully, no matter how you personally perceive your adversary. Be no more rude than you would expect a debater in a round to behave. Please.
Overall, it’s a sad commentary. And not unusual. My experience is that most public forums are, sooner or later, hijacked by the loudest people with the most time on their hands, to the exclusion of other, usually more more valuable opinions. So it is with VBD. Too bad.
The comments thread following the Smilin’ J follow-up post on VBD has shed much light on some issues surrounding LD, almost all of it inadvertent. I didn’t read the thread that closely, but I didn’t have to. You don’t have to either. And what have we learned from these comments?
First of all, VBD is, theoretically, a website for and about high school students. But high school students are sadly lacking in this thread, with one or two exceptions. Mostly it is the young people, primarily college students, who ought to be doing something else with their free time who are posting. Even if they are dedicated coaches planning to enter secondary school education when they graduate, they simply need to have something better to occupy their brains than monopolizing a thread on a high school website on which they spin endless screeds explaining their understanding of this or that philosophy. Go to a movie. Read a good book. Please. It is bordering on the pathetic to see the level of commitment by these college students to posting in this forum. There aren’t that many of them, but they are omnipresent. These people are not setting a good example of, shall we say, the intellectual college life. Nor are they in fact living what I would term an intellectual college life. There is no rounding to their education. They appear to be locked into a high school existence from which they cannot escape, and an inherently sophomoric approach to that existence that may be cementing the inescapability.
Secondly, the level of demonization of Smilin’ J is remarkable, considering that his influence on the activity is small and, agree with him or not, is entirely motivated by good intentions. What did he ever do to these people to rouse them so much, when most of what he says has been said many times by others? I suspect, and there is some evidence for this, that he dropped these people when they themselves were debating, or he dropped their present-day students, and they still hold a grudge. But even in cases where that is not true, the level of discourse is embarrassing. Debate in an educational context ought to be inherently respectful with differing points of view presented clearly, without calls to personality. Name-calling and sour grapes and broad attacks simply do not, as noted in my first complaint above, set a good example. And these people are presenting themselves as debate coaches? I don’t want to be in the same room with them, and I pity the students who are forced into adjudications from such self-impressed, poorly mannered people, whose only claim to superiority, which they never stop making, seems to be their vast knowledge of the philosophy they have gleaned from their Pomo 202 course last semester.
All of this underlines one of the chief problems many of us have been pointing out with LD today, which is the corrosive nature of the college judges slash assistant coaches on the activity. They have brought to it materials inappropriate to the educational age group, claiming that these materials are progressive when in fact they are simply beyond the understanding of anyone who is not first versed in the basics of elementary philosophy, and—hello?—most 14-year-olds haven’t had that much time in their short intellectual careers yet to reach that point. And they have so much time on their hands that they are ubiquitous, spouting all this material at the drop of a hat in forums that, frankly, are not theirs to control. Let the high school kids have VBD. Guide them occasionally if you feel a need to do so, and certainly explain yourself, but let them learn something from the Smilin’ Js of the world. If you must post, do so respectfully, no matter how you personally perceive your adversary. Be no more rude than you would expect a debater in a round to behave. Please.
Overall, it’s a sad commentary. And not unusual. My experience is that most public forums are, sooner or later, hijacked by the loudest people with the most time on their hands, to the exclusion of other, usually more more valuable opinions. So it is with VBD. Too bad.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Tizzies
I somehow managed to set up a whole series of practice rounds and then mistakenly set dates a week early in the team calendar, thus sending all and sundry into a considerable tizzy. I fixed it, but this does seem to be a week for tizzies. There was the flap over the clone army of RJTs, which seems to have melted without a trace, and a tizzy about the impossibility of holding policy rounds at districts, and a tizzy of Nixon for President ads that Noah keeps sending me, presumably on the assumption that dead does not preclude tan, rested and ready, and there’s the tizzying lack of time for no apparent reason that has kept me from Nostrum. I’ve got to get things back on track. Considering that, unlike most of the VCA, I don’t have this week off, you’d think I’d be more organized, but that never happens. Disorganization by contagion. For instance, there’s a message from one Sailor that he is “kinda in Florida.” What can that possibly mean? That he’s in Georgia? That existentially no one is ever “in Florida”? Or something even more complex? You’ve got to wonder… In any case, like said Sailor, my mind is kinda in Florida. I hope to have it return to earth shortly.
Being that this is a forensic interstitial period, I do what all forensicians do when they have nothing more important on their plates, and their Netflix queues are all organized, and their hair is shampooed, and the cat has been fed and the baby has been milked, which is to trundle over and visit good old WTF. I have to admit that it’s been a while since I’ve done much more than glance at the thing, because mostly lately it’s been nothing but the usual adorations of the $ircuit (wikis of who’s going to Kentucky) and photographs of schematics from round 2 of the Uvula University Invitational (which O’C swears are of some interest to someone, and the minute I meet the person in whom this interest resides I promise you I’ll hit ‘em over the head with a frying pan and put us all out of his misery), although there were a few photos of the Huddians that I managed to pick up from hither and thither. O’C taking pictures at tournaments means that I don’t have to, which means I’d be saving film if I actually used film, if you know what I mean. Anyhow, I did notice that there was an addendum to their hotly discussed interview with Smilin’ J, this time a handful of Q&As from the curious multitudes. I love the way our hero does what can only be referred to as dropping J-bombs. He makes these wonderfully dry statements that are fairly difficult to elaborate, or are patently straightforward but the way he says them leaves you slightly askew. When asked about speed in LD, for instance, his questioner wonders how his opinion (he’s agin’ it) would apply to policy, and Smilin’ J says, and I quote, “I don’t say much about policy debate because I don’t know much about it, and it doesn’t really interest me.” This is a statement that is probably true of 110% of the people who read WTF, but there’s something about the way that he says it that makes the WTFian hair stand on end. I love that. How dare he not be interested in policy debate! How dare he feel that he can’t elaborate his opinions on postmodernism in the short context of a WTF interview! The nerve of this spalpeen!
In a way, Smilin’ J has taken on a burden comparable to Teddy Kennedy in the Senate. Whereas Teddy is so identified with liberal opinions that he is practically a parody of liberality, Smilin’ J is so identified with a traditionalist view of LD that he is practically a parody of traditionalism. This makes for a curious situation for traditionalists like myself (as, for that matter, Kennedy makes for a curious situation for liberals like myself). I mostly agree with everything Smilin’ J believes in, but I don’t seem to always agree with what he says or the way he says it. The hagiological aspect of WTF, which refers to SJ as “The Winningest Winner since the Invention of Winning,” makes matters that much more confusing. He is presented as LD’s brightest star, but as such he is immediately targeted by all the WTF amateur astronomers as glowing in a firmament that has been replaced by a new paradigm of night skyness, sort of like Zeus trying to find worshipers in the Vatican, and in his pronouncements SJ makes himself as unendearing as is humanly possible. I suspect that, to some degree, he’s being deliberately provocative, but mostly he’s just being himself. At this point, his just sitting still on a park bench reading a copy of this month’s Reader’s Digest would be provocative to WTFians. He is the face of “regressive” to all those who claim to be “progressive,” but who are, as I’ve pointed out often, merely different. Something different from what used to be is not, ipso facto, a progression, no matter how achingly it longs to make that claim. After all, he’s a couple of hundred years later but you’d have to go a long way to prove to me that the road from George Washington to George W. Bush is any sort of progress.
Anyhow, this being a slow debate week, one meditates on the demonization of Smilin’ J, some of it self-generated, and looks forward to tonight’s chez when I’ll actually be venturing into the darkest reaches of some Sailor brains with gun and camera in search of wisdom on March-April. Wish me luck. I’ll have O’C photograph me in my pith helmet when I’m in there. Look for the results on WTF, in photos, under Exploration.
Being that this is a forensic interstitial period, I do what all forensicians do when they have nothing more important on their plates, and their Netflix queues are all organized, and their hair is shampooed, and the cat has been fed and the baby has been milked, which is to trundle over and visit good old WTF. I have to admit that it’s been a while since I’ve done much more than glance at the thing, because mostly lately it’s been nothing but the usual adorations of the $ircuit (wikis of who’s going to Kentucky) and photographs of schematics from round 2 of the Uvula University Invitational (which O’C swears are of some interest to someone, and the minute I meet the person in whom this interest resides I promise you I’ll hit ‘em over the head with a frying pan and put us all out of his misery), although there were a few photos of the Huddians that I managed to pick up from hither and thither. O’C taking pictures at tournaments means that I don’t have to, which means I’d be saving film if I actually used film, if you know what I mean. Anyhow, I did notice that there was an addendum to their hotly discussed interview with Smilin’ J, this time a handful of Q&As from the curious multitudes. I love the way our hero does what can only be referred to as dropping J-bombs. He makes these wonderfully dry statements that are fairly difficult to elaborate, or are patently straightforward but the way he says them leaves you slightly askew. When asked about speed in LD, for instance, his questioner wonders how his opinion (he’s agin’ it) would apply to policy, and Smilin’ J says, and I quote, “I don’t say much about policy debate because I don’t know much about it, and it doesn’t really interest me.” This is a statement that is probably true of 110% of the people who read WTF, but there’s something about the way that he says it that makes the WTFian hair stand on end. I love that. How dare he not be interested in policy debate! How dare he feel that he can’t elaborate his opinions on postmodernism in the short context of a WTF interview! The nerve of this spalpeen!
In a way, Smilin’ J has taken on a burden comparable to Teddy Kennedy in the Senate. Whereas Teddy is so identified with liberal opinions that he is practically a parody of liberality, Smilin’ J is so identified with a traditionalist view of LD that he is practically a parody of traditionalism. This makes for a curious situation for traditionalists like myself (as, for that matter, Kennedy makes for a curious situation for liberals like myself). I mostly agree with everything Smilin’ J believes in, but I don’t seem to always agree with what he says or the way he says it. The hagiological aspect of WTF, which refers to SJ as “The Winningest Winner since the Invention of Winning,” makes matters that much more confusing. He is presented as LD’s brightest star, but as such he is immediately targeted by all the WTF amateur astronomers as glowing in a firmament that has been replaced by a new paradigm of night skyness, sort of like Zeus trying to find worshipers in the Vatican, and in his pronouncements SJ makes himself as unendearing as is humanly possible. I suspect that, to some degree, he’s being deliberately provocative, but mostly he’s just being himself. At this point, his just sitting still on a park bench reading a copy of this month’s Reader’s Digest would be provocative to WTFians. He is the face of “regressive” to all those who claim to be “progressive,” but who are, as I’ve pointed out often, merely different. Something different from what used to be is not, ipso facto, a progression, no matter how achingly it longs to make that claim. After all, he’s a couple of hundred years later but you’d have to go a long way to prove to me that the road from George Washington to George W. Bush is any sort of progress.
Anyhow, this being a slow debate week, one meditates on the demonization of Smilin’ J, some of it self-generated, and looks forward to tonight’s chez when I’ll actually be venturing into the darkest reaches of some Sailor brains with gun and camera in search of wisdom on March-April. Wish me luck. I’ll have O’C photograph me in my pith helmet when I’m in there. Look for the results on WTF, in photos, under Exploration.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Smilin' Through
Not surprisingly, the Smilin’ J interview on WTF has drawn a lot of response, virtually all of it negative. The Vatican News did an interview with Richard Dawkins that had much the same result… I only read the first handful of the SJ comments, and for all I know meaningful dialogue has since ensued, and maybe even a few supportive voices have been found. Both would be nice. Unlikely, but nice. In any case, I’ll provide my own take.
There are some issues worth discussing. First, SJ does tidily wrap up all sorts of critical thought —theory, in ironic quotes—into a nice neat bundle and tosses it on the compost, based on its content, which he finds lacking. My own mixed feelings on this material are well known to the VCA, but I’m more inclined to vilify based on the material’s incomprehensibility than its meritriciousness. I have honestly found interesting ideas in the slag heaps of some of this impenetrable prose, which does not excuse its impenetrability but does question how meretricious it might actually be. My objection to using the material in LD has mostly been that the material is not suitable for its high school audience, and that the vast unwashed of 15-year-olds being introduced to philosophy are better served with more traditional and accessible texts. This does not burden that traditional and accessible material with the value of being more true, which is another issue altogether; it simply admits the obvious that philosophy is a difficult subject, and if we seriously wish to engage young students in it, we need to do so in such a way that it will, indeed, engage them. This is not so much teaching scales before you teach Chopin, as it is reading Seuss before you read Shakespeare. Your enjoyment and appreciation skills improve as you move “up” a theoretical ladder of difficulty. It would be an iffy proposition to start high up on that ladder, without having yet developed those enjoyment and appreciation skills; growing into those skills means enjoyment and appreciation all along the way. This is hardly innovative pedagogy.
Of course, there are those who claim that the material is not “above” the best of the LDers, and should not be banned just because it is not populist. This is arguable on a number of counts, but even accepting that there might be high schoolers to whom Derrida is no more challenging than a Dagwood cartoon, there is still the question of engaging in a discourse that cannot be fully understood: I don’t think anyone claims that ALL high schoolers are capable of deconstructing the great deconstructer, for instance. A desire to win an argument should be premised on setting groundwork where the argument can, indeed, be won. Throwing a lot of material around that only one person in the room (possibly) understands doesn’t sound like much of a strategy for anything except obfuscation, which is obviously antithetical to education, even if it does “win” the round. Winning, in this situation, would have been all that it achieved. No brain cells would have been stirred in the process.
Frankly, I do not think that, until we all have read all the philosophy, past and modern, that JS has, we can engage him directly on the issue of truth in philosophy, at least on the academic level. I am from the school (the Menickites) that believes that ultimate truth in philosophy is, in fact, science. Or is in science fact, to be more precise. I talk about that a little in Caveman, and I’ll get around to it more directly at some future date. In any case, I have no intentions of becoming an academic philosopher, or a student of academic philosophy, as in knowing all about all the great (or stinky) philosophers of all time. So I really can’t address that aspect of SJ’s interview. In other words, I agree with him on the consequences of using this material, but I cannot engage him on what he claims are the causes. Although honestly, I doubt if he disagrees with my claims, and it’s just that he wasn’t making those claims himself in the interview.
The second interesting point of the interview, which Duby took SJ to task on, is the disdain for first- and second-year judges, and those same folks as assistant coaches without portfolio. Or, I guess, college coaches in general, if you wish to read a full menu from the implication. Since I am on record as placing assistant coaches on a par with the minor demons of Milton, I would seem to agree with SJ’s opinion here, but I don’t know if I do. What I am against is coaches who hire college students to provide positions if not complete cases to automata high schoolers, and then who send those “assistant” coaches into rounds to flow the competition, all in aid of a bigger trophy at the end of the day. I am also against college students attempting to achieve high school glory a little too late, who do so by finding malleable Trilbys on their own and feeding them material borrowed from their college courses, and then showing up week after week at debate tournaments (and on WTF) to push their theories of debate on the general public, molded in the hot forge of being a second-rate high schooler always on the brink of getting a TOC bid. Now, okay, this is a little cold, and stereotypical, and not completely true, but I have historically run up against the least resolutional arguments and the most erratic judging from college kids who were almost good high school debaters and who don’t seem to fit in at college now and prefer hanging around with high school people. The words “Grow up!” come to mind here, at least for this latter group. I would also direct those words to the adult coaches pulling the strings the the former group. Unlike SJ, I don’t believe these college students should be arrested on sight and banned from the back of the room, but I do feel that they need to be perceived as what they are. A balance of judges is required in the pool, and use of that balance in a neutral albeit meaningful way. My solution at Bump, of course, was to create community rankings of the judges, putting As into bubbles and mixing As and Bs equally in the outround pools. This seemed to satisfy the mob.
The idea of assistant coaches ruining LD seems to be a major theme of the Legion of Doom (which, SJ says, is far from rendered moot by the new NFL rules, but nonetheless seems to be as dormant as a dead bear in a blizzard), and it’s not one I really ever subscribed to. I certainly am against mutual judge preference, but that’s a different thing. SJ subscribes to this assistant coach vilification whole hog, and may in fact be its driving force. In my experience, there just aren’t that many of these people, of either of the stripes I’ve described above, to have that much of an influence except in one small corner of the $ircuit. And since lately I’ve been questioning the true influence of the $ircuit on LD, I’m not thinking it’s all that deadly. But one thing that is true is that these assistant coaches are not spending all their time and energy working with novices. There’s no glory in that, and therefore they’re not giving good educational value for their buck, whether you like them or not, because they’re only applying themselves to very specific competitive contexts. Education of debaters means educating 4 years worth of them, whether they are good, bad or indifferent in rounds. Chauffering a moneyed elite to major tournaments around the country, even in the most well-intentioned and ethical context, does not do that. So even if that’s not what SJ refers to, it is a part of the issue. But, mostly, I think he’s talking about something that just isn’t either that prevalent or that important.
Finally, there is the air of arrogance that is a little thick about the proceedings. Although no stranger to arrogance either in myself or others, I am surprised to see SJ express views that are unrelievedly so. Specifically, it is one thing not to flow rounds, and another thing altogether to claim that it is unnecessary. Those who do inevitably claim that they are more than capable of doing the math in their heads, so to speak, or like SJ that there is something intrinsically wrong with the round that precludes taking notes. I don’t buy it. Yeah, I’m smarter than the average teenager, and often I’m writing down stuff that is fairly unimportant in my assessment of win/loss, but giving off either odor in the round is offensive to the debaters, and if I accept the responsibility of judging then I am willing to accept the formula of proper behavior that accompanies that responsibility; it’s analogous to having debaters wear business suits. I am reminded of one of my more sketchy varsity debaters in his first judging gig, who called for a runner to take his ballot after the NC because, as he said to me in explanation, as far as he was concerned the round was over and the winner was clear. I did refrain from hitting him over the head with a frying pan, but only just. I would like to think that I wait to hear the whole round before making a decision, but if you’ve ever judged, you know as well as I do that there are cases where that is not necessary. But you owe it to the debaters to act as if that is the case. They’re doing a job of work up there, and as long as they’re seriously working at it, I need to at least appear to be seriously working at it on my end, even if my mind is already made up, although I will keep my mind open till the end, because you never know. It’s a matter of simple respect, like their wearing business clothes. I do my best to listen to everything, and heed everything, regardless of its content; I am here to judge that content, but I need to know what it is—all of it—first. I want the debaters to believe that happened, for their own self-respect, if nothing else. In those situations where last year’s TOC winner hits a novice who’s never won a round in a random pairing, that novice deserves a respectful round from both his opponent and from me, even though all three of us might know the result of that round the minute we read the schematic. For many debaters, the judge’s looking busy is important. A judge who doesn’t flow doesn’t look busy. Which means that the judge is not doing what the debater thinks is important. In this case, I think that thing—taking complete notes—is worth the debater thinking it’s important, and therefore worth the judge doing it. Even when he doesn’t really have to, because he’s smart enough to retain all the germane material in his head. It just goes with the territory.
Mostly, of course, I agree with SJ on LD, which is why I was for a short while the Legion’s poster boy. What he’s asking for is that people argue resolutions in rounds, looking for and supporting the truth of their side. This leads to constructive dialogue and great education. This is major. Where we disagree is in some of the smaller side business. But that side business, once it’s printed up, must be considered. For all practical purposes, SJ has now created the longest judge paradigm on record (unless you count this blog). So be it. If I were a debater, I would want him to be adjudicating the round. I just wish he were a little less…serious. It must come from not reading any pomo. Maybe we should all chip in and get him some Derrida for Valentine’s Day. That and some chocolate. That should do the trick.
There are some issues worth discussing. First, SJ does tidily wrap up all sorts of critical thought —theory, in ironic quotes—into a nice neat bundle and tosses it on the compost, based on its content, which he finds lacking. My own mixed feelings on this material are well known to the VCA, but I’m more inclined to vilify based on the material’s incomprehensibility than its meritriciousness. I have honestly found interesting ideas in the slag heaps of some of this impenetrable prose, which does not excuse its impenetrability but does question how meretricious it might actually be. My objection to using the material in LD has mostly been that the material is not suitable for its high school audience, and that the vast unwashed of 15-year-olds being introduced to philosophy are better served with more traditional and accessible texts. This does not burden that traditional and accessible material with the value of being more true, which is another issue altogether; it simply admits the obvious that philosophy is a difficult subject, and if we seriously wish to engage young students in it, we need to do so in such a way that it will, indeed, engage them. This is not so much teaching scales before you teach Chopin, as it is reading Seuss before you read Shakespeare. Your enjoyment and appreciation skills improve as you move “up” a theoretical ladder of difficulty. It would be an iffy proposition to start high up on that ladder, without having yet developed those enjoyment and appreciation skills; growing into those skills means enjoyment and appreciation all along the way. This is hardly innovative pedagogy.
Of course, there are those who claim that the material is not “above” the best of the LDers, and should not be banned just because it is not populist. This is arguable on a number of counts, but even accepting that there might be high schoolers to whom Derrida is no more challenging than a Dagwood cartoon, there is still the question of engaging in a discourse that cannot be fully understood: I don’t think anyone claims that ALL high schoolers are capable of deconstructing the great deconstructer, for instance. A desire to win an argument should be premised on setting groundwork where the argument can, indeed, be won. Throwing a lot of material around that only one person in the room (possibly) understands doesn’t sound like much of a strategy for anything except obfuscation, which is obviously antithetical to education, even if it does “win” the round. Winning, in this situation, would have been all that it achieved. No brain cells would have been stirred in the process.
Frankly, I do not think that, until we all have read all the philosophy, past and modern, that JS has, we can engage him directly on the issue of truth in philosophy, at least on the academic level. I am from the school (the Menickites) that believes that ultimate truth in philosophy is, in fact, science. Or is in science fact, to be more precise. I talk about that a little in Caveman, and I’ll get around to it more directly at some future date. In any case, I have no intentions of becoming an academic philosopher, or a student of academic philosophy, as in knowing all about all the great (or stinky) philosophers of all time. So I really can’t address that aspect of SJ’s interview. In other words, I agree with him on the consequences of using this material, but I cannot engage him on what he claims are the causes. Although honestly, I doubt if he disagrees with my claims, and it’s just that he wasn’t making those claims himself in the interview.
The second interesting point of the interview, which Duby took SJ to task on, is the disdain for first- and second-year judges, and those same folks as assistant coaches without portfolio. Or, I guess, college coaches in general, if you wish to read a full menu from the implication. Since I am on record as placing assistant coaches on a par with the minor demons of Milton, I would seem to agree with SJ’s opinion here, but I don’t know if I do. What I am against is coaches who hire college students to provide positions if not complete cases to automata high schoolers, and then who send those “assistant” coaches into rounds to flow the competition, all in aid of a bigger trophy at the end of the day. I am also against college students attempting to achieve high school glory a little too late, who do so by finding malleable Trilbys on their own and feeding them material borrowed from their college courses, and then showing up week after week at debate tournaments (and on WTF) to push their theories of debate on the general public, molded in the hot forge of being a second-rate high schooler always on the brink of getting a TOC bid. Now, okay, this is a little cold, and stereotypical, and not completely true, but I have historically run up against the least resolutional arguments and the most erratic judging from college kids who were almost good high school debaters and who don’t seem to fit in at college now and prefer hanging around with high school people. The words “Grow up!” come to mind here, at least for this latter group. I would also direct those words to the adult coaches pulling the strings the the former group. Unlike SJ, I don’t believe these college students should be arrested on sight and banned from the back of the room, but I do feel that they need to be perceived as what they are. A balance of judges is required in the pool, and use of that balance in a neutral albeit meaningful way. My solution at Bump, of course, was to create community rankings of the judges, putting As into bubbles and mixing As and Bs equally in the outround pools. This seemed to satisfy the mob.
The idea of assistant coaches ruining LD seems to be a major theme of the Legion of Doom (which, SJ says, is far from rendered moot by the new NFL rules, but nonetheless seems to be as dormant as a dead bear in a blizzard), and it’s not one I really ever subscribed to. I certainly am against mutual judge preference, but that’s a different thing. SJ subscribes to this assistant coach vilification whole hog, and may in fact be its driving force. In my experience, there just aren’t that many of these people, of either of the stripes I’ve described above, to have that much of an influence except in one small corner of the $ircuit. And since lately I’ve been questioning the true influence of the $ircuit on LD, I’m not thinking it’s all that deadly. But one thing that is true is that these assistant coaches are not spending all their time and energy working with novices. There’s no glory in that, and therefore they’re not giving good educational value for their buck, whether you like them or not, because they’re only applying themselves to very specific competitive contexts. Education of debaters means educating 4 years worth of them, whether they are good, bad or indifferent in rounds. Chauffering a moneyed elite to major tournaments around the country, even in the most well-intentioned and ethical context, does not do that. So even if that’s not what SJ refers to, it is a part of the issue. But, mostly, I think he’s talking about something that just isn’t either that prevalent or that important.
Finally, there is the air of arrogance that is a little thick about the proceedings. Although no stranger to arrogance either in myself or others, I am surprised to see SJ express views that are unrelievedly so. Specifically, it is one thing not to flow rounds, and another thing altogether to claim that it is unnecessary. Those who do inevitably claim that they are more than capable of doing the math in their heads, so to speak, or like SJ that there is something intrinsically wrong with the round that precludes taking notes. I don’t buy it. Yeah, I’m smarter than the average teenager, and often I’m writing down stuff that is fairly unimportant in my assessment of win/loss, but giving off either odor in the round is offensive to the debaters, and if I accept the responsibility of judging then I am willing to accept the formula of proper behavior that accompanies that responsibility; it’s analogous to having debaters wear business suits. I am reminded of one of my more sketchy varsity debaters in his first judging gig, who called for a runner to take his ballot after the NC because, as he said to me in explanation, as far as he was concerned the round was over and the winner was clear. I did refrain from hitting him over the head with a frying pan, but only just. I would like to think that I wait to hear the whole round before making a decision, but if you’ve ever judged, you know as well as I do that there are cases where that is not necessary. But you owe it to the debaters to act as if that is the case. They’re doing a job of work up there, and as long as they’re seriously working at it, I need to at least appear to be seriously working at it on my end, even if my mind is already made up, although I will keep my mind open till the end, because you never know. It’s a matter of simple respect, like their wearing business clothes. I do my best to listen to everything, and heed everything, regardless of its content; I am here to judge that content, but I need to know what it is—all of it—first. I want the debaters to believe that happened, for their own self-respect, if nothing else. In those situations where last year’s TOC winner hits a novice who’s never won a round in a random pairing, that novice deserves a respectful round from both his opponent and from me, even though all three of us might know the result of that round the minute we read the schematic. For many debaters, the judge’s looking busy is important. A judge who doesn’t flow doesn’t look busy. Which means that the judge is not doing what the debater thinks is important. In this case, I think that thing—taking complete notes—is worth the debater thinking it’s important, and therefore worth the judge doing it. Even when he doesn’t really have to, because he’s smart enough to retain all the germane material in his head. It just goes with the territory.
Mostly, of course, I agree with SJ on LD, which is why I was for a short while the Legion’s poster boy. What he’s asking for is that people argue resolutions in rounds, looking for and supporting the truth of their side. This leads to constructive dialogue and great education. This is major. Where we disagree is in some of the smaller side business. But that side business, once it’s printed up, must be considered. For all practical purposes, SJ has now created the longest judge paradigm on record (unless you count this blog). So be it. If I were a debater, I would want him to be adjudicating the round. I just wish he were a little less…serious. It must come from not reading any pomo. Maybe we should all chip in and get him some Derrida for Valentine’s Day. That and some chocolate. That should do the trick.
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