TNC

So, sez you, am I ever going to actually talk about the Northeast Championships?

I thought you’d never ask.

It was an odd tournament in some ways, because the Massachusettsians aren’t exactly like the Metropolitan New Yorkers in a variety of ways, many of them semiotic. That is, they have a different sort of tournament as their norm, and their expectations of what a tournament is and how it operates is different. CP talked about this to a degree in his last post. The thing is, if your attendees are used to a one-day tournament, thrusting them into a two-day tournament adds a layer of complexity that takes a little getting used to. If nothing else, the burdens of the host buying food for a certain number of people, which warrants the setting of fees at a specific cutoff date, is hard for people to sort out when they’re used to signing up for things at a relatively last minute. (This late signup is not so unusual, by the way. I remember in the earliest days of the MHL, there was no pre-registration at all; you just showed up and signed up, which did, of course, lend itself to a lot of starting friction, but these were pre-computer times. Even now, we shut down one-dayers only a couple of days before the event, simply to allow us to get it set up in advance to remove the starting friction; no fees or fines are set on the basis of these pre-regs.) Another concept hard for people to grasp when evolving out of a one-day environment, with perhaps one elimination round, is the need to provide judging for a series of elimination rounds, and the usual one-past-your-own-elimination burden. As the VCA knows, I have always remarked that, even in situations where people are well practiced in the business of multiple elims, there are always those people who simply must leave early, which includes getting their ballots and trophies and other paraphernalia, for the simple reason that they live the closest and therefore have the least distance to drive home. As if the rest of us wouldn’t want to go home early too, and blow off the awards ceremony where we honor our top competitors and thank our hosts for a job well done. Feh! Anyhow, in this case it’s more ignorance than asininity, so it’s theoretically forgivable, but to be honest, we didn’t let anyone go until we didn’t need them anymore. If you do have to leave a venue I’m tabbing, I’ll try to accommodate you, but as a general rule, try to live 10 hours further from there than I do, and have a few minor children and aged parents dependent on your presence to keep them from being attacked by rabid wolves, and suffer from at least two rare diseases that require immediate medical attention, and provide documentation for all of this three days in advance before I can seriously begin to entertain your request.

So, there were some perception snafus, but on the other hand, our venue in the Commonwealth meant that we attracted about 40 Pfffft teams, as compared to 6 last year. Massachusetts is a hotbed of Pfffft, for some reason. Then again, it’s not much of a hotbed of other debate, and aside from Lex, and a few late drops, it was all from outside the area. Unfortunately we lost a bunch of Jersey teams due to financial issues. Still, the numbers were pretty respectful. If you look at who won in each division, you’d be hard-pressed to suggest that these are not worthy northeast champions.

The goal remains that we must build up this event. We are getting bigger every year, and learning every year. We have some seriously good ideas for improvement, but some things will remain. Posting results of each round, and brackets for elims, proved extremely popular (and uncovered one tab error, which is the real reason I want these up there). We are focused on what we think is the perfect venue for next year, and I’ll work with JV and Catholic Charlie this weekend at our District tournament to settle some dates (when I’m not judging HI or something). We will continue to import top judging talent and make sure money is put aside for it (and we’re even thinking of feeding the judges next year, since they were, as a group, starving at the free-from-hospitality judges’ lounge, a financial necessity this year that will not recur). We will keep the all-winning-records-break approach plus the modified RR approach for any divisions that remain small. And we will have rather super trophiage (thanks to O’C, of course).

All in all, TNC continues to grow, and to thrive. I got the feeling a good time was had by all (except for the people whose heads I bit off). It is a great way to end the season. I look forward to doing it again.

Last note: The quintessential O’C bracket was the hit of the event. Now he needs to send me his filled-out version so we can all compare results.

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It's all good

Followers of the Feed (yeah, I know, that’s about the square root of -1 of you) and/or followers of CP’s blog (which is probably about the square root of -1.5 of you, which I’m not sure is more or less) read his piece on the difference approaches to our activity. Not surprisingly, he and I are in fair agreement on the core issue (I think). All forensics is valuable. All levels of commitment are good (short of monomaniacal obsession on the one side and being a yearbook-photo debater on the other side). I like to see programs starting up and feeling their way around, and I’m happy that we have two inexpensive and, locally, compatible leagues in the NYCFL and the MHL. Between the two we offer almost a complete season of participation for very little money, maybe $100 a year for a whole team (by the way, we’re revising the MHL fees next year to a one-time payment to cover costs, i.e. trophies and printer cartridges and O’C’s sweater vests so it should be even cheaper), not to mention that we regularly waive fees for teams who arrive with their pants pockets hanging out, empty of even a dime for a cup of coffee (although you have to hand it to them for thinking that they can find a cup of coffee for a dime anymore). By the same token, I’m perfectly fond of the semidetached Sailor who shows up most of the time for meetings and doesn’t say much and only debates a little bit, maybe just enough to earn a membership in the NFL and for me to remember their names the next time I see them. They’re not my favorites, by any means, but I can appreciate that they have lives with something else in them other than debate, and there is no doubt in my mind that our discussions of resolutions and the like are academically beneficial even in small doses. On the other end of the spectrum, debaters who teach me a thing or two are what make this rockin’ world go round. I tend to like an intellectual challenge, and having to learn some new damned thing to understand what 17-year-olds are talking about gives me something to do in between golf games and bouts with Lego Star Wars. Those students too are getting something out of forensics, at a high level, obviously, and all of it is good. I’m similarly agnostic about specific activities, although I do have my personal favorites. I see little advantage of LD or Policy or PF or Extemp or Duo or HI or OO or OI in academic benefit, although obviously the benefits of interpreting poetry are different from the benefits of running Policy counterplans. But they’re all benefits, rewarding the actors rather equally in proportion to their dedication. Chacun a son gout, as they say in Montreal. And one gout is as good as another, if you ask me.

But it is true that this sort of pan-forensics approach is not as widespread as one would like. While I don’t necessarily expect students to feel this way, insofar as there is a certain tribalism that comes with each activity, replete with totems and taboos and talismans and tschotkes and other team paraphernalia that appeals to the high school brain, I do expect coaches to feel this way. My immediate circle certainly does (which is why they’re my immediate circle) but I know a lot who don’t. I know of coaches who believe that casual participation in forensics is worthless, or who believe that only their activity is worthwhile. For a 17-year-old LDer to be true to LD and to drink the LD Kool-Aid is one thing, but with a 40-year-old, you’ve got to wonder. It’s like an English teacher who sees no value in science classes, or worse, an English teacher who sees no value in reading Thackeray instead of Dickens (or in this day and age of declining readership of books, Harry Potter v David Copperfield). Learning is learning, and educators should take it wherever it comes. One of the nice things about forensics is that the learning is sort of hidden, or at the very least it’s fun. Which is a good way to do it.

The only way we can overcome biases and misunderstandings and tribalisms is to keep working to overcome them. At the point where anyone in a position of authority over a league of some sort begins to believe that their league has it right, and that if the world also wants to be right it has to do things the way that league does it, we are on the road to perdition. Interestingly enough, the nature of forensics tends to breed iconoclasts. But the nature of life in general tends to breed power enclaves that self-protect (through Foucaultian definition), so the power enclaves are often in a position to resist the changes proposed by the iconoclasts. But again, the nature of forensics tends to breed people who are constantly engaged in dialogue (you can’t shut them up, actually) and, in many ways, a dialectic search for truth. Which means that even if the doors of power are locked, we’re always out there banging on them.

So I ask you this, if you’re in any position of authority over any aspect of forensics whatsoever. Are you welcoming of change? Do you listen to newcomers and outsiders? Do you act openly? Do you welcome everyone? I’m not saying you have to agree with everyone. I maintain a rather conservative stance on LD, for instance, but I have also changed my opinions over my years of working in the activity, and I am willing to engage anyone, anywhere, in open dialogue. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I weren’t. And if you aren’t, neither are you.

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Coda

Riding home from Massachusetts usually means stopping at Rein’s deli, which is about at the halfway mark on Connecticut’s Route 84 regardless of where you happen to be coming from or going to. Rather magical, that. Everyone stops at Rein’s, except for NFA, which prefers to stop at malls to buy sweater vests and to play football. And I do mean everyone. As in, witness the following.

So Saturday night at around 8:30 we pull into Rein’s with our entire group. Being a tad on the large side, we break down into two smaller segments. The mostly male factor (or most of the malefactors, take your pick) went off together to order vast quantities of soup, while the rest of us were herded into a back room where one other large table was filled with people who looked remarkably…familiar. They looked at us, we looked at them; a mix of adults and teenagers, many of them well too dressed up for normal everyday existence. In fact, their adults were dressed up too, and I’ve never seen so many bowties in one place (and I hope never to do so again, for that matter). “Are you coming from the debate tournament?” one of them asked. Normally we would simply respond yes to this question, but there was something a little off in all of this, because these were definitely not the debaters I am used to. Speecho-Americans was my guess, and I responded accordingly. After speaking to these folks for a minute, we learned they were in fact from the NCFCA, the National Christian Forensics and Communications Association, the speech and debate league for home-schooled students. Pretty cool, I thought. If you take debaters—a rowdy and mixed group, to put it mildly—and Christianize and home-school them, they come out looking like Speecho-Americans. Sorta makes sense, when you think about it.

Anyhow, we had our dinner, which was the usual challenge of Sailor v. Coach. Forwhomthe Ben ordered a corned beef sandwich, making sure with the bemused waitress that it contain no peanuts or milk in it anywhere. I was tempted to explain the concept of kosher to him, but couldn’t figure out a way to include legumes in the discussion, so I let it pass. Then there was our student who had never had, apparently, either a reuben, corned beef, rye bread or Russian dressing, but was game and enjoyed her introduction to deli food leaving nary a bite. SuperSquirrel and I compared nasty foods we wouldn’t hesitate to eat, and although both of us love a nice rabbit, she drew the line at cervelle aux buerre nois, which used to be my standard Wednesday lunch back in the seventies at a restaurant since immortalized in Nostrum (thank you, Jules and Mite). The Panivore, fresh from victory, suffered mild apoplexy during this conversation, but given that she is in a permanent state of malnutrition, what do you expect? I keep waiting to see her picture in a magazine with a plea to send money to feed and save this child!

After these festivities were concluded, as I was paying, the leader of the NCFCA pack started chatting me up. His real question was, how do we get judges, and I explained the concept of paying college flaneurs students good money to do the job, although I pointed out that to some extent we also relied on parents. “Ah, yes,” he replied. “Parent judges versus student judges. I used to debate myself when I was a kid. We always hated the parent judges.”

“You were a debater?” I asked, not the wittiest reply ever, but I was full of corned beef (no milk or peanuts) and French fries, so my brain wasn’t its normally active self.

“Yes,” he said, pulling on the ends of his bowtie. “You said you were from Hendrick Hudson? I used to debate them.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Where did you go to high school?” I asked.

I should have been able to guess the answer. “Bronx Science,” he replied.

Aback was I taken! I suddenly had visions of O’C twenty years from now, transformed into a Christian Home School Debate Coach. The mind boggled.

I wished my new Bronx Science alum friend good luck, and went screaming out into the night.

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Modnov plus the triumphant return of bracketology

Get the latest on modnov.

And this being March Madness season, I offer Menick Madness. It's been a couple of years since we've done these, and a few new ones seemed in order.

Bracket for the best person you'll never be judged by. You can also use this to determine the worst person you'll never be judged by.

Bracket for your most personally important tech item of the 21st Century.

And finally, and probably most interestingly—not to mention my personal favorite—a bracket for the quintessential O'C.

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In which a variety of issues are sliced and diced

There’s more on ModNov: check it out.

Last weekend was the first Byram Hills invitational, which seemed to go well from my perspective. The fields were large enough that we weren’t breaking brackets left and right, and although the judge pool was small, it had some strong people in it. Putting a new event on the calendar is always difficult for a variety of reasons. Chief among these is simply finding an empty date. Even as we were doing Byram we were discussing where Scranton might be able to put something (around the beginning of November). And everyone knows by now that UPenn is going to stake its own unique claim on Presidents’ Weekend, on the assumption that plenty of people don’t go to Harvard and might like a more low-keyed event that weekend. In all of this I realize that my own participation will have to be pared down a bit next year, although I’m not sure quite yet where, exactly. I simply don’t have every weekend available because the DJ is getting progressively more difficult to excuse myself from so regularly. So, just because I tabbed you last year doesn’t mean I’ll tab you next year. Assume nothing. Ask early. Once I run out of days off, I’ve run out of days off.

Anyhow, not much of reportable consequence happened in the hills of Byram. The usual attempts by the usual suspects to get out of drop fees by not reporting drops at the table and letting the tab room discover them after round 2 has been paired hardly bears mentioning. One school didn’t show up entirely, but then again, no one had seen them all year so maybe they’re just imaginary. I know a lot of debaters whom I wish were imaginary, so that could be a blessing in disguise. We did have an irate judge who broke through our high level of security and attacked tab with a combination of scathing wit, litotes and vague allusion, but I responded to this uncharacteristic challenge by telling him to go suck an egg, so it didn’t amount to much. O’C and I were accused of sitting around doing nothing, to which we responded by heading out for lunch, so I guess you can see where we stand on that issue. (We were subsequently accused by the restaurant of—wait a minute. Why am I telling you all this here? I feel a great debate adventure coming on. BTW, I’ve been accused of doing O’C’s Irish accent as a Scottish accent. Jeesh. You want Mel Blanc, you go exhume him. Meanwhile, settle for what you get.)

I remain wedded to my Wii, having added relatives bumping into each other while boxing (virtually) to my repertoire that hitherto only included Lego Star Wars. This is all much more fun than debate, although last night we did have a practice round (first of the year in our regular meeting time slot) which was pretty entertaining too. I don’t know how the People’s Champion is able to read his case given that he has more hair than Cousin Itt, and I could barely recognize him since he wasn’t wearing his Ben Whiteguy sweater vest. (Catsmacker says that every time her team takes a road trip they have to stop at every mall so that Whiteguy can add to his collection. Quite the fashion-setter. Haven’t seen anything like this since Wedro’s matching Mafia shirts and ties back in the 90s.) For some reason the Sailors don’t have half as many practice rounds as they had oughta, and I don’t know why as they’re very useful. Reading and hearing cases are two different things. Oh, well. For some reason last night SuperSquirrel palmed off a counterplan on the PC’s opponent. Nasty. Given the rules about CPs, one has to wonder about them. As I put it, a third of your LD judges will drop you for it cold, a third will simply ignore it, which leaves a third who may or may not buy it. Those odds just don’t work for me. If you want to run a CP, go do Policy. LDers doing Policy (and Policians doing LD, for that matter) is all the rage around here these days. Speak French in France, in other words. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. In LD, do LD. Can’t hurt.

Northeast Chumps is coming up. I’m definitely looking forward to the last major Sailor road trip of the year. Maybe I’ll buy a sweater vest.

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It's time to settle on the novice topic

At the very top of the things-to-do list is finalizing the Modest Novice. I've already said what I want to say over on the Modest Novice site, so I'll just cross-post. http://www.modestnovice.org/2009/03/17/possible-wordings/

(I'm sure we'll return to news and views and general bologna soon enough here. I've lately come to realize that whenever I say something that is, shall we say, less than glowing about persons who remain anonymous, 95% of the VCA thinks I'm talking about them. How vanevain! Still, I would hate to keep you from your general albeit misguided rankles, so bear with me a little bit, and we'll tell you everything you need to know about you-know-who, whatchamacallit and you yourself—you bloody vile spalpeen—soon enough.)

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All the news Part 3

I’ve already posted an RSS how-to, specifically referencing the Google Reader, which is my personally preferred application. I started using GR because for a while I was using iGoogle as my home page, and the reader was right there for the clicking, and the progression just happened. But it was a happy accident. GR does have some nice features for controlling the look and feel, not to mention sharing (and thereby providing the source of the Coachean Feed, which we’ll get to shortly). GR also offers suggestions for new feeds based on the feeds you already source, which has proven quite helpful. I’m sure there’s other comparable RSS products, and if you already have and use one, more power to you, but if not, you can’t go wrong with it. Check out that how-to (it’s on the right over there under greatest hits) for the details.

My history with RSS is complicated. I started with one feed, through MHL, then broke out a second, personal one. Just recently I moved everything back to one feed again (there’s an easy way to do this, where you save your feeds to a file and GR picks them up, not unlike saving your bookmarks to a file and passing them to a different browser). My experience with RSS has allowed me over time to figure new and better ways to parse the feeds so that I can address them meaningfully. Feed management becomes something of an obsession, to tell you the truth. But if you have a hundred feeds in one folder, for instance, your RSS is totally unmanageable and not much different from having a hundred bookmarks in your browser, which is the old way of doing things. You need to divvy them up so that, depending on what you’re doing and when you’re doing it, you can access the ones you want, when and how you want them.

I have, at the moment, 171 subscriptions. That means 171 web sites are sending me updates every time something new happens on them. Those sites are broken down into seventeen or eighteen categories. When I log on first thing in the morning, there are probably a thousand new entries overall, and maybe another thousand accrue (and get cleared) as a day progresses. This is a lot of information. Breaking it down into folders meaningful to me makes dealing with it fairly efficient.

The first folder I check is Debate, which includes the handful of debate blogs including VBD and CP’s rantings and the like. Secondly there is an Ideas folder, which contains feeds most likely to be of value to debaters. These are philosophy sites, deep-background opinion sites, things like that. 90% of the articles I mark for Coachean Feed come from here. Thirdly there is an Opinions folder, which is more newsy and decidedly more loosey-goosey than Ideas, but still occasionally offers useful material. Beyond that, there are some areas of interest only to me (like amusement parks and entertainment stuff such as music and films), tech, science, books. I have a catchall category for general sites like Boing Boing and Digg (both of which are, one way or the other, aggregate sites, like the Feed), which I like to look at but which are not essential. Daily Dish gets its own category. eZines get theirs. And so forth. I’m not recommending you do what I do, I’m just telling you what it is that I do that is working for me.

Needless to say, I do not read thousands of internet postings a day. But once I’ve prioritized all the postings, the reader allows me to get through headlines/distillations at fairly blazing speed so that I can stop and read the ones I want. (GR allows me to switch from pure headlines to longer distillations, formats which I alternate depending on the nature of the material.) When all is said and done I probably spend about a half hour to an hour sorting through this stuff. And as I indicated, I address the debate material first, and repost it to the Coachean Feed by starring it (a retweet without twittering). So what does this mean to you? Well, you can grab the Coachean Feed and know that every single article in it is potentially interesting to someone of a forensician persuasion (or at least an LD or Pffffter persuasion). It may just be articles on human rights absent a specific context, but you can’t possibly not want to know everything you can about HRs, especially articles on HRs selected for you by a debate coach. You pay good money for research if you buy briefs; I give it to you for free.

But I’d be happier if you made Coachean Feed just one of the pages you RSS. It is, by design, specific to our little corner of the mental universe. But I’ll bet that your mind is also interested in other corners. Sure, you can go to those web pages you like, as you do now, and look at their stuff, but this is the same as saying, yeah, I know those mp3s are convenient, but I’ve got enough music already on my 78rpm records. It depends entirely on what you consider “enough.” In the age of the internet, enough is as much as you can get your hands on. Anything less is, well, not enough.

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All the news Part 2

It is a mistake to claim that the internet is all about news. But it is also a mistake to claim that newspapers are all about news. Newspapers certainly have a mission to transmit a selection of the latest important information, but they also transmit opinions and general information. They cover arts and culture and science and business. Additionally, they transmit indirect information, such as what you see in the ads. (For instance, I wonder how many people get virtually all of their selection data on movies from looking at the movie advertisements on the arts pages?) There are also purely entertaining sections in most newspapers, things like puzzles and comics. When I make the (futile) demand that the Sailors read the Times I am making it in the belief that there is more there than analyses of economics in Kyrgyzstan. A lot of it is fun and entertaining, and a lot of it is not news but simply good stuff they might want to know, or opinions on subjects that are of direct (resolutional) interest.

Obviously the internet is even more diverse than the seeming monolith of a newspaper. And it has some advantages over newspapers that are causing great and perhaps fatal harm to that older breed of media. In many respects, if not all, the internet does what newspapers do, and it does it better. It doesn’t have the ergonomic satisfaction of coffee mug and comfy chair on a Sunday morning, but it’s approaching that satisfaction with machinery like the Kindle and netbooks. But with the advantage of more and faster information comes the disadvantage of our having to sort through all that information.

Curiously enough, I’m still not settled on getting my literal news from the internet, so I don’t make any recommendations there yet, aside from applying what I’m saying here to that avenue as well in search of your own accommodation with today’s technology. Personally I still like my combination of NPR, breakfast and the New York Times as my specific feeds of data on the most important “news” stories of the day (excluding the breakfast part of it). This is about a half hour of my life every day (and more on the weekends). That’s a pretty substantial percentage of my conscious existence.

But as for all the rest of that stuff, let’s face it. Unless you spend all day surfing dozens if not hundreds of websites, it is all trees falling soundlessly in the forest as far as you are concerned. You don’t hear it, so it isn’t happening. While there are situations where the concept of you going out and getting information makes sense, if that’s the only approach you have to information on the internet, you’re not even making it to the level of dilettante.

So much information! So little time! But am I saying that you need all of the information on the internet? Of course not. What you need is a method for extracting the right information in a reasonable amount of time and with a reasonable amount of effort. In other words, until you are using RSS, and with a sense of mission, you just aren’t doing there yet. You are driving a horse and buggy down the autobahn, watching the sports cars zip past you. Don’t tell me you’re enjoying the journey. The driver of the Boxster is really enjoying the journey; you’re just making a virtue of ignorance.

Get over it.

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All the news doesn't fit anymore

Okay, you’ve heard this from me before. So sue me. You didn’t do anything about it, did you? You’re so set in your ways that you’ve decided not only that you’re better off doing things the way you’re already doing them but that your way is some reasonable alternative, and that just isn’t true. You are in the serious position of becoming computer illiterate, which nowadays is about two kliks short of life illiterate. If nothing else, you want to know what’s going on in the world so that you can win debate rounds or coach debaters or vilify the author of this blog or simply look smart at cocktail parties (has anyone had a cocktail party since, oh, 1974?). And then there’s my favorite line: If you were smarter, I’d be funnier. My goal here is to increase your brainpower. While resistance may not be futile, it is ill-advised.

It begins with the fact that newspapers are collapsing all around us. (Hearst, owner of some of the recently departed/departing, is waving the white flag by creating its own e-reader to take on the Kindle in the periodicals arena.) Even if you wanted to keep up with what’s going on in the world via newspapers, it gets progressively harder as time goes by. I maintain that the New York Times is the one to read even if you live in Podunk, but although at the moment the Gray Lady seems to be surviving as a physical entity, I wouldn’t bet the old 401K on its being there in 5 years, at least in its present form. Why are newspapers collapsing? Well, if the currency of newspapers is indeed news, the internet can deliver it with an immediacy that a pile of newsprint plunked down on your doorstep once a day can’t match. And the money behind newspapers, either space or classified ads, is going elsewhere. Craigslist is usually cited as the chief reason why no one uses newspaper classifieds anymore. The immediacy of instantaneous news is reflected in craig’s instantaneous apartment listings (or whatever). The horse is out of the barn, and it’s not going back. (And oh, yeah, you can buy horses on craigslist. Also there’s a category “baby+kids” so I guess you can also buy children, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you can afford to send them to college.)

Of course, you weren’t reading the newspapers anyhow, so you’re not terrifically affected by all this. At least if you’re an LDer you weren’t reading the papers. Policy people and Extempers (should) breathe news, and Pfffters are getting into the swing of it (although some strike me as still a bit dilettantish about knowing what’s going on in the world before a topic about it is released), but LDers like to think that all they need to know they already know or can look up. This is not true. Broad general knowledge precedes specific in-depth knowledge, at least if that knowledge is going to be put to broad use (as in informing one’s debate career). My arguments for reading daily newspapers (or their contemporary analog, whatever that is) remain viable, and you can dig back through the muck of this blog to find them, or listen to my research lecture, or simply assume that since I am always right and I never lie, you can trust me. You need to know what’s happening in the world. You have no choice. Resistance, as I said, is not futile, but it will make you a dolt. And we wouldn’t want that, now, would we?

I’ll continue this next time (I haven’t actually gotten to the point yet), but meanwhile, stare at this for a while.

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Tags

I’m willing to bet anything that you’re not tagging your cases as well as you could.

People often seem to forget that somewhere in the back of the room someone is trying to follow all the arguments, probably writing them down on paper. And all of the arguments are, as a general rule, complicated. Once you start throwing around evidence, and perhaps picking up your speaking pace to get through everything, you’re really burdening that poor note-taker back there. Oh, yeah, said note-taker loves speed and is proud of being the first in his or her region of the country to speak so fast back in the day that any room in which the debate was taking place was known to travel forward in time and leave everyone in the tri-state area dazzled by its Doppler effect. But still, as a debater, you can make it easy for our note-taker, or not. The choice is yours.

To make things easy, first of all, the entire contention needs to be cogently tagged. I’m not necessarily arguing against word economy, but at the top of your argument you should explain very clearly what the argument is about. This is analogous to what teachers tell you to do in writing an essay; you start off with a summary of your thesis. (Although, actually, both in speaking and writing you literally might start off with a teaser and then go into thesis summary, but we’ll presume that approach for this discussion.) This paragraph is, in fact, written in that style. Note the first sentence. It tells you that my subject is the need to tag contentions in a certain way. There is no doubt what I am talking about, although you don’t yet know what I am going to say about the subject. That will come in the ensuing sentences. If you were flowing this paragraph, the first thing you would write down is “entire contention needs to be cogently tagged.” If I were reading this aloud to you, I would slow down at that top sentence so that the thesis sinks in. Listen to a policy round some day. It’s not all blazing speed. They slow down when they need you to actually hear something, like the substance of their arguments. Speed is expended on reading the evidence and getting it into the record, so to speak.

What doesn’t work as a tag are things like, “Contention one, cogency,” any more than it would have worked if my first sentence in the paragraph above had been, “First, cogency.” Yeah, the idea is the same thing, but the clarity is missing. I’d have to sooner or later explain what I’m talking about before getting around to arguing for or against it. That’s a bad place to be in when you’re a debater. We should know exactly what you’re talking about at all times. A clearly tagged contention or subpoint will do that. An elliptical (or total lack of) tag will not. Which do you prefer?

Evidence, too, needs to be tagged. There are many ways to do this, but in LD this is usually handled in a statement such as, “The ICC is full of poopyheads. International analyst Joe McDoakes concurs: ‘The ICC comprises seventy-five percent off all poopyheads.” Your words lead us into the exegesis in the quote. The quote supports your words; it does not replace them, but elucidates them, perhaps providing the all-important warrant. Evidence is secondary to the argument you are making, even though the warrant may be in the evidence. The case is your claims, supported by evidence, not the evidence glued together by as few of your words as possible. This is a standard beginner’s error, after a beginner realizes that evidence is necessary. Starting out, a debater makes stuff up, then discovers that evidence is better, and then writes cases that are all evidence and no debater-written content, turning a case into not a position for or against but an aggregate of other people’s opinions, sort of like a live RSS feed. Not very convincing on the debate platform. The key point I want to make, though, is that evidence needs to be clearly tagged. When I am flowing I am going to write down the tag for your evidence. If I don’t have a tag for it, what do I write down? The whole thing? I’m not a court stenographer, after all. Tell me the meaning of the evidence at the top, and I’ll listen to the evidence for the crucial words that provide the support for that meaning. Otherwise I’ll listen to the evidence trying to figure out why you chose that piece of evidence. Which do you prefer?

Granted, this is Debate 101. But take a look at your cases. Look at the tops of the contentions. Look at the evidence tags. Are you making it easy for the note-taker in the back of the room? If not, do you really feel that you’re going to pick up that ballot?

Sisyphus and the Honey-Do List: A True Myth

One is just the busiest little beaver, but having, it would appear, little to show for it. The thing is, I’m getting a bit wrung out at the DJ, which means that when the evenings roll around and it’s time to revolutionize debate in our lifetime, I’m more inclined to watch “House” or play Lego Star Wars (I’m on episode 4, which is the furthest I’ve ever gotten in any videogame, probably because, well, it’s aimed at 8-year-olds, which is about my age in gaming years). I’m also reading Updike on art (Just Looking), which is one of the best books I’ve read in a while, absent the DJ. I might even go see Watchmen, but I wouldn’t bet any money on it, as I tend to be more critic-like than fanboy-like in my tastes.

Things to do:

1. The Modest Novice
2. Theory debate curriculum
3. MHL Workshop curriculum (and date, and place)
4. Prep Sailors on vigilantism (i.e., it’s pronounced vig-il-ANT-ism, not some other bizarre combination of the letters, and definitely not vigilante-ism or vigil-aunt-ism)
5. Get States info to Statesfolk
6. Hope I only reserved 4 rooms for CatNats and not the 20 that I’m afraid I reserved because there was no acknowledgments page and, well, you just don’t want to know
7. Find map of Needham
8. Run Bobcat with O’C (or run O’C with bobcat, whichever comes first; with luck, a tale of great debate adventure will ensue since he’s bunking at the chez again, but if not, at least he and I can sing obscure Disney songs to the Panivore on the ride over)
9. Pray for debatable CatNats Pffft topic
10. Explain to Panivore what a fried clam is, and that they are eaten by choice and not as a torture technique
11. Miscellaneous, etc.

Grand adventures

CFL LD Grands, where the top three debaters from each program in the New York diocese come together to fight over six slots was, as usual, a bloodbath. Almost every single pairing had the feel of a final bid round; few if any of the contestants were, as you might put it, walking byes. In the past there have been a few schlubs tossed into the mix by newer programs thinking to give their students some tough experience, but not this year. It was just a lot of serious talent having at it. The people who qualified all deserved to. So did half of the people who didn’t qualify. Whew!

Pfffft, on the other hand, had a different slant. From the mariners’ point of view, of the six slots, three would inevitably go to Regis. This is about as difficult to predict as guessing that the Latino restaurant down the street (Reason #1 to have a tournament at Stuyvesant!) will have rice and beans on the menu. That leaves three slots up for grabs. My guess was that my younger LDers who wouldn’t have a chance against the seniors in the LD division would be a reasonable entry in PF, hence the suggestion that the Panivore and the People’s Champion join sophomoric forces. The panivorous one watched a couple of Pfffft rounds at Lakeland to find out what the activity actually was, then we prepped the two of them Tuesday night, and Saturday, lo and behold, they qualified. Taking a play from our book, a similar albeit more elderly team from Monticello did likewise. This is the good news. The bad news is, of course, that now we have to go to CatNats in Albany on Memorial Day weekend. Oh, well. You can’t have everything. Still, couldn’t they have qualified to go somewhere cool. Like, maybe, any city that isn’t Albany?

Tabbing the event, which I had pre-whined over because of our traditional difficulty, turned out to be the plum of the year. It was positively balmy out, so the windows were open blowing in fresh air over the canned heat blasting out of Stuyvesant’s furnaces (in typical NYC fashion, the heat goes on and off by date, not by need). Because we had amended the constitution of the NYCFL organization this year so that if there were fewer than 20 entries we would use 2 judges instead of 3, and because LD came in at 18 (well, actually 19, but one brilliant coach apparently signed up a student and completely forgot about it!), and because everybody was obligated to bring one judge per student, and because we had a couple of extras (even after I had to disqualify one judge because it was his very first tournament ever, and would it kill that team to follow the rules just once?), we were able to single-flight with two judges in each round, meaning that, even pairing by hand, we were done by around 4:00. In the afternoon. There were, of course, issues during the day, the biggest being our dropping of teams from the tournament as it progressed. Once you are mathematically eliminated, there’s no reason for us to keep you in. It is, after all, a qualifier and not a tournament in and of itself. But dropping people in PF, as it turned out, meant that serious pull-ups (all double, plus in one case 3-0 v 0-3) came into play versus side constraints (yeah, side constraints, this being CatPffft, which has reformed NFL rules for no apparent reason other than to drive me and JV crazy at Grands). We checked the league by-laws, but this issue, side versus pull-up, was unaddressed The pull-ups seemed seriously unfair compared to going con again or whatever, and we consulted with Catholic Charlie and Kaz and everyone else sitting around, including our own history (one year I broke side constraints because otherwise it was somehow same-school v same-school), and we ultimately decided to flip some of the final pairings but to hold brackets. The pro still went first (the other half of the Catholic Reformation, so to speak) but at least it led to real debates. This was only in PF, though. LD ran more clockworkian. And one is more inclined to follow restraints in LD than in Pffft, which is inherently flippable unless it’s Catholic, go figure.

Anyhow, it’s over, and now I’m heading up to Albany on the best golf weekend of the year. Needless to say, I’m praying for rain. It being a Catholic event, and me being raised by the nuns, maybe my prayers will be answered.

Catholic food

Having dinner with the Catholics really slows down one’s blogging.

And what do the Catholics talk about? Well, we talk about you, for one thing, especially if you’re a coach. One reminisces over past foibles, the more notable the better. If you’re a student, your name probably didn’t come up unless you graduated and made something of yourself. As a rule, we are all fond of students, even the stinkers, and we praise their successes and dance past their failures. Otherwise, probably, we wouldn’t be in this business. We have a nice dinner, and talk a lot about the theater, given that this crowd, with the exception of Catholic Charlie, is a big theater crowd, even Sister R. Catholic Charlie, on the other hand, doesn’t like musicals unless they feature Genesis music which, thankfully, never happens. Catholic Charlie has a 120-gig iPod with nothing on it but Genesis music. Original Genesis music. Symphonic covers of Genesis music. Jazz covers of Genesis music. Bunch O’ Banjos covers of Genesis music. There is no room on that mp3 player for, say, Flora the Red Menace. Meanwhile, at least one of the Catholics claimed to have given a kid a 6 in an extemp round for not knowing who Barbra Streisand is. It’s that kind of group.

Saturday being CFL Grands, Friday night will be straightening out the data. The big question is whether we’ll hit the 20 needed for 3 judges in LD (we’re definitely not hitting it in Pfffft). In the words of Mr. Micawber, predicted Grands field 20 students, actual Grands field 18 students, bliss. Predicted Grands field 20 students, actual Grands field 20 or more students, JV and I go nuts trying to figure it out. Straightforward card tossing or the most complicated tabbing of the year. We’ll know tomorrow morning.

Sailing toward CFL Grands

Tuesday night is, of course, when the mariners get together and fondly reminisce about the good old days when debaters were debaters and proud of it. We concentrated on a couple of things that are worth sharing.

First, there is the question of following up a tournament, i.e., what do you do for the next tournament based on your performance at the last tournament? The answers tend to vary from person to person just as the results and performance vary from person to person, but a few things seem pretty basic. First of all, all cases need to be rewritten, although the level of rewrite will vary. If you did well, what you should be looking at are just little things, areas where your opponents were always zeroing in that need strengthening, or sentences that kept tripping you up, or maybe upgrading evidence; after all, the day you stop researching a topic is the day you decide you don’t want to win any more rounds. If you didn’t do so well, you’re looking at anything from a complete rewrite to a serious overhaul. While it’s nice to blame sunspots, judges and the quality of the ziti in the cafeteria for lack of success, usually weak cases play a crucial role in the losing of rounds. Starting from scratch may be a lot of work, but given that one definition of insanity is expecting different results from doing the same thing over and over may suggest that if you don’t rewrite your cases, you’re pretty much certifiable. (And in debate circles, being certifiable is really taking things to extremes, given that everybody is already mostly crazy to begin with.) The second big area is responses. Rounds that aren’t lost at the case level are lost at the response level. Obviously choice of what to push and what to let slide is something that can only be determined in hours of lost sleep over regretted choices made in the heat of argument, but having good responses in the first place is something else altogether. If you don’t have a response to everything you heard (or saw on some other flow), get one. If you don’t have a piece of evidence to back every response, get one. You certainly won’t use all your responses, but you’ll feel better knowing you’ve got more than just a handful of arrows in your quiver. And as for evidence, it’s one thing to respond to your opponent by saying, “Nyah, nyah,” and another thing altogether to respond to your opponent by saying, “As Immanuel Kant said on his daily walk through Konigsberg, ‘Nyah, nyah.’” You won’t use a quote in every response, but it’s good to use some in the responses that are most important in supporting your position or knocking out your opponent’s position. Given that it is highly unlikely that you already have a quote for every response, and, as I say, research never ends, this is an easy area for improvement.

The other thing we did was prep for Grands. We’re not big preppers, at least at meetings, but given that the Panivore and the People’s Champion are doing Pffft together for the first time, and that SuperSquirrel is doing a topic that was picked yesterday and is still a little green around the edges, this seemed like a good idea, and it turned out that it was. The Pffffters look to be in decent shape, and good suggestions were gleaned from the assembled multitudes, including from Termite, who seemed mightily disappointed that Zizek never came up in the conversation, mostly because he was the only person in the room who can pronounce Slavoj correctly. On the LD side, S-S’s cases were full of solid material, so much so that each one ran about an hour and a half, but a little judicious editing should help that. And so, on to Grands, which is not going to be a picnic for anyone, with the usual bunching of the top area talent all competing for 6 slots in each division, plus for me the usual Grands tabbing nightmare.

Oh, yeah. We also talked about which judges hate which debaters’ guts. Very enlightening, and not at all true. Dropping you a hundred times does not mean you are hated, merely that you haven’t won the last hundred times. Nothing personal. It’s all business. Like The Godfather.

Let's all do like the Catholics do

CFL Grands is coming up this weekend, at which our archdiocese selects 6 of each to send to the annual CatNats confab, which is taking place this year in beautiful Albany, New York. As the Catholics say, Oy!

Running Grands is something of a nightmare. It’s a tiny event, with side restraints not only in LD but in PF, with each person bringing a judge, and either 2 or 3 judges in a round, depending on the size of the field (we go to 3 if the field is over 20). The computer is relatively useless for most of this, as it is for most small fields, although it does at least provide us double-checks on sides and previous judge issues and things like that. And, of course, it gives us placements and brackets. But mostly it’s me and JV and Catsmacker throwing cards and trying every conceivable combination of judges and sneaking off for empanadas and spending a really long day getting through 4 very complicated rounds (or occasionally 3 rounds, if the results are predictable). It’s a mathematical problem as much as anything else, which makes it interesting. Judges tend to judge an A flight in one room and a B flight in another, they get purloined out of one division and dumped into the other, and the ones who like to complain are out of luck because it’s virtually impossible to find us in the tab room (as if we were going to listen to their complaints in the first place).

Speaking of which, it never fails to amaze me how people complain about having to judge. “I’m in every round,” they say. Well, yeah, duh. So are the debaters. “I’m getting really exhausted.” Oh, you poor thing. I got here earlier than you and I’ll get out of here later. “I’ve got tickets for the opera/theater/cockfight and I’ve got to leave at 7:00 at the latest.” Well, we all want to go to the cockfight, but you don’t see us scampering out of here. The deal is, when you commit to judge, you have committed to judge. You get to sit in a chair and the only part of your body you have to exercise other than your mind is your note-taking hand. It’s indoors, which is especially nice in inclement weather. And you’re either getting paid or you’re supporting the child no one forced you to bring into the world. If you’re a student judge and you don’t want to judge, don’t. Get another job. I hear that the market is really great out there these days. And if you’re a parent judge, well, you’re screwed. If you didn’t want to do this, you shouldn’t have been procreating sixteen or seventeen years ago. You think all that heavy breathing comes without consequences?

On the Bronx Brooklyn front, I have added a number of Facebook chums since the posting of the last tale of great debate adventure. Obviously the Bronx Brooklyn scientists think that sidling up to me will lead to more stories about their resident sweater-vest model. Maybe. Then again, they could just all go back and listen to Nostrum. Jules and the Nostrumite may not write exactly the way I do, but I narrate that exactly the way I narrate my tales, so it’s all much of a muchness as far as listening is concerned (once one gets past the first few pre-good-mic episodes). Gee. New Nostrum fans. Just what the world needs more of.

Lakeland 2009 enters the history books

Lakeland is now history, which means that O’C has memorized every round in every division, and will eventually etch it onto a plaque. The two of us worked tab together (once he got around to arriving in, yes, a Lincoln Town Car, for those who believe that I make this stuff up) and had a pretty interesting go of it. While the policy division was bigger than [insert humorous metaphor here for some really big thing; I’m too tuckered out from playing Wii Tennis yesterday], LD and PF were more of a boutique nature. Varsity LD was about 40 souls or so, which is pretty manageable, and to be honest, we had a disturbingly uniform and solid pool of judges, with nary a stinker in the pack. Not only were they all experienced, but they all mostly showed up when they were supposed to, except for the usual suspects who were, I assured you, given a good stern talking to. Brian Manuel was around tabbing Policy, and as he says, we always make a lot of empty threats, and nobody has ever actually punished a team for its judges’ sins, but then again, we all are more likely to be nice and quiet about things rather than confrontational, and even if confrontation doesn’t solve any problems, one always feels better after it. I’ve noticed that the older I get, the less likely I am to put off confrontation. I mean, if you can’t act the way you want when you’re an old fart, when can you? (For the record, I’m a very young-looking 92.)

So tabbing 40 LDers with good judging was okay enough, except for one thing. For a couple of rounds there were exactly enough judges. No extras. No sitting around in the judges’ lounge drinking apple martinis or getting Swedish massages. Get in there and judge, you meatball. For some reason I always spend more time running around looking for people at Lakeland than at any other tournament. But as I say, it wasn’t the LD judges who were a problem. And novice LD, which was smaller than [another metaphor, please] wasn’t particularly hard either because we did, in fact, have a couple of extra judges to work with in that division, and the balance among teams was spread out. It was Pfffft that was the problem child. With a very tiny field as we had (about 18 teams or so), you run through the judge pool pretty fast. Everybody has seen everybody, and then you start wrangling anyone who even marginally looks as if they’re breathing to adjudicate the rounds. The good news is that the official NFL Pfffft rules indeed specify only that the judges “marginally look as if they’re breathing,” so pretty much anyone who has graduated high school is a potential adjudicator. But one does need to explain the toin coss to them, and to explain that they marginally look as if they’re breathing and why this is all that matters. A couple of times I canvassed the judges’ lounge and saw a bunch of people who were doing a very good job of not appearing to breathe, so apparently they had read the NFL rules and knew how to duck this particular onerous judging task. But, one way or another, we made it happen (all on cards, by the way as we ignored school restraints in aid of a better tournament. More than half the Pfffft field was Lexwegians, and we made them face one another. Otherwise, before long the 3-0s are hitting the 0-3s and results are a foregone conclusion. Better to have more good rounds, was our philosophy. Remarkably enough, we broke to semis with 2 real rounds, so we must have gotten it right.)

While all this was going on, I was helping Catholic Charlie with Regionals. We were already strapped for rooms with the invitational, so we were putting Regionals rounds wherever we could fit them, including at various tables in the library where all the tabbing was being run, which meant that they had to debate while listening to the Best of the Doors Volume 1 (admittedly not what people expect to hear from my iPod, but variety is the spicy meatball of life, and if the 60s ever come back, I’ll be ready, except for the whole hair thing). There were a dozen novices, which meant an easy enough pick after two rounds of undefeateds and top point earners, and there were 4 varsity, which meant a playoff between the winners of round 1, but JV was three people, which was the least clean. X beat Y, then Z beat Y, then Z beat X, so realistically Z did qualify, having beaten X head-to-head, despite the fact that they had equal points. I don’t know what we would have done if Y had beaten Z. We’d probably still be there.

The high point of the weekend, in any case, was the occasional booming voice of Lakeland coach Stefan Bauschard over the school’s loudspeaker system. “You should now be in the final speech of your eleventh round,” or words to that effect. “Stop prepping and get to your rounds.” “If you don’t go home now, you’ll never go home.” These kept coming in perfect cadence with the policy rounds, and kept them moving admirably, but of course bore no relationship whatsoever to the LD rounds. Very amusing. I want Stefan to announce random stuff at all tournaments from now on. It just makes things that much more entertaining.

Clarifications

O'C commented that I was misinformed, and that there was plenty of sports at Bronx Brooklyn High School of Science. As proof, he provided the evidence that Matt D is on the bowling team.

I rest my case.

O'C also protested my claim that he would be arriving in a stretch limo at various tournaments whenever the spirit moved him. I stand corrected. He will be arriving in a Lincoln Town Car.

This weekend is Lakeland, which O'C and I are tabbing together (at least together after his Lincoln Town Car arrives). Perhaps a new tale of debate adventure will ensue. Perhaps not.

Onward!

A new tale, plus other odds and ends; in other words, enough of rules for a while

All right, I’ve got all that off my chest, so let’s get back to business as usual.

First of all, last weekend was the final MHL of the season. How better to acknowledge it than with a new Tale of Debate Adventure? You’ll find the audio version here on The View from Tab, and the pdf version here, just out in the cloud in general. If you crave more of the same, and haven’t listened to the first T of D A, I’ve reorganized the right-hand column to make these more prominent. I expect more will come eventually, unless I get sued for slander and/or libel and/or gross exaggeration over the ones I’ve already done, so I figured I might as well make room for them. (If you subscribe to The View from Tab on iTunes, by the way, you’ll get these turning up on your iPod automatically. What’s stopping you?)

I managed to get involved in that whole rules thing, so I put aside the Modest Novice for a while, but I promise, again, to sort it all out within the next week or two. If you haven’t already done so, go on over to ModestNovice.org and check out where we are so far. Complaining about the outcome will do you no good if you haven’t participated in the ingo, if you know what I mean. (And, knowing you, you probably do.)

Coming up this weekend is Lakeland, which I’ll be tabbing with O’C, although his approach will be to arrive by stretch limo in the early evening, thus avoiding having to rub elbows with the hoi and the polloi during registration, a plan he intends to follow a lot in the coming year. Well, lah-di-dah, as they say. (He promises he’ll be at all of Bump, however. What a prince.) He’s also getting bivouacked at the chez Friday night; maybe new Tales of D A will ensue. You never know. Anyhow, Friday and Saturday are the invitational as usual, but Saturday is also the Regionals competition for States, the last-ditch chance for people to grab a full qual in one swell foop. Given that Stefan has enough Policians at the invitational to invade Cuba, I have no idea where he is going to put all these people. Oh, well. That’s his problem. O’C and I will sort it all out tab-wise for Catholic Charlie, who is our Statesman as well as our Catholician. (How did he get all the thankless jobs?)

And through it all, I now have a Wii, which really is the perfect system for people who like games but don’t have any time to play them. So far all I’ve done is begin working my way through the Lego version of Star Wars, and I’m already in the middle of Episode II, which for me is epic, given that I usually never get past the first level in anything before giving up in disgust. My success now might be attributable to a very forgiving system that allows you to sort of kill stuff without getting too killed yourself, which, as I say, is just my style. When I retire, I’ll get an Xbox 360 (which will probably be up to 720 by then), but meanwhile the Wii suits me just fine. Of course, I bought the thing to play Wii Sports when my daughter drops in for a visit, but I haven’t even cracked open the cellophane on that one yet. I think tonight I face Count Duku. Wish me luck.

Fixing the problem

It’s easy to suggest that both debaters walk into the round with a copy of the rules in the old briefcase, but it doesn’t matter much if the judge hasn’t walked into the round with a copy of the same rules. So we have to mandate it. We have to insist that all judges follow the rules. It’s as simple as that.

As we’ve already argued, the rules to be followed are those published by the NFL in the District Manual, a pdf extraction of which is available on this site. The question remains, how do we mandate it? There are a lot of obstacles to this, despite its manifest logic. Chief among these obstacles is the jungle of individual paradigms published hither and yon, added to every year by the latest crop of college freshmen filled with their own ideas of what LD ought to be. I love that they are filled with their own ideas of what LD ought to be, but I am the first to point out that wishing doesn’t make it so. LD is what it is, and it’s fine to want to change it, and there are ways of changing it, but those ways are not in the rounds you judge in a competitive vacuum. In fact, not judging according to the rules does not allow to activity to evolve, as some people suggest, but merely makes the whole activity (and any hoped for progress) that much more muddled. Nonetheless, there is certainly variance among judge preferences that are within the rules, so although I would prefer to eliminate judge paradigms altogether insofar as they indirectly nurture the worst aspects of the activity, I would suggest that every judge, high and low, begin their paradigm with the simple phrase: “I adhere to the rules of LD as posted by the NFL.” Many judges (most?) could stop there. Contrariwise, if a judge does not submit to these rules, then they should begin their paradigm with the simple phrase: “I do not adhere to the rules of LD as posted by the NFL.” In this latter case, this would alert us in advance not to hire these judges in the first place.

But that’s where the real crux of the issue is, and the real source of control, in the hiring and use of judges. Ultimately this falls on the coaches, and the execution of practices that could keep the rules being adhered to falls on the coaches who are tournament or league directors. Like me. I am a director of the MHL, and I run the Bump invitational tournament every November. I can do a couple of very easy things that could make a difference. I can attach to the operational rules of the MHL a notice that we adhere to the NFL LD rules, and I can attach to the MHL website a copy of those rules. And I can insist at the beginning of every tournament, when I whisper the opening announcements, that we will be following these rules, which can also be distributed at the ballot table. Certainly these rules will be part of the package I give to new judges, posted on the MHL website. As for Bump, I simply make this a part of the invitation. I note that the activities at the tournament will follow NFL rules, and I will post those rules as an addendum to the invitation and on the Bump website. I will insist that all judges must adhere to these rules. Judges and/or teams who do not wish to adhere to these rules are welcome to find a different way to spend the weekend.

And, come to think of it, since I’m claiming I could do those so-called very easy things, I will do those very easy things.

And then we take to the bully pulpit (which is this blog, in my case) and we have at every other tournament. We ask simply, when we register, if the tournament will be adhering to the rules of LD as published by the NFL. If they are, so be it. If they aren’t, we can ask what rules they will be following. For instance, the CFL follows moderately different rules in PF and LD, and when I accept an invitation to one of their tournaments, I’m happy to follow those rules. Other venues might have other versions of the rules. But is it asking too much for them to publish those versions? And if they do not wish to enforce any rules, is it asking too much for them to admit it publicly? If I am going to a free-for-all in the guise of a debate tournament, the least you can do if I’m paying you an entry fee is to let me know that this is the case so that my teams can conduct themselves accordingly (bringing extra protective mental equipment, for instance). Even the most rabid “progressive” LD advocate can’t object to the idea that we should know what we’re paying for!

Great. Now I’ve got another iron in the fire, and something else to advocate for, and complain about. But, at least it’s clear and specific. You show me your rules and I’ll show you mine. It’s not asking that much at all. But I wonder how many people will actually take me up on it.

For whom the (LD) rules toll

If we believe that there ought to be rules for LD—and we do—we need to look at how those rules affect the people involved in the activity. That is, to whom are these rules important? This is an easy question to answer. The rules are important to 1) the debaters and 2) the judges. Occasionally the tournament staff is consulted on issues where there is a perceived rules violation, but this is rare, and need not concern us here, since if we have clear rules, the tournament staff would be merely interpreting and/or enforcing, and not legislating. The legislation, as we have claimed, has already taken place. (One could argue, perhaps, that the classical Lockean requirements for legislation were somehow not met when the NFL created the rules, but this would presume that not only is the forensics community a democracy, but that it is able to perform democratic functions, both of which are quite a leap. And, to be honest, I’m tired of defending the right of the NFL to create rules of forensics. In other words, get over it!)

So the rules apply to rounds and, mostly, within rounds. The rules, as we have argued, exist, and are clearly written and available to all NFL members (or anyone else, for that matter) in the district manual. And I have extracted them into a pdf on this site, for those who are incapable of surfing the NFL site (a large group with whom I have great sympathy). Which means that everyone walking into every round, debater or judge, has the easy ability to bring along a copy of these rules. They only take up a couple of printed pages. And they can answer, or prevent, all sorts of issues that might otherwise detract or distract from the round. The is, for instance, the Myth of Negative Presumption, which has about as many believers in LD circles as there are believers in UFOs, the Yeti and WMDs in Iraq combined. Let me make this clear. THERE IS NO PRESUMPTION FOR THE NEGATIVE IN LD. The rules are absolutely clear on this. You might wish there was a presumption for the negative, especially if you are, say, on the negative side, or you’re a judge who is unable to follow the arguments very well and didn’t bring a coin to surreptitiously flip while the debaters are otherwise engaged, but that does not make it so. Let me add this: ALL DEBATERS, AND ALL JUDGES, NEED TO KNOW THIS. And, of course, they need to know all the other rules as well. Keep in mind that knowing and following the rules does not mean you agree with them; study M. Rousseau on the subject of the General Will if you need to learn more about this. And if you are a total clown you can run a performative critique of the rules somehow, an act of debate civil disobedience if you will, but by the definition of c.d., you should be willing to accept the consequences of that action (i.e., losing the round).

As I said, the rules are important mostly to 1) the debaters and 2) the judges. The problem is that often 1) the debaters and 2) the judges don’t really care about these rules. Either they subscribe to their own mythologies (and they are mythologies: there are no alternate rules posted anywhere generally available to debaters and judges, so it’s not as if there is some other orthodoxy that can be consulted) or they simply don’t understand the rules that do exist, but in either case, it’s tantamount to the rules not existing, which means not only that anything can happen in a round, but that there is no way of predicting what will happen in a round, or more to the point, how what happens will be adjudicated. LD is not a game without rules, it is a game without people paying attention to the rules. There’s a big difference between the two. LD doesn’t pay attention to the rules to such a degree that we often mandate that each judge post his or her own rules just so we have some idea of what to expect from our adjudicators. We call these individual rule sets paradigms, and they can contradict the rules from NFL completely, and they can contradict all the other judges at a tournament, where every judge can have a unique paradigm different from every other judge, meaning that there is no normal expectations from rounds whatsoever. The thing is, we have begun to accept judge paradigms without any questioning whatsoever. A judge is a good judge because his or her paradigm is posted, not because the paradigm is a meaningful attempt to adhere to the rules of LD. While I’m perfectly willing to accept that there are measures of interpretation possible within the rules, at the point where paradigms become alternate rules they are, at best, counterproductive, and certainly counterintuitive, and probably countereducational. Compare, for instance, the subject of history. We can approach history in a variety of ways, from a variety of paradigms, in other words. We can look at history are a series of biographies of important people, or as the movement of the vast mass of people in daily life, or as the consequence/motivation of geography or any other of the usual disciplined approaches to the subject. Each approach yields a different view of events, with different priorities and analytics, but the facts remain the same, and the history itself is unchanged. And none of these paradigms can eliminate the other paradigms and say that they don’t matter; they just aren’t prioritized. In application to LD, a judge may like critical theory arguments, for example, believing that a resolution can be best understood through these analyses, but that does not make other analyses any less effective; they are just less preferred by that judge. But at the point where the judge may believe in a presumption for the negative, or that V/C standards are unnecessary, or that not arguing the resolution is acceptable, then we’ve gone off base. And there are plenty of judges whose paradigms are exactly that. And since LD is competitive, and people want to win, who can blame debaters (the 1 in the equation of this article) from trying to play the game the way the judges (the 2 in the equation of this article) imagine it? That’s probably the only way to win, after all.

Who’s to blame here for an activity with competing rules, where every judge is reigning over a private duchy of understanding/misunderstanding of the rules? A lot of people. Blame the NFL, as we discussed yesterday, for not policing the activity. Blame the bully pulpit of the TOC, which leans toward picking your judges (mutual preferences) rather than a belief that a good LDer should be able to convince any (trained) judge. Blame your average invitational that insists on paradigms but pays no attention to them. Blame coaches who don’t insist that the judges they hire abide by the rules, and who don’t train new judges, especially parents, but simply throw them to the wolves to cover an entry and the results be damned. Blame the college student judges who believe that the activity would be so much better if we only did it their way (a thought in which they are often sincere, and perhaps even right at times, but nonetheless misguided in thinking that they are central players rather than hired guns). Blame a lot of people. It doesn’t matter. Maybe these are the cause and maybe they’re not.

What we need to do is fix it, not whine about it.

Storm troopers of the NFL

Here’s the problem, or, “Previously on Coachean Life…”

1) LD requires rules.
2) There in fact are rules for LD.
3) The existing rules for LD come from the NFL.
4) For reasons slightly less complex than the genome of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, a large number of people involved in LD are woefully ignorant of, or totally uninterested in, either 1, 2, or 3 (above), or any combination thereof.

We’ve touched on 1, 2, and 3 (above) in varying degrees of detail in recent weeks, but we have not discussed 4 very much. While 1, 2 and 3 (above) rely on either simple logic or manifest facts, 4 is a highly subjective area of analysis that contains multiple threads, some of which are contradictory. One recent contention that I have heard brought forth in a comparable context was that, somehow, Rippin’ is to blame for not enforcing its rules, that it is a body so powerless that its existence is meaningless and therefore easily dismissed. There are a lot of corners that require turning in that concept, and I tend to get lost at around the second one-way sign. NFL is no more or less powerful than it ought to be. True, they do not run every forensics event in the country, and no doubt not every person at every event is a bona fide member of the league, but that is of no consequence. As a comparison, if I decide to head out with some friends and play a casual game of golf, that game is neither run by the USGA nor are any of us members of that organization, but we play by their rules just the same (except when those rules are so obscure that even the USGA can’t figure them out, but that’s another story entirely). The fact that NFL (or USGA) does run some events does not render the events they don’t run somehow rule-free. I can, of course, decide to adjust the rules, in golf, for instance, by dropping a ball at the edge of the woods where the ball was last seen and taking a penalty, whereas the rules state I should have hit a provisional ball. This penalty-drop allows us to finish a game the same week we begin it and, as amateurs, keeps it more fun. Granted, the USGA would frown on this, but all of us in the foursome play by the same rule. There is, after all, fifty cents riding on this match! So, I’m willing to concede that there are situations where an adjustment to the rules is acceptable, but that adjustment both acknowledges the existence of the rules in the first place and is clearly delineated ahead of the game and understood and agreed to by all the players. Source rules need not be absolutely binding, in other words, provided all the players agree to the new rules. That is not unheard of in many games. And how much fun would Monopoly be, after all, if somebody from Milton Bradley broke down the door of my house and arrested me every time I created a kitty of the fine money for the lucky goober who lands on Free Parking?

So I am not willing to blame NFL for not making everyone adhere to its rules. It is illogical for me to expect them to do it, and possibly undesirable. That does not mean, however, that their rules are rendered moot. It simply means that NFL is not a modern-day debate Gestapo breaking into rounds and carrying off novices who fail to uphold a value. (Actually, although there are those who doubt it is so, my personal opinion of the NFL is quite positive: who wouldn’t love an organization that wouldn’t want to have me as one of its organizers? But seriously, I think they do exactly what they’re supposed to do pretty much the way they’re supposed to do it, and I am impressed that present leadership has been addressing the questions of rules and procedures in apparently all its activities.)

Which brings us back to the point where, as I say, number 4 above is complex and is probably, in the end, impossible to pin down. Suffice it to say that it is true, and we must deal with it. And, as I have suggested here, I don’t think it’s the NFL’s job to deal with it; they can keep their theoretical jackbooted thugs back home in Wisconsin. And the rest of us, especially those subject to severe wunnophobia (morbid fear of the Wunn and Only), can breathe easy. There are other solutions, and better solutions, to the problem.

Although I have to admit that the idea of the Wunn and Only storming into rounds and carrying off recalcitrant novices does have a certain charm to it…

Short hiatus

We'll be back next week, the good Lord willin' and the creek don't rise. Use the time you would otherwise be wasting reading this blog wisely. I suggest that you learn French. This will make the coming revolution that much easier for you. And for the French.

Post 1001

I was wrong. I misread the dashboard. Yesterday was 1000, which makes this post 1001. And, if you’re reading this upside down, then this is still post 1001. (Some strange conspiracy? Perhaps.) What a comedown!

I know you were expecting fireworks and free cake, but that’s just not my style. Instead, I’m going to take the next few days off to not do debate stuff, or think about debate stuff, and then I’ll come back with six-buns glazing six-guns blazing on the subject of enforcing the rules of LD. Among other things.

Enjoy the break.

Taking up where the Legion left off

One has to wonder whatever happened to the Legion of Doom. A couple of years ago a lot of people got all het up over the decline and fall of LD—this was in the darkest hours of the pomo and CT influences—and banded together to attempt to cure the ills. Some of those ills were endemic problems that, needless to say, remain, but the Legion of Doom has, if not necessarily evaporated, at least disappeared from view. Despite my own agreement with their main themes of how LD should be operated, I always had to sort of wonder if we weren’t just going through the inevitable progress of the activity through the fashions of the day, given that I had previously seen other deadly fashions that we had managed to survive. My guess is that something new comes along, it takes over like mental weeds for a while, but then it goes away, leaving only a little of its genetic material behind, hopefully making for a better activity overall. (And I’m sorry for the confused metaphor, but you get my drift.) So back in the day pre-Legion, for instance, this decidedly philosophical activity got overwhelmed by practical evidence, and for a while it was a trend, and eventually it just became an improvement in LD overall, where people began backing their claims with, sometimes, meaningful warrants from reputable sources rather than their own imaginings. By the same token, the love affair with incomprehensible cultural studies types like the Old Baudleroo and Derrida has cooled, but the embracing of, say, Foucault remains, and that’s not a terrible thing at all, because MF’s view of things is applicable to a lot of situations, and worth considering. We may never shake the occasional Nietzschean fling, though, I’m afraid. Nietzsche is like this sly seducer who will say anything to anyone in order the make a score, and then the poor seduced (and quickly abandoned) soul has nothing left but a handful of aphorisms on which to base the entire promise of a future life, but that doesn’t keep that steady stream of left-at-the-altars from continuing to try. In a way, good old Freddie has become the Ayn Rand of 21st century LD, that one horrible voice destroying our youth by falsely empowering them. Oh, well. At least Freddie didn’t write any pulp novels (or at least any that I know about). Don’t get me wrong. I love Nietzsche. Where else can you find a writer who, sooner or later, contradicted literally everything he ever wrote? They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

Anyhow, for a while, the LDEP was out there proselytizing a fundamentalist approach to LD as a cure to all its evils (which went far beyond the pomo material), and now you never hear from them anymore. Hell, I think I’m on the board, and if I’m not hearing from them, I guess no one is. That’s not terrible, though. The creation of the rules of LD by the NFL provided the core material from which to work, and from a source much less peccable than the Legion of Doom. I mean, it’s pretty hard to dismiss the warrant of the core organization, as compared to dismissing a bunch of dinosaur sore sports like the Legion. So as I continue to proselytize for commitment to the NFL’s LD rules, I feel a little more secure than when I was speaking in aid of Legion ideas. This is nothing against the Legion, mind you, but maybe the NFL’s updated rules rendered the Legionnaires unnecessary. But we still have a problem. Despite the fact that LD has clear and specific rules, from its governing body, there is a vast population who believe that these rules carry no weight. We’ve already discussed how silly this is, and how you don’t get a comparable flouting of regulation in, say, table tennis (or any other competitive activity of which I am aware), but that doesn’t stop the flouters. The question becomes, how do you stop the flouters, then? If you believe in LD as described by the NFL, what are you supposed to do about it?

I guess that’s going to be my theme for a while. We’ve got rules. What do we do about them? And, I guess, why do we have to do anything about them at all? Chances are, most of what I’m going to be writing will either annoy the hell out of you or make you feel even more self-satisfied than usual, depending on your position on the whole business. But that’s what we do here a CL HQ. We either piss you off or pat you on the back. Occasionally we do both at once, if we’re really clicking on all burners and have a lot of extra arms to work with. By the way, this just happens to be post number 999. Which means two things. If you’re reading this upside down, it’s the Apocalypse, and if you’re reading it right side up, tomorrow will be our 1000th entry. Imagine that. Do you have any idea how much time you’ve wasted reading this blog? Couldn’t you have found anything better to do with your time? What’s wrong with you anyhow, you spalpeen! Jeesh. Get a life.

March-April, Modest Novice, the Kindle 2

(Notice the very informative headline? Well, given that anyone worth their salt nowadays uses an RSS reader, I figured it's time for me to go with the flow. How can I get you to read the whole article if all you see is my subject lines and they're unintelligible? Or worse, completely intelligible?)

Vigilantes, sez you? Well, you’re welcome to this, sez I. http://www.jimmenick.com/images/vigilantes.pdf It’s in the traditional NFL style of overview, readings and argument ideas. I won’t have many Sailors taking the law into their own hands, as it turns out; we have only the CatNats qualifier and Districts on this resolution, and the latter becomes less and less likely for any serious consideration as there is, apparently, a history regents exam dead in the middle of NatNats. Quelle surprise, as they don’t say in France. So maybe only SuperSquirrel will ever debate vigilantes. So it goes. Our other CFL Grands qualifier endeavor is the creation of the greatest PF team ever, which we are working on in the top-secret Sailor laboratory, ever hopeful that we can somehow snag a slot that seems so available, yet somehow so distant. (I will not review the sad history of the Sailors at last year’s Pffft-fest, except to point out that pfffft is too good a word for it. Don’t tell anyone, but here’s the 3 simple secrets to winning PF rounds:
1. Research
2. Research
3. Research
In the past, Sailors have attempted to get by mostly on their native charm. Not the best idea, eh?)

If you haven’t already done so, mosey over to modestnovice.org and help us figure out the wording of next year’s novice resolution. The more input we get, the better. My daughter was having problems posting a comment; let me know if you also have problems, so we can complain to CP (I haven’t complained to him about anything for hours now).

You can’t imagine how much I’m looking forward to my upcoming non-debate weekend in NYC. We’ve got ducats for this and that, and plans for the other as well. A nice dose of culture, popular and un-. All we need is the weather not to be too dreadful (always an issue in mid-February).

Like everyone else with an internet connection, I’ve been gazing at the Kindle 2, and I have to admit, for the first time I’m actually beginning to think nice thoughts. Kindle 1 was okay—I did get my hands on one for a while—and this improves on some of my complaints (especially page-change speed). I could really see getting one of these suckers if it didn’t cost the proverbial A and an L. (That’s an arm and a leg to you cliché-deprived types.) I’m also beginning to get intrigued about how this thing can play into the DJ, given that I am, after all, in traditional publishing. Is traditional publishing going the way of the buggy whip? An article I read this morning compared ebooks to talkies, and publishers to silent film producers. Maybe, but if I’m not mistaken, the cost of talkies, for patrons, was the same as the cost of silents. As long as there’s the heavy initial hardware buy-in, I can’t see ebooks jumping past early adapters and techies. At the same time, I don’t really see books really working in big numbers on the sort of competing iPhone/Touch platform (even though every now and then I do go back to “Leaves of Grass,” which is one of the books I’ve been toting around with me on my Touch, and one that responds well enough to the occasional glance). The screen is just too small, even though it’s perfectly sharp. I mean, I was raised on those old Penguin classics, with type so small I had to get a new prescription on my eyeglasses every time I finished reading one of them, but the Touch size is just not working for me. The Kindle size, on the other hand, is about just right. Maybe it boils down to whoever makes the $50 ebook reader is the ultimate winner. I don’t know. I have nothing against the concept per se, but at the moment, I do have something against paying all that money for it. I’m not betting against it, though. I’m hedging. I think I’ll sit on my chips for awhile before making any commitment. In the meanwhile, good-old-fashioned books on paper, despite all the economic turmoil in the publishing business (and everywhere else) still looks like a reasonable bet, at least for the short term.

Modnov and MHLW updates

A couple of things. First of all, the Modest Novice website is up and running, thanks to CP, at http://www.modestnovice.org/ I’d be curious to hear what everyone has to say about the wording of the resolution, which is the next big item on the agenda. We’re doing civil disobedience, as I pointed out earlier, but we don’t want to have Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King on one side, and a losing debater on the other. Help us out here! Throw your comments up at the site.

Secondly, as hoped, we had a lot of discussion at Scarsdale about the MHL Institute, or MHLI, which makes more sense to refer to as the MHL Workshop, of MHLW, given that it will be a one-day affair. We brainstormed an enormous amount of possibilities, enough for a couple of weeks anywhere else, and no doubt we’ll have to pare it down, but in general we’re looking at some basic, general lectures plus breakout sessions, and we’ll try to bring in some local ex-debater college talent. The curriculum will probably follow the numbers signed up. We’ll cover LD and Policy (and maybe a little PF too, I’m not sure). And we’ll probably do it Sept 12 at Bronx Science, but that sort of specificity is a little hard to pin down this early on. I took voluminous notes as we talked, and I’ll try to sort something out over the next couple of weeks so that we can begin planning. I’ll probably put up a page as part of the MHL site to explain everything. Just for the hell of it, I tried creating a registration page at tabroom. I figured, why not? Maybe not the perfect tool for the job, but it is the tool that we’ve got, so I figured, go for it. What I did looks feasible. The real questions revolve around the curriculum, after which we can look at who signs up for what.

The News from Scarswegia

Scarsdale was the first tournament around here (around anywhere?) to try to have varsity and novice divisions of LD, where participants in the former judge participants in the latter. This has always struck me as a good idea, and A. L. Johnson has also taken on this approach. I’ve always felt that judging is one of the most important learning aspects of the activity: debating is all well and good, but adjudicating rounds takes you out of the competition and into the overall flow of the event, and you get to see a lot more than just your own competitive record. And judging skill is not necessarily the same as debating skill. You can be quite good at one and quite a stinker at the other; they’re two different businesses. Of course, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, in the roll call of bad judges, I’ve always ranked high school students as number one, because they are so often prisoners of their own view of the resolution, and unable to see past their interpretations, which are sometimes not particularly good. Tabula rasa they ain’t. But with a little bit of training, and a little bit of eye opening, they can quickly get past their own biases into good, neutral adjudication. That’s the learning process, to see beyond their own noses. (For the record, college students who think they’re still in high school and hold similar prisoner-of-my-interpretation views of resolutions rank second in stinkerdom; for that matter, college students also are guilty of things like believing there’s a presumption for the negative, or that there are no rules to the activity. Parent judges? Well, if they’ve been carefully trained, I’ll take ‘em every time. Their paradigm is, ahem, adjudicate by the rules. Oh, the horror. By this token, parents ought to be the easiest judges to appeal to. Any LDer who can’t or refuses to adjust their styles to the relatively uniform concept of parent judges is really not a particularly good communicator. And since one main point of doing LD is to learn to become a good communicator, hey, you gotta wonder…)

There are those who believe that judging while competing somehow damages their chances, but given that the winner of the varsity division was judging novices in prelims, this doesn’t seem to stand. As a matter of fact, most of the elim debaters had been judging (and the same was true at ALJ). Granted it is a bit tiring, but in tab we do try to get you at least one round off, and more if possible. Scarsdale, unfortunately, was a little light in loose novice judges because of a local science fair (which also deprived me of a decent Sailor entry). Then again, it simply means that the LDers don’t spend half of the tournament sitting around playing tiddlywinks. Just like Policians. I mean, most LDers want to be (bad) Policy debaters, and at least when they’re judging and debating, if nothing else they acquire the schedules of Policy debaters. Let’s see how the other half really lives! For that matter, the winner of Scarsdale was in fact a Polician. Responses to this over at WTF were as if the winner of Scarsdale was a Venusian. Jeesh! The two types of debate aren’t all that different, especially with a topic like Jan-Feb, which has a lot of real-world aspects. It’s amazing how people get so locked into their parochial views of things. On the other hand, you’ve gotta love those schools where students do pretty much every single activity over their four year careers, from debate to speech to international cucumbering. Those are those folks cited in Rostrum for having 1,283,238 NFL points, all of whom go on to be governors, senators and federal judges. Must be more Venusians, I guess. (And why does Microsoft think Venusians is a word, but that Venusian isn’t? They must know more about aliens than they’re letting on.)

Anyhow, Scarsdale ran fine, and as far as I can tell, JV’s blood pressure never rose above the standard setting of DEFCON 2. As always, the food was superior; Scarswegian parents do not believe in debate ziti. And there was no blizzard, which was nice, but also no official name for the tournament, although the suggestion “The You-Know-Who is Failing English Invitational” had a nice ring to it. Also there was no cell phone reception, but how can you not like a tournament that generates a message from O’C afterwards with the subject line “I still have your beans!”? Oh, yeah, somewhere during the tournament I gave up and ordered a Wii from Amazon. I mean, the empty season is soon to begin. I have to do something on those warm summer nights.

Things to do. Things todo. Todo Things. Whatever.

I run this todo program called Things on my Touch. It has become the driving force of my existence. Every time I think of something I have to do, I type it in, and then it gets sorted and prioritized and, with any luck, sooner or later I do it. Granted there are a million todo programs out there, but this one has some meaningful functionality, and it’s always in my pocket.

How did I ever live without the Touch?

Anyhow, this weekend Things tells me I/we need to scope out the MHLI, update the Northeast Chumps, and get started on the Modnov topic site. And tab Scarsdale. I gather O’C will be arriving late (by design rather than by accident; late being the usual Scientology arrival time at most tournaments would normally render this comment unnecessary), but some of these todos require his todoing. We have about one more month before debate goes away at the end of March. After Districts (for which, at the moment, I have no takers among the Sailors, because, as always, they have other commitments for the week of NatNats, things like mandatory tests and graduation, which are of little concern to Rippin’, which I only point out because, if I am going to be demonized, I need occasionally to say something that warrants demonization), we’re done, except for the poor souls who venture forth to States (which I won’t say anything randomly bad about aside from the poor souls reference since I’ve expended my daily dose of bile on NatNats, and one does need to conserve one’s energy). Unless, of course, we qualify someone for CatNats. The Sailors haven’t entered the qualifier competition yet with much fervor, however; I’m trying to push a couple of plebes into PF because I think they’d do well, but they’re still ruminating over it. Whatever. The up side of a small entry is that I can drive my car down to the event, which speeds things up enormously. We’ll see.

And now, ta da, you can buy a Wii from Amazon with absolutely no hullabaloo whatsoever. They’ve taken all the fun away from it. Will I break down and finally buy one? I’ll have to look in Things and see if it’s on my todo list.