Fitting the battle of life

Well, I heard about debatewise earlier last term when the guy running it came to one of our debates to talk briefly about it, but it’s only now (when I remembered about it and dug out his card from a pocket) that I’ve had a good look and signed up, and started to contribute.

Today I came across a debate titled ‘Macs are better than PC’s‘, which, aside from its flagrant misuse of the apostrophe, is just a silly thing to `debate’. I will keep half an eye on it, but we all know what happens when an argument (yes, argument, not debate) like this starts up. Rule #2 of the internet: Reason holds no sway over the fanboy.

I’ll admit I did step in to offer a counter-argument, but that was only to point out the futility of the topic. I’ll blog about the actual concept and the site itself later this weekend; I just needed to get that off my chest.

In other news, I think I had better sort out my categorization and tagging.

Well, it has been a great year for the Debating Society, culminating in a rather fun Foundation Dinner. With MPs from all three major parties speaking over the year, academics and seasoned debaters, I think we’ve managed to provide and entertaining and informative range of debates for all to enjoy. Once again we grew in size, with both membership and regular audience numbers growing from last year - growth we plan to continue next year. We broke at many more competitions this year, and got a team to the final at Nottingham - well done to everyone who debated so well!

Foundation Dinner was a brilliant success, with not only a great dinner but a great debate afterwards, featuring three Tory MPs attacking the government, and two Labour MPs and Dr Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College, successfully defending it (for the first time in several years).

Many thanks to everyone who came this year, and here’s looking forward to September!

Following on from a successful term last term, where we had three teams break to semi-finals in two separate competitions, after just one week of competition this term, we have already had two teams break to semi-finals in two separate competitions: Anuj and Jon at the London IV, and Simon and Cormac at Warwick IV.

We await news as to how Simon and Cormac are faring in their semi; if they break to the final it will be one of our best performances for a long time.

I’m currently involved in (i.e. pretty much doing it myself at this stage, though I will bring in others once the groundwork is done) writing a guide to competitive debating for my debating society. We send out teams to various inter-varsity competitions most weekends, and while we had three semi-final reaching teams last term, that’s not good enough, so we’re getting a guide together to try and boost everyone’s skill level. It’s all in the knowledge-sharing vein, which is good. Anyway, I usually use OpenOffice.org for my word-processing jobs, but for this I thought it might be fun to try something new - .

I can’t remember exactly why I wanted to try it, but it had come to my attention during the summer and I figured it sounded pretty neat, and this was the perfect opportunity to try something. If all else failed, my document(s) would be in plain-text format so I could easily import them in OO.o and finish the job there. Turns out I’m pretty enamoured by . It’s incredibly simple to use once you’ve set up the document, and even that’s pretty easy if you follow templates. Making a .dvi of your document is quick and easy so you can see how any formatting changes look before the (tbh, only slightly) longer .pdf process, and that’s how I preview my document.

The thing I love is, it’s a lot easier to separate out all the chapters/sections of the guide from each other so I can concentrate on one bit at a time, and not worry about manually inserting page breaks between each one, and ensuring I’ve followed the same formatting throughout however many pages - takes care of all that for me, pulling all the separate files together when I run it on the main document.

I can easily add notes to myself about what to include that don’t get included in the final file simply by using comments, which in gedit are automatically highlighted blue, to differentiate them. (To write a comment in , just use the percentage symbol, %, at the start of the comment. The rest of the line will be commented.) This is a lot easier than using lots of bits of paper around my desk, and far quicker than any corresponding feature in a word-processor.

It’s not for everyone, this way of working on documents. One friend had a massive go at me - and I mean massive - for using a non-standard, geeky, out-dated bit of kit when she could do better on MS Word. But, I don’t really care. It helps me work on it, and it’s a choice I have - to use whatever software I wish. It’s not as if no one can open the resulting .pdf file, is it now?

Useful site: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/

This is just to point out a few general things where I thought teams/sides went wrong or hit things on the head, and what I think was missing from the debate we had (not the debate as it should have happened, if that makes sense).

THW conduct medical experiments on prisoners

Prop

• Defining as excluding the public from a risk was a bit dodgy; what about cancer drugs that need to be tested on patients with cancer? Some better knowledge about phase 1 and phase 2 clinical trials would have come in handy here. The argument that you’re taking a risk away from the public is alright but was easily taken down by the ‘controlled experiments’ point; they do tend to be ’safe’ (for a given value of ’safe’).
• Atonement/paying back a debt to society should have been the major point here; if it had been set up as the main reason to do this, with an additional benefit that it would help society in general, would possibly be harder to argue against as Opp would have to defend the penal system and prisoners’ rights, not the existing medical testing regime.
• The extension about why we conduct medical experiments didn’t serve a great purpose; the second point about rights should have been the major argument here: first prop didn’t do a great deal of analysis as to why prisoners shouldn’t have rights, so that would have been great from 2nd prop. It didn’t help that the summary didn’t mention this, either.
• Rebuttal concerning the ‘fiscally insecure’ who need to be protected from medical testing was ok but slightly unnecessary. In 2nd Prop I would have had no problems with you saying ‘even if we don’t stop the public getting involved with medical testing, here’s why this is still a good idea.’ It’s slightly a knife but I think not one that would lose you the debate automatically.

Opp

• Points about the small sample size are fine, but don’t need to be dwelt on for very long; I think everyone seemed to bring it up as rebuttal when it had already been fully dealt with in the first opp speech. The informed risk that the public take is also a good point, but should have been developed more into why it’s then wrong to force prisoners into this, and not give them a choice. Some material was made out of this (’they won’t co-operate as much as volunteers’), but really that didn’t go far enough.
• The rebuttal that ‘forced atonement isn’t atonement’ was good; I’d have liked to have seen it in a discussion about the role of prisons and of punishment rather than as a stand-alone point though. Still, kudos on it.
• Nazi comparisons should never be made. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Not once. Ok? Good.
• Extension was again on this side somewhat non-existent. The best line I got was ‘we remove their liberty but they still have rights’, and that came up in rebuttal, not as constructive material. Just as on Prop we should have seen a detailed analysis of prisoners’ rights, tell me why prisoners do and should still have rights. How do prison and punishment fit into society, our principles etc. Analysis!
• Summay was good, but was the first mention of the word ‘rehabilitation’. Why was this a) not mentioned before and b) not given to your partner to say? The function of prisons (i.e. what punishment is) is a key topic: do we make the punishment worse by imposing these tests? Yes we do. Why should we therefore not do it?
• One massive point that still stood for Prop was that we pay for prisoners to sit around doing nothing all day. The rebuttal was that they ‘could’ do something you guessed. Why not defend the fact that we pay not for them to do nothing but for them to be kept off our streets? There are sometimes costs we are prepared to pay, and prison is one of these things (especially for the kinds of criminals that were being discussed in this debate).

General

• Timings were all (with one exception) dodgy.
• Don’t giggle. I begin to wonder what was really in that cake…
• PoIs: Never take them during rebuttal; don’t give them a chance to answer back. They’ve made their mistakes and it’s your chance to point them out, not to let them recover their asses.
• Structure could be a bit tighter. Personally as a judge I find it a lot more helpful if you tell me what your three points are before you do any rebuttal.

Ok, hopefully that all makes sense and no one has any complaints. I shan’t at the moment give positions, unless you really bug me. See you guys Monday.

(For those who came to the debating workshop on Thurs 10/1 and wanted a refresh.)

We talked about the fact that most debates can be reduced to a broader topic, and went over what the main issues in some of those debates are. I’ve added a little more here since we were running out of time. This should serve as a reminder of what we said, rather than being exactly what we said (my memory serves me only poorly, even if I can remember 52).

Democracy
    THW give the vote to <group>
THW limit Prime Ministers to one five-year term of office.
These debates are about what’s best for democracy, not whether you can be ‘too old’ to be PM.

Security vs Liberty
    THW allow the use of torture/evidence gained by torture etc
Human rights of a few individuals ([suspected] terrorists) versus the liberties of the majority (the innocent public).

International Relations (IR)
    THW invade Zimbabwe
Best route to ’stability’; sovereignty vs internationalism; the moral duty to intervene or not.

Rights generally/benefits, harms
    THW conduct medical experiments on prisoners
THW ban music that promotes criminality
Balance of rights and harms, e.g.freedom of speech vs the harms it might cause; discussion of rights generally (how do you get them, can you lose them?).

We debated THW conduct medical experiments on prisoners. I’ll get some of the feedback about arguments etc up about that over the weekend.

My thanks especially to Stanzie for the cake, and to you all for coming. Until next Thursday, goodnight.

For some reason the new year is the time to make resolutions for the 12 months ahead. Over the next couple of days I’ll be posting my resolutions and aims in various categories. Today it’s debating.

1. Break again. My first semi-final at Kings was a good moment, and obviously one I ought to be repeating. If I can do it once I can do it again (assuming it wasn’t a lucky fluke). All it requires is some good, solid performances, starting at Warwick on the 26th.
2. This leads neatly onto number 2: make it to Euros in the summer. We haven’t sent teams for a while, and I want to be there. Debating well in tournaments this term will get me a place in Tallinn.
3. Sort out the debating guide for the Society. This is a project I’ve wanted to get done for some time, and really want to get it written and improved by our best debaters this term. I’d hoped to get it done for the start of this term, but it actually involves quite a lot of work, so I will be happy for it to be done this term ready for the incoming debaters in September - so we can perform better at President’s Cup!
4. Some other minor goals include running UCL IV to be really enjoyable by everyone who comes, making a few good floor speeches, and so on.

I’ll report back on these at the end of term, and see how well I’ve done.

Well, I’ve finally done it; I’ve broken to the semi-finals of a debating competition, after numerous attempts ending in failure. (more…)