It's all the fault of the Village People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I eagerly(?) await the November topic.