In which we tell you how to flip

As I pointed out on Facebook on the Tournament Toolkit page, one thing was pretty clear on Saturday at CFL Grands. Aff was killing in LD, and Con wasn’t far behind in PF. I wonder if there’s reasons for that.

Maybe the housing was doing so well because we were in the capitol of Liberal Tree-Hugging America. Housing is far from a natural right, though, so the idea that it’s a civil right guaranteed by the government, specifically in the US, requires an awful lot of leaps from what is a right to what ought to be a right. Even as a civil right: although housing is perceived as a right in the UDHR, it’s pretty far down the line of the things that a government is able to guarantee, and rights require guarantees from governments by definition. I’m wondering if LD has gotten so far away from a basic, classical understanding of rights that it just hooks on to whatever claims it wants to make, despite drawing on a subject with more literature than virtually anything else in ethics. The pool on Saturday wasn’t exactly drawn from the avant garde of the $ircuit, but they were nevertheless generally pretty experienced. And good debaters know how to adapt to CFL judges. Go figure.

Meanwhile, PFers were hot and heavy for the US to pressure Israel for two states. Again, maybe the location of the event says something here, but I’m not sure what. It could be that, indeed, the two-state solution, which pretty much everybody in the universe prefers aside from Benny the Net and Landslide Donnie (who seems to prefer whatever he sees on Fox News five minutes ago, and then blames it on Hillary), is simply hard to beat in a straightforward debating environment. As I also pointed out at TT on Fb, this one really needed judges to step back from their own opinions. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t.

Needless to say, there aren’t a lot of opportunities to debate these resolutions, aside from qualifiers and maybe state events. Given the tendency in the LD world to believe that, aside from NSDA, the topics end with Jan-Feb (thanks for nothing, TOC), this may not be an issue for them. PF, which seems a bit more bought into the actual months it occurs, would only have one more chance. I would be curious if other operations using these topics had similar results, considering that our results were both definitive and, because of the size of the field, statistically useless.

///