When you don’t have any skin in a game, you tend not to pay all that much attention. Since I no longer coach anyone, new topics can arrive and I can miss them completely, and it doesn’t matter one way or the other. But I do enjoy the topic of topics, and October 1 marked the release of Nov-Dec for both PF and LD, and they’re sort of worth consideration. It just happened to take me a little while to notice it.
LD is “De-extinction is unethical.” This is sort of…meh. I mean, it is a real enough subject, but as I’ve noted with other topics over the years, it is not a subject that comes up very often at the dinner table. The main problem with it is that all the arguments pro and con are tangential to any question of morality or ethics, which is where I think LD does its most important work. There are good reasons to do it, and there are good reasons not to do it. All of these good reasons involve hypothetical outcomes. My guess is that the judges will be bored to tears by around November 3rd. Not the worst thing that can happen with a topic at this time of year, when everyone is in the final stages of getting their acts together. But not exactly much to sink one’s teeth into. (Unless, of course, we de-extinctify the tastier possibilities.)
The alternative topic in the voting was that the US ought to vest ecosystems with legal rights. This may or may not be a lively topic at dinner tables somewhere, but my guess is that when the voters looked at the two choices, they immediately turned away from this one, muttering the oft-used debate phrase “WTF” as they did so. I would suggest to the wording committee that they keep this one on hand whenever they want, without a doubt, for the voting to go to the other possibility. It is guaranteed to lose in any fair fight.
PF, meanwhile, voted for “European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization should ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.” This raises the questions, Why Europe, Why only the European members, and Why prohibit (or not), not to mention the question of use of nukes as intrinsically right/wrong. Talk about meat on the bones. The educational value of this one cannot be underestimated. Students will learn all sorts of things about the international situation, historical, practical, meaningful. NATO, one way or the other, is very much a worthy dinner conversation subject. This is debate doing its job of leaving regular secondary education in the dust. Well done.
Alternatively, the voters could have gone for the Republic of Korea pursuing an independent nuclear deterrent. There is nothing wrong with this one, but it is so much more parochial than the NATO one. It’s a one-trick pony. North Korea develops nukes; should South Korea do likewise? A practical question, but not a particularly complex one as far as educational opportunities go. I would imagine endlessly similar rounds with endlessly similar contentions, and 90% of all judges, observers and debaters falling asleep long before the Grand Crossfire. Curiously, “The winning resolution received 57% of the coach vote and 44% of the student vote.” Obviously the coaches know the score here much better than the students. As for the LD topic, “The winning resolution received 54% of the coach vote and 57% of the student vote.” Obviously here, everyone was on the same WTF page with ecosystems’ legal rights. We all love a good ecosystem, but we wouldn’t necessarily want to take one home to mother.
For the record, our traditional novice kickoff event for the NYCFL is the last week or so of October. Lately we have started our novices there with the Nov-Dec topics, rather than forcing them to a single week of Sep-Oct. This is in lieu of the old Modest Novice approach, which we here in the northeast conceived originally. NSDA eventually took us up on it, but after a while substituted universal military service for our civil disobedience, which no one in the region particularly preferred. To be honest, around here, given when things kick off for the noobs, I think our present approach is a better scenario. If we had thought of it originally before the Modest Novice, it might easily have been our basic approach all along. In regions where schools open earlier and debaters start earlier, it probably wouldn’t work. It’s a Northeast thing, and as it’s worked out, a pretty good one.
So, our local PFers are in luck. And our local LDers? It could be worse.
