Conflicts

One is always dismayed by bad ethical choices in an activity supposedly all about ethics. All of our discussions, at least on paper, are intended to be about the right thing to do, but that does not necessarily mean we always do the right thing, even when the rightness of a thing is absolutely clear. As a community we should be ashamed of ourselves in those situations. But clearly we are not. Those of us who are much more interested in winning a debate round over every other consideration need to question their motivation. Those of us who are willing to resort to unethical means to win those debate rounds need to change their ways. Yes, we can all argue our way out of the tightest paper bag, but that does not make our arguments in favor of unethical decisions correct.

I will reprint the document here that describes the nature of a conflict:

Conflicts are defined as situations where debaters are perceived to have an unfair

favorable advantage with a judge, usually due to previous working or personal

relationships. Situations where you feel a judge is prejudiced against any of your

students, for any reason, should be handled by strikes and preferencing, and not by

conflicts.

A judge conflict exists with a student:

• whose high school the judge attended in recent years;
• to whom the judge is related;
• who attends a school with whom the judge has had a coaching or judging relationship, paid or unpaid, during the past two school years (does not apply if the only relationship to a school was as a hired judged at that school’s tournament);
• who attends a school that has offered to hire the judge to coach or judge for the team in the future;
• for whom the judge has ever had primary instructional responsibility as, e.g., a school coach or a personal coach;
• with whom the judge has or has had in the past personal friendships or romantic relationships, or with whom the judges socializes in non-debate settings;
• who personally has provided a judge’s transportation or housing at this tournament, or who attends a school that has provided the judge’s transportation or housing at this tournament;
• who has been hired by, or who has an outstanding explicit or implicit offer from, a debate business (e.g., workshop or brief company) to which the judge has financial ties;
• if the judge’s current, or in the past two years, coach of record is currently coaching the student;
• If the judge coaches or debates for a college/university, any student that is debating for the judge’s program next year or whom the judge’s school is still actively recruiting;
• with whose coach(es) the judge has or had in the past had romantic relationships;
• to whom the judge bears any other relationship that might reasonably be thought to compromise the judge’s impartiality as a judge. To determine whether a relationship meets this test, the judge might ask, “If I were a competing student and knew nothing about my judge except that he or she bore the relationship in question to my competitor or my competitors coach, would I have any doubts about his or her impartiality?” If the answer is “yes,” that is a conflict.

The first paragraph says it all: “Conflicts are defined as situations where debaters are perceived to have an unfair favorable advantage with a judge, usually due to previous working or personal relationships. Situations where you feel a judge is prejudiced against any of your students, for any reason, should be handled by strikes and preferencing, and not by conflicts.” The rest is just examples for the sake of clarity.

Conflicts are, quite obviously, not meant to include people you don’t want to be judged by, for whatever reason. If the point is that a judge could be perceived as giving you an unfair advantage, then a judge who has always dropped you in the past, a judge that disagrees with your politics, a judge who does not like your style of debate, a judge who is a [blank]ist and you are a [blank], or any other judge who could be perceived as giving you an unfair disadvantage, does not fill the definition of a conflict. There are no shades of meaning here. There is no hard-to-find bright line. This is a clear as day. Conflicts are for judges with whom you have a personal or professional relationship. End of story.

The only argument that matters about the use of conflicts is that they are meant to cover one specific (and rather broad) area of perceived favorable prejudice. Any other use of conflicts, especially to eliminate unfavorable prejudice, is wrong on face. That is sufficient reason to regard the use conflicts as they are meant to be used as the only ethical possibility.

But let’s look at the facts. At the average circuit tournament, there are 50 judges or so, at least. We’ll have 87 at Yale, and well over 100 at Bronx, to take two examples. In the normal course of events, 10% of those will be strikes, and another third will be 4s and 5s, categories one is progressively less likely to encounter as a field grows in size. In other words, between strikes and low ranks, you can pretty much insure that you will not be judged by around 45% of the field, except in the most unusual circumstances (which, by the way, will exist for both you and your opponent, this being a mutual judge assignment). Which means that the people misusing conflicts as strikes, are eliminating even more judges from possibly judging them. We’ve already reached the point where nearly half the pool will not judge a debater, and the debater adds even more to that number, with the use of scurrilous conflicts. Not only is this the mark of an unethical debater, it is the mark of an apparently incompetent debater who sees half the world as ballots he or she cannot pick up. (Incidentally, the more conflicts one adds into the mix, the smaller one’s universe of each ranking becomes, so this debater is shrinking the likelihood of mutuality, and probably albeit inadvertently screwing themselves in a totally unexpected way.) The fact that misuse of conflicts is self-evidently ludicrous and in aid of bad debating practices—limiting one’s need to pick up a variety of judges, and therefore skill in doing so—are not really reasons not to misuse conflicts, as we’ve already demonstrated that to do so is wrong on face. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see the consequential ramifications of so doing.

Another ramification, and much more heinous, is that if a debater enters a conflict into their tabroom.com record, that conflict will hold at all tournaments. Since a conflict is meant to be an objective thing, reflecting a real relationship, it doesn’t come and go with the tides. It would always hold. So even at a tournament offering no strikes (and there still are a few of these), a debater can surreptitiously strike a judge by claiming a non-existent conflict. Of course, at a tournament with no strikes, a conflict of the appropriate sort would still hold, which is at it should be. A conflict to get an unwarranted strike would be fraudulent.

I think that when we first started talking about conflicts, it might have been unclear what the limits of that meant. I had honest and open discussions early on with people who had construed them differently from the way we’ve defined it above. I don’t think that is true anymore. I do think that a tournament needs to post its conflict rules in advance (the ones here are on the NDCA site, although not specifically their conflict rules), so that there can be no dispute, but after that, well, there is no dispute. Needless to say, this is something that has caught my attention, and which I will continue paying close attention to. I hope that others do likewise.

In which we debrief on the Hillbillies

Byram Hills was good on many, many counts. Most importantly, it was good as a tournament. The real action was in varsity, thus proving that Benk was right and that a lot of people would like a prep for Greenhill/Yale. They have a new coach there, and we met him and were forced to fiat that the only music allowed in the tab room came from my iPod, even if it was three hours straight of classic yodeling, and he seemed to understand, which was a good sign. I have a feeling he will be in for the duration. In a region plagued by coach changes, having at least one new one solidly in place is good.

Kaz and I were very happy to have at tabroom.com again before the big guns come out at Yale. After all, it’s been a while and we were rusty. We didn’t really screw anything up, but there were some new things that we had to solve with CP’s help (people not correctly filling in their TBAs with real names, which we’d never seen before but which is, apparently, not all that unusual) or without it (splitting flights electronically overnight without revealing the second flight so that 12 hours or prep won't occur). I once again had issues with coachovers, which we reckoned by the dozens, but been there, done that. Speaking of which, we closed out the last round of the day, in VLD, which is always a joy from the tabbing perspective. If it were up to the tab staff, every round would close out starting in triples and we would all go home now. As it was, Kaz was already on the road by then, leaving me behind doing Kenken puzzles waiting for semis to conclude. At one point the lights went out in the tab room while I was alone in there and people thought I had died, but I just hadn’t moved enough to activate the motion detector. I’m a pretty quiet guy, left to my own devices. I should have gotten up and danced a bit to the classic yodeling music. I’ll keep that in mind for the future.

While all this was going on, a host of Catholics met down at Iona to determine the fate of True Faith forensics in the region, and once again found no one better to handle the debate side of things, so I’ll be back in the saddle there. Good. It’s always fun, and it’s not terribly onerous. I’d like to do it until they excommunicate me. Unlike the belief of the Byram Hillbillies when the lights went out, I’m not dead yet.

I did get to see a few Sailors while I was in the Hills, by the way. They looked at me with fire in their eyes, but, let’s face it, I was almost dead, so they eventually took pity on me. They even had a newbie with them, a senior no less. Will wonders never cease?

In which we close out the week on our way to opening day, season 2015-16

Benk wanted MJP for VLD at BH. [Note: if that makes no sense to you, maybe Google can translate it for you into English. Then again, if that makes no sense to you, are you reading the right blog?] My original reaction was, Feh, but then I thought about it and figured, well, three tiers with a couple of strikes might work. You could at least get 1s on the bubble, which is where all the true action is. So we’ll see. The worst case scenario is that people will get the judges they were going to get anyhow, but not as often. Nothing wrong with that. So I put it in. We’ll find out how it goes starting tomorrow.

On the Pups front, people are coming through the woodwork with all sorts of things that are not my job. If you send people a message that says, to wit, I am doing LD and here’s some LD stuff, you are guaranteed to get a response asking for details about Duo or Parli, which I would have thought I had implied that I wasn’t doing, but what can I say. I do try to be patient with newcomers, though. If I haven’t heard of your school, I’ll probably be nice to you for a little while. After that, I’ll only be nice to you if you are nice to me. I have nothing whatsoever to gain by being nice to spalpeens and tattie howkers (the latter being a phrase I just discovered on Google, which I will do my best to make a part of my daily vocabulary) who simply want me to hand them their hearts’ desires on a velvet pillow. I try to maintain a velvet-pillow-free zone around me at all times.

Take that, you tattie howker.

Last night I came to the end of the editing of the N2 episodes. Which means the whole Nostrum project is rapidly nearing completion. I have next to explain the clam linguini and the falling pants, and to reveal the identity of Mr. Lo Pat’s murderer, which I never got to in the canon, and N2 will be a complete wrap. After that, there’s just the handful of N3 episodes which have never even remotely seen the light of day, and it will be ready for prime time. The Vast Nostrumian Army will finally see its dreams come true.

Maybe it’s time for N4…

If this is Wednesday it must be Nostrum

This week, as we polish up our work kit for Byram Hills, a couple of stand-alone epistles.

We almost didn’t make it this week. The Nostrumite is in a state of permanent depression over a suggestion that has arrived in our mail e-bag that we somehow allow our episodes to be privately doctored by this one particular school so that instead of writing about Nostrum characters, we would be writing about their team. These mad-lib episodes, for want of a better designation, would be then passed around in their own private Idaho for their somewhat bizarre personal amusement. As we replied to them, it is a well-known fact that Herman Melville wrote at great length about his adventures hunting raccoons in the American northwest. However, some whaling friends of his in Bedford preferred that he write about their adventures, so whenever he mentioned raccoons or forests, in their edition, much to his chagrin—they had an in at the publisher—they substituted whales and oceans. The great white raccoon Melville’s characters were seeking was named by the author, Oscar the Raccoon (not very imaginative, we grant you, but Hermie was rather fond of it). The Bedford contingent changed it to Moby-Dick, after a cook at the local hash house who had a real way with grilled cheese sandwiches. The amazing thing is that Mr. Melville’s original has been lost to history, and all that remains is the unauthorized version. Needless to say, we do not wish the same thing to happen to Nostrum, and we turned down the suggestion. The Mite was rather vocal on the issue. “What next?” he asked. “Product placements? Drop-in visits from the cast of ‘Friends’? Marion Davies movies?” He did suggest, however, that if people offered cold, hard cash, he’d do it in a minute.

Apparently the request for Mad Libs Nostrum was a real thing. You'd think that Nostrum was bad enough with characters like Worm Padrewski and Tarnish Jutmoll. Nostrum with Joe Vaughan or Matt Dunay? I just can't imagine it.

Onward:

We almost didn’t make it this week. The Nostrumite is in a state of permanent depression over the pending release of postmodern Barbie. According to the press, the Mattel Madonna is coming out soon in a version with a flower tattoo, and some members of the fifth estate are suggesting that she may also have nose and lip studs as optional accessories. Presumably she’ll also smoke, club hop, and enjoy music by groups that only know two chords and still have trouble finding them on their guitars. Over the years the lad has been more than amused by the manifestations of the goddess of the Baby Boom, which have included both Elvis and George Washington, and he was heartily amused at the suggestion that she was going in for a nip and a tuck and a lipo to make her more human and less... whatever she is. “Have you ever tried to put shoes on one of those things?” he asks. Well, to tell you the truth, no. Anyhow, he could abide all of these, but pomo Barbie takes the whole thing a few steps too far. “What’s next?” he asks. “Shooting Gallery Barbie? Crackhead Barbie?” High Falutin, whose experience of Barbie apparently extends beyond reading the ads in the Toys ‘R Us catalog, suggested to the lad that he stick to subjects about which he has some knowledge, rather than trying to interfere in the milieu of seven-year-old girls, to whom this tattoo is probably as innocent as Barbie’s assemble-it-yourself bordello that High remembers fondly from her own childhood, but since when is the Nostrumite one to acknowledge borders to his knowledge? “Speaking of Borders,” he adds, “the clerk at our Borders [a now defunct bookstore chain] has a tongue stud. ‘Will [click] ckltere be anycklting [click] elcklt, clktir [click]?’ It’s painful just watching him. I’ll bet you he’s already got his order in for a truckload of these pomo Barbie babies.”

Maybe.

[click]

And yes, there were Elvis, George Washington and Tattoo Barbies. You're surprised at that?