Sparring

We played around with SPAR at last night’s SailorFest, and it was both entertaining and a true gauge of debate character. In the round between LPW (AKA HPL) and the Phantom, our young plebe’s interest was clearly displayed but could not hold a candle to our old salt’s spending way too much time watching the Colbert Report. Our two sophomores were game, readily willing to make up evidence on the spot in support of Spam (the “wonder food,” as in, people wonder what’s in it), indicating that they are going to be quite mainstream when the time comes for them to go full varsity. Two pre-plebes who have yet to dip their toes into the stream of the dialectic known as actually debating, although at least one of them is signed up for the future, were dumbstruck. And our two debate hacks, SuperSquirrel and the Panivore, were downright scary: those two will not only argue about anything, but they’ll do so with a level of aggression that keeps the feebleminded up at night with the lights on and the guards posted in fear for their lives. If any team needs to take the temperature of its participants, and have some fun while watching for stylistic issues, SPAR is it. (Full post over at TVFT.)

Speaking of which, the Panivore, who once told me she liked the parts of Lingo that she was able to read for free online, accused me last night in no uncertain terms of supporting the NFL rules for LD. Talk about venom! At the time we were staring at Nov-Dec and talking about if affirming a piece (some specific public health concerns warranting some specific immunization) could justify an aff ballot (we also talked about this on TVFT). The way I read this rez, there’s nothing in the wording that indicates that all public health concerns and all immunizations must be supported. But that does lead to the problem of the affirmative picking some particularly complicated issue and dazzling the neg with deep specificity that cannot be answered. The real issue, and I think my young padowan and I probably agree here, is that the aff must first and foremost support a principle that can apply to enforcing compulsory immunizations, and the actual example is, indeed, secondary. That is, proving one instance isn’t enough: you have to demonstrate WHY one instance demonstrates the principle.

And with that I can hear the theory bell going off in that little mind of yours. Listen to TVFT this week. Moe and Larry and I are planning to discuss theory. No, I’m sorry, I mean Theory. This ought to be interesting.

One thing that didn’t happen last night was that the People’s Champion didn’t show up with the t-shirts. Has he absconded with them to South America? If he doesn’t show up for Bump, we’ll at least know that every exiled dictator now living in Argentina is wearing a WWMD or VCA shirt. They’re probably the perfect audience for them.