PF at NatNats, and LD and PF at CatNats

The NatNats PF topic is drones, and the way it’s worded, it’s hard to see any terrible loopholes up front. The history of weaponry, of course, is a steady progression of steps away from the target. I used to play a lot of war games in my day, complicated deals where you had all these little pieces and grids, and archers were always better than infantry, guns were better than arrows, etc. Civilization players know the same story. You want to increase your firepower and you want to protect yourself. Nuclear weapons allow maximization of the former but, as it turns out, thanks to MAD and nuclear winter, not so much the latter, not to mention the issue of civilian casualties, so there seems to be an objective limit to firepower. Drones don’t have much firepower but they maximize self-protection; civilians do seem to get in on both ends, though, insofar as one doesn’t want to kill them, and they just might be the people at the controls—it’s like the obnoxious guy from the help desk is the only one who knows which are the right keystrokes or something. Anyhow, I think there’s a lot to this topic, and it’s a good one for students to learn about.

It occurred to me that I hadn’t heard anything about the CatNats topics, so I went over and checked them out.

PF: "Resolved: The main goal of US public education should be to eliminate racial and economic achievement gaps."

LD: "Resolved: Just societies should never deliberately initiate war."

Once again it would seem as if the CatNats topic committees have overindulged in the sacramental wine on topic-selection day. I do sort of vaguely remember being asked what I thought about a slew of LD topics by our league director, and not being over the moon on any of them, but I strongly believe that this was not my best-of-a-bad-lot selection. They’ve got all the time in the world to come up with topics, and this—

All right. I’ll keep down the bitching. After all, I’m not going to be in either division, and I’m thankful because, well, it’s going to be torture.

As for PF, while I am a firm believer that education is a cure for a lot of societal ills, if eliminating racial and economic achievement gaps is the main goal of public education, then the one good thing I can say is that it’s a good thing there’s no coin flips at CatNats, because, sorry folks, that's not any reasonable educator's goal. The pro has no real ground other than presenting a series of links that become progressively more sketchy, from the real goals of education (learning stuff and learning to think, primarily) to the indirect goals of education and, ultimately, the resolution: people who know stuff achieve more in society. Oh joy. Oh rapture. All the con has to do is read up on virtually any analysis of the philosophy of education and take good notes. One wonders if any actual educators had anything to do with picking this topic; assuming that they did, can you blame me for thinking the wine was flowing on topic day?

Of course, the real fun will be in LD. The best I can think of is that the rez might refer to preemptive attacks, but they, by definition, are not the initiation of war but the presumed prevention of war. So where is the initiation of war just? Let me think. It’s on the tip of my tongue. Oh, no, wait. It isn’t. Then again, there could be some Philip K. Dick novel I’m unaware of that covers this subject. It’s certainly going to be mostly PKD rounds for a couple of days in Philadelphia, I’ll tell you that. I simply cannot imagine what people are going to come up with the justify literally initiating wars.

Oh, to be in Philadelphia.