The Kent IV

My brother or sister debater, heed these words, for I tell you that you are in great danger. Through unhappy accident I have stumbled across details of an ESU plot that threatens the very existence of the debating circuit and promises to plunge our way of life into turmoil and civil war the ferocity of which has not been seen since the WUDC break regulations changed. I have awoken an evil the power of which I even now cannot fully comprehend. If you ever wish to drink yakka until the room goes wibbly or laugh at Jake Armes for prepping the wrong side of the semi’s motion again, then you will believe what I tell you.

For weeks now my enemies have pursued me from city to city, time and time again I have ever more narrowly slipped through their fingers. From Berlin, Manila, Botswana and Koc to Serbia, Galway, Tallinn – the list blurs and my head spins. I fled far from civilisation to wander empty deserts in unworldly silence, befriended the Yukaghir and trod their secret paths through the Siberian tundra, snatched uneasy sleep in the ruined temples of forgotten Aztec cities and entered a kebab shop in Hull – still their dead-eyed enforcers remained mere minutes behind me: untiring, unceasing, pitiless. Harnessing skills of persuasion honed in a thousand break-rooms they have subjugated governments to their ends, argued the world’s police into submission and presented every lone-wolf vigilante with three expertly analysed points as to why they should cease their investigations. They are everywhere, and they are powerful.

Now my strength and resources are exhausted, my wit at its end and they are sure to find me soon. By getting David Jones to judge a school’s round whilst drunk I have distracted them long enough to scribble down the letter below, which I have entrusted to my last surviving friend with orders to publicise it on the foremost debating blog the internet. The truth must be known. They must be beaten. Even now I hear jackboots on the staircase, feel the draught on my neck as a window is expertly forced open and I hear sirens in the distance. Run my friend, seek out the council in exile and carry my message to safety!

The horror, the horror!

                                                                                                * * * * *

Debaters of the world,

What if I told you the ESU is not actually the benign debating organisation you thought it was? What if I told you that the people who worked there are not in fact self-sacrificing and occasionally cuddly individuals, resolute in their noble cause of padding the CVs of the privately educated? What if told you that Steve Nolan once refused a drink?  

What if it I told you that the ESU is in fact a front organisation run by a shadowy overlord intent on World’s domination? What if I told you that for the last decade they have been collecting the best speakers from the debating societies of Britain and offering them employment only in order to monitor their behaviour and harvest samples of their DNA?

What if I told you that deep underground and in total secret, they toil with warped and perverted sciences to isolate the debating gene and splice it into selected hosts? What if I told you that beneath your feet are vast fields, that on those fields are hellish camps engulfed in a miasma of death and blood, and that in those camps thousands of these hosts are training and drilling, only the strongest and quickest hosts surviving? Disguised as children, they are in fact the diabolical and pitiless avatars of their dark ESU masters, versed in the ancient art of analysis, International Relations and sarcasm?  What if I told you they are awaiting the day they will get to University and begin their mission of gathering trophies and titles to adorn the throne-room of their lord? What if I told you I have seen them, and I am afraid?

What if I told you that the Kent IV was founded as nothing more than an excuse for them to test their prototypes for the first time under the close surveillance of their ESU masters?  What if I told you that that the reason the final motion was so mental was to discover the glitches in their “dealing with insane CAs” training program? What If I told you that Kent isn’t even a real University?

What happens if my concerns are completely unfounded? Nothing. But what happens if my concerns are justified and ignored? Nothing good.

There remains but one solution. We must debate the 14 year olds. We must debate them and we must win. We will debate on to the end. We will debate in France (at the Paris IV,) we will debate on the seas and the oceans, we will defend our island whatever the cost may be. We will debate them on the beaches, we shall debate on the landing grounds, we shall debate in the fields and in the streets, we shall debate in the hills; we shall never surrender. 

For me it is too late. But for you, who now know the truth, there may still be time to foil the plot of those who would tear down all that is pure and good and drunken and random about debating and cover all the world in a darkness of robotic competency. Sober up the troops, you have a war to win. The fate of debating lies in your hands. Do not fail me.

 

Godspeed.

Ben Adams

The Leeds letter

After arriving at Leeds and being introduced to our crash, we head for the pub on Friday evening. In a small room, we meet dozens of debaters, both fellow Scottish speakers and several Dutch debaters from Groningen, none of whose names I ever learnt to pronounce. Then, off to bed, rationalising it as “mental recovery for increased cognitive performance.” Nobody, after all, would want to admit to being sleepy just after midnight on a Friday. As debaters, we furthermore consider ourselved superhuman, beyond the need for sleep (at least that’s the impression I get from seeing so many cans of energy drinks at competitions.)
So, on the next, we wake up from our crash, in a room we shared Ben, the DCA, whom we didn’t manage to trick into revealing any of the upcoming motions. A quick fried breakfast (once again, for boosted cognitive performance) later, we set off to a first day of speeches at Leeds. Only one team was registered this time, Penny and I (Lukasz), under the team name St Andrews Second Term Moonbase. (If you haven’t been following the news, US Presidential Candidate Newt Gingrich promised an American moon base by his second term). Now, Leeds is a bit different as a competition, since it espouses first person motions. Thus, every motion is debated from the perspective of an individual, and was often preceded by copious amounts of infoslides and/or (not very relevant) video game trailers.
The first motion had plenty of info about a young Muslim parisian woman in a traditional community, and read: THW wear the burqua. We were in in first opp. Penny fiercely front-loaded knowledge to me, and the team created a coherent argument on how the burqua was traditionally symbolically oppressive and how it would harm relations with greater society as a whole. The proposition came up with much weaker arguments on civil disobedience and religion, catapulting us into a comfortable first place.
The second motion had a long infoslide about black holes. Essentially, it was about a scientist who knew, with certainty, that the earth would end within a year. THW not reveal the findings. We were in first prop and ran why the scientist is necessarily utilitarian and why this would lead to utilitarian harms, with the world not becoming too nice a place if everyone was aware of an impending doom. Except we under-analysed that point a bit, and lost the win to first opp. Still, a solid second.
The organisation team seemed to enjoy misleading us. Thus, for the third round, they put on an awesome-looking game trailer, with lots of shooting and flying in a futuristic world. And the motion was on… tax policy. Essentially, a billionaire can choose not to (legally, through a loophole) avoid taxes and have less money to invest and the like. In second prop, we unleashed devastating analysis on what the “spirit” of the law is, democratic accountability, equality, you name it. And then we topped it off with a strong summation that gave all these points some sense and context. Narrowly took the second over second opp.
With those three good performances, we finished all three open rounds. We were in a solid standing, with a +1 going in to the closed rounds, an easily breakable position. If we maintained that performance. Yet, Leeds was a tale told in two acts, one a comedy, the other a tragedy. And little did we know that the comedy was over.
If it looks like a top room, feels like a top room and has a worlds quarterfinalist in it, it probably is one. We were in second opp, on a rather bizzare motion. The infoslide talked of a magic genie who could turn  a 20 year old female university student into a man. THW become a man. First prop fiercely argued that men have it better, due to the gender pay gap and the like. (Thankfully, unlike other rooms, nobody in ours mentioned menstruation.) Then first opp, Pam and James from Durham, skilfully opposed it by talking of gender, and how gender, a socially constituted value that results from upbringing, never changes, making the protagonist an essentially depressed transsexual. They further ran arguments on how women often have it better, from being relieved from frontline duties to other things. Second prop, an Edinburgh team, were calling for a super-feminist to be created, as nobody would be able to understand gender issues and make  a greater impact on feminism than a woman who magically transformed into a man. And then our turn came. I stood up and pushed through an extension, speaking at the pace of a machine gun, talking first of how the gender pay gap is caused by gender and gendered upbringing and thus first prop’s points were invalid, and how third wave feminism made it pretty awesome to be a woman right now, due to a greater flexibility in redefining gender identity. After seeing the judges, I learned I got a third. First of all, I was immensely, immensely enthusiastic about getting to the top room. And, supposedly, my machine-gun extension was too fast and thus difficult to follow. Something about structure and so on. Needless to say, I was rather gutted. Emotions had run high and I still gave a good speech. I was still proud of the heights we had gone to. But, back on straights, we desperately needed a first or second in our next round to break.
Also, rather amusingly, an opp team in another room acknowledged that life was harder as a woman, but that that was fun, as life was to be lived for the challenge. Like a video game, life was best in “hard mode.” They were quickly denounced with a POI about why we don’t cut off people’s arms, though.
And now, the final round. A room on straights. And a motion about the US Supreme Court. I thought we were ready. I thought spending evening watching The West Wing would have given us sufficient knowledge. And I thought my extension made sense. I thought we engaged. I thought we had gotten better than a 4th. None of those were true. We committed serious tactical errors. But, the first rule of the final round is that one does not talk of it.

So, with our much-hyped hopes of breaking completely dashed, we set off to the semifinal. But first, an infoslide graced the screen, talking of the death of JFK, who, in hindsight, was a rather mediocre president. Yet, after his death, the Democrat party rose to power on his supposed legacy, enabing crucial bills such as Medicare and Medicaid to be passed. The infoslide also reminded us, to the CA’s insistence, that the death of a president is generally bad. And the motion: with foresight of all that would happen as a result of his death, JFK would still have gone to Dallas.  So the arguments on all sides talked of JFK’s motivations, beliefs, Catholicism, affairs, in a constant barrage of facts and analysis. One Scottish team, GUU A, went through to the final, though.
The final did not break with the tradition of extensive infoslides, either. Imagine the Pope found out that Christianity had been made up. THW reveal that discovery. First prop, Pam and James from Durham, won the final, arguing that the Pope very much cared about spiritual truths and that he wouldn’t have had to destroy all of religion, just disbelieve in the New Testament and become a Jew.

And the tournament ended. In general, I had an amazing time. Whilst at first scared at the thought of first person motions, I found them all very good and debatable (aside from the unmentionable final one). In fact, I think they should run a first person motion at internationals from time to time. Yet the great disappointment of not having broken still hangs over me. Oh well. It happens. Time to move on to the next competition, whereby, once more, we all, the St Andrean warriors of discourse, will seek to get past the evasive break.

Aberdeen Open 2012

Aberdeen! A place of oil, fish, oily fish and fish oil. A place where men can be real men, women can be real women, the gender indeterminate can be really gender indeterminate and small fluffy things that go wibble can be real small fluffy things that go wibble, right up to the point someone hits them with a shovel, fries them in batter and serves them with fish-oily chips.

Aberdeen! A place where your dreams come true, as long as they involve being headbutted by a swaying and dribbling red-faced man wearing a stripy skirt and bellowing in a dialect resembling the mating call of an elk among architecture so grim that it caused people to defect to the Soviet Union in search of something more cheerful. Or at least something that didn’t make them want to drink whiskey by the pint.

Aberdeen! A liberal utopia where society does not sneer at the earth-shaking and spirit-affirming love of one man for his sheep. A spiritual home of innovation: the birthplace of the engine, the car, the road, the pneumatic tyre and, around twenty seconds later, the drink-driving fatality. The place where wild eyed visionaries brought forth the equations of electrodynamics, the atomic cloud chamber, general anaesthetic and, according to the people who drink whiskey by the pint, Finnegan MacDonaldson the haggis-shitting unicorn.

Aberdeen! Believe it or not, my home town! This firstly makes it ok for me to tell the above jokes and secondly made returning there all the more of a pleasure, even if only because it vindicated my decision to leave for St Andrews as soon as I could, discovering for the first time people who wore trousers, would at least consider stopping drinking after they were sick and, when presented with cutlery, didn’t stick it in your leg for imposing an unreasonable level of social decorum at the dinner table.

Aberdeen! (Last one I promise.) Host of the latest outing of the UDS, to which the following went along:

St Andrews: “99 problems but a trolley aint one” – Tony Boase and Duncan Crowe.

St Andrews: “Doing it in the original position” – Lukasz and Ruth

St Andrews/ Strathclyde: “Ben and Joey’s Ice Cream” – Joe Dyer and I.

Along to judge were John Harper and Penny.

Following an unreasonably early start, we headed to the University via a conveniently placed Costa. I went for a pair of extra-shot large cappuccinos, a subtle but sure sign I was aiming at the break. On my more relaxed days I limit myself to enough caffeine to kill a rabbit, but no such niceties were observed today: Joe and I had been building our expectations for weeks and I wanted to be on my best form.
There was a longer than average wait for the first round, but a small competition with all the usual characters present meant there were plenty of familiar faces to chat to. Eventually though, the first round rolled:

Round One: THBT the gay rights movement should campaign for the abolition of marriage rather than marriage equality.

Joe and I found ourselves in second prop, which was a problem, given that in five of the six rooms 2^nd Opp won, (much bitching resulted) and we were staring across the table at Becca and Steve, the team we had been hoping hardest to avoid. Never mind, that made it easy enough to create a second-half debate, and Joe and I got the second, despite having to defend a pretty mental prop that meant no one would ever be able to go through a partnership ceremony of any kind in a religious institution of any kind ever again. Still, it made us keener to avoid Steve and Becca in future. That or, y’know, debate better…

Round Two: THW immediately withdraw from the EU.

First Prop in this one. What I’m going to call “strategically sub-optimal utilisation of available preparation resources” but might better be described as getting a bit over-excited in prep resulted in me giving a speech that was basically a litany of all the a EU-bashing examples that Joe and I could remember from Daily Mail headlines, but without much argumentation to string them together – very much like a Daily Mail leader in fact. We got the third.

We went to lunch a bit glum. Our expectations had been pretty high for this one, and to get to the final we’d have to win both the remaining debates and take high speaks.  Coffee, fag, game-face on.

Round three: There is scientific evidence that a specific race is more prone to psychiatric disorders. THBT journals shouldn’t publish these findings.

Second Opp, at last on the side of the debate I’d have chosen. The room stunk slightly of bin-juice, and Joe and I got up and won by saying sensible things in a way that mirrored the chair judge’s frustration. This included refuting arguments along the lines of “because science can never actually prove anything, we’d better not publish this in case we’re wrong and it’s not related to race at all,” and one that went, as far as I could tell, “because I know the word ‘epigenetics’ everyone else is wrong.”

Round four then, we were in first Opp and needed a win on the motion: THBT the image of female sexuality portrayed by videos such as Rihanna’s “Rude Boy” is empowering.

The feminism motion! Roll out the post-modernist jargon and prepare to denounce everyone as an unknowingly hetero-normative tool of the patriarchy. The general rule appears to be that whoever does this in the fastest and most outraged speaking style and mentions breast implants, high heels and FHM the most takes the win. Joe and I did the best we could, noting that if such women really were choosing to construct for themselves a unique sexual identity free from male influence, wasn’t it a bit of a coincidence that they ended up looking exactly like men wanted them to?

It appeared to be enough, because we broke third! The final looked like:

1 Prop: (Strathclyde and St Andrews) Joe and I

2^nd Prop: (Strathclyde and ESU) Becca and Steve Jamison

1^st Opp: (Aberdeen) Katherine Duncan and Ian O’Neil

2^nd Opp: (Somewhere or other) Karen Read and Greg Murray

The normal feeling of mild irritation at pulling 1^st Prop in a final vanished when I saw the motion: “THBT it is immoral to vote Republican.” Awesome, right-wing bashing speeches practically write themselves. Add an MLK quote or two, a bit of analysis about the limits of the harms that can be justified by a democratic mandate and an impassioned, entirely off-the-cuff speech from Joe (I’m a big fan of front-loading, but only because I generally speak at the front: good DLO and DPM speakers never cease to amaze me) and we thought we’d put up a decent account of ourselves. As finals go this one was huge fun, plenty of rhetoric, audience engagement and drama. Speakers kept abandoning the table to grab the free cans of beer – Steve even accomplishing this manoeuvre mid-speech in the time it took for someone to ask him a POI.

It didn’t appear to affect his speaking ability though, because the win went entirely deservedly to second Prop. A highly enjoyable competition to which yours-truly shall certainly be returning next year to finish some unfinished business…

The tab can be found here: https://docs.google.com/a/st-andrews.ac.uk/spreadsheet/ccc?pli=1&key=0AlSALh8_RNvXdFJwZjRjYUZBeDc4OENHN0o4TWdqQ2c#gid=0

Oxford Women’s IV

There is a problem within debating ; there are not enough women in the competitive circuit, and there are even less women who make it to the top of the speaker’s tab. The Oxford women’s IV was put forward as a solution. The idea being, let’s have a competition that introduces female debaters to each other showing them that they are not alone, give them a lot of feedback and present them with female role models in debating. The IV  this year was exclusively for women meaning not even male judges.

Personally, I think the IV is a really good idea. They kept their promise about focusing on development and improvement opportunities for debaters and excellent judging. It was nice having judges that take their time explaining to why they came up with that call and going through the debate and analyzing it instead of the usual  way in most IVs where the judge is in a rush and the justification for the call is short. Obviously, I liked Oxford women’s IV and I agree with the concept and I hope next year we can send more teams.

Now that I got the contentious issue of a gendered competition done with I can tell you about what happened to Team St. Andrews in Oxford. Why we didn’t do good (you shouldn’t look at the tab) and follow the debater’s tradition and blame it all on my partner.

After asking every female debater I know from St. Andrews and being turned down for various reasons (a certain ginger fresher let me down because of her boyfriend.  Choosing your men over career, well, that’s not really Feminist), driven border line insane by boredom in my room in DRA over Christmas (yes, I’m claiming insanity as a defense) and quite desperate, I asked my friend Kelsey who was back at home in Delaware if she would go with me to this competition and she equally insane, I’m sure (from the intoxicating happiness of Christmas at home ? ), said “sure”.

The promised training session by CA and DCA was really good and afterwards we got our gifts from the sponsors of the event ; a notebook and a mirror. “They want us to remember to stay pretty while debating”, “don’t forget you’re objects” and “I can imagine someone going “what are we sponsoring again? right., let’s give them mirrors”” were some of the quips and cynical comments. Personally , I think of course this could be a gift in any other IV and no big corporation can be accused of sexism.

The motions were :

R1: This House Believes that religious organizations should be subject to all aspect of civilian law. (including but not limited to : employment practice , adoption policy ,etc)

I should point out that by this point Kelsey’s training constituted of me talking to her about debating for an hour and trying to fit everything in and she had never before seen a debate or been in a debate which is not something you want when your first round is in the chambers of Oxford Union. Her speech was a bit undermined by her anxiety.

We got the fourth and I got her speaker points for round 1, in the tab.  Karma for putting my friend through the grill and making her run an extension ?

R2: This house would require military training to include extensive ethical and philosophical study.

We got the second by talking about the impracticality of it and the need for a hierarchy in the army.

R3: This house would vote Republican.

My partner had to shout at me and  kept me from forcing her to run eight points in a 5 minute speech. Don’t you love it when you get a motion which you know stuff about and you care? Not that I can be accused of ranting in my summation about the general state of the GOP.

We got the first.

R4: This house would legalize S&M.

We were first prop and we got negative feedback on our mechanism and how it undermined our case. It was fun though, sex motion in a novice competition  in a minus one room? might as well be stand-up.

We got the third.

R5:  This house believes it is legitimate to use violence to defend private property.

The whole of prop was about how stuff have emotional value and the whole of opp was about how health is more important than stuff.

We got the third, the call was rather surprising but the feedback made sense.

Semi-final : This house , as the UN, would use private military companies for peace keeping operations.

Final : This house would raise its children without gender.

Thanks to the organizers , the whole experience was very enjoyable  and we now have so many anecdotes , the judges and the feedback were amazing and we got to see the beautiful Oxford. You should come next year and accompany me because I am definitely going again!

 

Penny

The UDS at Trinity

Trinity IV 2012

After a walking tour of Dublin with Ireland aficionado, Parker Burns we were joined by the rest of the team who had flown in from Edinburgh ready for the pub. Alex Don had miraculously made it to Dublin despite having left his passport in St. Andrews. Dickie Douglas came to the rescue, Alex’s passport in hand, driving 60miles to Edinburgh to save us all from a missing team-member.The following day we woke up early and torn between a trip to the Leprechaun Museum or something a little more high-brow, we eventually settled on the ‘museum district’ of Dublin and our appointed tour guide (Parker), took us to see art and history so that we arrived sufficiently cultured in time to register at Trinity that afternoon.

Roughly one hundred teams enter the Trinity IV, and it is one of the most prestigious competitions attracting Oxford, Edinburgh, SOAS and the like. I was amazed to see post-grads from Cambridge competing against 1st years, but hey, it’s all about equal opportunities – and they were given a good fight anyway.

We were all thoroughly disappointed by the university’s rejection of carefully selected team names along the theme of Zoolander (Magnum and Derelicte included), but Farhan and Ed, Parker and Jack, Alex and John and finally Parnian and Duncan were called (not in the correct order) A, B, C and D. This led to much confusion later when the teams were called into the chair room in order to confirm which team was which and who had what points. Controversial?

In between each motion, we would reconvene in the Commons to exchange war stories. Duncan and Parnian’s travelled down to the (highest) bin room and back up to the (lowest) break room, Ed and Farhan were clear and determined, Alex and John were cuttingly witty, and  Parker and Jack became know as ‘The Chill Bros’, that last setting an example for those debaters whose faces turned an explosive purple, or whose arm gestures were so outraged, one wondered at the potential of competitive violence.

Skilled, subtle and succinct sophistry meant that our very own teams John and Alex, and Parker and Jack got through to the quarter and then the semi-finalists, with Ruaridh winning over the top speakers in Europe, and being placed in one of the quarter-final rooms to judge. The first motion questioned whether Boston College should release the identities of ex-IRA members who had contributed confidential accounts of their crimes to a study. I sat in on The Chill Bros who opposed the release of information. Their relaxed approach got them a laugh when they provocatively highlighted their American-ignorance about the specifics of the IRA’s reign of terror. This emphasised the significance of academic/sociological development over revenge and retribution. At one point, Parker’s very chilled summation speech had all four proposition speakers standing up with points of information. But their talent shone through and along with John and Alex, they were put through to semis.
In a show of balance and solidarity, I watched John and Alex’s opposition to a motion arguing that there should be Primary competition in the USA’s next election. Following the fastest-speaking woman I have ever tried to follow in my life, John and Alex came out with some light-hearted jokes about Scottish/Irish rivalry and moved on to succinctly highlight the cons of such an electoral shift.

It was a proud moment for the rest and me as we watched our comrades reprazent. The humourous and easygoing attitude of both teams was enviable and I felt typified the general vibe of our Debating Society. Despite not getting through to the final, we were all happy with the result. Making up a quarter of the eight semi-finalists (out of one hundred). Speaker tabs put Jack at the top of the St. Andrean league, and with Parker, Duncan and Alex in the top 25 we can certainly boast of a very good group of speakers.

A great night of debating madness followed i.e. debaters getting drunk and of course doing the famous debate-gesture-dance. Trust, me it’s cooler than it sounds.

TCD 2012 from the perspective of St Andrews D

This will be a short (read; concision and comprehensiveness, locked in the eternal death struggle) run through of TCD as experienced by ‘someone who isn’t Ben’. (P.S. – I’ve bumped this back a bit so it’s with the other TCD posts).

Not just due to past and present good fortune but for the excellent atmosphere, the always solid CA team, the odd tendency (is it genetic?) for Irish people to be nice and the fact the folks in charge of TCD don’t see it as their duty to bankrupt other debating societies, I’ve come to regard Trinity as one of if not the best events on the debates calendar. We sent a job lot of teams in 2010, half a team in 2011 and another large batch in 2012… I encourage anyone reading this thinking about The Trinity 2013 to make it another banner year; it’s just a great competition.

St Andrews A = Farhan Samanani and Ed Noel
St Andrews B = John Harper and Alex Don
St Andrews C = Jack Whiteley and Parker Burns
St Andrews D = Penny Sadeghi and Duncan Crowe
In addition we sent Lauren Hepburn and Ruairidh MacIntosh as judges (violating n-1 but in our defense a) all the cool Scottish institutions were doing it and b) it was only because Sam dropped out close to the last minute).

Truncated Team Tab
1.UCD L&H J            3    1    3    3    3    13    806
2. Regis                    3    2    3    3    2    13    795
5. St Andrews C        3    3    3    0    3    12    796
7. St Andrews B        3    3    0    3    3    12    776
10 Edinburgh MN     3    1    1    3    3    11    790
22 Edinburgh LB       1    3    2    1    2    9    783
27 St Andrews A        2    2    1    2    2    9    771
29 St Andrews D        3    0    2    3    1    9    764
90 Maynooth D          0    0    0    1    0    1    539

Truncated Speaker Tab
1 Harish Natarajan           82    83    80    82    84    82.2    411
11 Jack Whiteley              76    82    81    78    82    79.8    399
14 Marlena Valles (E)       78    77    82    81    80    79.6    398
16 Parker Burns               78    81    80    78    80    79.4    397
23 Benjamin Lau             75    82    77    79    81    78.8    394
25 Alex Don                    75    78    79    79    82    78.6    393
25 Duncan Crowe            78    74    78    84    79    78.8    393
29 David Norris               76    78    81    80    77    78.4    392
36 Andrew Beaverstock    75    80    78    78    78    77.8    389
50 Farhan Samanani         77    78    76    79    76    77.2    386
51 Ed Noel                     77    73    80    76    79    77.0    385
59 John Harper               73    77    74    78    81    76.6    383
79 Penny Sadeghi            71    72    75    80    73    74.2    371
166 Jona Kalemi              70    67    66    55    66    64.6    324

No… I don’t know what could cause a 55 either, and am too afraid to ask.

All motions are ‘words to the effect of’; if someone has the exact wording, feel free to correct.

Round 1 – THW Never Disclose the Ethnicity of a Sperm/Egg Donor to the prospective parents

This was a strange one, in so far as I believe (our room is a poor basis to judge on) the debate very quickly becomes about whether a class of vulnerable individuals can legitimately be used as a tool of ‘sending a message’ of racial equality. First prop ran ‘ending the legacy of racism’ and some rather strange, not to say a little bit… er… racist stuff about the potential for mixed race children born in white middle-class families to act as role models. 2nd prop added to this the need for racial diversity in Ireland and that parents love their children so the policy will convert some racists. I don’t remember 1st opps line and don’t have my notes, but as I recall most of the case was left standing, leaving me free from 2nd opp to throw everything including the kitchen sink at the 1st prop from second class children (parents racist enough for prop to care about them are also racist enough to keep trying until they have a white child, which is unfair on the mixed race child) to the policy violating the right to medical privacy to the exploitation etc above to affirmative action being better at achieving those ‘role models’. I’m less enamoured with that last one in retrospect, as its only relevant given the bizarre avenue prop decided to go down and a red herring otherwise.

The chair seemed to be pretty inexperienced as according to her justification she gave us the 1st because we won the debate, 1st opp the 2nd because we didn’t knife them (“we remained consistent with the line they had established” true enough) and 1st prop the 4th because we refuted them. Speaking to a wing or two afterwards it turned out the whole ’1st props line was a teensy bit racist’ did factor in as well, so I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt that there might have been reasons which weren’t explicitly mentioned for the call and not say anything to the CA team (noting in passing I am as unpersuaded as ever by the “you should never question the judgement when you take a 1st” line of thought). In retrospect, seeing the speaks, I regret this decision. Penny effectively saved the day with her summation, clarifying what was a rather unstructured extension so I find the fact that she was given a 72 when there was reason enough to place her ahead of me more than a little irritating.

Round 2: ‘THW submit all future international bailouts to ratification by referendum’

Again, I do wish I had my notes. 1st prop did a reasonable job, barring the odd tactical hiccup (the “the Germans bailed them out because they were bumchums” line John seemed to like so much from 1st prop would have been much better directed at the Germany/Greece deal – as I tried to do in extension – as it clashes with John’s claim that politicians always act in the national interest (not so; sometimes (arguably) they act in the interests of preserving the European project. Is that in the national interest? Why not ask the nation etc)) but I left the top half firm in the belief that Alex and John (in 1st opp) were ahead. They’d run a series of arguments to the effect; referrenda are unnecessary as voters have already given mandates to politicians (who they elect on ‘values’ which if I’m not mistaken is a distant cousin of the justification John has heard me give of why political parties need not honour the letter of their manifesto commitments (so long as they act in the manner most consistent with the political values those commitments express subject to constraints of what is possible), that the decision on whether or not to bail a country out is made by experts in the best interests of the country and a rather suspect argument I didn’t hit hard enough to the effect ‘we can’t do this because the markets won’t like it’. To this 2nd Opp piled on more about the need for urgency, a claim regarding the reliability of politicians and a bizarre claim that bailouts always yeild a profit.

Perhaps because of the lack of structure in the round before (I don’t understand myself) I over compensated and, seeing that I could reduce the prop-side to one long syllogism and win decided to pursue that course. The eventual decision to give us the 4th was mainly predicated upon the fact that the judge found it difficult to ‘locate’ my extension in the speech. Fair enough, and as I said to Penny “this is why we can’t have nice things”. Obviously there was a lot of rehashing arguments already made in prop form as 1st prop hadn’t done so bad a job that I could literally run the whole prop argument without any mention of claims similar to those made there. Another other factor in the decision was the belief that opp had won the debate, mainly due to the ‘urgency’ point. I did ask the chair (John believes this was ‘questioning the decision’, John is mistaken) “suppose that you had been convinced prop won the debate. Do you think that would have changed your call?”. The hypothetical should be easy enough to understand; everyone agreed Alex and John had won the top half (I think, no one suggested otherwise), so if you left the debate thinking then that prop had won this would presumably entail that 2nd prop HAD moved the debate on quite substantially, even if looking at your notes it was difficult to pinpoint where they differed from first prop. This would only work as a question relevant to ‘whether there was an extension’, you should never hinge normally decisions on ‘which side won’, or if you do it’s a shortcut to a bad call, but I’m obviously biased because I’m aware that we did substantially modify the prop line, but evidently that failed it failed to come over (which is why we stick to more conventional structures).

The changes were principally ones of redefinition, clarification and pruning; the one plank which was significantly under analysed was why bailouts were sufficiently important to warrant consent of the governed, but I gave some chat about the effects of substantial public deficit increases on citizens. John’s ‘values’ stuff I just gave a swift kick to as I didn’t think it needed anything more than that (it’s one of those claims where the better you explain it the less sense it would make; no one makes pro-unanticipated bailout value commitments in their manifestos either, there are no ‘Good Global Citizen’ parties) and I attempted to swap the Ireland example of 1st prop for the Greek Bailout in Germany. I don’t think the judges understood my response to the market point, but in hindsight it’s possible to explain more succinctly; complaining that the markets will respond negatively to a bailout referendum is – given the negative response is presumably based on the possibility the bailout might not go ahead – is to suppose that all bailouts must take place. It’s a subtler variant of the ‘bailouts are always good and always turn a profit’ line out of 2nd Opp but no more valid. In the final call it looks like my responses to John and Alex were largely overlooked, but Penny’s claim in the summation that the claim that 2nd Opp noting that ‘Fianna Fail sucked’ contradicted the ‘governments always make economically prudent decisions’ line was deemed significant to bump them behind John and Alex despite the ‘urgency’ point as having been what ultimately run the round. I think responding to urgency would either have required a more careful prop (implicitly case setting it in Germany on the eve of the Greek bailout, say) or else some kind of sleight of hand in the summation to argue that the prop case was entirely principled. The universal quantifier in the motion makes it a little difficult, as technically opp win if they can prove that in some hypothetical case there might be sufficient reason not to hold a referendum (which is pretty easy; call that the Sam Block opp-line) so one way or the other you’d have to distract from it. I didn’t like the call but it’s hard to imagine us placing ahead of 2nd opp and, if they buy Penny’s contradiction charge, hard to see 2nd opp placing ahead of John and Alex so the best we could have taken was 3rd or an awkward 2nd. In any case, the take home lesson is ‘don’t try to do anything interesting structurally, it’s usually a bad idea’.

Round 3 – THB the US should give Nukes to South Korea

This was our only 1st prop of the tournament and we took a close 2nd, largely my fault. It seems obvious enough to me that the chief merit of this is that it strengthens the deterrent effect on North Korea. It’s easy enough to see why but I didn’t get it filed down to the essentials until a POI to the bottom half ‘who is more likely to retaliate if South Korea is attacked; South Korea or the US’. Once you’ve grasped that point the question is one of whether the benefits of strengthening that deterrent effect outweighs the possible harms (‘China won’t like it!’) and a bit of careful framing on prop (we’re the US, so we don’t care about half of what you’re talking about) makes that an easy fight to win. What were wrong here was two-fold; I was so insistent that we nail the MAD analysis in the first speech that there wasn’t really anything else in there (I hadn’t really thought about the supposed diplomatic benefits – I tried to run some frankly outlandish stuff about Nuclear South Korea now being an independent counterbalance to China in SE Asian politics, we could have easily shoved that into the first speech and rebuilt it in the second) and unfortunately (my bad for not having supplied enough additional material) Penny laid too much stress on the ‘rational actor’ element of the MAD calculus which meant the opp went to town over how crazy North Korea supposedly is. In fact MAD, while it is an abstract model which assumes – I guess – the various parties are acting rationally in so far as they aren’t acting completely irrationally, you only need to be rational enough to (a) think that being alive and head of the Peoples Democratic Republic of Korea or whatever the north calls itself is better than being dead or some mutant wandering a post-apocalyptic radioactive wasteland. Rationality really doesn’t enter into the discussion here in the same way that it would if the question is ‘should we let Iran get the bomb’ because the people getting the bomb here, South Korea, are assumed to be rational and it is the other guys – who already have the bomb – who are taken to be crazy. The key element of the calculus which comes into tension in the round is whether the expected likelihood of retaliation (a key component of how MAD is supposed to deter an attack) is strengthened by doing this. And I think on opp you have to either concede that or call it a wash (America is already certain to respond anyway) and claim ‘harms + no benefits = bad idea’.

Our opp didn’t do that. Instead he offered the outlandish claim couched in gobbledigook that multi-lateral someorother meant that MAD was inapplicable (I think this is one of those half chewed arguments; you heard it elsewhere and it sounded good so you’re repeating it. The argument is this ‘with many actors, who aren’t all global superpowers MAD is less stable. Because MAD assumes any nuclear weapon being fired you care about, which is only true if there are only two players and they’re both global hegemons’. That’s true, but if understand the argument you can see why it’s totally invalid here. It’s a reason for saying ‘MAD is no longer active’ or in the irritating rounds people keep running about how everyone should have nukes ‘MAD won’t work to prevent nuclear war with that many players’ but in this case the only players you care about are the US, NK, SK and possibly China and ‘multi-lateral somethingorother’ is as good a name as any for the reason the US might not care /enough/ if SK is attacked to retaliate, given retaliation might escalate what was until then a region conflict into a global conflict. In other words… it’s a prop argument. The rest was largely ‘China won’t like it’ leading to the most annoying POI of the tournament, directed to an Italian-speaker in 2nd prop [words to the effect of] “won’t this negatively impact interest rate negotiations vis a vis the Remimbi?” The answer is ‘possibly’ but as a general rule if you are asking a POI to an ESL debater you should ensure your POI is at least a real sentence of English. Their second speaker expanded some of the harms (e.g. “this will undermine the NPT” well… I guess. 2nd prop ran something about peace and understanding and ‘you have to be on the level with the other side’ and 2nd opp decided to return to the ‘rational actors’ issue including the claim which annoyed Penny that the prop would cause China to give nukes to Afghanistan. She wanted to POI on this but I pointed out some battles don’t need to be fought. I gave them the one mentioned above clarifying the ‘credible retaliation’ point and another challenging the validity of the ‘NK, they so crazy…’ line hoping they’d highlight the absurdity of the 1st opp line on it but instead they decided to affirm that yes, the NK leadership was so crazy they didn’t care whether they lived or died.

As I said, the call was a close second to 1st prop. It would have probably shifted if we’d had something other than just MAD in the first speech as I would have had more freedom to explain the problems with the ‘China wouldn’t like it’ stuff. Ricky (for it was he) helpfully suggested calling it something other than Mutually Assured Destruction (partly motivated by the fact that – “it’s called MAD cause it’s crazy!” – was actually something 2nd Opp decided to run with… I hope they took the 4th). It’s not a suggestion I’ll be following but it was made in kindness.

R4 – THB Feminist Groups Should Stop Campaigning for Abortion Rights

I’m somewhat sympathetic to the prop teams as I didn’t know what I’d have propped… and I don’t think they got around to deciding what they’d run either. I decided the most sensible options were ‘abortion rights have gone too far’ (I should have spotted they were Irish but my head is fixed in American politics now and can’t shift from it) or ‘Feminist groups campaigning for abortion marks it as a ‘womens’ issue’ when properly it’s an issue for all society” probably the second because you can then run stuff about backlash etc etc. The best counter to this seemed to be to run a hardcore ‘all abortion is good abortion because of bodily autonomy’ and ‘an assault on the bodily autonomy of women is an assault of women’ and threw in Judith Jarvis Thompson’s violist ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion ) just for fun (though I recognise James Drey’s ‘zombie’ would do much the same job. The experimental philosopher in me does want to test how compelling people find those thought experiments as I suspect there’ll be an age and possibly gender divide, but no matter….).

In the end they didn’t run either. Instead they ran ‘Feminism used to be about public issues e.g. voting, and it should still be about those things (for some reason) and abortion is a personal issue’. So I shrugged, did away with the distinction and ran the bodily autonomy stuff I was going to run anyway dressed up as ‘an explanation of how the personal is public’ and added a bit of pre-buttal about backlash and stuff about the importance of issue based fundraising. Penny offered substantive rebuttal of a line coming from 1st prop’s second speech to the effect that ‘they didn’t have to worry about campaigning for the issue because ‘progressive education’ would take care of it’ and an extension that this would be disastrous for progress on women’s rights in the third world (which IIRC led to a ‘shoot self in foot’ POI from opening ‘but actually abortion isn’t legal in Ireland’) and 2nd opp offered some good extentiony material which I’ve managed to forget (though I remember I was worried 2nd had stolen the debate from us but I remember the summ as being only so-so). 2nd prop’s line was something to the effect ‘groups should campaign for equality and this isn’t an equality issue so campaigning for it will provoke backlash’. I POI’d “Do you think the NAACP shouldn’t campaign for things like affirmative action”. They said “what’s the NAACP”. Which makes it seem like the kind of POI I was complaining about in the last round, but a) it was one of the Denver teams, b) the NAACP is the largest lobby in the US for ‘African American issues’ (broadly construed) and c) man…. they didn’t know? Ain’t you got no black people in Colorado?

This round actually produced a really awkward moment. I got a POI from closing “but these women have already consented to pregnancy by consenting to sex”. Those moments when you realise ‘there is no better option here than to quote Will Jones verbatim’ – so I just did that and stuck a hat on it.

R5 – THB the US should pay reparations to its Muslim Populations for actions carried out after 9/11.

So, we’d clawed our way back up to a break room where at least one team and possibly two teams (in the event, two) would break. Yay. I think the trouble was that by the time the debate rolled around to us in 2nd proposition the debate I was watching was radically different from the debate the judges were watching. In my head, 1st prop (Edinburgh) had instantly shot themselves in the foot by implicitly limiting their case to The Patriot Act which… isn’t really about race. And so the team to beat was Oskar and his partner in 1st opp. But for the judges, while David had made a gaffe, Marlena’s repair work was satisfactory and Oskar’s response that other groups were harmed by the Patriot Act as well (e.g. Mexicans) was read as in effect conceding that the Patriot Act was intended to target Muslims. I’m not sure how much of a difference would have made if I’d been on the same wavelength, but I’d probably have spent less time attacking 1st opp (on generic anti-reparations stuff like the claim attaching monetary value to harm is somehow degrading) and more on building up a credible ‘group harm’ case (as Ben points out ‘Kymlicka, not Rawls’, yeah… fair point). I defined justice with just a touch of sarcasm by way of the veil of ignorance and claimed justice them demanded compensation for group harms. I widened to prop line to include things like Mosque planning permission denial (e.g. this guy; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNlo24EK4WQ ) and the decision to err on the side of ‘caution’ when adding names to the No Fly list. I then tried to claim the systematicity of the policies amounted to a harm to group identity but got distracted by my desire to pre-but Parker on the backlash stuff which was going to come up (including a redneck joke in bad taste, for which I apologise. Parker, you know I love you really) and the fact I’d for some reason included stuff about it helping our international relations. In retrospect I should have dropped that an focused making the group identity stuff sharper, but I’d included it in the expectation 1st prop would have covered more of the debate than they did. Parker and Jack did run backlash, albeit in a slightly more sophisticated variant (narratives?) but they also claimed that the Bush administration had always made a point to state they didn’t mean their policies to be read as impuning all Muslims. It shouldn’t have been a debate winning point but ultimately it was; Penny’s summation emotively rebuilt some of the harms material and expanded the IR-dimension but without hitting Parker and Jack on that point the rest of the prop line just didn’t stand.

The final call went to Parker and Jack (rightly) and to over simplify slightly they called prop side based on issues with the summ and because they liked how well they felt Marlena had rebuilt David. Penny feels that I actually helped to contribute to this impression by responding to the main line (I forget what) coming out of Oskar’s partner Lynsey once via POI and once again in my speech when she POI’d the same material by name checking Marlena. I just felt it was a form of honesty as I felt the point had been clearly implicit in Marlena’s speech, but if the claim is that by doing so I might have helped contribute to the perception Marlena clearly dominated the top half I guess I’d have to plead guilty. Casey (I can’t remember if he was Chairing or if it was Deirdre Milner) was kind enough to give us a very extensive explanation after the break announcement, despite the fact it left him almost no time before the quarter finals. In any event, we couldn’t have fairly taken the 1st over Jack and Parker and we wouldn’t have broken with the 2nd so in a way I’m happier with the way the call went, especially given Marlena and David then progressed all the way to the final. Plus the best thing about our room was I got to lead with a joke; ‘at least one Scottish team will break and we didn’t even have to change the rules to make it happen’.

Quarter Final – THB that Boston College should release the tapes.

I guess reading the motion as written I can make sense a bit more easily of exactly what happened. Figuring that two Scottish teams trumped one St Andrews team I followed John and Alex to their quarter where they were 2nd opposition, Marlena and David were 1st Opp, Sheraz and Mark Eastham in 2nd prop and the team from Regis (apparently also in Denver) who broke 2nd were in 1st prop. The motion was accompanied by an info slide which said essentially ‘a few years back Boston College did research on an IRA bombing including taped interviews. The police have now decided they want the tapes from those interviews in order to try and prosecute the bombers’. Now… I don’t remember if the word ‘prosecute’ was used or just heavily implied but….

For some reason, Regis decided to run “we’d release the tapes the transcripts of which would then be published with the names redacted….” Now, I don’t know if it was an honest screw up or an attempt to steal the opp-line but… yikes. At the point where you have the Metropolitan Police of the Gardai (I forget) serving as an academic publisher something has gone wrong with your prop. The reasons they offered were sensible enough – it’s good to understand terrorism etc etc. David seemed so surprised by the whole thing I remember worrying he might forget to actually run the opp-material anyway, as presumably they weren’t expecting some kind of self-immolation. I remember Marlena’s speech as being fairly strong but no one had even touched the most obvious, and it would seem to me, strongest opp material about how this would disincentivize future e.g. terrorists to come forward with their accounts – which seemed especially strange given that was sort of Regis’ case, unfortunately. So that material was left for John to extend on and add some things about academic freedom. For my money though the clear winners of the round were Sheraz and Mark who got to run the full prop case about the need to prosecute, justice for the victims etc including some quite interesting stuff in Mark’s speech about how the nature of the changes in Ireland mean that the worries about future people coming forward isn’t especially relevant. I’m not sure what my call would have been but I’m sure it would have involved 2nd prop, so I was surprised (but pleasantly) when they called it opp sweep. Apparently all rooms got called that way which suggests it’s a counter-intuitively (certainly counter to my intuitions) opp-heavy motion. It’s hard to imagine Sheraz and Mark doing a better job than they did, so unless the call was made on the basis of them knifing first prop (which they did but… come on now) it seems almost as if it was impossible to lose from opp once Regis imploded. (Incidentally the 2nd speaker from Regis was very good but… there’s some holes you can’t dig your way out of).

Semi – TH wishes that Barack Obama had faced a primary challenge.

Parker and Jack gratifyingly also made it through their Quarter (on opp). I had intended to stick with my ‘two Scottish teams’ policy, but got the rooms mixed up and this way I at least got to see both St Andrews teams in an outround. Parker and Jack drew 1st prop to Muireann and Ruth Faller in 2nd prop, what I have down as ‘UCD Law B’ in 1st opp and Harish and James Hardy in 2nd Opp pretending to be Lincoln’s Inn. Now, you don’t have to know much about American politics to know this is pretty much unwinnable if you run the prop straight: opp only has to point out that this will split ‘leftist’ finance and the contest will force Obama to move to his left and therefore hurt him with moderates in the general to win. Instead you can pick from a menu of prop-choice alternatives such as: ‘We don’t care about the real world, we only care about abstracty democratic considerations’ (which I think may have been the route Ruth and Muireann went down, but I don’t recall for sure) or ‘This House is the Republicans’ (you trade places with opp – maybe in fairness you should tell 1st opp you’re going to do this during prep?) and you run the winning opp arguments or else just ‘we are Leninists; it has to get worse before it gets better and so we want the Republicans to win for obscure left-wing reasons’. My favourite is option (2) but to their credit they chose to run it straight and lost in a way which makes me want to talk about the Alamo.

The case was this is good because it’s better for discourse; we get to have a chat about who the Democrats are and what they believe and it prevents the GOP campaign from having the monopoly on media attention it currently has. (a: it doesn’t; Obama gets plenty of coverage, as I think was pointed out but b: it’s not like the GOP primaries have been bad for the Democrats. I suspect the Committee to Re-Elect might be trying to organise some kind of Ron Paul / Newt Gingrich / Rick Santorum / Hermann Cain talk show for when Romney wins the nomination just to keep the fun times coming). Harish gave a killer POI “is there any possibility this challenger would win”. Jack said ‘probably not’ but in fact this is a pick-your-poison question. If you say ‘no’ then he can run that this is totally pointless and just a waste of Democratic party resources, which is basically what he did run. And if you say ‘yes’ then you’ve opened the possibility to a) another fight-to-the-bitter end nomination contest like Hilary (because an incumbent is unlikely to go easily) and b) a less electable, which is to say further left wing candidate getting the nomination. I cannot for the life of me remember what first opp did which, given they were in the best seat on the table, isn’t a good thing. I believe the prop material about the positive effect on turnout was left until Ruth and Muireann who also ran minority voices within the Democratic party getting represented, while Harish was left to run all the meaty opp material and the debate was called for bottom half. Should have gone Republican folks!

I’m not sure what happened in the other room. John and Alex were in the (coveted) first opp position, with Marlena and David in 2nd (same side, different order. Scotland represent etc etc). I’m told they didn’t go Republican either. I assume Limerick was in 1st prop (given they didn’t progress; 1st prop seems to be the Idiot Ball in this motion) but maybe not. It would be nice to have John and Alex’s account.

Final – THW Welcome the Downfall of Global Capitalism

I won’t discuss the final. It was fun, and very good and the call doesn’t make much sense to me but I never found out the reasons for it though I dare say there are some. It does seem to be another point in the worrying trend of ‘analysis motions being called in favour of 1st prop when things get complicated, contrary to the intuitive call of the majority of people watching’. If that is true it might be a sign that the format of BP (as opposed to something like Australs) just isn’t able to deal very well with analysis motions which, after all, are essentially all definitional challenges. I’ll just say everyone was fun to listen to, Mark and especially Christina were fantastic in 1st Opposition and we’re all very proud (if that’s an appropriate emotion) of Marlena and David for making it to the final. (James began his speech with a joke which must have seemed better on paper than it played to a mostly Irish audience about coming from the University of Cromwell. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out however that he doesn’t come from the College of Cromwell, which is of course Sidney Sussex College which also happens to be (a) where his head is (but not the rest of him) and (b) the best college. Perhaps not on the Tompkins table, but in terms of what the Dutch would call ‘gezelligheid’.)